Kat Gordon: On Writing

When I first read about Alice de Janzé I was looking for a way into my novel. I’d recently come back from travelling and working in East Africa, and I knew I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about a sun that grew so hot that we’d rise at 5am to start teaching at 7, so everyone could be safely home by 11. I wanted to talk about the fruit we’d eaten – coconuts, bananas, papayas, mangoes, pineapples, all freshly picked. Tomatoes so sweet and juicy we ate them like apples. I wanted to talk about how we ended up adding four or five hours to our journey estimates in case they had to finish building a bridge before our bus could cross it (this happened).

But at the same time I didn’t want to write about my own experiences – it was too close, too personal for me to feel I could do it justice. 

Then one day, when looking up photos of a building that had been pointed out to me in Nairobi, I came across one of Alice. I was immediately drawn to her and started reading all about her. She was an enigma: one of the core members of the hedonistic 1920’s Happy Valley Set, yet sensitive and vulnerable.

A prolific adulteress, yet someone who formed intense attachments (intense enough to attempt to kill certainly one, perhaps two, of her lovers). A beauty, who threw away her looks on drugs; a depressive, with a wicked sense of humour. Finally, tragically, after a hysterectomy she committed suicide.  Fitzgerald was fascinated enough to base a character on her in Tender is the Night, and biographers have long been drawn to her.

  What fascinated me the most about her, though, was the ‘mothering dichotomy’. Here was a mother who left her two daughters to be raised by an aunt while she relocated to Kenya, yet she was by all accounts a devoted carer to a menagerie of wild animals (including a monkey, a baboon, an eland, and, most famously, a lion cub).

She became the basis of the character of Sylvie in my novel An Unsuitable Woman, and from the start I tried to understand and explain this dichotomy. In the end I decided my Alice was damaged (her own childhood had been changeable, to say the least) and insecure enough that she believed she would damage her children if she stuck around.   

My (fictional) protagonist Theo’s mother Jessie was another reluctant mother, in a different way. Fiercely intelligent, and married to a much older man (more for reasons of stability rather than love), I wanted her to feel constrained and frustrated by the limitations placed on women in post-war society.

Motherhood, for her, made her world and power shrink ever further into the domestic sphere, and she rebelled against that constraint by lashing out at her son. She is not, obviously, a sympathetic character, and I wanted her violent tendencies towards Theo to be shocking, but at the same time I wanted there to be an ambiguity in her vision of her son.

Is her behaviour partly driven by her desire to keep him free of the corrupting influence of others (and given that he does fall under the influence of the Happy Valley Set, was his mother the only one who saw this potential in him), or is it her violence towards him that makes him seek these alternative role models in the first place?   

And then, of course, I discovered I was pregnant myself. I’d always spent my time creating people on the page, nurturing them, but now I was doing that as well as growing and nurturing a whole other person in my body. I went from writing these mother figures from a purely detached, creative position, to a far more subjective one. Both Sylvie and Jessie seemed suddenly much less understandable to me, and also terrifying. What if I became a reluctant, or distant mother myself? 

But it was when my son was born that I finally had an epiphany. When I held him for the first time I realised that it was how much I loved him that was most terrifying. He was only a few minutes old, and already I was frantic at the thought of anything happening to him. And this was what I decided my mothers felt.

They were overwhelmed by their love for their children, but, for various reasons, they were incapable of channelling that love in a healthy way. Sylvie abandoned her children to protect them from herself, and Jessie beat her son to keep him ‘safe’ from himself (as she saw it).  I still thought of them as flawed mother figures, but I’d found a way to relate to them, too. I understand the terror of being responsible for this tiny being, and how without the necessary support that terror could lead to the wrong decisions being made (even if for the right reasons). 

Since then, mothering has played a big part in my writing, even if there are no actual mothers in the book. For instance I’ve recently been writing a story set in Iceland, in 1910, about two sisters, one of whom plays the role of carer and protector to the other, even risking her life for her. Because what is a ‘mother’ if not someone who loves you enough to do that without question? 

—

Perfect for fans of Dinah Jefferies and Gill Paul’s The Secret Wife

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips