sons, mothers and the frozen south

Hello everyone, and thank you all so much for coming along today.  I’m delighted to be here in Brussels, and to have the opportunity to talk a little about my work – specifically about the unpredictable (and for me, often almost unrecognisable) way real life crashes into my fiction. I’m going to start with a question I was once asked by a journalist. 

‘Would you say,’ they asked, ‘that you’re an autobiographical writer?’  

I thought about this. I was in my late 40s at the time, and I hadn’t yet written  any novels, but I  had written a lot of short stories. I’d written, for example, about a man who tries to seduce an exhausted, overworked housewife by inventing linoleum; another in which I imagined Charles Dickens being bitten on the hand, during a visit to an asylum, by a female inmate. I’d written about a woman driven almost to madness because everything on the island where she lives is the colour red. I’d written about an old car with a mind and body of its own that escapes, one day, without its driver, from a Chicago suburb; I’d written about a man in a remote Colorado mining town who is hung for eating four Republican voters, thereby ensuring a Democratic victory in the local mayoral election.   

 Autobiographical? ‘No,’ I told the journalist, ‘definitely not.’  

I can see now that I was lying, or at least that I wasn’t telling the truth. The stories weren’t autobiographical in any strict sense – they weren’t events from my life narrated by me. But I don’t think the question was meant in a strict sense; I think the journalist was curious about how the stories had come to be, and how much of me, and my life, was in them, and I see now that I didn’t give him a straight answer.   

I’d begun writing short stories in my mid 30s, when I was living in the United States, first in New York and then in Chicago, with my husband Michael and four young children. They were insanely busy years. When babysitting allowed, I worked as a freelance journalist, and occasionally I carved out the time to read a book. I discovered, for the first time in my life, the great American short story writers, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever and the rest, and it was a revelation. This was what I had to do! What I loved most, I think, in those years, was that making up stories was a way of being ‘elsewhere’, a long way from my own life, and they were full – or so it seemed to me then – of things which had nothing much  to do with real life, played out by characters I’d invented or drawn from history and put on the page with more imagination than attention to what was going on around me at the time.  

It really is extraordinary, how you can not see what you’ve put of yourself into a story, but long after the interview, in that period when my kids were in their late teens and heading off to distant countries by themselves, I wrote a story  that was so clearly and inescapably full of my deepest fears, that I began  to wonder for the first time – incredible as that might seem – what it was I was really doing. Most of my stories take a year or two to write and many much  longer than that, but this one came in an afternoon. It’s extremely short. It’s called   

It was, I suppose, a kind of amulet against disaster – one of those bargains we strike with ourselves at one time or another: if I write this catastrophe, if I imagine it in technicolour and put it down in black and white on the page, it can never happen. But it was also, I think, the first time I understood that writing, in all those other stories, about made-up people, often in the distant past, and in faraway, sometimes fantastical places, was a way of worrying about the here and now, a kind of continuous, constantly moving back-and-forth with life and the world.   

Every story grows out of the time in which you write it; if you’d written it at a different time, it would be a different story. In retrospect I can see that I  should probably have recognised myself in the exhausted mother being seduced by the offer of a square of easy-to-clean lino, or the woman going a bit crazy on the red island, or the beaten-up old Chevrolet slouching down the street, past Walgreens, past Dunkin’ Donuts. Rolling west across the desert, taking in the sights: Mesa Verde, the Hoover Dam, Vegas. Nosing north across the border, into the cool air of the Rockies. Making a break for it.   

And casting my mind back to the early noughties of the George Dubya era, I probably should have recognised myself in the Republican-eating Colorado cannibal too.   

Don’t worry. I’m not going to spend the next forty-five minutes parsing everything I’ve ever written, looking for parallels between my own life and the lives of my characters. That’s not what I’m interested in. What I do think is interesting, is the alchemy of real life and imagination, of our private and public worlds, and how it feels to be caught up in the march of history, and  tangled up in what can be named and identified as ideas, but are only experienced as – experience.   

Once a story or a novel is written, and making its way into the world, you find all sorts of abstract nouns suddenly coming into play to describe it, a critical urge that comes, partly I think with the business of publishing, to explain  them as much as, and sometimes more, in terms of ideas than in terms of  story – in my case, the abstract nouns that usually crop up are extinction, settlement, colonisation, complicity, solitude, faith, love, death. But stories  aren’t made of abstract nouns, they’re made of what arrives on the page in words and sentences; they’re made of what people, and sometimes animals, think and do and say to each other, almost always at a particular time and in a particular place. And in the end it doesn’t matter, in fiction, where all that has come from; what matters, is that where it’s come from makes it possible for the story to be told in the particular way that it’s told.    

I love what one of my favourite writers, the brilliant Flannery O’Connor, had to say about all of this: 

I prefer, she said, to talk about the meaning of a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction. When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of the story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing, is to tell him to read the story.  

Now, I think it’s a bit harsh to say that being able to pick out the theme of a story is the litmus test of it being a bad one. What she’s really getting at though, is a different and more important truth, which is that you can’t  express, or capture, a story’s meaning by talking or writing about it; only the story can do that. Otherwise we wouldn’t need the story, or any kind of art; we wouldn’t need stories or novels or poems or plays or painting or music. She puts it so simply.  

I can only speak for myself, but I think that ‘way of saying something’ is above all an act of imagination, and because the imagination works so strangely and so unpredictably, and thrives as much on unconscious emotions and associations and memories and experience as on precise observations and little pieces of knowledge, it’s often really hard to unpick, after you’ve written a story, how it was that it came to be. As I said, I can only speak for myself, but when I’m writing something, I’m not constantly thinking, ‘What is this about?’   

I always knew that my first novel, West, had started with a fascinating little piece of historical gold I’d come across in the journals of Lewis and Clark, the two explorers dispatched in 1804 by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the vast uncharted territories west of the Mississippi River which the United States had recently acquired from France. The journals themselves are actually surprisingly dull, but an almost throwaway detail in the preface caught my imagination: that before the explorers set off, Jefferson secretly asked them to keep a look out for woolly mammoths while they were gone. Mysterious giant bones had been turning up in a Kentucky swamp and the President fervently hoped the kind of enormous creatures they belonged to might still be alive in the West, partly because he was curious – he was an avid palaeontologist – but also because he was in the middle of a furious row with the French over who had the biggest animals, the Old World or the New. A leading French nat-ural-ist had recently published a book about how small and degenerate American animals were compared with those in the Old World where there were things like elephants and giraffes, and unfortunately for Jefferson, the book had become a bestseller in Europe. It was all very embarrassing, and Jefferson desperately needed the woolly mammoths to  be found alive so he could win the argument, put a stop to this humiliation,  and once and for all, make America great again.   

I was intrigued by the silliness of Jefferson’s spat with the French, but mostly I was captivated by this hope that something extinct might not actually be extinct; I loved the existential curiosity of it all, and I was so touched by the sadness of knowing from my vantage point 200 years later, that this quest to find living animals was doomed before it had even started. It was one of those little historical details that drops you straight into the head of someone from another time.  

 I began to imagine a man, a widowed English settler called Cy Bellman, who decides to head off into the west, as Lewis and Clark had done, without success, a few years before him, to look for the mammoths.   

 As I wrote, I read.   

 In the archives of the New York Public Library, I read speeches and letters and diaries and newspaper reports, treaties and land transfer documents, and looked at maps and lots of other pieces of paper that catalogue this period of American history, when the frontier of the United States was pushing its way further and further west. And as I followed Cy, mile after mile, sentence after sentence on his journey, I did begin to realise what the story was at least partly about. I realised that Cy’s guide in the wilderness, a fifteen year-old Shawnee boy called Old Woman From A Distance, had been removed along with his family from their ancestral lands in Pennsylvania, the same land, in fact, where Cy had built his farm, and that this story, at least in part, had to do with settlement and dispossession and a different sort of extinction.   

And all of this is very important in the novel, played out through the uneasy relationship between Cy and the boy, and much of the meaning of the story comes from their relationship, but it wouldn’t by itself have given the story what I think of as its whole meaning – that way of saying something that can’t be said in any other way –  without it being bound up with something that had happened in my life.   

What this real-life thing was, I didn’t realise until long after I’d finished the book, and it was this: just before my husband and I had left the UK where we were living then, to spend a year in New York, our youngest daughter had graduated from university. She had no job, and, once we’d rented the family home out from under her feet, nowhere to live. We packed her off to London to look for work and rent a cheap room to live in. On the railway platform in our small northern town, she cried. Huge tears slid down over her cheeks and I’m not exaggerating when I say they splashed onto her coat. We hugged her and kissed her and waved her off and if we felt guilty and were worrying about how she’d manage, we didn’t let it stop us from going home to finish our packing and catch our plane to America.   

It really is incredible to me how you can not see why you’ve written something the way you have until long after the event, but I just wanted to read you the opening scene of West, which I wrote after I got to New York, in which Cy, my English settler, following the death of his wife, Elsie, is setting off on his quest to look for the mammoths:  

Bess, of course, is not my daughter, no more than I am Cy, and I’m not for a minute suggesting that this was some kind of transposed re-enactment of real life. West is a work of imagination; I made it up, but the imagination is mysterious. It does its own thing and that can often feel almost magical. What happened with my daughter is actually pretty banal compared with what happens to Bess, but still, it’s impossible when I read that scene, and everything that comes after it, not to think I was doing the whole amulet thing again, but in a slightly different way, hoping that our daughter wouldn’t hate us forever for abandoning her, and that she would always, always think the best of us.  

In any event the novel is shot through with feelings of guilt and worry and fear and hope and doubt and love, and if I had to come up with a synonym for the word ‘meaning’ I think more than anything it might be ‘emotion’, the way a story touches us in a manner that no statement or description ever could.   

Here’s Cy again, much later on in his journey, when he and his teenage guide, Old Woman From A Distance, are wandering fruitlessly around in the wilderness:  

I spoke earlier about novels being a kind of continuous, constantly changing back-and-forth with life and the world; a way of worrying about them, and while I was in New York that year, writing about Cy and Bess and Aunt Julie and Old Woman from A Distance, another story came back to me, a true one I’d been told back in 2010, when I was living for a short time in Ooty, a former British hill station in the Nilgiri mountains of Tamil Nadu, in south India. Something that had happened not long before I’d arrived there.  

Two young boys, aged six and ten, from one of the local schools, had travelled east to a different state to stay with their father, an Australian Christian missionary called Graham Staines. Together, father and sons set off in the family station wagon to join a bible camp in the jungle near the small tribal village of Manoharpur. It was a long journey and on the way they paused to rest. It was very cold, so they decided to sleep in the car, where they were found by a gang of around 50 Hindu nationalists who attacked them with axes and tridents and then burned them alive inside the vehicle.  

Since leaving India, I’d been writing, on and off, about a depressed  Englishman, a librarian from the London suburbs, who in the way that westerners often do, heads off to India hoping it will make him feel better somehow. I’d given him a sister, Wyn, and made up a name for him, Hilary Byrd, and I’d sent him to Ooty. I’d given him the bungalow that had been my home,  and sent him to all the places I used to go: the Botanical Gardens and the post office, the cinema, the chocolate shop, the English-language bookstore.  But it was only now, in New York, in the winter of 2016, that I  began to have a sense of what his story might be. I was still reeling from the shock of the Brexit vote that summer, a result which I should have seen coming but, like so many people in the UK, hadn’t; and now something else no one – at least no one I knew in New York – really thought would actually  happen, had happened. Donald Trump was the president. It made me think about Graham Staines and his boys again, and about being in India just a few years before Modi came to power on his Hindu nationalist agenda, and how, when I was there, I hadn’t seen the signs that that was going to happen either. I had an overwhelming sense of having been blind, both to what had been gathering momentum in India, and to what had been building in the West on both sides of the Atlantic.  

It made me think of an essay George Orwell wrote in the 1940s about how good we are as humans at ignoring things, and how it takes a constant struggle to see what’s in front of our noses.   

The Mission House is a novel ‘about’ this man, Hilary Byrd, who, like me, fails to see things until they’re staring him in the face. The book came out in the US in 2021, just after the storming of the Capitol in Washington DC. Reviews talked mostly about Empire and its consequences, and that is important in the novel, it’s undoubtedly partly what it’s ‘about’, but the meaning of the story – the thing that can’t be said in any other way – is something different, and to be found, I think, in the to-and-fro between Hilary Byrd and the people he meets, because it isn’t just the simmering political tensions all around him that Byrd fails to notice: he’s blind to everything; he’s so wrapped up in himself that he misjudges everyone. He thinks people want things from him when they don’t. He thinks they return his feelings when they don’t; he thinks they don’t have feelings when they do. He sees things either as he wants them to be, or as he’s afraid they might be.   

Here he is one evening, at the home of the local Christian Padre who has taken him under his wing and given him a place to live. The Padre is anxious to find a husband for his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, who for various reasons is not very marriageable, and the Padre, here, after he and Byrd have eaten dinner together in the presbytery, has invited Byrd upstairs to have a look at something:

And we’ll leave Byrd there, I think, but needless to say, everything becomes a  bit more complicated later on.   

Nearly every writer I know has what they loosely call their ‘Covid novel’ or whatever it was they wrote during that strange period. For a long time, I didn’t write anything. Letters, and a few essays but no fiction. It was like a kind of paralysis. Everything I wrote felt made-up in a bad and pointless way.  

Eventually, I retreated into a dictionary I’d stumbled across about a decade previously. Roughly 10,000 words in an extinct language called Norn that used to be spoken on the islands of Orkney and Shetland off the far north coast of Scotland before it started to die out in the middle of fifteenth century, when the Danish king pawned the islands to Scotland. I’d found the dictionary one evening in the library in Edinburgh where I live, and for years I’d been going back to it, reading it, and making lists of words and their definitions. Now, I started writing scenes ‘up and out’, as it were, of the words themselves, extraordinarily precise and transporting words, like hoss which means a muffled murmur or the sound of waves lapping the shore in calm weather; groma which means a light mist with rifts through which blue sky can be seen; eterford, a bubble of foam on the grass in the hill pasture containing an insect.  

 I imagined a man called Ivar, living alone on a tiny island in the middle of the North Sea with only a few sheep and chickens, his old blind cow and his horse, Pegi, for company, such a remote place that Norn, in my imagination,  had survived there into the nineteenth century, and Ivar was its last speaker. I imagined that, when the rest of his family had either died, or left the island, years before, he’d decided to stay on, alone. I know I said earlier that when I write, I’m not asking myself, ‘What is this about?’ That said, it was obvious to me that I was writing, in some way, ‘about’ language, and precariousness, and beauty and a sense of home, and I knew that a huge part of the story’s meaning would come from that – a meaning I could never have found or tried to capture by any other means than through the words in Ivar’s language. But meaning never comes from just one thing and although I don’t think I realised at the time that I was also writing from the experience of being quarantined,  I can’t read the book, Clear, now, without thinking that I must have been.  

The story unfolds during the Highland Clearances in Scotland when, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landowners were evicting their small, poor tenants from their estates so sheep could be grazed instead. A minister, John Ferguson, has arrived on the island to deliver Ivar’s eviction notice, but almost as soon as he gets there, he falls off a cliff and is found unconscious by Ivar, who takes him home and begins to care for him. He’s  the first person Ivar’s had any contact with for twenty years,  ever  since his family left and he chose to stay, and he has no idea yet, why John has come.    

Here he is, a few weeks after John’s arrival:   

I’m not living in Edinburgh this year – for the time being I’m living in Paris, at least physically I am. In my imagination, I’m spending most of my time in Antarctica.    

Let me explain.   

Of all the years I’ve talked about tonight, this last one has been the most momentous, because in the summer of 2024 my husband, Michael, died.  

There was a year when we thought he’d get better, and a year when we knew he wouldn’t, and during both of them I was always writing something, different things without having much idea what they were. I wondered, at the beginning of it all, if I should be keeping a diary. Time was so precious, shouldn’t I record it? But after a couple of brief entries, I abandoned it. I love other people’s diaries – I’ve been carrying around Helen Garner’s brilliant ones with me for months now, and they’re so full of wisdom and insight and humour. But keeping one, writing about life in that way, through that means, doesn’t seem to be for me, and during those two years, I had no interest in recording and examining things, I was only interested in living them. It did make me think there might be something at least a little bit true in what Henry James said

Michael was always my first reader and about six weeks before he died I read him about twenty pages of something I’d been writing. He knew before I read it to him that it had something to do with Antarctica, because we’d been rummaging around together in all the second-hand bookshops in Edinburgh,  looking for interesting books and he’d bought me a few. He knew all about my fascination with the frozen South – with the journals of Captain Scott and the men who lived and died with him; with Ernest Shackleton’s hair-raising and astonishing trip to safety after the Endurance became stuck in the ice in the Weddell Sea. Over the years he’d already bought me a pile of memoirs by whaling and sealing captains and big, colourful books about the animals and birds that live in that faraway place which is so hostile to humans. I had no idea what the story was that I was writing, and after I’d read it to him aloud  with him lying on the sofa and me sitting next to him, I was very discouraged by it. Almost all of it felt like something I’d already read somewhere else  before.  

But there was a short paragraph that to both of us was alive and interesting  and full of possibility in a way that none of the rest was.   

One of the many books Michael had bought me, way back in 1997, for my birthday, was called The Reminiscences of Captain Joseph Fuller, an American whaling captain from New London, who was shipwrecked while hunting elephant seal in Antarctica in the 1880s. Fuller writes well and there’s lots to enjoy about his dealings with the grumpy mutinous crew of his ship,the Pilot’s Bride. But one little detail interested me more than any other, and that was  that when he finally makes it to Cape Town, his mother-in-law is there. Why, I can’t remember, I’m not sure Fuller even tells us, but he ends up having to take her back to the United States on another ship. In his account, it’s all over in a couple of brief lines, and we never find out how they get on on  that  long  journey back. But I loved that – you survive an Antarctic  shipwreck and your reward is an 8,000 mile trip home with your mother-in-law.   

When I’d finished reading the short paragraph I’d written, loosely based on  Fuller’s experience, Michael said, ‘I like that bit,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I like it too.’   

‘You should keep going,’ he said, and I did. And then, after he died, something  completely unexpected happened. Our youngest son announced that he was coming to live with me for a year. He’d quit his teaching job in Philadelphia to come and be with me in Edinburgh. So there we were. Mother and son.  Cooking and eating together, doing our laundry and going out for cups of coffee and to the cinema, for walks on the beach and in the hills. He’d just turned 34, and it was 15 years since we’d lived together under the same roof.  Inevitably the time came eventually or him to return to his life, and I decided to move to Paris, to spend nine months at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, where I am now.  

That rough paragraph I read to Michael has changed a lot since, the biggest change, perhaps, being that the mother-in-law has morphed into a mother, and rather than being thrown together at the end of one journey and the start of another, my two characters, mother and son, are with each other from the outset. There’s still a huge amount I don’t know about the story; what I do  know, is that the son’s name is Robert, and the mother’s is Frances, and that he’s heading to Antarctica to hunt seals at a time when, because of the over-hunting that went on throughout the nineteenth century in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, there are barely any seals left to hunt.   

As I said I’m still far from sure what’s going to happen. I never do know in my stories, what’s going to happen, and wouldn’t be interested in writing them if I did. Until they’re finished, they’re always a rather chaotic work-in-progress, something that sometimes moves forwards, but also sideways, and very often backwards.   

All I can say is that I hope it’ll be finished one day, and that when someone asks me what it’s about, the only proper thing to say, will be to tell them to read the story.   

 An early version of this text was read at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination Reid Hall in Paris on November 6, 2025.
The excerpts from West, The Mission House, and Clear are used with the kind permission of Éditions du Seuil and Éditions de La Table Ronde.