Book Review: Shy: A Memoir by Sian Prior

An attractive, forty-something woman peers around a gallery, trying vainly to find her partner in the buzzing party crowd. ‘A familiar sensation was sweeping through my body’, Sian Prior writes. ‘It was as if someone had spiked my drink so that instead of sparkling mineral water I was now sipping a kind of effervescent cement’. Unable to spot a familiar face, she starts to sweat and her stomach churns. Alight with panic she flees the party, not even recognising the ‘calm, confident blonde woman’ she glimpses in a mirror on the way out.

Prior, a successful arts journalist, choir master, public speaker and media consultant, suffers from crippling shyness. But this Renaissance woman is also a published author and writing teacher, and the incident jolts her into an exploration of the paradox of her life – that someone so comfortable in the public spotlight could also be felled by terror in unstructured social situations.

That paradox makes this book unique. Its author was born to tell her own story of shyness because her professional persona is the perfect vehicle for spreading the message.

Shy is no conventional memoir, but nor is it a self-help book. Prior ditches a chronological account of her life and replaces it with a panoply of elements – interviews with psychologists (including her own mother, Margot) and her own research; playful lists; play-offs between incidents from her past and theories of shyness – to present a frank account that is often funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.

Although the result can feel anarchic at times, it works beautifully; experience and vivid recollection step in where the research evidence is simplistic, suggesting both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific definitions.

To cope with the shyness she has battled all along, Prior developed a persona she calls ‘Professional Sian’ – a confident, polished performer who knows how to fake it till she makes it.

But ‘Shy Sian’ surfaces when there is no script, no structure. And for Prior this has meant a lifetime of lost social and romantic opportunities  – from Sally, the school friend round the corner who the young Sian is too scared to visit, to ‘the beautiful dark-eyed boy glimpsed in the stairwell of my first high school’. She has missed out not just on sex but ‘the subtle semaphore of attraction’.

For Prior, shyness is as much about fearful thoughts – what she calls the ‘what ifs’ – as it is about the intensely discomfiting physical symptoms: ‘armpits drenched, throat clenched, locked in battle with myself’. While travelling in Europe in her twenties, Prior develops a stubborn throat lump: ‘Lying on my hostel bunk in the night I would feel it resting there, nuzzling at my vocal cords’.

There is a central narrative here that anchors Prior’s account to the recent past. For ten years she lived with the musician Paul Kelly (whom Prior calls Tom in the book) – an Australia folk hero, one of our national bards. She reveals their slow-burning courtship, which blossomed into a shared life, and the cocooning effect of this relationship on her sense of self.

Her relationship with Tom and other life experiences are held up to the light to examine what shyness isn’t as much as what it is. Is it genetic? What is its relationship to social phobia? Is it the same as introversion, or can a shy person be an extrovert? How does Tom’s fame relate to Prior’s own contradictory stance towards being in the spotlight? Is shyness related to hypersensitivity? She explores the positive character traits that go with shyness, like empathy, conscientiousness and a willingness to listen.

Then the unthinkable happens and Tom announces he is leaving. Suddenly the very rejection that all shy people fear has come to pass.

Upheaval follows, but it is viewed in the light of a formative childhood event – deepening the examination of the origins of shyness in ways that take it far beyond the biological.

Prior’s writing is fresh, visual, funny. She has a sharp recall of the quotidian detail but also the insight and hard-won wisdom of someone who has battled to live a socially and emotionally fulfilling life in the midst of a sometimes crippling fear.

Yet there is something implicit in this book that Prior herself doesn’t pay much attention to. Given the rise of positive psychology, I looked for the protective factors that enabled Prior to seek out significant relationships and pursue professional success.

Without diminishing her pain, I was also interested in the class aspects of her success – her psychologist mother is an obvious factor, as is her immersion in the world of classical music and love affair with the clarinet. But what about schooling – was a private school, with its small class sizes and individualised attention, a strengthening influence?

Prior, intent on exploring a trait that has been hidden and denied in her public life, seems mostly oblivious to these broader questions, although two things stand out that will be useful to anyone who is shy. ‘Professional Sian’ first came into being because Prior was able to find, in a high-profile environmental job, a cause far larger than her own insecurities. She also singles out a passionate curiosity about other people and the world as an incentive to push past her fears.

In public appearances since writing the book, Prior has discussed how risky it felt to break the illusion of her professional competence by publishing Shy. While her discoveries did not lead to the cure she originally hoped for, they have enabled a new-found acceptance, and Prior claims she is no longer embarrassed to be shy.

While Prior’s level of professional success may seem out of reach to many of us shy people, I found this encouraging rather than dispiriting. I suspect most of us have our own version of Professional Sian, and although she may not be as reliable or fearless as Prior’s version, this writer offers a bold role model for risk taking and a path to self-acceptance that many readers will benefit from.

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Secular Churches: A Bibliophile's Paean to the Library

Photo: Glyn Lowe

When psychotherapist Thomas Mann writes about the need to incorporate soul into daily life, he distinguishes soul from spirit. The latter is transcendent, visionary, concerned with going forward; soul, in contrast, is grounded: concerned with the past, with memory, with the earth. Libraries nurture both my soul and my spirit. They are about the familiar, the comfortable, the known, but also the unexpected leap of intellectual and literary adventure, and the very anticipation of those adventures.

Every time I enter my local library I relive one of my most pleasant early memories: my father taking me to Malvern Library in High Street when I was about four. Surely I must have accompanied one or other of my parents to the library before this, but on this memorable occasion he signed me up as a borrower with her very own library card. I have never lost my reverence for libraries since.

Church was another early experience of soul. It held a quantum of familiar faces, school mates and their parents, choir members, a community of sorts; but it dictated the hushing of the voice, the quelling of the body’s tongue and momentum while grumpy Father Riley droned on to a God who was depicted on the cross as, well, dead. Every five minutes I turned around and checked the clock that hung over the back door. Pacing myself through each segment, the lion’s share endured once communion swung into gear. That was always a change at least, watching people shuffling obediently up to the alter like prisoners queuing for lunch.

The library was different. Just as hushed, just as respectful, but this time there was a point to the quiet, enabling a very different kind of communion with an equally absent presence. It was the sound of a hundred minds encountering the bright imagination of an author via the words on the page. A hundred small adventures, a hundred serendipitous discoveries, a hundred love affairs with the written word being carried on silently in this homely, local place that nevertheless offered many windows to the wider world, like the magic windows of Play School.

But discovering books was as sensual as it was abstracted. When you pulled the covers of the books back, their spines cracked and the opaque plastic on the covers broke free with a squishing noise. When you took the books to be checked out, the librarian pressed each one against a grey metal machine that recorded the date of issue. The deep clunky sound this made expressed the most complete satisfaction, and seemed to deliver each book to me alone with a unique authority.

I soon became addicted to books. This was my weakness and my strength. I did not always attend to the present book closely enough; I was thinking of the next one. While we were still at the house in Manning Road, after a visit to the library I would sit on the step between the kitchen and the tiny sunroom and go through my stash. It had to be at least five at a time. I swallowed them like Tic Tacs. At first they were picture books but it didn’t take me long to graduate to the proper books with chapters that belonged on the freestanding shelving in the middle of the children’s book section, a large sunny room with child-sized reading benches set at the perfect angle for comfortable perusing.

It was the serendipitous find I craved. I still go into nostalgic reveries when I recall some of these discoveries. Most were English, probably some American, very few Australian.

I was especially drawn to books that had a poignant, nostalgic edge or tipped over into the darkness of the occult. Charley by Joan G. Robinson (now called The Girl Who Ran Away) is the wistful tale of a runaway who moves into a chicken coop near the aunt she is convinced does not want her, and gets to know the local community while playing a series of fictional roles. A Candle in Her Room was the darkest of Ruth M. Arthur’s haunting tales. It’s about several generations of an ancient Welsh family, all haunted by an evil doll called Dido; the spare illustrations by Margery Gill were as important as the text. It’s out of print now, yet so sought after that hardback copies in good condition sell online for as much as two hundred and sixty five dollars.

It’s heartening – and very soulful in Thomas Mann’s sense – to see the way the internet links older readers like me with the past by making new and old editions of these books available, offering Goodreads reviews and helping to jog our memories on titles and author names, with a little help from Google. Just yesterday I tracked down the name of another book I had loved, All About the Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren.

It's no surprise that there's now a forum where members can post requests for information about books they revered as children but have forgotten the titles of. This is perfect for those books whose titles and authors have fled from the memory forever, while the stories themselves, with their themes of loss and longing, linger in the heart.

I remember being transfixed by the tale of a young girl who accidentally left her favourite doll in the park one sunny afternoon. When she realised what she’d done she and her nurse rushed back to search for it, but the doll was nowhere to be found. The months passed and the seasons turned, and yet the little girl always kept a lookout. The more time that passed, the more beautiful the doll became in the child’s mind, the grander her outfit, the brighter her eyes, the lusher her hair, until she was the very model of the perfect doll.

And then one day, in the middle of a heavy winter, on a familiar walk in the park, the dog nosed out something under the snow – a wrecked, sorry thing that might once have been a doll, its clothes in rags, its shoes gone, wisps of hair and perhaps an eye missing. It was the little girl’s doll. Could there be a harsher lesson than this, for both the heroine and the reader, about the dangers of excessive imagination and the hard thud of reality (if anyone by chance has any knowledge of this book please let me know)? And doesn't this story resonate, making us think of old flames whose recent photos convey a distressing physical deterioration compared with the idealised image the mind has created.

The enduring charm of the library

Libraries are unique environments because they represent the communal spirit that made so much social progress possible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but is now under threat. If council-funded libraries had never been thought of up to now, and someone suggested them, the idea would be labelled bolshie, radical and socialist by the loony right. Libraries represent what we can achieve when we pool our resources for a common good.

When the conservative Coalition fought its successful election campaign in the state of Victoria in 2010, it failed to mention that it planned to slash funding to local libraries. In 2011 councils were left reeling when they were told that recurrent funding for public library operating costs would be cut by up to $7.1 million over four years. There was so much outcry that the government quickly backtracked, providing assurances that the funding would be maintained while it undertook a review of Victorian library services and funding arrangements; the fight is not over yet. (In the meantime it took an axe to TAFE colleges, but that’s another story.)

I’m always heartened by the sight of people kicking back in libraries and reading the paper at the communal tables, or poring over a novel in a secluded corner. I find this very hard to do myself. For some reason I can only relax to that extent at home, but for me, these communal readers are part of what makes the library worth going to. Because my local library is currently closed for renovations I go to a newly built one in Camberwell. It’s spacious and tall-ceilinged, and there are cushy beanbags arranged against one of the walls, inviting you to plump down and wile away an hour with the printed word. I haven’t seen anyone on those beanbags as yet; I’d like to think that when the nearby primary school finishes up every afternoon the local kids come streaming in and head for the beanbags, but if they do I bet they use them to play on their tablets and smart phones.

I still believe in serendipity, still comb the shelves for new discoveries; one of my recent browses yielded This Is How by M.J. Hyland and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond, by Jane Haas. But I understand I can't rely on chance alone for my book thrills; I reserve books I've read about on the review pages of the weekend papers. I’ve just finished my library copy of Kate Atkinson's excellent Life after Life and I’ll be reading Christos Tsiolkas’s latest book Barracuda that way too, but I think I’ll be in for a long wait.

I am as hopelessly addicted to the mixed-lollies potential of libraries as I ever was as a child, and after all these years I do not have the willpower to  borrow only as many books as I have the time to read (I will often borrow new books while there are others sitting at home unread from last time). There are always a few that I have to return without having read them, having gone through the two renewals that are usually permitted. 

Memories of libraries past

I actually worked in a council library service for a year, in 1985. I lived with my parents and saved up for a five-month trip to Europe. I am glad I did this because it satisfied my curiosity – I decided I didn’t want to become a librarian, it was too dull. I did little else but shelve books, mend them, and check them in and out. However, although I was a library assistant only, because I had an arts degree I was allowed to do the occasional reference query; this was the 1985 version of googling and made a nice change from the endless wielding of the computer wand.

Now I curse my lack of imagination – this was an era before libraries had started holding the book discussions, author talks, adult storytimes and competitions that now pepper their calendars. If I’d thought about it I could have livened up ‘sleepy hollow’, our fond name for our branch library, which was surrounded by a vibrant Jewish community and not far away from the arty grunginess of St Kilda.

But I was only 22 after all. It took all my willpower to stay in the job because I had a bad case of love shyness (love avoidance would be more accurate) powered by OCD, panic and social anxiety. My fears centred on the young gay man whose job it was to transfer the books from one library branch to the next. He always did his rounds in the early afternoon and I would blush furiously when the glass doors swung open and he waltzed in. He ended up thinking I hated him, as I bristled if he approached me; the opposite was the case, I was a little in love with him, everybody was, but I couldn't and still find it hard to distinguish sexual feelings from feelings of love. He had so much life force in him, I could see it in the challenge of his liquid dark eyes, which reflected both a sense of anarchy and a narcissism that was forgivable – he resembled a short, slightly built version of James Dean, but was better looking. My fantasies of him were fairly chaste; we played hide-and-seek in a huge mansion with sweeping staircase and enormous chintz curtains of pale gold. When this clip for the new Tears for Fears single ‘Head over heels’ first played on Countdown while both of us were still slaves to the library service, I felt as if the yearnings of my soul had been bared for the entire world to see. Needless to say such tumultous emotions have done nothing to reduce the charm of libraries for me (he was only the first of a short series of male library workers I had crushes on; the women were unexciting). 

With the arrival of ebooks I refuse to fear the loss of the local library. I think it will stay around in some form or another as a gathering place for those who value the life of the mind, whether they’re two or eighty-two. Libraries are both a place of refuge from neoliberal madness, and the secular world’s answer to churches, and long may they remain so.

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Book News

Here’s an update of my publishing adventures ...

I’ve now published a book about Birthday Depression! It makes no claims to cure it, doesn’t tell readers to just get over it. Instead it offers some keys to understanding, and perhaps even benefiting from it – looking beyond the balloons and streamers of the ‘celebration’ to what’s really going on underneath.

The book is available to US readers,  UK readers and now there is a separate Amazon Australia site.  (There are also several other country sites but too many to list.) 

Unfortunately at the moment if you’re buying in Australia, you can’t click to see the book on the Australian site – have a look inside on the US or the UK sites.

My memoir now has a review! The reviewer gave it five stars which is extremely gratifying.

Of course this is exciting but I want to reiterate that I am interested in getting a wide range of feedback about the book. I do not expect every reader to have the same reaction to it.

I’ve also updated the memoir – it now has a new title and blurb.

If you don’t have an ereader, don’t despair. You can download free Kindle apps for your tablet, smart phone or computer (PC or Mac).

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The Secret and the Law of Attraction are Bad for Your Mental Health – Here’s Why

In my twenties I had two undiagnosed mental illnesses – social anxiety and pure OCD. I lurched from one crisis to the next, underperforming at work, leaving jobs when they got too hard and moving into dodgy share houses. My judgement was poor and my thinking was immature. I was incapable of an intimate relationship. I knew I had some kind of ‘neurosis’, but if asked what it was I would have launched into a convoluted description of my hang-ups that would have left you open-mouthed with equal parts of boredom and bewilderment.

After reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, I was convinced positive thinking was the answer. If I repeated enough affirmations I would be healthy, rich and nestled in a secure long-term relationship – all things that were singularly lacking in my life.

For three years I was a cadet journalist with the Hastings Sun. On the weekends I stayed with my parents in Melbourne, and on Sunday nights I would drive down to the Mornington Peninsula, to the brick veneer house I shared with a fellow cadet with anger management problems. She had thrown a coffee cup onto the floor in front of me once during an argument; as it crashed into pieces on the vinyl, I knew our friendship was over.

When I left my parents’ suburban home on Sunday nights my father would come out and wave goodbye to me as I drove off in my white Mazda 1500, which was chronically on the verge of collapse. Filled with numb desolation, I’d drive through sea squalls and lashing rain to the semi-wildness where no friend waited. How brave and foolhardy I was in those days, crossing the rural railway lines with a dodgy engine, a clutch that was about to fail.

Positive thinking kept me going on those Sunday night drives home. I remember the bloody-mindedness with which I set off in that lonely car, its interior a minimalist desert of brown vinyl and radio, which smelt of petrol. Every week as I commenced the journey I set my teeth and wheeled out my tray of positive thinking maxims. Carefully I recited all the things I was manifesting right now – a great job in a groovy workplace close to the city, supportive colleagues, a wonderful partner, a new car that never broke down, an interesting group of feminist friends. The list was Homeric in scope and grew longer every week. Reciting it probably got me along Springvale Road and as far as the entrance to the Mornington Peninsula Freeway. It no doubt included extended spells in exotic European locations, a year living in a great share house in Sydney, enough money to buy my own house in Fitzroy or Carlton, and an interesting left-wing cause to get my teeth into.

At the time I used positive thinking as a way of just carrying on. On the pathetic wage of a cadet journalist working for a rural newspaper, I was wretchedly poor. I had only a small number of friends in Melbourne, but I was too insecure to let go and explore life in Mornington. I felt unmoored and feared my youth was disappearing before my eyes, but I put my head down and stuck at the journalism, as there wasn’t really an alternative. But at least I had a job.

Fast forward to 1992, when there was a serious economic downturn in Australia. I was now working three days a week as information officer for a small community group. I’d fled from journalism the year before, when the panic attacks had started again; I figured that if I was too scared to talk to the CEO of the council I was covering at the time, I couldn’t do my job.

I was now in a more functional share house arrangement, living in a tiny house in inner city Richmond with a playwright who was doing a Masters in philosophy. Eventually her example would lead to the completion of my own Masters degree but in the meantime I was still in thrall to the promises of the New Age.

Then the community group that employed me lost their funding, and I lost my job. With no savings to back me up, I was forced to eke out an existence on unemployment benefit. I used to make vegetable patties from the okara – a waste product in the making of tofu – that I got free from the Tofu Shop up the road.

Positive thinking came in to fill the breach, but this time it wasn’t a willpower thing, but a flight into fantasy. Whenever I walked home from a train station or tram stop along the narrow footpaths of Richmond, past the rows of renovated workers cottages and Victorian terraces, I kept my eyes on the ground in case God or providence chose to put a two-dollar coin in my path among the trodden-over dead leaves and gold bottle tops. Small, thick and gold-coloured, two-dollar coins seemed to embody the fairytale idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This myth is more fitting than I realised at the time, because you can never reach the rainbow – it appears to move further away when you walk towards it.

The memory of this time makes me sad. Could I really have set my sights so low? With so little understanding of the world and my place in it, this faith in the slim abundance of stray two-dollar coins seems disempowered, child-like, embarrassingly unambitious.

The lure of the positive

The positive thinking that I sought refuge in has been thoroughly denigrated by science, and many of the people who espouse it have been exposed as shysters or even criminals. Yet in the individualistic, materialistic climate of the digital age it’s as popular as ever. The astonishing success of The Secret, the 2006 bestseller by Rhonda Byrnes, was due to Byrnes’s brilliant repackaging of the Law of Attraction, the idea that your thoughts alone can bring you unlimited health, wealth and happiness – and their opposite, if you’re not careful.

In 2009, Forbes estimated that the book and accompanying film had made $300 million. According to Wikipedia the book has sold 19 million copies and been translated into 46 languages; the DVD has sold more than 2 million copies. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 146 consecutive weeks and was named by USA Today as one of the top 20 bestselling books of the past 15 years. The Secret is above all a triumph of marketing.

Not everything that positive thinking promotes is harmful. The realisation that your thoughts are not you, and that they are spitting out a constant static of negative commentary, is actually a valuable discovery. It’s the antidote that positive-thinking-based books like The Secret get wrong. There are plenty of thought-based treatments that don’t require you to make believe everything’s fine when it’s not, including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Below are just some of the reasons why The Secret, the Law of Attraction and positive thinking in general may be harmful to your mental health.

Repression of emotions

Books such as The Secret scare readers about the effects of negative thoughts. One of its many precursors, a bestseller in the 1990s, was actually titled You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought. The suggestion is that negative thoughts will attract illness, bad luck in work and relationships, and ultimately death. The Secret counsels: ‘Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts’ and ‘Your thoughts become things’. Louise Hay insists that ‘You are the power in your world! You get to have whatever you choose to think!’

This kind of advice is tantamount to emotional fascism. If you become scared of your negative thoughts, you’ll naturally try to repress them, and the emotions that go with them. Your psyche will start to rebel, and you’ll feel angry and unbalanced.

Carl Jung developed a concept of the shadow – everything that we consign to our unconscious mind because it’s inappropriate, not socially sanctioned or just childish. The shadow is the naughty self, which will not submit to culture or socialisation. It’s a very loose concept and it changes along with shifting cultural mores, but it can easily be applied to affirmations. If you recite positive affirmations all day long, your Jungian shadow will feel ignored and repressed and will try to get your attention!

If you have OCD or anxiety, you might develop an obsessive fear of negative thoughts and the consequences they could bring.

Narcissism

Books like The Secret tell people that their thoughts have a vibrational energy that the universe will respond to, magically delivering whatever they use their thoughts to envisage. This encourages a reversion to the childhood stage of narcissism, to the mentality of two-year-olds who believe they are omniscient and can have whatever they want.

While narcissism is a natural stage for children, it is a destructive worldview when carried through to adulthood. In fact, the very definition of maturity might be the understanding that we do not have ultimate control over anything except our own behaviour. The world may respond to a change in our attitude and behaviour, or it may not. We can’t control other people and we can’t control the ultimate consequences of what we think and do.

Learned helplessness

Back in the early nineties, as I wandered along the footpath in search of two dollar coins, I was wasting time I could have spent dreaming up ways to make money in a depressed economy. From this vantage point I am astounded by my lack of imagination. I see now that the abundant universe of the positive thinking books was actually a kind of parent figure and a substitute for the Christian god that I no longer believed in. My vivid imagination had gotten married to my learned helplessness, and together they made a formidable pair.

The need for challenge

In recent years neuroscientists have discovered that the brain actually thrives on challenges and novelty rather than pleasure alone. Our brains enjoy solving problems and achieving mastery of a skill. A world in which we could have whatever we wanted just by wishing for it would have been bad in an evolutionary sense; perhaps this is why the mythical Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden. Positive thinking doesn’t take these needs into account, instead preaching that the brain has to merely imagine something and it will appear.

Conclusion

All of the above doesn’t mean that motivation, optimism and idealism are bad things. Not at all. What could be called realistic or natural positive thinking has been around as long as cliches such as ‘Look on the bright side’. However, optimism should not be used to avoid rigorous planning. When embarking on a large project, you have more chance of success if you take into account the potential obstacles and work out how you will deal with them.

Nor should optimism be used as a way to avoid reality. There are times when sitting with unpleasant emotions and accepting unpleasant truths is the only sane response to a situation.

With all its mixed emotions, its difficulties and challenges, the real world is infinitely more compelling and worth exploring than a universe in which we manifest whatever our childish egos dream up.

If you’d like to read more on this theme, I’ve published a book on the subject, Why The Secret Is Wrong. You can sample the book here, or on Amazon UK here.

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Slightly Nutty Uploads New Book Cover

Exciting news - I've given my blog compilation a new cover!

These blog entries have all been lovingly edited and cleaned up and handpicked for your delectation.

Okay, well perhaps more exciting things have happened in the world. But I did the cover all by myself, and with a photo sourced from the creative commons, no less.

Oh I hate selling. I am not good at it. It goes against the very fibre of my being, unless I am selling for someone else.

You can buy it here. Or here if you're in the UK. Find out more about it here. Okay I'm out of here.

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