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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Why I Called My Memoir Love Shy

Picture:  Tambako the Jaguar

My memoir, which I first self-published back in 2012, is called Love Shy. As a confirmed commitment phobe I only settled on this title after going through a string of others, starting with the first one, Splitting.

I settled on Love Shy because it suggests my main disorders while acknowledging that there was a familial and psychological aspect to my illness, a basic problem with the formation of self – it wasn’t a case of a fully formed ego being hit by a breakdown out of the blue, which is how mental illness is sometimes represented in memoir.

But the term 'love shy' is now mired in controversy and I feel the need to explain why I used it.

Love Shy is the name of a forum, now notorious, that is the voice of the Incel community – a group of primarily men who are, to put it primly, unable to ‘get any’. Incel stands for involuntary celibacy. These are men who try their luck with women, and get nowhere.

The forum received worldwide attention following the horror of the Elliot Rodgers mass murder in Isla Vista, California. Not that he was on that forum as far as I’m aware, but there is a strong anti-feminist movement associated with particular Reddit groups that some men on the Love Shy forum subscribe to. Before the shooting spree that he carried out on 23 May, Rodgers had aired his revenge manifesto in a chilling video. In the video he expressed disdain for the women who had rejected him sexually over the years, and his intention to punish both them and the sexually active men whom he despised.

The misogyny of Rodgers’s thinking would have fitted in perfectly with those of many on the Incel forum. (Which is not to say the Incel community are potential mass murderers – in the light of the murders the internet exploded with debate between those blaming the murders on mental illness and those pinpointing the structural misogyny that made Rodgers’s views mainstream thinking. It’s worth mentioning that Rodgers killed five men, including himself, and two women.)

I’d looked at the Love Shy forum before the Rodgers murders, of course, but not analysed it in any depth. The forum seems to equate love shyness with involuntary celibacy. But my own definition of love shyness is the opposite of involuntary celibacy. The difficulty in making a distinction between the two terms indicates the difference between the unconscious and the conscious minds.

My memoir details how I ran away from love and emotional involvement. It’s not that I didn’t have opportunities – of course I did. And if asked at the time I would have said that of course I wanted a relationship. But I had a phobia about love and sex, so everything I did ensured that I obtained neither. The unconscious forces within me were stronger than my conscious wishes.

Committed relationships are quite different from casual sex. In fact as a young person I was very phobic about the latter too. There was an inner saboteur (which my psyche saw as a protector) that kept me away from both love and most sex.

Those who grew up with the internet won’t understand how much harder it was then to negotiate sex in real time, without the mediation of electronic devices to let one’s wishes be known at one remove. Before the rise of the internet, when you had to have some social confidence to negotiate casual sex, involuntary celibacy was the consequence of love shyness but for me they were not the same thing.

For me, the internet made it easy to get around that saboteur because meet-ups could be neatly arranged. I can now cope with the anxiety around casual encounters, although I’ve pretty much lost interest in them for various reasons. But the internet didn’t change the fundamental problem. Nevertheless I became more open over the years, and have begun to believe that fate itself has played a role in my more recent lack of long-term relationships. I had rejected the major loves of my life over a period of years and before the advent of the internet as dating platform. Perhaps these earlier rejections of love have created such bad karma that, willing or not, real relationships do not come my way.

As I've said, I found the internet amenable to ‘hooking up’ – although unless you’re at any age where a large pool of your peers are unattached, actually finding suitable candidates for even casual encounters is not that easy. But what I realised from these experiences, as well as countless celibate ‘pre-dates’ with both men and women, is that whether you find a relationship or not is ultimately out of your control. Sure, you can increase your chances by frequent dating, joining interest or hobby groups and pursuing ‘personal growth’ (using your intuition to avoid time-wasting and dangerous situations) but, at the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, it’s really up to the universe.

My date-to-relationship ratio has been about 60:0 (this excludes casual short term relationships). Sex may seem available at the drop of a hat, but bad casual sex can actually reduce your chances of a future relationship because not only will you will need time to emotionally process the negative experiences, but they could damage your level of trust in the future. Which is not to say all casual sex is bad of course – intuition is the key here.

Some people are simply frightened of their own inexperience, or just very shy, and have been able to use the medium of the internet to start off with casual sex and then move onto relationships once they got the chance, without having any deep-seated fear of involvement. Good luck to them.

It may even be true what the male incels say about women – that most can get sex if they really want it and therefore can’t rightly be called incel.

But to my mind a phobic fear of love, intimacy and the often wordless courtship rituals that surround those things is not the same as the fear of casual sex, a fear that may be more controllable now that sex can be neatly arranged beforehand via dating sites, email and texting.

Despite what some incel men believe, it’s therefore quite possible that there are love shy women out there (using my definition)  who can get casual sex if they want to, but flee potential relationships – not that I think my level of phobia was or is very common.

I doubt very much whether most of the men on the Love Shy forum have the kind of problem that plagued me. They seem to be willing to approach women, and to ask for what they want. In their own narratives, they just keep getting rejected. Instead of thinking their own approach might be the problem they therefore conclude that women are castrating bitches.

But in a great irony, this is itself a form of self-sabotage. Patriarchy is a psychological construct and never just a social one, but male power is contested these days. Patriarchal masculinity and its manifestations, ranging from old-fashioned views on rape to the extremities of domestic violence, are often evidence of crippling psychic terrors to do with fear of abandonment and fear of female sexual power that are beyond my powers of analysis (and may also be related to early trauma).

Clearly it is not just the misogynistic views of these men but the psychic defences that underpin them that are the problem.

So perhaps these men are in fact closer to me than I would like to think, to the extent that both they and I employ psychic defence mechanisms (albeit very different ones).

Patriarchal machismo is a powerful psychic defence – but this is not immediately clear because in so many circumstances it is socially sanctioned.

The more embittered men on the Love Shy forum might do well to go into therapy with qualified psychologists who could help them to challenge their fears of genuine involvement with, and commitment to, people of the opposite gender – as well as the distorted ideas about women they have picked up.

As for me I can rail against fate all I like but the fact is that what we have done in the past always affects the present. My rejections of love have helped make me the person I am today. Being in Grow has enabled me to adopt a more philosophical approach to life, and to accept that if I follow my path I’ll be okay. But my past actions with significant others continue to haunt me.

Love Shy: a Memoir of Social and Sexual Terror is available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon. It's available on  the UK Amazon site here and on the Australian or US Amazon site here.

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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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Memoirs of Madness: Five of the Best

The memoir of madness has been with us far longer than Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar or William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Firsthand accounts of life beyond the limits of sanity have been around from at least the early nineteenth century, as this alluring bibliography attests. 

Below I’ve picked five of my favourites, all dealing with illness that includes elements of psychosis. I’ve chosen these memoirs because they are all vividly written and because they provide vital insights into the treatment and lifestyle needs of people with mental illness. Each and every one of these memoirs makes the loud and clear declaration that it is never more important to view the mentally ill person as a complete human being with human needs and emotions than when they are most acutely ill.

Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher

Already a classic in the field, Hornbacher’s riveting immediacy, hold-onto-your-hat style and liquid prose make this memoir un-put-down-able, even as the reader squirms. She ignores her bipolar diagnosis, ditches her medication and descends into alcoholism, destructive relationships and psychosis before colliding with the consequences of her illness and making a slow journey back to sanity. Meeting her husband Jeff, finding meaningful work and suffering extended stays in a psychiatric ward are all part of the fabric of this painful and visceral but ultimately uplifting memoir.

Madness: A Memoir by Kate Richards

This memoir is written in the tradition of Hornbacher’s but Richards has a talent and voice that are hers alone. Richards’s seductive prose demonstrates that great pain and suffering can actually amplify the sensory perceptions that make life rich and meaningful. At the start of the memoir the narrator’s psychotic depression has left her an emotional adolescent, addicted to sleeping pills, dependent on alcohol and lacking in life skills. But sustained by music, literature, philosophy and the outdoors, meaningful work as a medical researcher, strong friendships and the support of a wise psychologist, Kate and the reader emerge into the daylight – with all the down sides as well as the joys and possibilities that stem from coming to terms with life and chronic illness.

One of the key strengths of this memoir is the passages written while the narrator is in psychosis, seemingly drawn from Richards’s diaries. They explore the limits of meaning, collapsing the difference between subject and object and demonstrating the dangers and lure of madness. At the same time the memoir encompasses vivid accounts of episodes in psychiatric hospitals and a grounded critique of Australia’s mental health system.

Flying with Paper Wings: Reflections on Living with Madness by Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffs is a popular Melbourne poet and an acclaimed community educator on mental illness (in her own words ‘professional lunatic’). In this honest and moving memoir she reflects on a life lived with the chronic illness of schizophrenia following a semi-rural childhood riven by constant battles between her alcoholic mother and violent, controlling father.

Jeffs’s experiences in Melbourne mental hospitals from the 70s onwards, mostly harrowing but occasionally affirming, the stubborn viciousness of her inner voices, the sustaining support of her alternative family, and the world of literature and philosophy that feed her intellect and spirit all enrich this narrative. Entirely lacking in self-pity, this is a document imbued with the wisdom and clarity of a well-lived and nurturing life despite mental health that is at times precarious, with plenty of useful lessons for carers, professionals, policy makers and the general reader.

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness by Michael Greenberg

Photograph: Marion Ettlinger

This is a poignant and beautifully written memoir about bipolar disorder from the perspective of fatherhood. Greenberg narrates the horror of watching his beloved daughter Sally switch suddenly into bipolar psychosis at the age of 15 and eke out a slow, shaky recovery in a no-frills Manhattan psychiatric hospital during a sweltering summer. It is meticulously and delicately written in a realist style that conveys the heaviness and various losses that result from watching a loved child disintegrate, as well as the financial stresses of living in New York, and of dealing with an inflexible, privatised health care system.

Greenberg describes madness as something that takes his daughter far away from him, and vividly conveys his fears that she will never return. The awkward encounters between his current and his ex-wife, the eccentricities of the other patients, as well as the burden he already bears of supporting a mentally ill brother, ground this memoir in a complex and challenging context.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness by Elyn Saks

Elyn Saks is a tenured professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California with degrees from Oxford, Yale and Vanderbilt, and an expert in mental health law. She has also had the experience of being forcibly restrained for hours on end in psychiatric wards and forcefed medication while suffering acute psychosis. This memoir describes Saks’s struggle to accept and manage a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while forging a stellar academic career.

Saks first experienced full-blown psychosis as a young postgraduate on a philosophy scholarship at Oxford. In The Center Cannot Hold she documents her torturous journey towards accepting the severity of her illness and the need to take medication. During this period she was able to avail herself of skilled psychoanalysts who understood the emotional content of her delusions and enabled her to maintain some degree of equilibrium.

Saks gives important insights into her state of mind during her most acute episodes and how traumatised she was by the dehumanising treatment she experienced after suffering a breakdown at Yale. Key here are the human aspects of the illness – the way it is affected by stress, Saks’s struggles to maintain her academic career, and the shocking attitudes of psychiatric staff who valued compliance over healing. ‘While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that had helped me find a life worth living’, Saks asserts. The support and intellectual engagement that her career and her academic colleagues provide, her ultimate acceptance of the need for ongoing medication and her fulfilling marriage in her mid-forties together enable a life that is ‘rich and satisfying’.

Narratives of madness

These memoirs are riveting yet educational reads for the general public, as well as important guideposts for sufferers. But they are also vital documents for mental health practitioners, akin to qualitative research about the experiences of users of mental health services.

Three of them, Madness: A Bipolar Life, Madness: A Memoir and The Center Cannot Hold, contain a similar trajectory – after experiencing the extremes of the illness, sometimes worsened by addiction, the sufferer eventually comes to accept the need to take medication and to manage addictions and stresses, and learns how to maintain a balanced, fulfilling life. 

This trajectory suggests that if the right level of support and skill were offered early enough, sufferers might be able achieve recovery without the self-destruction and descent into addiction that are so commonly represented as necessary stages on the journey.

All five of them reflect on the human elements that make the long-term management of illness – and just as important a fulfilling life – possible.

In The Center Cannot Hold and Madness: A Memoir, what makes this journey possible is the loving, sustained attention of therapists who provide a safe psychic space in which the patient can explore emotional defences and gradually embrace maturity.

In Hornbacher’s case it is her ever-patient psychiatrist, the hospital she lives in for months on end, where staff are unendingly accepting and supportive, and the unconditional love and fortitude of her husband that together create a safety net in which she is harboured until the illness is tamed.

In Flying with Paper Wings, it is Jeffs’s ‘two Demeters’ – the female friends with whom she has lived in a peaceful setting on the rural fringes of Melbourne for 30 years.

In Hurry Down Sunshine, it is the sustained love and attention of Sally’s family, including the father–narrator, that eases Sally's transition to precarious sanity.

Creativity, purposeful work and strong friendships also play vital roles. Secure housing is vital and the fact that most of the stories feature middle class sufferers is no accident. Kate Richards expresses how lucky she is to be able to afford to choose her own therapist, and to buy a home that offers not just long-term security but a haven.

One of the reasons for the importance of these memoirs is their various critiques of the psychiatric profession and the mental health sector.

The memoir of Richards, a medical researcher, has not one decent psychiatrist throughout its 200-plus pages. Not one. They are helpful in dispensing medication, but the healing she receives comes from a psychologist. The implication is that the problem is systemic, due to faulty training – Richards is ‘sacked’ by one psychiatrist, while others demonstrate various levels of boredom and disengagement.

Sandy Jeffs also questions psychiatry, having left her long-term therapist, Dr Y, after 27 years. She is critical of what she calls ‘Fastpsychiatry’ and ponders the dangers and possibilities of investigating the psychic content of her delusions with a new therapist, Dr K, who is willing to explore with her the darkest underpinnings of her hostile voices: ‘If I could heal that little girl, would the persecutory content of my delusions and voices diminish, and allow me to embrace her?’

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Free Offer: Review Copy of Memoir

I'm offering 10 readers a free copy of my memoir, Compulsive Mind: A Memoir of Panic, Social Anxiety and OCD.

There's just one condition – that you promise to provide a review of the book on the Amazon website. This means that you need to have an Amazon account, and to have bought something using that account in the past.

At the moment no-one has reviewed my book on Amazon, despite it having been in the top 100 for Kindle mental illness categories many times. The fact is that many – perhaps the majority of – Amazon reviews are either set-ups, or an expression of extreme reactions to a book, whether positive or negative.

Of course I want reviews so that potential readers will have something to go on and feel more comfortable buying the book. But as a writer I also crave feedback. I would love to know what works about the book for readers, and equally what doesn't.

I want any reviews of my book to be sincere. I don't expect you to review the book positively, just honestly. And reviews don't have to be time consuming – Amazon reviews can range in length from a short article to just a few lines.

If you're successful I will send the book in the form of a mobi file, so you need to have a Kindle reader. But you don't need a Kindle – you can download a free Kindle reader for iMac, Windows and many types of smart phone and tablet, including iPad and iPhone, from here.

About the book
In this sex-saturated world, imagine for one minute that there's something you're more terrified of than anything else: love and intimacy. And that a nasty case of social phobia and low-level OCD lurks behind your terror.

This moving, often confronting memoir reveals how a devastating and complex anxiety disorder exploded into the life of an intelligent, creative young girl struggling to reach maturity in the Melbourne, Australia of the 1970s and 80s.

Adrienne McGill grew up with undiagnosed social phobia and OCD, and developed panic disorder at the age of twenty. The toll her untreated illness took on her career, relationships and emotional development is related here in sardonic, sometimes relentless prose that packs a punch.

This book is essential reading if you:

• want to better understand the dynamics of anxiety
• feel that your anxiety disorder doesn't fit neatly into the standard definitions
•  love memoirs of the 1980s
• are looking for a memoir about blushing
• suffer from more than one disorder. 

How to request your free review copy 
Write to me requesting your free copy at caetem@yahoo.com. I'm only giving away ten copies, so be quick! I'll amend this blog entry when the offer is no longer valid.

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Writing a Memoir: Tips for Bypassing the Inner Censor

When you’re figuring out how to write a memoir, it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the mechanics. Of course these are important. But unless your memoir is primarily factual in nature, getting to the emotional core of the story – the most profound version of what really happened – is vital if you want your writing to be compelling.

But how do you do this? I’ve written in the past about the challenge of finding your memoir voice. Your unconscious mind may be prey to all sorts of strictures about telling the truth that you’re not aware of. You may have an inner censor that metaphorically blacks out your most intense memories.

Yet this censor is often asleep on the job, and it may not be difficult to get past them. Below are some tips for doing just that.

Mind’s eye

Sometimes your inner censor is only working on the level of the writing itself, and not your actual recollections. It may be that you’re easily able to picture and remember whatever you were feeling at the time of the event you’re writing about, but somehow the link between this internal state and the writing process is missing.

You need to be conscious of the gap before you can bridge it.

As an exercise, start writing about a memory. As you write, focus on what is present in your mind’s eye. Does your subject matter accord with the picture in your mind’s eye? If so, chances are you’re in touch with what was really going on emotionally at the time.

If there is a discrepancy between the two, start to explore this inner picture. Ask yourself the following:

Which room or environment are you picturing? Why is this room significant?

What are the feelings or thoughts that circulate around this mental image? Can you put them into words?

Sometimes there’s a delay between completing a piece of writing and being aware of the underlying emotions that accompanied the original experience. You may complete the writing and only later become aware of a deeper layer of feeling and experience. Try to capture this deeper layer in words as soon as it comes up, and use this later writing to enhance what you’ve already completed.

Studying photos

Photos are a great way of jogging memory and unearthing perceptions about the past.

One option is to find a photo that appeals to you, study it, and start to write freely about anything that comes to mind. Think about what was happening around the time the photo was taken, and what the underlying dynamics were. If you're writing about relatives, a photo that appeals to your imagination can spark a search for more information.

Another option is to keep a photo nearby, or in your mind’s eye, as you write, as a general reminder of the subject matter. In this case you're not so concerned about whatever is going on in the photo, but of the individual character of the people that feature in it. Whether the photo is of you alone, family members or other significant people, use it to help you retain a strong sense of the character, emotional burdens, or general circumstances of those you're writing about.

Perceptions on waking

One of the times we’re most vulnerable to unconscious thoughts and memories is when we first wake up in the morning.

Sometimes a deeper layer of perception or emotion may reveal itself in a dream, or simply as a general impression when you wake. Keep a pen and paper or writing device next to the bed to capture these impressions, or alternatively write about them as soon as you get to the computer in the morning.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

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Memoir Writing: How to Find Your Voice as a Writer

Writing a memoir sets you on an inner voyage of discovery. At the end of it you’re almost bound to know yourself much better than you do at the start.

A vital key to writing a successful memoir is finding your voice as a writer. The irony is that you may have to listen to many other voices before your own comes through.

Your authorial voice is an organic thing that makes your writing unique. But how to unearth it successfully differs from person to person.

Some lucky people simply start to write, and the voice of their earlier self suddenly bubbles up and they simply channel it. For others it’s not so easy. When you start to write, there are likely to be psychological restrictions you’re unaware of: parental dictums to be polite; fear of hurting or embarrassing family members; the restrictions imposed by well-meaning teachers; even the sense of what is syntactically correct can all interfere with voice.

One way to get the flow going is to read lots of different memoirs. I’ve read hundreds of memoirs by now and they’ve all helped to put me in writing mode.

Reading other memoirs can provide permission. ‘She dared say that!’ you think, and a hidden part of you that has been crouching in the attic of your psyche for years, ignored or reviled, starts to stretch and parade herself. And there are things she’s desperate to tell you.

Like how you really felt when you moved house at the age of nine. And why you stopped dancing classes at the age of twelve. And who you really had a crush on, even though they weren’t at all cool. This disowned self is far more interesting and subversive than you realise and if you let her speak she may give your writing a force and immediacy that might otherwise be lacking.

When I first started writing it became apparent after a while that I was repressing the most interesting and subversive parts of the narrative. I would describe the event and then find myself mentally rehearsing something I hadn’t thought interesting enough to include. Hmmm. Over a period of time it became clear that the most interesting things were the things that I didn’t want to look at.

Good writing is about bravery. It’s about daring to look. Experiencing the feelings again is likely to be painful. But the pain won’t last. The record will.

When I consider voice, I find myself also looking at style, tone and language. Perhaps voice is the combination of these, powered by the essence of the narrative self who is the subject of the memoir.

When you read other memoirs, take note of the tone, as that is a key aspect of voice. Tone can range widely from highly emotional to melodramatic, from blackly humorous to cheerful or self-contained (and can also be a combination of any of these).

Also important is language, which also varies depending on the aims of the writer. For example, you can use language to bring the reader closer to the emotion or distance them from it. Language combines with tone to tell the reader who the narrator is, what life stage they’re at, and how much distance they have from the subject matter.

Two stand-out memoirists

Out of all the many possible examples of memoirists I want to choose two that illuminate voice. Both are excellent writers yet their styles are in  sharp contrast, at either end of two extremes.

In Borrowed Finery, Paula Fox (above) writes about a horrific childhood in small, jewel-like vignettes that have a haiku quality about them. They are highly visual recollections that together make up what one admiring reviewer called  ‘a montage of scenes and epiphanies’.

Fox was abandoned by her feckless parents at birth, and passed around from person to person, sometimes finding temporary sanctuaries, often not. In writing her memoir she seems to have stuck to the rule: ‘thou shalt not wallow’. There is little sentiment here and no self-pity. There is a sense of someone surviving sufficiently to retain the observer self, who notices the unique detail and stores it for later. 

Whether a restrained style is right for you will depend on your strengths as a writer and your subject matter. If you want to write with drama and urgency, you’ve got to read Marya Horbacher (pictured at top). She’s written two outstanding memoirs, Wasted: A Memoir of Bulimia and Anorexia and Madness: A Bipolar Life. The first details a near-fatal eating disorder that Hornbacher developed at the age of nine; the second her experience of, and coming to terms with, a severe form of bipolar disorder. Hornbacher’s work is fast-paced, highly dramatic and a miracle of immediacy. She is a lyrical writer from whom the words seem to pour. 

Hornbacher’s work is also noteworthy because, especially in Wasted, she combines an intellectual and at times scholarly approach with a highly vernacular, heightened and poetic style. A chaotic, free-for-all quality accompanies the powerful imagery and strong narrative drive.

There are occasional drawbacks to both styles. Fox has deliberately stripped emotion from her writing; Borrowed Finery  is almost an essay protesting the misery memoir genre. At the same time it occasionally becomes a little frustrating to read because you don’t get much of a back story (or a sense of Fox’s adult life – perhaps a sequel is required).

And while Hornbacher is brilliant, quixotic, un-put-downable, at times the reader feels trapped in the narrator’s hellish world and, especially in the earlier work, her self-destructive tendencies (of course, involuntarily identifying with the writer’s experience is a sign of good writing and probably what Hornbacher intended).

Neither of these memoirists is ‘wrong’. Far from it. Both have sought and found the voice that’s right for them.

Are you struggling to find your memoir voice? Which writers have helped you?

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Killing Your Darlings: How to Delete Material from a Manuscript without Tears

When you’re working on an extended piece of writing, whether it’s a novel, memoir or other form of non-fiction, editing is one of the most important and painful tasks. Hard as it is to face, much of what we write has to be ultimately turfed, chucked out, trashed. Whatever word you use, it’s all the same – it won’t belong in the piece. It will interrupt the flow, confound the narrative, or have the wrong tone.

Information on the practical aspects of editing your work is widely available, but it doesn’t make the emotional part any easier. Knowing a piece of copy isn’t right doesn’t make it any easier to cut out.

But it’s not all bad news. You don’t actually have to trash what doesn’t belong. In fact, there are many options for putting it to a completely new use. Below are some suggestions.

Store deleted text in a separate file. Don’t simply delete the text you need to discard. Create a file with a name that makes it easily identifiable, eg ‘Copy deleted from memoir’. Cut and paste any deleted copy into that, separating each piece of text with a line break. Even if you never use the copy, you’ll have a record of it. In the case of a memoir, you’ll retain scenes that have emotional resonance for you. View these scenes as the textual equivalent of the deleted movie scenes sometimes included on DVDs as extras – worthwhile revisiting for their own sake.

Make different versions of your manuscript. If you complete a draft of your manuscript before making major structural changes, you’ll probably have a strong level of emotional involvement with the earlier draft. In the case of a memoir this may be particularly strong because the earlier draft may include more information about your life, and what made you the person you became, than the later one. Retain two versions of the manuscript: the long version and the edited version. Publish the shorter version to rave reviews(!) and keep the long version as a record for your personal archive.

Repurpose text to create a new piece of writing. Deleted copy could become the basis for a new story, article, poem, play or blog entry, or perhaps a whole book!

A description of an eccentric relative or a significant trip could become the basis for an article that is published in a newspaper, magazine or journal, whether in hard copy or online. (This could be used as valuable publicity for your published book, as the bio that would accompany your piece would mention your book).

A descriptive line from a novel could become the inspiration for a poem.

A real-life incident that had to be cut from a memoir could become the basis for a short story, play or novel.

Alternatively, it might be the starting-point for a second memoir dealing with aspects of your life the first one didn’t. Augusten Burroughs, the acclaimed author of Running with Scissors, has now written a total of six memoirs, including three collections of stories from his life. Kathryn Harrison, author of acclaimed memoir The Kiss, has completed three memoirs and a book that is a combination of memoir and travelogue. (She has also published six novels, some of which deal with the lives of her maternal grandparents.)

Condense the copy and use it somewhere else. You don’t always have to explain everything in detail. Sometimes a paragraph or scene contains information that has value for readers but could be expressed more succinctly. My memoir originally included a scene in which my sister and I were taunted by a group of non-Catholic schoolchildren on the way to school. I deleted the scene because it wasn’t pivotal and made the memoir too lengthy, but its emotional import remains in the line ‘Would they laugh in my face when I cried, like the state school kids laughed?’

Describe your experiences of editing when you publicise your book. Readers are fascinated with the process of constructing an extended piece of writing. As well as the technical aspects, they’re curious about the emotional ups and downs that come with the territory, and the ways in which the writing impacts on real life. If you’re giving author talks to publicise your book, discussing what you took out (or left out) of your book and why, and the process of editing in general, can be rewarding for readers. It can also be the basis of an article itself – as this blog entry testifies!

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Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

Photo by Harmony and Home

Can writing a memoir actually help heal a painful past? Is it therapeutic, or does it simply provoke bitter memories and angry ghosts that are better left alone? Like an explorer returning exhausted but triumphant from a gruelling journey, full of information about the terrain she’s traversed, I can assure you that the psychic knowledge that results from memoir writing is well worth the effort.

But there is a catch. If you want your writing to come alive, you'll need to revisit the raw trauma of the original pain, and risk being seared and burned by it once more.

To write a memoir that I considered worthwhile, I had to relive painful experiences and periods. I was aiming for a sensual, immediate tone that strongly evoked each episode (I’m not saying I achieved that – just that I tried). So I plunged myself back into each stinging memory, and consciously tried to recall exactly how it felt to be in that situation at the time.

Not an exercise for the fainthearted.

That goes for particular episodes. But what happens when you’re writing about a significant period of your life for a matter of weeks and even months? When I was 20 I moved into a share house in the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy that was opposite an estate of high-rise public housing flats. This was way before Fitzroy’s gentrification and the culture shock was immense, not only in regard to the geography but to the lifestyles of my lefty housemates. I soon developed a crush on one of them, and the intensity of those feelings is inseparable from the bohemian romanticism of the shabby iron-laced terrace we inhabited.

While I was writing the scenes set in my Fitzroy abode, I felt haunted. I was living in two eras at once, the present and the early 1980s, and two places at once, the terrace house and my current flat. The contrast between my past and present lifestyle, combined with strong feelings of connectedness with people I hadn’t seen for more than 25 years, was profoundly disorientating. I was surrounded by ghosts who would not let me go. Perhaps – and here’s the kicker – I was releasing feelings for them that I hadn’t felt secure enough to fully experience (let alone express)  at the time.

When you’re going through something like that it can feel as if it will never end. You wonder if you’ll be permanently trapped in an emotional time warp. But it does pass. Not that the feelings don’t come up again every now and again – I believe now that if a traumatic experience is sufficiently intense it creates its own momentum in the psyche, and complete freedom from it may never be possible. But for me at least the intensity is now far less, and I’m a freer human being through having released those pent-up emotions.

Not only that, but in a strange way you may gain a stronger relationship with yourself. I know myself better now. I’m Adrienne McGill who experienced certain very human emotions at a particular time, not simply Adrienne McGill who went into meltdown when she moved out of home for the first time. I’ve become better acquainted with the non-pathological aspects of my younger self; it’s like meeting a scary stranger who is much less frightening once you get to know them.

Memoir writing and forgiveness

Sometimes writing the memoir involved not just reliving old emotions, but experiencing difficult new ones. A memoir forces you to examine your personal journey with a keen and bloodless eye. While you're working out what really happened, no one can be allowed to get off the hook.

So, not the most forgiving daughter at the best of times, I was faced with powerful anger as I put together the jigsaw puzzle picture of my life. The mistakes my parents made were routine rather than extreme, but they sometimes had profound effects. For much of the time of writing I was furious with both of them in a way I hadn’t been before, but particularly so with my mother.

But understanding something cognitively ultimately allows you to move beyond it. Discovering something new about the reasons for a pathology makes you realise that your brain is much more adaptable and creative than you'd given it credit for. You begin to perceive the perverse rationality of your dysfunction, to view it as a logical reaction to circumstances. Aha you say, this is why I closed up, or this is why I acted out. You gain more compassion for yourself.

You may also end up with compassion for the authority figures that once oppressed you. It took me a long time to escape from the deep well of anger for my mother that I was thrown into. I was angry with her even before I started writing the memoir and, in the way described above, my anger intensified while writing it. I’ll never completely lose the anger, but it has now substantially subsided.

This is partly because however egregious my mum’s perceived failures, writing about her has forced me to see her as a separate human being with a life independent of me, and her own story of parental failure. (Making me less narcissistic in the process.)

But it’s also because I now own my own story. I’ve set it out, and my mother’s an important part of it, and I’ve told what I believe to be the truth about our relationship. I’m somehow freed by the fact that the story of me and her is now on the public record. And this is not dependent on some kind of public naming and shaming – it’s all been done very discreetly.

This greater ability to distinguish my identity from hers makes it possible for me to go forward with the understanding and knowledge that I don’t have to live my life as an endless response to our story and relationship. Instead, I can live my life with courage, stretching myself and fulfilling the potential of the creativity that was buried so long under neurosis.

Publishing a book can give you a stronger sense of self regardless of whether it's about your own life. Completing my first book, which was about shopping, and having it out in the public realm helped me start to separate from my family. The memoir has boosted this process simply by being another book, but its subject matter has also helped to free me from the psychoanalytic aspects of my background. I’m now an author with my name on the cover of three books (even if it’s a pseudonym for two of them). I can begin to stop hoping that my family will one day be what I want them to be, and instead get on with being the person that I am.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like You Must Remember This.

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Time and time again

Human beings are hardwired to regret. One of the most pernicious regrets is that of lost time.

Do the following statements sound familiar? We learn from our mistakes. Even suffering brings growth. If we take a wrong direction it provides valuable feedback that can enable us to make a better decision the next time. Similarly, if we are too frightened to act in case we make a mistake, then that defeats one of the main purposes of life, which is to learn.

All of these things are true. However, it’s also true that some mistakes come at a great cost, and that some decisions have serious adverse consequences. We don’t always get a second chance. These are hard truths that I believe some new age spiritualities do not take account of.

One of my earliest heroes was the melancholy Leo Sayer, surely the forerunner of today’s emo. ‘I’ve wasted, wasted, so much time / walking on the wire’, he wailed on one of his early and greatest hit songs, ‘The show must go on’.

For me, the hardest thing to put up with in my present life is that, from my own reckoning, I ‘waste’ huge swathes of time, especially compared with my idealised image of what someone with my degree of intelligence ‘should’ be doing. Inevitably I link this wasted time with the present structure of my life, which is the result of mistakes made years ago, when I was literally a different person from the one I am now.

I’ve long forgiven the wasted time of my late teens and twenties, when I didn’t know any better. But in my early and mid-thirties, when I’d started to recover from an eating disorder and gain some sense of engagement with reality, I continued to make some decisions that I knew at the time were unnecessarily timorous. The mistakes I made then led to wasted time that to some extent continues into the present.

This doesn’t mean that I never have valuable experiences. It does mean, however, that I miss out on many important aspects of life and I don’t work nearly as much as I’d like to.

Most of the time I can live with regret about the past – it’s gone, and I know I can’t change it. It’s the continued wasting of the present, the seeming unavoidability of that waste, that’s difficult. And this also relates to the realities of ageing and living alone. I can learn from my mistakes, but the fact is – to be perfectly blunt – at 47, it feels as if I’m literally running out of time.

There are three fronts on which the time appears to be washed under the bridge by forces I can’t control: not working enough because of fear of others, and therefore not being able to shovel money away for a more secure and fun lifestyle (own house, holidays, old age, more music, theatre, expensive clothes, money for good causes); through depression and anxiety not ‘improving’ myself enough ‘culturally’, with appropriately highbrow music, film, and literature; and through having my literary creativity curtailed by the ‘failure’ to achieve an emotionally and socially fulfilled life (the blog has helped a bit with the creativity).

I envy people who write successful books out of the horrors of mental and physical illness or addiction because it seems to me that they have somehow recuperated the ‘lost’ time, made meaning of it and created something new from it. Not only do they help themselves by writing their story down and shaping it into narrative, but they help many others by sharing their story and offering hope. They may also gain financially from sharing their suffering in a way that chimes with others.

I fully understand that I am clinging onto an idealised version of myself. If I had a family I would probably be overly busy, but much of that busyness would involve mundane tasks. I’ve always had a morbid fear of being a female parent, and being given the role of self-sacrificing ‘mother’ instead of equal partner in the parenting enterprise – I look at my sisters, all of them mothers, and simply don’t know if I am better or worse off than they. But fathers also get lost in the mundane – I think of the hours my brother-in-law spends ferrying his kids to footy and basketball.

Yet even amidst the ennui and chronic exhaustion, as a parent I would be able to tell myself that I was achieving a valuable long-term goal – the continuation of the species and the nurturing of tomorrow’s taxpayers and, hopefully, stewards of planet Earth. And my brother-in-law probably uses at least some of that driving (and game watching) time to bond with his children.

As well, the wound of loneliness sometimes requires the antidote of bad television rather than the intellectually stimulating read that some busy parents, including mothers, might crave. At times, such parents might envy the likes of me, free of the never-ending drudgery and pleas for attention. But they might find me curled up in a ball bewailing my fate as I watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares rather than poring over the Collected Works of Charles Dickens as Beethoven’s Ninth thunders in the background.

Obsessed with time management

My fear of wasting time also relates to the mistaken belief that not doing something productive is somehow sinful. I certainly didn’t pick that up from my Catholic upbringing. Instead, this fear stems from the time when I was completing my Masters thesis in the late 1990s. I was on a scholarship, studying full time, and surrounded by successful people who gave papers at conferences, tutored, learned French to improve their understanding of theory, and attended reading groups.

At the time, to my way of thinking the pursuit of knowledge easily trumped consumerism, materialism and any sort of interest in popular culture, and from my lofty, poverty-stricken heights I looked down scornfully on anyone who did not value intellectual endeavour, seeing them as sadly deluded. I spent hours in the library brushing up on theory, much of which has now long since vanished from my mind.

But the sense of directedness I saw in the high achievers was pervasive. I remember one day glancing behind me at the library queue and noticing my supervisor further behind me in the line, waiting to have a book checked out. She poked her head around to scan the queue and, with a quick jerk of her body, abruptly left. I still remember what that momentary action indicated to me: the instantaneous weighing up of the time she would lose in the queue compared with the convenience of having access to the book. This suggested someone whose life had no spare seconds, who was so full of purpose and responsibilities that time management meant the difference between ongoing achievement and mere striving.

So in the couple of years following my Masters I would use every minute of spare time ‘productively’, by, say, reading small cards on which I’d drawn kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) while waiting forlornly at a city bus stop on a biting cold winter’s afternoon.

And before I started editing, and during the times when the work dried up and I was coaxing survey responses from reluctant telephone interviewees, I’d surreptitiously go over Japanese sentences while waiting for respondents to pick up the phone. Eventually the supervisors noticed and, despite my high success rate in obtaining telephone interviews, ordered me to stop. This caused me unseen angst; I couldn’t just relax and let the time be spent simply making enough money to live on. I was obsessed with ‘improving each shining hour’.

At its height, this fear of wasting time would have extended to, say, the idea of socialising with people who I didn’t have much in common with (ie my relatives!). But one gift of my social phobia, and the exploration I’ve done in trying to understand it, is that I now see those everyday interactions as being vitally important.

There are two reasons for this: they're good for mental health generally, because as humans we need to interact with others and feel safer when we’re with others, and particularly our ‘pack’; and because they provide me with valuable exposure practice for my social phobia.

So to some extent regret about wasted time is something I live with. Slowly I’ve begun to realise that the moment, even in its occasional awfulness, even when not filled with mental exercise, has its own integrity.

I could learn kanji till I was blue in the face but it would be useless, a waste of time, unless I was attending a Japanese class or had a reason for learning it such as a planned visit to Japan. Neither of these situations applied, so the keeping up with my Japanese study became, in the end, a waste of time rather than a good use of it.

The concept of mindfulness helped me understand this. Mindfulness involves becoming an observer of the self – one’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings and current actions – in order to move into the present in a more profound way. When I divide my attention too much (writing my diary while watching tele, for instance) I’m subtly diminishing my experience of time, indeed of life. While trying to save time, I may actually be wasting it.

I love good thrillers and I need to spend some time vegging out on weekends. But I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to decent thrillers at my local video store. So last weekend I ended up on a Saturday afternoon watching one of the worst klunkers ever made, Cold Creek Manor with Denis Quaid and Sharon Stone.

There literally wasn’t a scary moment in it; it could have been parody if it hadn’t been so dull and lacking in humour. It made me wonder about the technical aspects of thrillers – why some work and some fail spectacularly. But perhaps the most important thing for me to do was to actually pay attention to the film, observe and follow the creaky plot, and try and work out why it failed, rather than just having it on as background to my random thoughts.

Another reason why unstructured time is vital is that it refreshes the mind and enables creativity. Late one afternoon I took my seven-year-old niece to the park, supervising as she mucked around on the play equipment. For quite a long time she half-lounged on a swing, moving slowly back and forth as she gazed into space. This natural ability to enjoy mental downtime is too often mistaken for laziness. But it's the space in which new ideas and creative breakthroughs hatch themselves.

A book on worry that I read recently goes further than advocating basic mindfulness. In The Worry Cure, Robert R Leahy provides useful advice for incessant worriers who are busy dreading what the future might bring. One of his suggestions is that once you’ve brought yourself back to the present moment using mindfulness, you can add value to the moment, make it count.

I love this idea because it extends the concept of mindfulness so effectively. You bring yourself into the present, become aware of your body, breathing and perceptions; then you do something to improve the present, even if it’s just subtly. This could be something insignificant, like savouring a cup of tea, putting some music on (Beethoven’s Ninth?) or taking the kids for an ice cream.

Using intuition is also important to me in combatting my fear of wasting time. In the past I was constantly using my will to forge ahead; now I use intuition to decide whether something’s worth spending energy on. Anything that feels right can't really be a waste of time.

Being busy for the sake of it can actually cause harm. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s political demise provides a cautionary tale. Rudd seems to have been unable to stop work, to delegate, and he also caused great harm to his staff because he unapologetically worked them to the bone, no doubt causing havoc with their family lives.

‘A staff working year is probably like a dog year, that is it's probably worth seven years in normal life’, he was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph of 15 April 2010. That report also stated that he had lost 28 staff, presumably since coming to office in late 2007.

The coup that ousted Rudd in favour of Julia Gillard occurred for many and complex reasons, but the refusal to delegate seems to have been one of them. I sympathise with Rudd and wish fervently that the party had given him an ultimatum months ago rather than cruelly dealing the death blow – but I can’t help seeing in his fate a grim warning about the effects of overwork!

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Of wolves (and parrots) and men (and women): research and reflections on animal intelligence

For many years science and common sense were totally at odds when it came to the abilities of non-human animals. In recent years a slew of popular memoirs, not to mention philosophical texts, have testified to the deep bonds that can exist between us and our non-human friends (who hasn’t heard of Marley and Me, now a Hollywood film?).

Science has slowly caught up with the instinctive understanding of many that animals are sophisticated, intelligent beings with complex needs. It has destroyed one by one each treasured illusion about what humans alone are capable of; we’re not the only ones who can make tools, use language or think about the future, for instance. But its findings also pose a threat to our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation – if we’re not fundamentally different from other animals, who are we, and where exactly do we fit in the scheme of things?

Lupine philosophy

Research is showing that dogs, the ancestors of wolves, have complex inner lives, experience a range of emotions and possess a moral compass. The implications of this are beautifully explored in The Philosopher and the Wolf, a memoir-cum-philosophy text by Mark Rowlands.

For over a decade Rowlands, once one of those intellectuals who could abuse his body with impunity – he admits to having been drunk while writing his best-selling popular philosophy books, although he seems to have since calmed down – flitted from one philosophy post to another accompanied by his wolf hybrid, Brenin, purchased as a puppy.

Knowing Brenin would trash the place if left at home, Rowlands took his young wolf to his philosophy lectures. Brenin would lie quietly in a corner and snooze, but would sit up and start howling ‘when the lectures became particularly tedious’.

In what is now a well-established and almost cliched tradition, but one he injects with originality, Rowlands reflects on the close ‘brotherly’ relationship he shared with Brenin. He uses it as a basis for philosophising on humans’ attitudes towards and ethics regarding non-human animals; good and evil; and our obsession with finding happiness. There’s some autobiography thrown in but the focus is always on the central relationship. The book is very deliberately written for a general audience but the philosophising is original and although it’s mostly easy to understand, it doesn’t seem to be watered down.

I adored this book. The thing I liked most about it was that it explained to me why I am a bit dog-crazy. Rowlands has a beguiling theory about why so many of us love and need dogs. It apparently harks back to our being a species of ape. At some point in evolution, apes began to live in large and complex social groups. In order to survive in such groups, we developed a Machiavellian streak – the ability to hide our true feelings and motivations from the world, to scheme and dissemble to improve our social standing. Rowlands attacks the idea of the social contract, the theory that we submit to the rule of law to avoid chaos and bloodshed. He asserts that it simply reveals how calculating we apes are; it’s ‘a deliberate sacrifice for an anticipated gain’.

Wolves, in contrast, didn’t take the Machiavellian path, although they are just as dependent on the pack as we are on the clan. And it’s because of this inability to dissemble that we love dogs, the ancestors of wolves – we crave that lost simplicity, we long to escape from our evil ape selves, to be ‘the wolf we once were’ who ‘understands that happiness cannot be found in calculation’.

This makes perfect sense to me on many levels. We can’t be dogs, although we’d like to live in the present and not hold grudges like them. But it’s refreshing to be around that kind of honesty, to be in a world where the appearance matches the reality, and to experience that level of loyalty and affection. The beautiful and classic example of canine honesty is, of course, the dog’s involuntarily wagging tail.

We are frequently humbled by the noble qualities of dogs and other mammals. A few years ago animal researcher Marc Bekoff caused controversy when he claimed that in some respects animal morality might be ‘purer’ than that of humans.

This may be true. But perhaps humans, simply because we live in a world set up for our species, often have many more choices to make, and more freedom, when it comes to morality than do non-human animals. Well-socialised dogs (and wolves) may not have to work at being good in the way that John Ames did in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, for example.

Could the term ‘bird brain’ be a compliment?

Dogs are not the only ones who amaze, delight and nurture us. Alex was an African Grey parrot who revealed startling abilities during the course of 30 years working with researcher Irene Pepperberg, despite having ‘a brain the size of a walnut’ (Alex and Pepperberg are pictured above).

Pepperberg’s findings radically altered the scientific consensus on the intelligence of birds, and showed that the brains of birds are much more similar in structure to human brains than was previously thought. Her work also helped to challenge the long-held dominance of behaviourism in science, which assumed that animals were basically automatons. Pepperberg tells the story of her relationship with Alex in her touching memoir Alex and Me.

Pepperberg is a gifted scientist. She is a currently an adjunct professor of psychology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a lecturer at Harvard. With a PhD in chemistry, she came to animal communication belatedly and, hampered by gender as well as her then-controversial research area, struggled for years in cramped corners of university labs with tiny funding grants. But eventually she and Alex won through, and indeed he had become something of a celebrity before his sudden and unexpected death in 2007 at the age of 38. Pepperberg was still teaching him new skills at the time and remains convinced that he hadn’t yet reached his full potential.

Over his career, Alex learned ‘object labels (words), categories, concepts and numbers’. He could distinguish whether an object was the same as or different from another object in terms of colour, shape or material (‘matter’), a sophisticated cognitive task that was beyond what primates were being tested for at the time.

When presented with a tray showing objects of different shapes and colours, including blocks in more than one colour, he could say, for example, how many green blocks there were. He could also tell whether one object was bigger or smaller than another object. He learned to count, and could distinguish between a higher number and a larger object. He learned parts of words – phonemes – and, when presented with refrigerator letters in different colours, could tell what colour a particular sound was, and which sound was a particular colour.

Pepperberg is committed to the scientific project and that’s one thing that makes reading the book so worthwhile. It also means that the most stunning examples of Alex’s intelligence didn’t make it to the scientific literature because they sometimes got in the way of the experiment to establish intelligence; although the tests were effective, they were too reductive to limn every aspect of Alex’s abilities. Simply, he sometimes got bored with the experiments and joked around. Here’s a wonderful example, which occurred when Alex had already successfully passed many tests confirming his knowledge of colours, and had answered such questions ‘dozens of times’:

… we would ask him, “What color key?” and he would give every colour in his repertoire, skipping only the correct color …We were pretty certain he wasn’t making mistakes, because it was statistically near to impossible that he could list all but the correct answer. These observations are not science, but they tell you a lot about what was going on in his head …

Earlier, Pepperberg relates that Alex once made up a new word combination. He had just been given a piece of apple for the first time and been told the name of it. But he stubbornly refused to repeat the word apple, calling it ‘banerry’ instead because it reminded him of banana and looked like a large cherry. When Pepperberg didn’t at first get what he was trying to do, he patronisingly spelt it out to her in the way she carefully pronounced new words to him: ‘he said, very slowly and deliberately, “Ban-err-eee”’.

Let’s be clear, Alex didn’t merely copy phrases – he held conversations. However, Pepperberg wasn’t going to buy into what was then a controversy over whether animals were actually speaking, ie using language as humans do; she called her area of study animal communication. But her accounts of some of the conversations are incredible. This doesn’t mean that Alex necessarily knew the meaning of every word he used, but he understood the effect of the phrases.

One example is his use of ‘I’m sorry’. He frequently yelled it out when he’d been uncooperative and the researchers were angry with him. Pepperberg never knew whether he understood it only as a means of defusing others’ anger or whether he was actually sorry – probably the former. In that way he was very like a young child who seeks to restore favour with her parents. And indeed he was shown to have the intelligence of a five-year-old human (astoundingly, he also seems to have had greater numerical ability than chimpanzees).

During their years together, Pepperberg had tried to maintain scientific objectivity and so had not let herself get too close to Alex, but when he died she was engulfed by a powerful grief. She stills continues to work with African Greys, however, and Griffin, a Grey she now works with, also shows considerable ability.

Parrots and apes are not the only animals to possess high levels of intelligence. Dolphins are able to think about the future and crows have been shown to use ‘multiple tools in complex sequences’. These kinds of findings are leading some animal advocates to call for animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins to be given some rights that are equivalent to human rights.

Earth rules, okay?

For my own part I don’t find these testaments to the closeness between human and non-human animals either surprising or comfortable. I still eat free-range chicken because of an extremely limited diet due to allergies. I imagine that if I tended free-range chickens I would bond with them and come to know their separate personalities. It’s the brutality of the human world that is the subject of a book with a very different focus to those described above, John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.

Straw Dogs is a philosophical slap in the face to humanism. It seems to be advocating an extreme form of Darwinism mixed up with James Lovelock’s revolutionary concept of the earth as Gaia, a living, self-correcting organism.

Gray believes that humans have overrun the Earth and are set for ruin; that our lifestyle won’t destroy the Earth, but instead will ultimately lead to a vastly reduced human presence.

Gray mows down a number of cherished philosophical assumptions. For example, he disagrees with Richard Dawkins's belief that humans will ever be able to control science and technology and use them only for progress. Instead he insists that they will continue to be used to wage war and cause widespread destruction, death and suffering.

Mark Rowlands, the wolf-owning philosopher, believes that humans show true goodness only when we act morally towards ‘those who have no power’ (including animals), because only in that situation do we act without thinking of what we’ll get in return. Gray, in contrast, insists that we must accept the fact that humanity is essentially evil and self-serving, and that good will never prevail. For Gray, Humans are not just evil but foolish; they are in love with abstract thinking and always trying to seek a purpose in life. The only goal in life, he believes, should be ‘to see’.

It’s a curious argument, and indeed I found much to disagree with. What I was most impressed with, though, was Gray’s ability to dismiss human delusions about our superiority to nature, particularly in relation to animals. He’s very positive about hunter–gatherer societies, not because he romanticises them – they are capable of causing the extinction of particular species, for example – but because they do not populate to the extent that settler societies do, and they live more harmoniously with nature through sheer necessity.

Gray believes that the development of farming has caused all the current environmental problems we face, and he insists that we would have been better off if we’d never done it. Anyone reading Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River might agree: the main character, William Thornhill, an English settler in colonial New South Wales, decides that, unlike in Western society, Indigenous people live so well in their own environment that they are all ‘gentry’.

Gray’s daring thesis is despoiled and cheapened by his failure to even mention feminism – not once. If that theory doesn’t represent genuine social progress, what does? Sure, it’s progress for only a tiny percentage of the world’s population, but if its ideas were to spread, that would affect for the good the population explosion that is one of Gray’s central concerns (he talks about this in a disturbingly abstract way, as if it has nothing to do with actual female bodies that often have no choice but to reproduce).

This glaring omission doesn’t destroy his argument, although the inclusion of feminism would have added nuances and complexities that are missing. Nor does Gray bother with the research that shows that doing good (even if it’s done in a world in which evil prevails) leads to greater contentment. It’s as if Gray is ever so slightly succumbing to the modern requirement that opinion-makers be shocking and controversial, even when that means ignoring the inconvenient grey areas (no pun intended).

But what makes this book worth reading is its provocative challenge to humans’ assumption that we are the centre of the universe. Darwin’s daring theory of evolution remains as vulnerable to dangerously retrograde interpretations as any religion – look at eugenics – but it also provides the basis for a much greater respect for the natural world, and this is where the main strengths of Gray’s argument lie.

While these three books differ greatly from one another, they all come to the conclusion that, in Pepperberg’s words: ‘We are not superior to all other beings in nature. The idea of humans’ separateness from nature is no longer tenable.’

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