The physical sensation of being read

The physical sensation of being read

Last year I tweeted, “One day I'll tell you how weird it is to have a book published and a broken computer and a broken heart at the same time”, and now that things have calmed down, more than a year later, I am going to. I have my swimsuit on under my clothes and, later today, I’m going to walk on the moors to a hilltop reservoir.

In September, I took the tube, deep into London and into my past. I used to travel on these trains to nightclubs, then hungover to work. Now there were billboards down here advertising the book I wrote - a picture of its cover surrounded by superlatives from reviews – a memoir, about when I lived in London and what followed: rehab and returning to the Scottish island where I grew up. It was my first book, written with hunger and candour, about what happens after you stop drinking and the possibility of change, about cold water on hot skin. The experiences I had in bedrooms and bars and rehab and in the sea, the thoughts I wrote in my diary and at the kitchen table on a small island, were now packaged and marketed, then posted on walls of the transport system around my past. And then there’s me, in this future, back in the city and promoting myself, travelling west on the Central Line, somewhat bewildered.

People ask me how it feels. Well, I say, in spring I saw a woman in my peripheral vision, on the other side of a library, reading my book and, each time she turned a page, my nerves fizzed. Then I realised this was simply an intensification of how I’d been feeling since the book was published. I learned ‘being read’ can be a physical experience. I am aware in my body that my book is out there. My nerves feel close to the surface, my emotions on show and bubbling over. I went a little insane the week that the book was published - sleepless nights, racing mind - and was told this is not uncommon in authors: I was going through the looking glass, the internal made external.

Every day, readers get in touch. I’ve had messages from people I haven’t heard from in years, from young women, book groups, other writers, Orcadians. I get emails and tweets from the newly sober and the exhausted drunk. Reviews appear on Amazon, on Goodreads, in obscure magazines and personal blogs. I’m spun out. I’ve exchanged emails with a man who was given the book by a stranger on a train in Russia, read it then passed it onto another traveller bound for Mongolia. I’ve heard from someone listening on an audiobook while driving through the Highlands, from another reading on a canoe trip up the Yukon river, from readers in hospital waiting rooms and commuter trains. Each hold my heart in their hands.

I hadn’t anticipated most of this, not least the bodily sensations. I have constant goosebumps. As I nervously wait before going onstage to discuss my personal book, as I sign copies, as I listen to an actress read my words, as I meet a stranger who knows a lot about me, I’m floating somewhere slightly above myself. My life is divided into thousands of pieces, in books and kindles and bags and bedrooms.

I’ve discovered that a book is a mirror. It becomes something new in its relationship which each reader and their location and experiences. Parents are interested in the relationship between me and my Mum and Dad. An acquaintance told me it was a book about recovering from heartbreak and this told me something I didn’t know about him. People want to tell me the parallels between my life and theirs: maybe they also grew up on a farm and left, or know Hackney, or have had a battle in their life - everyone does - they equate with my problems with alcohol. A few responses have floored me: some people said that the book gave them an understanding of, and compassion for, an addict in their lives they’d previously resented. Others say it encouraged them to swim in the sea, or visit the Scottish isles, or explore their local patch, or confront their addictions.

I remember all those days at the kitchen table on Papay when I fought with myself to make something true and beautiful, and sometimes it hits me: it worked. Readers understand. It is wonderful and strange. The most startling, disarming thing is people taking the time and seeing the subtleties and learning things and liking it. I’m slowly absorbing and replying to these responses and realising what a privilege it is. But I am physically aware of people wanting things from me, reading me, new pulls and contradictions and obligations, each hair on my body strangely alert. Readers recommend things to me: barefooting, the Polynesian island of Anuta, Jesus.

I veer from pleased and proud to embarrassed and vulnerable. Most of the time we are able to shift our personalities subtly depending on who we are interacting with, but when you have a book published it is a fixed version of your voice that you are inviting people to spend time with. You have to stand strong.

I had never spoken on stage before, but by the end of the year I had done 47 public events and more press interviews. I said yes to everything and played the game. I went to literary festivals in towns and cities and fields around the UK. I talked to journalists, readers, editors and booksellers. I took a copy back to the treatment centre I attended six years ago. I visited a prison. I took the book home to the island where I wrote it. Photos of me appear on the internet and out of my control. Here’s my life in a blue hardback. Here’s my body in a turquoise dress, in wellies, in someone else’s scarf, in make-up I never wear. Here’s a rare refreshing moment of calm.

I spent a year talking to strangers, a year always close to tears. I gained followers and lost weight. A hundred deep but one-off encounters at book events, then lying on a hotel bed staring at the internet, emotionally drained.

The book had good reviews and sold steadily. When the paperback came out, it spent five weeks in the bestseller list. It won a literary prize. It was displayed in the windows of bookshops all over the country. It is going to be translated and published in twelve other countries including China and the USA. I’ve been talking to people interested in adapting it for screen, and for stage. I was on lists of ‘Scotland’s Hottest Artists’ and ‘London’s Most Influential’. It all often made me laugh aloud.

While all this (wonderful! exhausting!) was happening, there was another story, one that didn’t fit into the pleasing narrative of ‘turning my life around’. I was hurting, part of my heart left in another city, a dream I had with another person broken. What readers didn’t know was that my life last year was been a dual narrative of literary success and heartbreak. Can I tell you about how it feels to have my ambitions for my writing fulfilled at the same time as a romance crushed? To be both acclaimed by many but rejected by one? My mood oscillated - within one car journey, within one song on the radio - from the stomach-flipping, chest-clenching thoughts of him with another new woman, to genuine laughter and amazement at my good fortune.

People kept tell me to “enjoy it” and the phases “the time of my life” and “at the height of my powers” rang in my head when often I was just coping. But I realise that to have good things and bad things happening at the same time, this is life: bittersweet and relentless. The story doesn’t end. I’ve written this book about my addiction and emotional problems but these problems are ongoing - the journey, the recovery, the longing. Despite everything, all year I couldn’t stop searching for my ex on the internet, although it was hurting me. The nerves of publication and sting of rejection have been my drug, my highs, this year.

These days are passing with my life and career shifting under me so fast, I am seasick. I've been so thinly spread lately that I've feel I've just been able to be physically present and polite rather than thinking deeply or being interesting. And some people say congratulations simply because I was on telly rather than because of what I said. And strangers write me long letters about their lives. And often I’m not even living the things I wrote.

By winter I was losing my drive for the book events. I was highly aware how astoundingly lucky I’d been but I was tired of performing my delight. I had been exposed and was sensitive, on alert, nervy. I wanted a quiet house and a closed door. I wanted to swim in cool water. I want to write. The advertisements on the tube are replaced every fortnight, my heart part of last month’s consumable media. So I’ve moved to a small town where no one knows me and I’ve found a new place to swim.

As I climbed the hill toward the resevoir, the wind got stronger and felt more and more like home. The sea wind is where I come from and was always in me and blows through my book and has carried me on. My eyes and nose are running in the cold and I feel like myself - elemental, physical. The book is about the things I found to fill the absence created when I stopped drinking. For me it was returning to the place where I grew up and gradually changing my relationship to it, travelling to different islands, understanding and experiencing the tides and the birds and the skies and the sea. The wonderful things my book has done, the other lives it has touched, all come from this and up here on the moor I remember.

In gust of wind, I hear my first curlews of the year. When I get in that cold water - skin contracting and breath shortening - all I can do is move my limbs and not drown and it is clarifying. Six years ago I was taking a dose of sedatives to help me through my first week without alcohol. The night before I’d run away from a taxi I couldn’t afford after finishing the dregs of strangers’ drinks. In the biting water for brief minutes far away from the internet, I am alive and sober and surviving moment by moment.