Ages ago — long, long before the new beginning I’m attempting now in 2022 — I wrote here on this blog about the time a very famous author tore my just-published debut novel to shreds in the Irish Times.

Writing that post was supposed to give me a sort of closure, but here’s a bleak little confession: I’ve been chewing over the very famous author’s review ever since it appeared. Intermittently, like, but consistently. It really got in amongst me.

It’s not that I’m enormously precious about my writing — I don’t think I am. In my opinion, my book is … fine. It’s a reasonable attempt at a first novel. It succeeds in some ways and fails in others. It got a few positive reviews, and a few more that gently pointed out its shortcomings. I’d be the first to agree that it could have been a lot better, if … well, you know, if I’d been a more skilled writer when I wrote it. (And maybe if I’d trusted the process more. I’ve just remembered: I blogged about that here, too.)

The bad review upset me because it was so over the top, so histrionic, that it was difficult to regard as a good-faith reading of the book. I’m not saying it wasn’t, it’s just … it seemed to be more about itself, as a piece, than about my novel. I’ve still never read it with my actual eyes (just listened to it being read aloud), so I may be misremembering.

(My kid has read it, mind you. He became interested when it turned out that the very famous author and the dad of one of his classmates were close friends. Because of course they were. This is Ireland: we don’t do anonymity.)

Anyway, the very famous author is on Twitter, and in August 2021, he happened to tweet about how it’s important not to attack authors’ work too viciously, because there’s a real person on the receiving end of the criticism.

I had hoped to link to the relevant tweets in this post, but when I searched Twitter I discovered that the whole thread has been deleted — and of course I didn’t think to take screenshots at the time, because I am a clueless middle-aged lady novelist and not a social-media-savvy operative. Dammit.

Oh well. I may not recall the precise words, but the gist of the tweet was as I’ve described: be kind when criticising people’s novels. Obviously, I agree with the sentiment. In the circumstances, however, I found it upsetting to read.

Surprisingly upsetting

So upsetting, in fact, that I did something I hadn’t done in the seven years since the review had been published: I … mentioned it.

Out loud.

In public.

Where people might see.

I quote-tweeted the very famous author’s tweet:

There ensued a teeny tiny Twitter flurry (by which I mean that my quote-tweet got multiple times more likes than any other tweet I’ve ever posted, which isn’t saying much as I don’t exactly move in the kind of exalted social media circles where things like double-figure likes are a normal occurrence). People expressed their solidarity with me, and some people urged the very famous author to respond.

To my shock — and to his credit, I think — he did respond, and he apologised. Again, he has since deleted the tweet thread, but from what I remember, he said, in so many words, that my book hadn’t deserved his review and that he’d regretted it ever since it was published.

It was an eloquent and gracious apology.

I accepted it.

And we all got on with our lives.

And that was it?

Yeah. Kind of.

For the first little while after the apology, I felt great. The cloud had lifted; I turned my face to the sun. I tweeted things, and it felt good and safe. Someone with a much bigger platform than me even got in touch to ask if I’d like to participate in his group project. I was excited.

Nothing unpleasant happened as a result of my volubility, but after a while, my little fizz of momentum drained away. School term started, and I got very busy. The group project proposal didn’t go anywhere. I settled back into my regular groove of mostly saying very little indeed online.

I’m just more used to being silent

One great thing about the internet is the space it gives for different perspectives — and specifically, for people with less power (in a given context) to express themselves in the same forum as those with more power.

I find it heartening and inspiring to hear from people whose voices don’t usually feature in the dominant discourse. These people are brave, and it seems to me vital to the health of society that they speak up and share their experiences. I’m grateful to them for what they do.

I’m not brave, though

After the bad review, and certainly in part as a result of it, I fell silent. Not totally, but noticeably. Having never been a huge user of social media, I became excruciatingly hesitant about posting. I also put off starting Strange Forms until years and years after the idea first grabbed me by the lapels.

This wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, and I don’t actually blame the very famous author for it: I could have acted differently. (I almost certainly wouldn’t have, being what I am, but … well, I like to believe I could have.)

In a very real way, I did this to myself.

I silenced myself for seven years

(Something folkloric about that, don’t you think?)

And you know the thing about a silenced voice?

You can’t hear it.

So even those brave people who do speak up, who kick out against the forces of cultural homogenisation and normativity and share their unique and diverse perspectives for the benefit of all of us — even they are a self-selecting group. These are the people who, when they get knocked down, in fact get up again, as the old song goes.

But not everyone who gets knocked down gets up again.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m absolutely not claiming to be wildly oppressed and marginalised here. Yes, there are certain axes on which I fall into the “othered” category, but I also have a robust framework of unearned privileges sustaining me, and I am doing all right.

Yet it is undeniably the case that for seven years — more, now — my public voice has been a whisper. I’ve been largely absent from my chosen fields of endeavour, and that’s largely because of what happened when I tried putting my work out in the world.

The image I always think of is of a snail’s horn when you touch it with the tip of your finger. A full-on retreating CRINGE — Horn? What horn? No horns here! Tell you what, you must be thinking of moose. Yeah. Moose.

I silenced myself because I was ashamed

Well, obviously. We appear to be all about the shame here at Strange Forms these days.

And look, there I go, trying to tie a neat bow around this thing! It’s not that I was ashamed. It’s worse than that: I am ashamed.

I am ashamed of having published a book that someone considered so asinine that it was necessary to write a self-consciously witty take-down of it in a national newspaper.

(I should have written a book that was impossible to criticise, being perfect.)

I am ashamed of having been seen to have said, “I think my book is good enough to be published,” when apparently this was a questionable assertion.

(I should have refrained from inflicting my third-rate drivel on the world.)

I am ashamed of how strongly I’ve felt about the bad review over the years — how it has floored me, how on darker days just thinking about it has made me sob.

(I should have had the backbone to shake it off.)

I am ashamed of having become so reluctant to venture out again into the Gale of Judgement that I’ve published barely anything since, in any medium, on any platform.

(I should have been able to access some self-preservatory anger to use as fuel for a defiantly prolific output.)

I am ashamed of being a mediocre foot-soldier of feminism, and allowing myself to be cowed by the rhetoric of “she wrote it, but…” — as laid out in Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which, by the way, totally go and read right now, if you haven’t.

(I should have done my bit to even the score, instead of letting the bastards grind me down.)

I am ashamed of being such a poor servant of my art that all my delicious ideas curdle in my chest, unuttered.

(I should have been writing, making, performing, putting work out all this time.)

I am ashamed of making such a fucking meal out of this; don’t I know there are people with real problems? Yes. Yes, I do know that.

(I should probably just shut up forever, really.)

I don’t have a neat conclusion

I am ashamed, finally, of publishing this blog post without having a closing catharsis, or at the very least a wistfully elegant point of resolution, from which you, the reader, may derive comfort and/or illumination. I’m still working through this stuff. The story is ongoing.

However, part of my practice in 2022 — as we know, because I have gone on and on and on about it — is to post in spite of all the reasons not to.

Right. I’m just going to run away screaming and bury myself head-down in this handy mud over here. Carry on.

On a trip to England in 2008 we visited the National Railway Museum in York. This is a fantastic museum, and if you have any interest in trains, you should definitely go. (And then go to Train World in Brussels, which is smaller but better. It just is. Sorry, York.)

I’m not hugely into trains myself, but the hozz has a long-standing affection for transport systems, and more importantly, back in 2008 we had a small but fanatically devoted railway enthusiast in our midst, in the person of our elder kid, then just approaching his fourth birthday. So obviously, being within striking distance of the museum, off we all went.

Locomotives, man, what can I tell you?

They are impressive. Honestly. They are impressively large. They are impressively metal. Even at rest, at last, in the vast halls of the museum, they exude an impressive sense of clanking power.

You can climb up into some of them and look out the window and pretend you’re the driver. You can see how their wheels connect and how their couplings work. You can examine their buffers. You can imagine them in motion, speeding down the track with a long plume of smoke floating out behind them on the blue air.

And when you’ve done all of that, I am here to tell you that there are still nine hundred and eighty-six more engines that the three-year-old really, really needs to inspect. Sigh.

So we saw the trains. And we saw the other trains. And we saw some more trains. The hozz did much of the actual performance of extreme train enthusiasm, while I pushed the empty buggy around, and the eight-month-old slept in his sling on my chest.

Then I spotted something that seemed much more my style

I hurried towards it with a familiar sense of rising excitement, anticipating the very specific flavour of brain-tingling pleasure that is derived from looking at beautiful things.

It was the exhibit devoted to the Royal Trains.

Through the windows of the carriages on display, I looked at all the rich textiles, the carved and polished wood, the ornate fixtures and sparkling glassware. Lavish appurtenances. The trappings of royalty. King-bling.

I stood there, and I felt … peculiar.

It was as if the fuse had fizzled out and the firework of my lovely-object joy hadn’t ever got off the ground. Something about the exhibit just wasn’t doing it for me.

Forgive me: I felt too Irish for the occasion

I found myself acutely wanting to know what it would be like to look at the exhibit as a British person — an actual subject of the monarchy for whom all this was done, who might therefore be able to look at it with some sort of an integrated perspective.

Or what, by the same token, a French person might feel in looking at Versailles, or at Napoleonic splendour. Or a Belgian looking at some royal extravagance paid for, god help us, with the wealth of the Congo. What is it like to be a member of a nation with an imperial past, looking at artefacts of that past?

(It should be pointed out, by the way, that on the imperial front, the Irish are both innocent and guilty. Wait, what? OK, lightning-quick summary: it’s complicated! Yes, Ireland was colonised and suffered enormously under British rule; and also, Ireland was in the United Kingdom for over a century and supplied a disproportionately large percentage (compared to its population) of the British army and colonial administrations in other parts of the empire. The reasons for this? Also complicated. But the fact remains that some Irish people perpetrated horrific imperial violence. Look up Michael Francis O’Dwyer’s career in India, to take one example. It. Is. Complicated. Please don’t take my word for any of this: read actual historians.)

Anyway. What I was trying to grasp, I think, was something about a layered view. Having grown up and been educated in Ireland, I believe it would have been quite difficult for me to go through life leaving questions of monarchy and empire unexamined, and so when I looked through the windows of (as it might be) Queen Victoria’s dining carriage, I saw the sumptuous velvet and the gleaming mother-of-pearl, certainly, but I also saw the layers of history, and friends, I felt mournful.

I really did feel sad.

I thought, “This would have entranced me once!”

When I was a child, I was as fanatical about Olden Days Stuff as our tiny trainspotter was in 2008 about steam engines. I wrote ages ago about how much I loved visiting châteaux in France (among other delights), how I revelled in the opulence of it all, the fanciness, the decadence.

And at least to some extent, that’s still true. I will reliably go weak for a bit of intricacy, a bit of silk and velvet and lace, a bit of polished wood and shiny curly metal. But apparently, I can’t unlearn what I now know about the context that many such things carry with them.

Nor should I. Context is important.

Don’t we all love beautiful things, though?

Aren’t we all entitled to take pleasure in gorgeous objects that bring a smile to our lips?

Yes. We definitely are. The right to enjoy beauty for its own sake should be open to everyone. “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses,” as the song goes.

Where does the balance tip over into ugly excess?

I don’t know. It probably depends (dammit).

I did happen to remember this week that the word “luxury” used to have a much less positive meaning than its modern one. It has the same root as “lechery”, and started off meaning something much closer to “lustful excess” than it does today.

Access to excess — the ability to display surplus — has been a sign of power for a very long time. I mean, probably since humans started doing power. And the fact is that beauty, in this context, often has an unmistakable stink to it, once you notice. Sadly, that makes it harder to enjoy.

In conclusion, we’ve all heard the saying that all that glitters is not gold. I suppose you could add, sometimes gold that glitters is not all that.

When I was writing my post about fancy notepaper the other week, I couldn’t stop thinking about this poem I wrote in the late 1990s.

It describes exactly the same thing, but with boyfriends.

Metaphorically, that is! Allow me to state for the record that at no time did I in fact make a life-size boyfriend puppet and drag him around the dance floor with me. But the largely unconscious and entirely unexamined urge to make things into something they weren’t, so as to (here it comes again) fit in? Yeah, no, definitely.

I’ve updated my original title to something I dislike a little less, and I’ve tweaked one or two words, but otherwise this is the poem I wrote in my early twenties.

I was trying to capture something I knew was important in my life. At the time, I never made the link with my seven-year-old attempts to fake normality using A4 typing paper and 30 markers, but today, it’s glaringly clear.

Creature

“I need a man,” she said, and set to work,
tapping a childhood flair for arts and crafts—
she gathered scraps: a battered piano stool,
old clothes, the ruins of a basket chair,
even some pots and pans she thought would do

spread them all out in her living-room
and worked for days with tape and string and glue—
did clever things with chicken-wire, fleshed out
the figure with old ravelled socks, and cut,
out of a magazine, a face to die for

and now they’re dancing—yes, it’s worked—at last!
her wild eyes break her tears, her livid smile
grimly denies the lurching, thumping weight
she wields; her clenched and brittle hum drowns out
the quick snap and creak of a wicker heart

We begin with a susurration from the basses, which melds into a low buzz on a G sharp, then back to the voiceless fricative, as the sopranos add a high, soft whistle through the teeth. A murmuring ripple from the tenors, and a solitary alto note — no words, just a long broad vowel sound, an ornamental semiquaver flourish, and back up to the starting pitch, which breaks now into a short staccato sequence before dying away.

This is as good as it gets

I’m in my element. My feet are rooted to the stage, I feel joyful and strong, and the notes I sing — that luxurious opening A sharp, the supple semiquavers, the playful staccato — feel connected, aligned, plugged in, as if I’m simply opening my mouth and letting them flow.

Over the next few bars the sound will diversify, with bird calls, gentle ululations, and tongue clicks proliferating through the choir, before the basses and tenors gradually set up a more traditional chord sequence, and the sopranos and altos swing in above them, at last, with the text. It’s one of the most delicate transitions from silence to choral harmony I’ve ever heard.

The piece is Under-Song, Derry composer Seán Doherty’s setting of the poem of the same name by Irish modernist poet Lola Ridge, and it’s been a favourite in my choir’s repertoire since we first sang it in 2014. (Here’s a version from 2019 featuring unseemly quantities of my face.) Text and score together create a brilliant, intelligent evocation of a forest soundscape, complete with breezes and raindrops and birdsong — and also of an elusive, mysterious other music: the ”under-song” of the title.

It’s a stunning piece, a real privilege to sing.

After this particular performance, our conductor remarks to me, “I always know I can rely on you for that entry. You’re rock solid — you don’t seem to get nervous at all!”

I respond with vague thanks and assent, and change the subject, quick.

What I don’t say

…because I’m scared (always) of coming across as Too Much…

…although I’m no longer even too sure what the risk is, there, because lots of people are Too Much, and they’re still allowed to exist, right?

Anyway. What I don’t say is, No, you’re right, I don’t get nervous. How could I? The music is already living in my body: all I have to do is let it out.

I don’t say that, because, well, I don’t want to come across as a pretentious wanker. But truly, performance — and solo performance all the more so — brings me alive like a lightning bolt to a mad scientist’s lab specimen (I thought you were a bit funny-looking all right, says you).

People talk about stage-fright, the fear of public speaking, the urge to avoid being the focus of attention. But when I’m on stage, I get none of that. Instead, the feeling that overwhelms me is one of vast safety and love. I want to tap into that and let it flow through me and back out to the audience through my performance.

Last year I heard the sublime and amazing Sinéad O’Connor say in an interview with Blindboy Boatclub that when she sings she wants it to be like bringing people to church. When I heard that I burst into tears, because I related to it so hard.

My choir did a stadium gig a few years ago, in front of something like 60,000 people (with millions more tuning in on TV). I remember looking around as we prepared to sing and thinking, “Yeah, this feels like about the right size for an audience!” I envied the professional soloists that evening, because they got to soak in the crowd by themselves.

I am, of course (and this will come as zero shock if you’ve been reading any of my recent posts), deeply ashamed of this trait of mine.

It’s all wrong, you see

Not getting nervous before a performance is obviously a character flaw.

I should get nervous. Everyone gets nervous. It’s part of what makes us human. Solidarity over performance anxiety is how we connect. The fact that I don’t really get it makes me alien, unrelatable, and (if I ever slip up and let anyone find out) irredeemably annoying.

What’s the matter with me? Is it that I like the attention? Is that it? Because that, too, seems irredeemable.

It must be that I love the sound of my own voice, because I’m a show-off. Furthermore, it seems probable that I am up myself, and perhaps also that I think I’m so great.

I am — quite seriously — imagining you muttering all these things about me right now, as you read this. (Sorry. I realise that’s annoying in itself.)

But come here to me, do you want to know the awful truth?

Of course you do.

Ready?

OK.

Here it is: I do love the sound of my own voice.

I don’t even hate hearing myself on tape.

You see? Like I said, unrelatable.

This feels super vulnerable to admit, and I have an immediate compulsion to qualify it. So I want you to know that I don’t necessarily think my voice is especially “good”, in absolute terms. It’s a fairly ordinary middle-aged amateur (ok, semi-professional, technically) singer’s voice.

It’s just, I enjoy using it, I like the way it sounds, and I like when people seem pleased to hear it. That’s all.

Nobody ever seems to say that out loud, though, so it feels as though I’m breaking some sort of omertà.

This, more than anything I’ve written so far in 2022, feels horribly scary to publish. I can hear, in my mind’s ear, a deafening chorus (ironically enough) of nasty voices going, “Oh my GOD would she ever just shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off? Imagine thinking this drivel was interesting! And have you ever heard her sing? Jesus wept. She’d want to cop on to herself.”

(If you were ever wondering why I don’t have comments enabled on this blog…)

We shall continue the practice of publishing anyway.