“No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.”
Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
This is the best quote I heard in September, and I am going to explore it in this essay. I heard Elif Shafak quote a version of it in a podcast which I will discuss and link to later.
Generally, you can’t make someone do anything they don’t want to do, unless they’re physically constrained or you’re living in the fear of dictatorship. Vanilla control doesn’t work with adults. Planting seeds sometimes does, and that is why I love literature and TV. Art wakes us up, and plants seeds. So does talking to people who share an experience of something, rather than someone merely telling you what to do. Telling people what to do is easy, holding back is the hard part. Just ask someone who’s been married for a long time, or who has children.
I wasn’t ready to get sober until the very minute I was. No amount of carnage could persuade me that I had a problem with booze. It was everything and everyone else. If only I had a different job, house, man (or any man, as I became perpetually single). You see, I wasn’t at the riverbed and I wanted wine, not water.
However, seeds were planted, and when I look back at this bit of therapeutic horticulture, I wonder if I would have got sober as young as I did (I was 30) had people not bothered to tell me their story.
YES. THEIR STORY. THEY DIDN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO. They planted ideas which eventually, I drank up at the water. Inhaled, thank goodness. It’s probably why I am still alive today so it’s no exaggeration when I say that stories have been a lifesaver for me. There was the friend from school who met me for a coffee and told me about his blackout drinking. By that stage he had been sober for a good few years, probably around twenty now. I retorted that my blackout drinking was normal, to which he just replied ‘is it?’
There was the addictions counsellor, the brother of a work colleague who had been put in touch with me to do PR but who had sniffed out a fellow booze hound when he saw one and told me about his drinking. He told me that he also drank like me, and what happened to him. It’s an important differentiation to say that he didn’t tell me to stop. In fact, no one said stop, people said ‘rein it in,’ which I never succeeded in. He said if I ever wanted help, he was there. A couple of years later I was in his office, ready.
There was also the film called 28 Days starring Sandra Bullock, where I had to leave the room because I was cringing so much at the similarities between the protagonist’s and my drinking (yes, I was the drunk speech giver). I didn’t stop, but again, it planted a seed. There was a Tom Sykes book called ‘What did I do last night?’ that I read while drinking and identified with in totality, but still, I did not stop. More seeds, though.
You can probably see why I love books and other mediums more than self help. Self help sets me up for failure. Art helps me realise, slowly, what I need to recognise in myself. Paradoxically, it also helps me escape, perhaps to the outside in order to go deeper inward, at some point.
The Shortlist for the 2024 Booker Prize has been announced, and I read something this year’s chair, Edmund de Waal said which reinforces my beliefs. It’s a great quote, and stops this wannabe novel writer in her tracks –
‘“I love the fact that a book can be like a living thing,” said one of the judges as we were choosing the shortlist for the Booker Prize. I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us.”
I so agree about books being living organisms in my psyche am an addict in all things I do, and I honour that. It makes me chuckle at the therapy joke about an alcoholic relationship:
Q. “How do you know if two alchies have made it to a second date?”
A. “The removal van is outside one of their houses.”
Great books really do move in with me, and quickly, too. I spend my days wondering what the characters will do when I get to spend time with them, that evening. Bring on the removal men, it all happens so quickly, if it’s good. Afterwards, I feel bereft, as if an old friend has left me. I have this with TV, too, and wrote a Substack about my love for The Affair, a show I devoured in lockdown and had to refrain from watching the last episode because I was too sad to let it go. The message of that show really took over my head, in the best way possible.
de Waal continues:
“Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.”
Absolutely, Edmund.
“If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.”
For me this is Alison in The Affair, it is Philip Hutton in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain (also long listed for the Booker, and his second novel, In the Garden of Evening Mists, an absolute favourite of mine, was shortlisted) it is both Hamlet and Hamnet. Of course there are others.
I want to create something on this page that stops people in their tracks. Maybe not even on this page, but somewhere. Perhaps like the piece I wrote on making a mark in this world, it’s a rather narcissistic existential plight to be remembered when I am gone. Saltburn did that for me. It created so much impact for me, made me want to be sick, laugh out loud – and more. This is the task of the writer and here she claims victory. It’s not to make people always ‘like’ your work. Think of the scene when they are eating Shepherd’s Pie on that morning – no spoilers, please watch it if you haven’t – or that infamous bath tub. The creator, Emerald Fennell said she knew she had a film in mind that started with that image of the bath tub and she went from there.
Lots of other books and TV shows have done this. Have a read through my other Substacks to seem them.
When I work with clients, I often bring in TV, books etc. I think it can really help to find out what a person is yearning for in their heart when you hear about what they like to read, watch, look at in galleries, etc.
I want to bring art and mental health together as much as I can in these posts. How do we drown ourselves in puddles, as this title suggests (here I quote the father of a friend of mine). We find out how we do this by watching and reading fictional characters. The authors ask the questions, the answers are up to our own interpretations (I heard this recently on a podcast which is sourced below).
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‘Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.’
— Elif Shafak, ‘There Are Rivers In The Sky’
Last month I went to hear Elif Shafak speak at the University Arms in Cambridge at a Cambridge Literary Festival event (I recommend these events, they are fantastic, and if you click on the CLF link you will find details on their winter festival which is selling out fast). On the way and for some background I listened to Elif being interviewed by Elizabeth Day in her How to Fail Podcast (click on the link to listen).
I haven’t finished Rivers in the Sky by I know it is one of those books that will stay with me always, penetrating my psyche like the greats I’ve talked about on here (again, see my Substack for more details). As Shafak said, literature is as important as bread and water, and I know that’s really easy to say for an over fed, over indulged westerner like me but I do tend to agree with her. It has certainly done more for me than any self help book aside maybe The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous… but having said that, much of this book is people’s own experience, their own stories out of the mires of alcoholism. I once heard an AA speaker talk about how the Big Book says the same thing, in a different way, many times over. Perhaps that is the art of great storytelling and why Greek myth has stood the test of time and why Harry Potter, loosely based on Greek Myth, did as well as it did. The same themes, many times over. Us humans don’t change much, you see.
‘Life as I see it is always interconnected,’ said Elif on that podcast. ‘Our destinies, our stories are connected. It is an illusion to think that there is the east, there is a west, these are the boxes where everyone has to stay.’ It was an evening I won’t forget in a hurry, not least because while signing my book, she looked me square in the eye when I told her I was struggling with my novel and said ‘you will get there Jessica, just follow your heart,’ before writing in my copy of Rivers, ‘Jessica, more power to your heart.’ I will treasure that book and that interaction forever. Who said authors can’t change lives? They can.
I have been drowning in a puddle of self doubt for what feels like forever. This blog, writing, psychotherapy. I doubt my ability to connect things, even though I think that’s actually my best intellectual quality. I am neuro divergent, and lateral thinking is my forte. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to novel writing which is one large bit of problem solving as far as I can see (so far, draft one down and a mental breakdown in between), and why I am drawn to going and listening to wonderful people like Elif Shafak speak. Novel writing is a jigsaw where you have to connect the dots, but to write deep interesting stories you’ve also got to do that with yourself. This is an ongoing process. It would be interesting to document a seasoned novelist and how they feel their novel writing has progressed as they go through five, ten, twenty novels over the course of their careers.
After the beautiful and humble Elif left the building, having put her train back in order to talk to ask many of us as she could when it was already late, I saw Oliver Burkeman whose book Meditations for Mortals is a fabulous daily read. He was saying the same thing as Elif in a way – self help books don’t work, stories do. We are all connected and by telling our stories we can find the links.
It is what I want to get to the bottom of on here, why I adore literature as a form of self help. Let’s look at those puddles via our favourite characters and the themes they bring to the table.
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 