The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  The Art of Not

  Falling Apart

  The Art of Not

  Falling Apart

  Christina Patterson

  First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  Copyright © Christina Patterson, 2018

  The moral right of Christina Patterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of non-fiction, but some names and details have been changed.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  Atlantic Books Ltd considers the quotes included within this text to be covered by the Fair Dealing definition under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and as subsequently amended. For more information, please contact Atlantic Books Ltd.

  ‘Born Yesterday’, from The Less Deceived (1955), by Larkin, Philip, published by The Marvell Press. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 78649 274 6

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 78649 275 3

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  In fact, may you be dull –

  If that is what a skilled,

  Vigilant, flexible,

  Unemphasised, enthralled

  Catching of happiness is called.

  Philip Larkin,

  ‘Born Yesterday’

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I – Falling

  Kafka, eat your heart out

  Anger is an energy

  Sex can be like broccoli

  Motherhood and Michelangelo

  Maternal deprivation

  Depression with a smile

  The body speaks

  A change in grammar

  Stuck

  Octopus pot

  Part II – Gathering

  A sentimental journey

  Coffee and cake

  A kind of sustaining grace

  Part III – Fighting Back

  Sex and Borgen and ice cream

  Madonna of the Rocks

  A life worth living

  A signal you send out

  Shooting the breeze

  A charmed life

  Fortysomething millennial

  The incredible machine

  Because I could not stop for Death

  Stick your face in the sun

  A big cone

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  I was writing up an interview when I got the call. Five minutes later, I felt as if I was falling off a cliff. The letter had been bad enough. The letter had used words like ‘synergies’ and ‘integration’, and the ‘synergies’, it said, would ‘reduce costs’. The letter had been followed by a meeting with a young blonde from HR who talked about ‘consultation’ while she gazed at her nails. But now what the man in front of me was saying didn’t seem to make any sense at all. When I asked him to explain, he started fiddling with his pen. ‘You’ll have,’ he said, ‘to see the editor.’

  When I walked into the editor’s office, he was hunched behind his desk. Something about his mouth made it clear he was raring for a fight. I had, I told him, accepted the ‘synergies’, but I had been promised a contract to sugar the pill. Now the promise seemed to have been broken and I didn’t understand what was going on. The editor, who is fat and bald and looks as though he should be wearing a nappy, stared out of the window as he told me that he had decided to ‘freshen the pages up’.

  It’s quite hard to swallow when the boss has just made it clear that your older, male colleagues are still ‘fresh’, but you are not. I tried to keep my voice steady as I told the editor that readers liked my work. I told him that I couldn’t have worked much harder. I told him that I had given ten years’ loyal service to the paper and I did not deserve to be treated like this.

  Now the editor looked at me and his cold, grey eyes made me think of a fish. ‘And what,’ he said, and he seemed to be smiling as he said it, ‘is so special about you?’

  When someone asks you why you’re special, there isn’t really anything you can say. You could, I suppose, say that some people think you’re special, but it isn’t easy to say that to someone who’s looking at you as if you’re a stain on the carpet they would like to blast with bleach.

  I told him that I didn’t like his tone. I told him that I didn’t like the way he was treating some of the senior women on his staff. The editor looked away and then back at me. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was surprised to hear myself shouting that I did. And then he threatened to call security. This big bull of a man actually threatened to call security.

  When I walked out of the office, for the last time, after ten years, nobody even looked up.

  I always dreamt of being a journalist, but never seriously thought I could be. I grew up in a family of teachers and public servants and was brought up to believe that saying you wanted to write for a living was very much like saying you wanted to be a punk. At university, I had vague dreams of sitting on a frontline, looking like Martha Gellhorn, bashing out pieces that ‘spoke truth to power’. But the only things I wrote, as dawn broke and the birds in the college grounds shattered the silence of the night, were essays about alliteration in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the use of allegory in The Faerie Queen.

  I was thirty-eight, and running a small arts organization called the Poetry Society, when I got a call from the literary editor of The Independent, saying that his deputy was leaving and asking if I wanted to apply for the job. I had been reviewing books for the national papers since I was twenty-six, but had given up all dreams of journalism as anything other than a sideline to a full-time job. I loved my job, and my colleagues, and I also quite liked being the boss. But I knew that if I wanted to work on a national paper, this was my chance.

  A newspaper, my new boss told me, was like a medieval fiefdom. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. In the arts world, bosses pretended to be interested in getting the views of their staff. In the arts world, you got sent on courses on ‘diversity’ and talked about things like ‘continuing professional development’. I once even got sent on a course to learn the Alexander Technique. I thought it was very nice of the taxpayer to let me lie with my head on a cushion, ‘allowing my neck to be free’.

  Newspapers were not like this. On a newspaper, or at least on my newspaper, no one cared about your ‘continuing professional development’. You didn’t get training for anything except IT. There was only really one item on your job description: do whatever the hell your boss says. On the books desk, we would sweat over each semi-colon and piece together the pages as if they were the fragments of a Ming vase. At five o’clock on press day, the deputy editor would stroll down to look at the proofs. He would glance at the pages, grab his pen from his pocket and slice it through the air as if it was
a machete hovering over a neck. When he handed the proofs back, we would gaze at the marks like gashes on the pages and wonder how to salvage something from the wreck. My boss said it was just ‘willy waving’, but dealing with ‘willies’ seemed to be quite a big part of the job.

  When I moved upstairs, to be an editor on the comment desk, I learnt more about stress. It started with the tension in the faces of the section editors as they tried to put together their morning list. A list on a newspaper isn’t like a list you write on a notepad, where you might or might not tick some of the items off. A list on a newspaper is a miracle you have snatched out of air. You have got up, you have listened to the Today programme, you have read, or at least flicked through, all the papers, and tried to grasp the latest developments on quantitative easing in the Euro-zone and the Nigerian government’s shift in policy on Boko Haram. You have strained every neuron in your brain to put together a list of ideas that will make editors on other papers feel sick that they didn’t come up with them first. But when you see the editor’s PA opening the door to his office, you know that there is only one view that counts.

  A ‘conference’, according to the dictionary, is ‘a formal interchange of views’. Perhaps, in some places, it is. In conference on a newspaper – not ‘a conference’, because there’s no time to mess around with indefinite articles – the ‘interchange of views’ is just one-way. The editor asks you to read your list, and then stares at you as if you had just projectile vomited on to his new Damien Hirst. If he’s in a good mood, he might nod. If he’s in a bad mood – and editors are in bad moods quite a lot – he will pick out something on your list, and repeat the words back to you as if you had just suggested a front-page story on Jane Austen’s use of the quadrille. He will then ask you about a tiny news item on page 36 of the one paper you didn’t get a chance to skim.

  It’s hard to explain why we all love it, but we do. Perhaps we all like to think we really are in a war. The relief that it wasn’t you in the firing line, or that it was you, but that the bullet somehow missed your heart, sends some chemical flooding through your veins. It makes you want to climb up on your desk, raise your arms as high as you can get them and bellow that you’re still here, you are actually still alive. After that, all you have to fear is the later prowl round the office. That, and the ticking clock. If you’re editing, you get on the phone. You talk, you wait, you hone, you chop. If you’re writing, you do as much googling as you can squeeze into the minutes before you have to get that first mark on that blank page. At the start of the day, there is nothing. At the end of the day, there are a hundred pages of what you hope is sparkling copy. This happens every day and it makes you feel as if you are, or are working with, God.

  When I was asked to write a regular column, I felt like singing an aria. When I was told I could drop the editing and write full-time, I felt like singing the Hallelujah Chorus.

  As well as my column, which I now did twice a week, I did a weekly interview. I had been interviewing writers for years. Jeanette Winterson had given me the number of her psychic. Jacqueline Wilson had told me that she sometimes only just managed to ‘get her knickers on’ when people asked for her autograph at the gym. Philip Pullman had talked about a satire he had written on journalism called I Was a Rat! He seemed to think that being a journalist was something that should make you feel ashamed. I wanted to tell him that nothing in my life had ever made me feel as proud.

  And nothing had. The truth is, nothing ever had. It was certainly stressful. Writing two columns a week and finding someone famous to interview, and doing the research on them, and going to meet them, and transcribing the tape, and writing it up, meant that I ended up working nearly all the time. Sometimes the interviews were interesting. Sometimes they weren’t. Alice Cooper told the same anecdotes he had been trotting out for thirty years. Eddie Izzard compared himself to Nelson Mandela. Carlos Acosta complained about being a sex symbol. I told him that it might be a good idea to do up the buttons of his shirt.

  Candace Bushnell, who wrote Sex and the City, gave me some advice on dating. I thought I could do with some advice on dating, because my so-called romances never seemed to last more than a few weeks. ‘The people I know who are happily married,’ she said, jabbing her finger, ‘don’t expect their husbands to bring home the bacon. If you’re very wedded to a narrow idea of what life should be like,’ she added, ‘you’re going to run out of time.’ When I realized she thought I was trying to find a rich man to support me, I had to make an effort not to laugh. I thought of the date with the man with buck teeth who had shouted to the whole restaurant that I was ‘a cunt’ and left me to pay the bill. Never mind bacon, I wanted to tell her. I’m thrilled if someone buys me a drink.

  When I was asked to write the lead column in the paper once a week, I started reading newspapers all the time. A lead column can’t just be about some little thing you find quite interesting, like the return of the legging, or the fact that men seem to think they should get a medal for saying that Helen Mirren is still ‘quite hot’. A lead column has to be about a big item in the news that day. It could be a change to the definition of child poverty, or a cut to tax credits, or whether you should try to extradite a radical preacher with a hook for a hand. I started to feel as if my life was a twenty-four-hour viva for a PhD in current affairs. I went to bed with the news and woke up to the news and felt like yelling at the presenters of Newsnight that the news they were discussing was now rather old.

  Every Tuesday, when I heard people stumbling over their interviews with John Humphrys, I wanted to tell them that they should count themselves lucky. They should try to think of a ‘fresh’ argument about a piece of news they’d only just heard about, wait for the comment editor to take the idea to conference and wonder if you might then have to write about something else that has just leapt into the editor’s head. And then churn out 1100 words of interesting, thought-provoking, editor-pleasing prose by 3 p.m.

  When the emails started pouring in, they sometimes made me laugh. ‘If you had done your research, Miss Patterson’ was a fair sign that what followed would make me smile less. Yes, I wanted to say. Yes, if I’d had time to do research I might well have come up with a different argument. If I’d had time to do research, I would have had a different job. I sometimes wondered whether readers thought columnists sat in libraries, rifling through Socrates and weighing up arguments like a judge. A columnist, I wanted to say, was someone who showed up. You licked a finger, stuck it in the air and hoped to catch a breath of wind. What you did next was fill a page. Whatever else you did, you had to fill that page. And your photo and name would be stuck over it whether what you produced was Plato or Russell Brand.

  Freud talked about love and work. He said they are ‘the cornerstones of our humanness’. Most people have taken that to mean that if we want to be happy, we need work we like and someone to love. As Candace Bushnell pointed out, my search for love wasn’t going well. Work I could do. Work was what I had. And then a new editor arrived on the paper, and a junior member of staff was given my boss’s job, and then I got a letter about ‘synergies’, and then a bald, fat man asked me why I was special and threatened to call security, and then I walked out of an office on Kensington High Street knowing that I had lost the thing I had spent my whole life building up.

  It’s interesting what happens to the body when it’s in shock. Shock, according to the medical definition, is ‘a life-threatening condition of low blood perfusion to tissues resulting in cellular injury and inadequate tissue function’. But this, it says, is not the same as ‘the emotional state of shock’. When you’re in emotional shock you’re not likely to die. You’re just likely to feel that someone has tried to kill you.

  What you experience in emotional shock is an ‘acute stress response’. This is triggered by something called the ‘sympathetic nervous system’, which is specially designed to respond to phrases like ‘I don’t love you any more’ or ‘what’s so special about you?’ You might t
hink that a sympathetic system would be trying to calm you down, wrapping you in a nice chemical blanket and offering you a choice between Green & Black’s cocoa and a whisky sour. It doesn’t. The sympathetic nervous system has decided that what you need when you’re really, really upset is to be flooded with hormones that set your whole system on fire. It thinks that what you need, when you’re trying to keep upright as you walk out of an office on Kensington High Street, is to be able to gallop over a savannah.

  It’s actually quite hard to do anything when your heart is thumping in your chest like a mad prisoner trying to hammer a way out. And when your whole body is trembling, like one of those Power Plates you never use at the gym. You think, at first, that it’s quite interesting that you can actually see your body shaking. You wonder if this is what it’s like when people say they have ‘the shakes’ and can’t do anything until they’ve had a drink. You think that the shaking will surely soon stop. You honestly don’t see how it can carry on. But your heart keeps hammering and your body keeps shaking and you still find it hard to swallow, while you’re still gulping air and wondering why you seem to have forgotten how to breathe.

  I was still shaking the next day when I got a phone call from Harriet Harman’s chief of staff saying that they were keen to fix the interview she had agreed to do for my planned series on ‘women and power’. I had to explain that I wouldn’t be doing any interviews on ‘women and power’ because I didn’t seem to have any power any more. I didn’t, in fact, seem to have a job. A few minutes later, the phone rang again. ‘I’ve got Harriet on the line,’ the voice at the end of it said. ‘She wants to speak to you.’

  I was wearing torn leggings and a stripy Primark top as I paced around my study and told the shadow deputy prime minister what had happened. Harriet Harman had started something called the Commission on Older Women. Three days before, on the Sky News press preview on which I was a regular guest, I had talked about her commission. Now she said she wanted to understand The Independent’s policy towards women. Why, she wanted to know, was a national newspaper that had a reputation for being liberal forcing out quite a few of its fortysomething women?