Memorialising and Writing: A Conversation with Christina Patterson

28 Jan

“What I do think is that you can be miserable in a relationship and very happy on your own. There are lots and lots of ways to lead a good life.”

In your acknowledgements section, you mention that you’ve wanted to write a version of this book for years. What gave you the final incentive?

I’ve wanted to write this book for more than 20 years and made various attempts, but when my brother died it took on an urgency it hadn’t had before. Tom was 57 when he died. I was 55. I’ve had cancer twice. I was intensely aware that none of us knows how much longer we have and I couldn’t bear the thought of dying without having written the book I’d wanted to write for so long. Since both my siblings were dead and none of us had had children, I was also intensely aware that there was no one else to keep their memory alive. I wanted to honour them, but also tell the truth about what it’s like to live with mental illness. I wanted to pay tribute to my famliy, but in a truthful way.

Which sections of Outside the Sky is Blue did you find the most challenging to write, and which were the most enjoyable?

I found writing about my sister Caroline’s breakdown and mental illness very painful because I couldn’t bear to think about what she had gone through. Writing about Tom’s death was difficult because it was recent and raw. And writing about my time at the Christian youth club and the years of faith that followed was difficult in a different way because it made me so angry that I had been targeted, radicalized in a way, and this had such a profound and harmful effect on my life. But the truth is, I loved writing all of it. Even when it was painful – and an awful lot of it was painful – I felt as if I was doing what I should be doing and that’s a truly wonderful feeling. To be honest, I feel as if writing this book, and trying to tell the story of my family, has been the greatest pleasure and privilege of my working life.

The novelist Michele Roberts says that being half-French has had an enormous effect on her work and her outlook on life. Do you feel the same about being half-Swedish?

That’s such an interesting question! I think in Michele Roberts’s work, it’s very evident. She speaks fluent French, has had a house in France for many years, and has an obviously French sensibility, in her sensuous and sensual approach to life. It’s a much more difficult question to answer for me. For a start, I don’t speak much Swedish and have never lived there. But I would say that I never felt “English” in the way that many of my childhood friends seemed to. I felt English in Sweden, but I felt like some kind of strange mongrel growing up in England. In my early twenties, I suddenly realized that very few of my friends were pure “English English”. Many of us were a mix of different cultures, children of immigrants, or from other parts of the UK. I think I was always unconsciously attracted to outsiders of one kind or another. Certainly, in my romantic life, I was hardly ever asked out by white, English, middle-class men. Or perhaps I just didn’t pick up the secret signals!

More broadly, I’d say that the Swedish part of my background has had a strong impact on my political views. My parents were both highly principled people with a strong sense of fairness, but for my mother, it went further. She was shocked by the English class system and passed that on to all of us. I’m still strongly opposed to private education. I think it perpetuates class divisions in a way that makes it very hard to move to anything like a meritocracy. Sweden is not Utopia, but I do think its model of social democracy is a really good starting point for a more civilised society. I wish we were moving in that direction and not, as it seems, the opposite.

You mention often feeling the ‘odd one out’ among your siblings. Do you think that feeling affects your writing at all?

Goodness, I’ve never, ever thought about that! In a sense, I think it must, because the way we write is an expression of who we are and I think that sense of being the odd one out in my family was reinforced in my Christian years when I was in any “normal” (ie non-evangelical Christian) group of people. I often felt like an oddball and can only guess that that sense of isolation fuelled my writing. Many of my contemporaries took more orthodox routes to “non-conformism” in punk, fashion, whatever, while I was going to Bible studies and singing choruses about how much I loved Jesus. But although I’ve always looked and sounded like a conventional middle-class person, and in many ways am, I’ve always had a strong independent streak. I think that’s probably reflected in my writing voice. Quite a few people have told me they can tell if a piece of writing is by me, even before they’ve seen my name. That must be part of it, I suppose, though I don’t really know how it works. I’ve also often written about things that have been deeply controversial and sometimes embarrassingly personal. There’s a sense in which I don’t really care what people think, or perhaps I mean I only care what people I respect think. That must have something to do with the independence of spirit.

What memories of your parents, sister and brother do you treasure most?

It might sound strange for someone who has written a memoir to say this, but I do generally try not to think about the past. There’s a part of me that can’t bear to face the fact that my family’s dead, so I tend to focus on the thing in front of me and only think about the past when it hits me in the face. But lovely memories do surface, of course: of us in Sweden, of us having Christmas dinner together, of walks with my father, of watching TV with Tom and Caroline, and of meeting my mother in London for lunch or tea, and Mum being so pleased to see me that she actually clapped her hands. At the moment, I’m still actively trying not to think about Tom. I have all his LPs, but I still can’t listen to them. I hope, as the grief fades, that I will.

You were a born-again Christian for a decade. What led you to this kind of faith and why did you stick with evangelism for so long despite your growing doubts?

It’s unsettling to think how much of our life rests on chance, but it really does. My girls’ grammar school turned into a mixed comprehensive when I was in the third year. My brother’s grammar school turned into an independent school. Until then, it had been a rich source of boys for the girls in my school, but now Tom’s school paired up for social events with a local girls’ private school and our supply of boys was suddenly, and cruelly, turned off. So when one of my brother’s classmates invited him to his youth club, and Tom invited me, I couldn’t possibly turn the opportunity down. I didn’t realise, of course, that the point was to convert us to a particular brand of evangelical Christianity. I was thrilled to meet handsome boys with motorbikes and leather jackets. I was less thrilled to discover that you couldn’t touch the boys, because they had given their lives to the Lord. After hearing a charismatic preacher called David Pawson preach about the need to invite Jesus into our lives, I followed his instructions and did.

I was an evangelical Christian from the age of fifteen to 26. It’s really hard for me to say now why I stuck with it for so long. In writing the book, I hoped to find the answer, but I’m not sure I can. I think part of it is that I felt emotionally blackmailed by the youth leaders and Christians around me, who told me with great authority that God wanted me to serve him and that everyone who wasn’t a “proper” Christian was going to hell. Some of them were very kind people. It’s just unfortunate that they subscribed to an ideology that, in my view, causes great harm. I’m a wholehearted, conscientious person, so I suppose once I signed up to it, I didn’t feel I had the option to give up. And I did swallow the whole thing, hook, line and sinker, so it was a very big deal for me to turn my back on it. But I think there may be a deeper reason I stuck with it. My sister was fourteen when she had her first breakdown. I was fourteen when I went to the youth club and “found God”. I think perhaps it was my own attempt at a psychotic episode (a very long-lasting one) though obviously I can never know.

Some of the most moving sections of the book are about your schizophrenic sister Caroline’s love of Russian history and 19th-century novels. Do you think society could do more to help people like Caroline, and to nourish their talents?

I absolutely do. As far as I can tell, society’s treatment of people with mental illness is no better now than it was nearly 50 years ago when Caroline had her first breakdown. There’s a lot of talk of “mental health”, but people generally mean stress or anxiety. They don’t mean schizophrenia, psychosis or any of the other mental illnesses that are debilitating and largely incurable. A few years ago, I went to a club for people with a mental illness and it was the same old story: people who had spent their entire adult lives with little state support, languishing on benefits, in insecure housing, unable to hold down jobs, or even be offered the opportunity. When I think of Caroline’s talent, and how much she wanted a job, any job, even a job washing up in a canteen, for God’s sake, it breaks my heart. I really mean that. It breaks my heart.

Literature has played a big role in your life: you studied it at university, worked as Deputy Literary Editor for the Independent and remain active as a book reviewer. What literary works have helped you the most in difficult times?

This question has really made me think because I rarely re-read books, actually. It’s not that I don’t want to, but it’s part of my focus on the infinite “to do” list and what needs to be done today. I mostly review non-fiction these days, so usually have a weighty book I’m meant to be reviewing, or a book I need to read for my podcast and then I feel I need to be constantly reading the news websites, for my political punditry and obsession. But none of this feeds the soul in the way true literature does: writing – fiction, poetry non-fiction, anything – that makes you feel “this is what it’s like to be alive”. You have made me think that I must somehow find a way to treat myself to some re-reading of the classics: Middlemarch, Emma, Anna Karenina, Keats, Wordsworth etc etc etc. But I think there is a sense in which these books still live in my head. I have a whole wall of poetry in my flat and it’s full of treasures. I have a whole wall of fiction, too. For many years, my “comfort book” was Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack. I love her work. Much more recently, I’ve discovered, and adore, Elizabeth Strout. Reading her most recent novel, Oh William! made me want to re-read her entire oeuvre.

You write very affectingly about your early shyness. How did you manage to conquer it to have a career in journalism and broadcasting?

Hmm. I don’t know! I think, to be honest, my shyness was much more to do with the romantic arena than the professional one. After my born-again Christian years, and an adolescence with no romantic activity (except in my head), I was terrified of men and had no idea how people managed to navigate what felt to me like a crocodile-ridden swamp. But I was always reasonably socially confident. I studied under a master – my mother! – who had brought me up to ask questions and keep the conversation going, so I didn’t find that hard. What I did find hard – and still do – was putting myself forward for work. I was brought up to believe that you should wait to be asked, which is no recipe for success in journalism! In the early years of freelancing, it was only with encouragement from other people that I forced myself to write letters – actual letters in the early days! – asking to be considered for reviewing or whatever. I had no contacts and that’s how I started, by sending samples of my work. I did always work extremely hard and I suppose I must have done the work well. The work needs to be good enough, but that’s not enough. People need to know about you. I also think all work comes down to relationships. People will want to work with you if you do good work and are a pleasure to work with. I suppose that’s what I’ve tried to do.

You discuss worrying a lot about being single in your twenties and thirties – do you feel society puts unfair pressure on women to be part of a couple?

Yes, definitely. I felt real stigma and shame about being single for many, many years and I think that’s ridiculous. We still live in a society that sends the message that there’s a superior way to live, in couples, with a nuclear family, and an inferior way, on your own. It’s sexist too, because the implication is that if you’re a single woman, you have somehow failed to “catch” a man. Actually, the reverse is often true. It’s the women who are highly educated high achievers who find it hardest to find partners. I often felt I knew masses of gorgeous, brilliant single women, but no single men who might be any kind of a match. It’s hard for men too, of course, and I don’t think the consumerist culture of online dating has made things any easier. What I do think is that you can be miserable in a relationship and very happy on your own. There are lots and lots of ways to lead a good life.