The Word Cloud

Hi Cloud-mouths, hope everyone is well and writing up a storm. I thought I'd post up this interview I did with a fellow writer about my novel Sisyphusa, the writing process and the impact it has had on my life.  Hope some people might find it interesting...

1.       Sisyphusa is unlike most books in that it exposes mental illness in a different context: fact seems to be weaved with fiction. What made you approach the novel in this way?

 

I think most, if not all, fiction has an element of fact. From what I can remember, I don’t think I planned what I was going to write- the idea for a story just hit me and I was off and writing.  It was clear straight away that what would become my novel would have a healthy dollop of autobiographical content but writing fiction gives you a licence to play around with the facts.  I was, and had been for a while, in a pretty dreadful place in my life when I began writing and the story began mostly as a way for me to make sense of what had happened to me and to escape into a fictional world that I had at least some control over.   

 

 

2.       You state that,

“[in] second year of university, in February 2007, he had a very sudden and unexpected onset of what was later diagnosed as Anxiety and Clinical Depression and later still with a form of OCD.  Within the space of a week he went from being a very confident and successful student to being unable to leave the house that he was living in with friends in Brighton.  Michael had to move back home to his parents’ house in London where he has remained ever since.” But the book is labelled fiction, how much of the context is based on personal experience?

 

A lot of it is based on personal experience; the sense of being wrenched from university, the feeling of complete isolation and desolation when in ‘Solitary’ and some of the people and experiences I encountered when in hospital.  It’s also reflective of how I’ve changed over the time that I’ve been unwell and the intellectual journey that I’ve made, that I’ve had to make.  Nevertheless, the book is fiction- Odis differs from me in a lot of ways and other characters are only partly or sometimes not at all based on people that I’ve known. 

 

3.       Where is your experience reflected most?

            I think the sections of the book where I describe in detail some of the emotion and suffering that Odis experiences is the clearest example of where I am using the novel to illustrate my own depression, my own anxiety.  It was a way of releasing some of the sheer anguish that I had felt for months or by then years.  There is an incredible sense of powerlessness that I think is almost intrinsic to depression, anxiety and OCD- I felt trapped in my mind, trapped by my thoughts and writing the novel felt like it gave me just a tiny little bit of the power back.

 

4.       Sisyphusa makes a statement about mental illness. Can you describe it?

 

I was very conscious that I wanted the novel to stand up as a work of fiction in its own right and not just be a vehicle for “my message.” Having said that, it was consciously intended as a polemic.  I wanted to use the dystopian genre and satire to say how I feel not just about the status of mental illness in modern Britain but also what I feel about the state of the country and society that I watched from my window (and through my television) in the years that I was shut off from the world.  I make it quite clear the seriousness and suffering that comes with mental illness but there is also anger in there around the sense of societal stigma, around the feeling of being misunderstood and the way that the system mistreats sufferers.   The novel, like all novels are, is open to interpretation for all those who read it. One of the most gratifying things since having the book published has been reading the reviews I’ve received and talking to people who’ve read the book and hearing the amazingly diverse interpretations that people have had.  I think that’s one of the things I love about literature, there’s never one single statement that can be divined from a whole work of fiction- that’s why there are so many interpretations of the Bible and other religious texts- you bring your own stuff to the book as well.  

 

5.       Has writing Sisyphusa helped you heal from mental illness? Can you describe it?

 

It has certainly been a part of the healing process, though that’s not to say that I’m “recovered.”  The help of my family and psychotherapist and other care-givers has been most crucial but writing Sisyphusa was the first thing that gave some meaning back to my life.  Depression drained everything out of me until I became a shell, unrecognisable from my own idea of myself.  My inner monologue would be taunting me much of each day for being weak and for being a failure.  I was constantly fretting that I wasn’t doing what a 21, 22, 23 year old “should” be doing.  Once it became clearer the size of the task that I was undertaking in writing a novel, it became a project that dwarfed the many others I’d engaged in to get through the days, weeks, months of depression.  I could at last give myself a tiny bit of credit for the amount I was writing, though I still found it impossible to praise the quality of the work.  Though I’ve learned that self-criticism is as much a characteristic of being a writer as it is of being clinically depressed.

 

6.       What would you most like readers to take from the book?

 

If at all possible I’d like them to enjoy it, if ‘enjoy’ is the right word? I hope that readers will sympathise and empathise with the characters and I hope it challenges people to think about the issues in the novel.  All you can really hope is that readers will read the book from cover to cover, after that it’s up to them what they take from it.

 

7.       If Sisyphusa had a mission statement, how would you describe it?

 

I think that the genesis of me writing Sisyphusa was far too raw and chaotic to have anything as planned as a mission statement.  I think if you go into writing something with too many grand plans, the people who read it might feel like you’re trying to “feed them a line.”  Above all, I hope that Sisyphusa is a serious novel with things to say about both mental illness and various other aspects of society.  The real sense of “mission” that underpinned it was the writing process, the feeling of being immersed in the characters and the plot and not even knowing myself how events would pan out until the moment I wrote them.     

 

8.       The main character Odis Winston, “abducted...” told he is “Weird” and needs to become “Normal.” Do you relate to this feeling?

 

Yes, I do.  I wasn’t abducted in a literal sense and I don’t know what it feels like to be sectioned or detained under the Mental Health Act.  I was more interested in the analogy, the theme of rupture.  One of the most fundamental aspects of my breakdown has been the utter shock of it.  My becoming mentally ill was so sudden and so unexpected both for me and everyone who knew me.  The causes even now are unknown to anyone and are at this point pretty irrelevant.  The dichotomy of the “Weird” status and “Normal” status is crucial to the fictional world of the novel.  What Odis learns through his forced change from being one to becoming the other is the same as what I learned, that such clear, oppositional distinctions do not exist in life.  That’s not to say that there is no such thing as mental illness, I believe there is and that it’s incredibly serious and sufferers need to be cared for.  Rather, what I am saying is that the destructive way in which human societies continually categorise minorities (even ones as sizeable as sufferers of mental illness) does immense harm.  The negative depiction and false stereo-types perpetuated in the media allow politicians to underfund mental health services, exacerbate feelings of self-hatred for sufferers and further cement stigma.  The variety of symptoms and behaviours in the innumerable conditions that are inadequately bunched under the term “mental illness” are so broad as to render the term almost redundant.  What is undeniably clear to me is that a fundamental rethink is necessary in relation to our notions of what “madness” means and how we can begin to cope in a more constructive way with the rising rates of mental disorders in society.   

 

9.       Sisyphusa has a fantasy element weaved throughout it. Was this intentional or did the story take form as you wrote it?

 

When I was writing Sisyphusa I never thought of it as being a fantasy novel.   I think maybe where the fantasy element comes in is firstly with the symbolism and allusions to Greek Mythology, particularly Homer’s Odyssey, which are present throughout the novel and can give it an “otherworldliness.”  The intention was always there to “create a world” which all my favourite novels do whether it be Tolstoy in War and Peace or Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude.  The key, however, was to make this whole world both fantastical but at the same time utterly believable and relatable to our own world.

 

10.    How would you describe Sisyphusa in one paragraph?

 

For me, it’s always difficult to describe the book succinctly to people.  It is definitely an allegory in that it has meaning on its own terms but also has various other meanings when you delve below the surface.  It is also without doubt a dystopian novel, in the tradition of Orwell, Kafka, Huxley, Bradbury and Zamyatin whose writing influenced me significantly.  But I think ultimately it is the story of struggle, specifically in a mental health context but perhaps applicable to the suffering that all humans face at points in our lives.  I hope that Sisyphusa depicts how painful severe clinical depression is through Odis’ journey in the book, through his search for hope and his fight for freedom.

 

 

 

11.    Do you have any final thoughts?

 

Thanks for the great questions Natalie.  This is only my second or third interview and it strikes me that I’ve not really thought a great deal about all the whys and wherefores that lay behind me writing the book.  It was really just something that happened.  I was 22 years old, I found myself in a psychiatric day hospital, a place I never dreamt my life would take me and I just began to write.  A couple of years later, with the book finished, I remember thinking to myself, “what on earth just happened?”  It was like I was in a daze all that time.