0 Getting started

“We mortals cross the ocean of this world

Each in his average cabin of a life”

Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology 1855

I always had a little difficulty with the borderline between fact and fantasy. I was taught to be truthful, but the truth is not always satisfactory or effective, especially in retrospect, so some of it has been embroidered, sometimes quite lavishly; there are chronological gaps, and certain events are no longer, when or where they happened.
No matter. This is not a history book.


Of course, it is not reasonable to write autobiographically without reference to one’s own identity. In my case this applies even more because of the peculiarity of my first name, which has been instrumentalized by others, but certainly not by me. Similarities with other persons alive or dead cannot be ruled out. If the person is a figment of my imagination, any likeness to a living or dead person is coincidental and claims to be this or that person will fall on deaf ears! It is up to the reader to decide whether any of the personalities exists or used to exist, not forgetting that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. In order that my reader may not be unnecessarily beset by suspicions and longings concerning the characters involved, I have renamed nearly all of them. You might want to say this has been done to protect the guilty, for there are quite a few baddies between the lines. But there are also a few angels, to whom I wish to dedicate my literary endeavours.

“All men should strive to learn before they die

What they are running from, and to, and why.”

James Thurber

On writing about myself

Why choose the historic present as the tense most used? Nomen est omen, of course...

What I thought would be quite easy, wasn't. I didn't want to write about myself as I see myself now. I wanted to find the little girl I lost on the way here. But on the long journey down memory lane I encountered so many more people than I had reckoned with that it became impossible to get them in any organized order of appearance. Awarding them all the tribute they deserved was an insurmountable task.

To be truthful, I have only hazy recollections of many of the people who influenced me the most and vivid recollections of fleeting acquaintances. My only solution to this most off-putting problem was to tell stories from my point of view and leave all the decisions to the reader.

So between the covers of this small book is a sort of fairy-tale about a child - me - who was born into an ordinary - but not that ordinary - family and set out rather reluctantly, because a fearful creature inside, to find herself - and never really did, although she sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to achieve her goal.

Attention to detail has always tended to blur my vision. Sometimes, before I started writing, I was confident that I would at least get right those facts of the incidents I remember clearly, even if I could not re-invoke my feelings. But the opposite happened. I am often not quite sure of my facts, but I am usually very certain about what I felt at the time. What I have written is therefore based more on my emotions than my reminiscences.

The other main problem I encountered was a totally illogical reluctance to get too involved with myself. I didn't want to grieve again, or be hurt or disappointed. But I did get massively involved and had to stop writing on many occasions, so emotionally drained and even tearful did I become.  I didn't realize until I started re-reading passages that I was on a cathartic journey to the depths of my being. Each subsequent revision has entailed a lot of soul-searching. There are periods of total blackness in my chronology, so the episodic form saves me from having to improvise episodes that have been blotted out irrevocably.

Forgive me for starting out on a metaphysical level. As a child I told people that I was a twin and that my sister had died. I tend to believe the theory that genuine left-handers like me could have an identical, right-handed "other half". I was happy that my lefthandedness was not an oddity.  Research into the reasons for spontaneous abortion – where it is recorded, since many unborn children escape the notice of the bearer - may bring (further) confirmation of this theory. There is also a theory that sometimes the second child gets lodged in the body of the first during embryonic development. This has been proven through operations to remove tissue from lungs or other parts of a person's body, which has turned out to have features of an undeveloped foetus – a weird thought. My own daughter is convinced that the encapsulated lump of tissue at the base of her brain that sometimes presses on the optic nerve and causes migraine is her (left-handed) twin.

Where much wiser authors than I have spent their lives pondering on questions I have more or less glossed over in my own narrative, the quotation below might bring you nearer to whatever truths you are searching for in yourself.

The original book ended with the chapter on socializing, but some years after completing the first 42 Episodes, some short, some long, I am going to make an effort to continue into the years that meant the most success for me as an artist, and the most tempestuous time emotionally,; a time that led to the catastrophes (bad decisions) about which my father had warned me and those that were prophesied by my mother. However, I hope to avoid my biography becoming a pathography, which it isn’t, compared with the lives of many!

As usual in the English language, Shakespeare has the last word(s) as well as the first, and who am I to argue?

We are such stuff as dreams are made on;

       and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV:1. 1612