Written in 1794. Addressed to readers who did not exist yet. Explaining that in a former time, love was treated as a crime, and asking whether some later age might read it differently.
I am the later age.
I am the indignant page.
The week my own ending went out of date
Mallory Jones on Blake, boots, a sitcom apology, and what happens when you finish a book about a living person.
I finished the book on Monday.
I want to be clear about what “finished” means, because I have used the word about four times now and it has meant something different each time. This time it meant: printed out, green pen, playlists chosen, ninety-nine thousand words in order, the last line decided and never once in doubt.
And then I read the Epilogue.
The Epilogue said he does not know.
The Epilogue said I am not sending the largest thing I own into that drawer.
The Epilogue said, in about four hundred careful words, that there was one thing inside those two years that we had never once mentioned, and that I could not say it to his face and could not write it down, and that this left the telephone.
Every word of that had been true when I wrote it.
None of it was true any more, because in the interval between writing the ending and editing the ending, I had gone and done the thing the ending said I could not do.
I sent the email.
The problem nobody warns you about
Here is a thing they do not tell you about writing a book that contains a living person.
The person keeps living.
They do not have the decency to hold still while you finish your paragraph. They carry on being themselves, in real time, on the other side of the world, and occasionally they do something so precisely in character that your manuscript develops a hole in it overnight.
I had spent thirty-three years describing a man who goes quiet. I wrote a whole chapter about it. I wrote a sentence I was rather pleased with — that writing is where that man goes in order not to arrive — and I put it in the Epilogue as a prediction, as the reason I could not possibly tell him in writing.
Then I told him in writing.
And he did the thing.
I am not going to tell you what the thing was, because it is in the book and the book is his as well as mine and there are lines I decided about, that I am not crossing for the sake of a newsletter. But I will tell you the shape of it: I made a prediction in a chapter, and then I ran the experiment on myself, and the prediction held.
You would think being right would feel like something.
What you do about it
You rewrite it. Obviously. That is the only answer.
But it took me most of a week to understand what to rewrite, because my instinct was to go in and correct the facts — change he does not know to he knows and move on.
Except he may not know. He may not have read it. He may have read it and been unable to answer. I have no way of establishing which, and I am never going to have one.
So the ending is not “he knows” and it is not “he does not know”. The ending is: I cannot find out, and I have decided that not knowing is allowed.
Which, it turns out, I had already written. Twenty paragraphs earlier. Weeks ago. Sitting there as a throwaway line about the two of us and our unclassifiable correspondence.
I have decided that not knowing is allowed.
The book had granted itself permission before it knew it would need it. I have no explanation for that and I have stopped looking for one. Anyone who writes anything long will tell you the same thing happens to them and they cannot explain it either.
The paragraph that was a lie
There was another one, and this one was worse, because it was not out of date. It was just dishonest.
I had written, about the man who set all this off and then would not discuss it:
That is not a grievance. He does not owe me the rest of his life.
Reasonable. Balanced. Fair.
Complete rubbish.
It is a grievance. A grown man sent three words across the world to a woman he had not spoken to this century, and then went quiet — in roughly the tone you would use to ask whether I had seen a band that weekend. What came out of it was a hundred thousand words and a stranger in an office with a plant in it.
I am appalled. I have been appalled for months. And I had written a nice, mild, even-handed sentence over the top of it, because that is what I do, and because being fair to him has been the organising principle of the entire book.
Here is the thing I had to face: fairness in the wrong place is just another way of not saying it.
My own book warns about this. Near the end there is a paragraph about being careful of the thing you are good at — that mine is understanding, that I can take anything that has happened to me and turn it into a structure with evidence and a chronology and deliver it in a dispassionate voice, and that I have never once had to feel it while I am doing that.
It looks like recovery. It is extremely convincing.
And there I was, three pages earlier, doing it.
Boots
The fix was not more anger. It was a pair of boots.
Somewhere in the middle of the book there is a line I had entirely forgotten: that anger has boots on, and begging is barefoot in a vest on the floor. I begged once, at eighteen, on a cycle path, in daylight, and it is on the record and I am not taking it back.
So the Epilogue now says: this is not that. The boots are on.
Which meant going back through the manuscript and discovering that I have been putting boots in this book since chapter eighteen without noticing. A pair of Doc Martens under a hospital gown. A boy on his knees taking them off. A line in the twenties — Freya again. The one who wore boots and was not barefoot — that I have absolutely no memory of writing.
Three hundred pages apart, and they had been waiting.
Blake, and an in-joke
The other thing that happened this week is that I remembered who gave me Blake.
Two of my chapters are called Innocence and Experience. I have been calling them that since the start, and if you had asked me why I would have said something vague about tone. They are, of course, Blake’s two contrary states of the human soul, and the reason they are in my book at all is that a nineteen-year-old boy in Leeds in 1991 handed me Songs of Innocence and of Experience and I have apparently never got over it.
So the book now has an epigraph:
Children of the future Age, Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time, Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
Written in 1794. Addressed to readers who did not exist yet. Explaining that in a former time, love was treated as a crime, and asking whether some later age might read it differently.
I am the later age.
I am the indignant page.
And — this is the part that made me laugh out loud at the kitchen table — Blake is the only writer in this entire book I am allowed to quote. Every chapter has a playlist. Not one lyric appears anywhere, because lyrics cost money and permission and you cannot have them. Thirty-nine chapters of music and I am not permitted to print a single line of any of it.
Blake died in 1827. Blake is free.
The boy gave me the one thing I could actually use, thirty-four years before I needed it.
A sitcom apology
Last thing.
The Epilogue now contains a passage about what I would actually want, if the phone ever rings. It is not an apology, particularly, and it is not an explanation that makes it all right, because there isn’t one.
It is three steps, and I stole them from a sitcom about a man written to be incapable of understanding other people.
You say what you did wrong. You promise not to do it again. You ask to be forgiven.
I have had none of the three. And the thing he would have to promise not to do again is the thing he is still doing.
That is the closing argument of a hundred-thousand-word book: a template borrowed from a comedy, because the comedy treats it as the absolute minimum, and I cannot get it.
Forgiveness is not off the table, by the way. It is on the table. It has been for some time.
It costs one conversation.
The Missing Chapter is finished, which this week I have learned means: finished for now, until the man in it does something else.