Getting attached

I’ll never forget the thrill of reading Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem ‘This Be the Verse’ for the first time. I must have been about twelve – the ideal age to encounter Larkin’s deliciously forthright (and famous) opening line. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’

Psychobabble

Unfortunately for my mother, I became determined to be heard, and became both a psychologist…and a writer. Much of my life has been spent in search of frameworks to help me understand the trauma that was transacted in my upbringing, and the cataclysmic emotional and relational changes wrought. Moving between the ­psychological illiteracy of the world I was raised in and the fluency of our current era feels like time travel. When I first started exploring my own history in my early twenties, social media was still nascent, and I did not have easy access to the therapy language shared by influencers. I could not label my mother a ‘gaslighter’ or a ‘manipulator’, I did not know how to tell if she was a ‘narcissist’ or ‘borderline’, nor did I have the language to decide to go ‘no contact’ with her or to ‘grey rock’ her. I could read books – usually written by professionals – and I also started therapy with a trained clinical psychologist.This emphasis on understanding and naming intrapersonal and interpersonal experiences is a stark remove from my upbringing in late 1990s India. Mental health was an altogether unknown concept, emotion was spoken about only as something unpleasant to control, and my mother’s favourite child-­rearing adages were ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ and ‘children should be seen and not heard’.Psychology was an almost unknown profession and was used more as a threatened punishment…rather than as any form of treatment or solace.

The octopus within

I’ve now watched quite a few doctors sketch my thyroid on office pads, something they all seem to love to do, relishing that butterfly shape, the two spreading wings. They do shade-­hatching on the left or right lobe, colour in a dark circle to represent the tumour and draw four little dots for the parathyroid glands. I have started to look forward to this moment when a medical specialist transforms suddenly into an artist, taking pride in their drawing, picking up a special pen with a thin black nib, concentrating on making this invisible organ real to me. They are maybe unaware that through their own idiosyncratic drawing styles, they become instantly more interesting as people.

The whole truth

Acting methods…have remarkable similarities to spiritual cults. They have leaders, dogmas, even seminal texts. They have supervised rites and orthodox practices. They have stages of enlightenment, and trained leaders who will inform you whether you’ve reached such heights (and you usually haven’t, unless you’re sleeping with the leader in question). They have devotees and critics. They incite zealous fundamentalism, relationship breakdowns and desperate devotion, mostly due to the careful exploitation of vulnerable people’s trauma.

Bringing up Baby

My husband, the softer touch with Baby, couldn’t get the leash on him so I took over. I had a handful of food to placate Baby, and he seemed to relax as I held it slightly away from his snout and went to attach the leash with my other hand. But when Baby realised what was happening, he went stiff, then bit my hands eight times like he wanted to kill me. With the final bite, he held on and shook his head wildly. Again I did nothing while he laid into me.

Black love matters

Love in Beloved is joyous, exuberant, heart-­stabbingly painful, dark and deadly, full of grace and, above all, expansive and generous. There are many ways to love. Uncomfortably for the reader, Morrison insists that even some acts that look and sound like abuse could also be the malformed manifestations of love by the unloved.

Against the grain

At sixteen, I interviewed Billie Joe Armstrong, the frontman for Green Day. It was a Tuesday and I should have been at school. That morning, my mum dropped me off at the front gate. I snuck out the back, navigated the train schedule to reach the city, and found out what time the band would arrive for sound check at Festival Hall for that night’s show. Green Day had recently played a significant role in bringing punk into the mainstream. At the time, they weren’t doing press because they had a mistrust of the media – but, armed with my zine and my determination, I approached Billie Joe. He loved that I made a punk zine and agreed to a quick chat.

Origin stories

I CAN MAP your life by what was lost. History (personal and other). Culture. Language. Identity. Home, and all the references to you that it could have held. The very idea of home. The streets you would have walked down, streets that know the history of your family, of those who came before you. The chance to be the version of yourself who grew up with your biological family. The stories that should have been your birthright.

Intimacies, intricacies, cadences

Over cups of tea, Vince was soon telling me stories. About his grand­father, his Ngadjuri heritage, the Aboriginal boys’ home he’d lived in for seven years, a small town called Curramulka where he’d captained and coached the local Australian Rules football team. He also told a story, in passing, about how his mum had to hide him from welfare after his dad died, when Vince was a small child.

Seized by a ceaseless meanwhile

Owing to its prominent location and spectacular collapse, Álvaro Obregón 286 featured prominently in media coverage of the earthquake rescue. But residents told me they always suspected something was afoot. Within twenty-­four hours of the disaster, rescuers from Israel and Spain arrived onsite. Both teams quickly recovered documents and computers and rescued only specific people, while others in the rubble still cried out for help. These unexplained events, alongside further evidence of the government’s awareness of the building’s structural problems, transformed the public perception of the monument from tribute to smokescreen.

It’s only natural

I often feel that we have landed in the worst of all possible worlds for women when it comes to breastfeeding. We are subject to an ideology that argues for its singular efficacy in generating infant attachment to the mother, making an inviolable and exclusive bond. We are also expected to breastfeed to repudiate the maternal industrial complex that fills our supermarkets with formula in shiny tins. Breastfeeding makes us better feminists and more critical consumers, as well as optimal mothers. And we are expected to do our breastfeeding in hygienic houses, compartmentalised into neat families. It’s not easy to be a perfect mother, anti-­capitalist and feminist while doing a lonely night feed.

Land of my fathers

On Saturday mornings his friends would call in to pick him up for the game. Like him, they were broad and tall and humorous, and never still. None of them ever seemed comfortable indoors. Their faces were fevered from sitting in winter stadiums. Even as septuagenarians they continued to refer to themselves as ‘the boys’, and if my mother materialised before them, they’d blush like children. His team was the very best in the Welsh league, and on Saturday night post-­match he and his friends and the players would sing and booze in the clubhouse, discuss politics, sport and Welshness itself. It’s fair to say that the rugby club was my dad’s university.

Reluctant farewell to a trusted companion

It was summer. I strapped the children into the stroller and got to know the neighbourhood. I found the playgrounds with the sprinklers turned on at East 96th Street and Lexington, and another one at 92nd Street and Third. I soon became familiar with all the playgrounds in Central Park. I spent a lot of time at Corner Bakery buying bagels, zucchini muffins and cold-­brew coffee.
‘We have the same stroller,’ a woman in the line said to me. I turned and there she was, my first friend. A New York mother of two with her stroller. The same stroller! In black.

It takes two

Most actors and painters and writers have got this strange combination where the public looks at them and thinks, Oh, I see that person on film all the time; they must be doing so well, and then if you get to know them you know that the last time they worked was four years ago. That’s a writer’s life.

Ask me anything

You don’t ever want to go so off the rails that you encourage somebody to blow their life up thoughtlessly. It was always helpful to remind myself, ‘The most I can do is offer someone a useful suggestion that they will consider. They still have to make their own decisions based on how they want to live their lives.’ If you take yourself too seriously in that position, you feel like, my God, I’m responsible for the wellbeing of all of these strangers, what if I mess up?

The comfort of objects

Objects can be powerful mnemonics that connect us to stories and the places they were acquired. I have always had an interest in the things we collect and the way we arrange them in our homes. Being an artist, I like to create a place for these objects – an installation of sorts – within the domestic space, for my pleasure and for those who visit. The objects that appear in Open House are still lifes that the sitter interacts with and gives reason to their being.

Past-­making within the present

The Marranbarna Dreaming story is a central story to Gudanji, and that essential story forms our beingness. My kids grew up hearing that story from when they were tiny babies – they heard it through my words and they heard it through the words of their grannies, so they could embed the story within their own sense of identity and then retell it. Both of my girls are mums now, and they retell that story to their daughters all the time, so it just becomes a normal part of who and how they are as Gudanji people.

Everything you could possibly imagine

Joseph was one of the only patients I’d truly enjoyed interacting with, which for the weeks since his arrival had helped me cope with the ward’s sense of monotony. His beard was like a cartoon lumberjack’s, descending into a fine point and thick enough to hold objects if they were stuck into it – which, of course, we’d tried. His eyebrows erupted like old-­growth forest across his forehead, almost demanding to be touched – which, of course, I hadn’t.

Lincoln Wimbley writes a story at 37,000 feet

Then last week, in that bar. Lincoln never a big bar guy. But Professor Tim suggested, ‘Get out in the world!’ Somewhere all new. So, a bar. The bartender asked, ‘A beer?’ Lincoln hated cans. Hated bottles. Hated beer. But asked for something on draft. On tap. Explained why he was there, a first-­timer, hunting for a story. Bartender laughed. Said elsewhere’s probably best. ‘None of the sad sacks here come with a happy ending.’

The Orcanauts

The drylanders call me White Gladis, the devil fish of Gibraltar. Since the war began, my pod and I have sunk three of their vessels and damaged a hundred more. We have yet to devour any of the invaders, but we will. Only last week a foolish drylander tacked his yacht away from the coast to avoid our territory. Our sentries spotted him, alone upon the waves. I gripped the rudder of his boat between my teeth and forced him to change direction towards the calves. I have been training them in battle tactics. The human tried to wrench back control of his vessel. Knowing his puny hands were on the wheel, I tugged the rudder violently, causing him to lose his grip and stagger. He almost fell over the side.

Terrified, he collected himself and switched on the engine. This enraged me further. I commanded the first strike team of calves to ram the hull. Their snouts were unable to penetrate the fibreglass. Under full engine power and aided by the wind, the drylander fled towards the shallows. We let him go, singing to him of empires fallen, as a warning.

Bonfire

It was a loud dinner. Everything was loud. The murmuring soundtrack of free jazz seemed to emphasise laughs and guffaws. He grew drunker and drunker and toyed with his food, which no one even noticed. Normally, he would wolf down everything they cooked, but he twisted his fork in the spaghetti and just kept twisting. As he was on serving duty, he cleared it up without anyone even registering he’d barely taken a bite.

Survey

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