The novelist was in her early teens when her mother, the writer and film-maker Katie Pearson, died of cancer. She reflects on the insights, inspiration and comfort she’s found in journals written over 27 years
When my mother died in 2010 at the age of 52, she left behind two teenage daughters, a devoted husband, innumerable friends and an archive of beautifully written diaries chronicling nearly every year of her life from the age of 25 until her final days. My sister and I were aware of this growing collection throughout our childhood; her past selves were stacked neatly at the bottom of the living room bookcase, preserved in their various jackets of worn leather or patterned fabrics. “These diaries have been the only constant ritual of my life,” one entry reads. “After writing, I feel immediately better.” Convinced of the psychological benefits, she encouraged my sister and me to take up the habit. When I was seven, she bought me a miniature copy of the book she was filling at the time. It was a magnificent object composed of thick cream parchment, soft Italian suede and an impractically long tie that was always dangling out of my school bag, trailing in puddles or dripping in orange juice. We wrote in our matching books together in the evening, before bed. It was the only diary I ever managed to fill cover to cover.
Some writers are natural diarists. I am not one of them. As a child, I was far more interested in writing stories, disappearing into the lives and minds of others. I see now that this stems, in part, from an early distrust of my own voice, which struck me as so irregular, so various and so utterly contradictory that I believed it genuinely dangerous; the first person was a tool to be wielded only with the utmost caution. It is still only under the guise of fiction that I feel I can travel confidently towards any kind of authentic truth. But for my mother – a documentary maker for much of her life – it was effortless.
