Rewriting the North: Memoir Writing – A Search for the Truth

Memoir-writer, novelist, poet, and short-story writer Catherine Simpson reflects on the life story which has led her to publish three books.

I was born on a Lancashire dairy farm in 1963, as part of a family who didn’t read books never mind write them. The only books in our farmhouse were cow pedigree registers and the family bible, which we used for pressing wildflowers.

The idea that one day I would write a novel and two memoirs, which inevitably talk a lot about my childhood in rural Lancashire, would have been laughable if I had dared to think it.

I kept my desire to write books secret because it seemed as achievable as saying I wanted to be a ballet dancer or a champion jockey. I trained as a journalist because that seemed a more realistic way of writing for a living. It wasn’t until I was aged 45 when the fear of failing at writing had been overtaken by the fear that I would never try at all, that I went to the Open University to study Creative Writing, followed by am MA in Creative Writing at Napier University.

As soon as I started, I was hooked. I realised I could reach people with my writing and that was a heady feeling. My first book was a novel called Truestory, published by Sandstone in 2015 when I was 51. This was inspired by my lived experience of raising an autistic child. I decided to novelise the story to protect my daughter’s privacy and in truth never thought about writing a memoir. I wouldn’t have had the confidence. I lived in Edinburgh by this time and was fortunate to win a Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award with a first draft of this manuscript. The New Writers’ Award came with a mentor which was so very valuable, she questioned my decisions – about point of view, pacing and character arcs, and encouraged me to improve the book enormously.

After my sister, Tricia, died by suicide I had the urge to explore how this catastrophic tragedy had occurred in our family. Was it something about us? Something about the way we lived. Tricia had left a lifetime of diaries and I used them to dig into our childhood and adolescence down on the Lancashire farm and Tricia’s ever-growing difficulties with her mental ill health. 

I did not have a publishing contract and indeed did not know if anyone would ever read it but first and foremost, I was writing it for myself. I wanted to find out, as much as it was possible to do so, what exactly had happened. This book was never going to be a novel. This was a raw digging about in the reality of our lives. A search for the truth.

Again, I was lucky to be awarded a mentor by Scottish Book Trust (in a scheme now known as the Ignite Fellowship). This mentor was invaluable in encouraging me to include my own story in the book – I originally tried to be something of a faceless narrator, but this did not work. As my mentor said: ‘The reader wants to know who is telling them this story. Who are you?’ The book was published as When I Had a Little Sister, by 4th Estate in 2019. It was described as ‘superb’ in the Sunday Times and as I caught the first glimpse of this review, illustrated with an old school photograph of me and Tricia at Winmarleigh Primary school in 1972, life seemed surreal indeed.

The responses to Truestory and When I Had a Little Sister were very moving. People messaged saying I had told their story. One woman wrote to say she had read out a page from Truestory to her child’s psychologist because it explained her difficulties raising her autistic child in a way she felt she could not.

It seemed that on the whole my readers did not differentiate between fiction and memoir – they thought both books were true! They would ask me if my husband did not mind my writing about him as I had done in Truestory and looked unconvinced when I explained that ‘Duncan’ the husband was a fictional character.

During the editing process of When I Had a Little Sister, I went to London to meet my publisher and agent, I was wined and dined and invited to a glittering publishing party. It seemed I really had made my dreams come true.

But life keeps giving me things to write about and on the train home I remembered I had never heard back from a routine mammogram I’d had a month before…

After being diagnosed with breast cancer a fortnight later, I tried to find the book I needed – one that was not sentimental or sugar-coated, one that was not minimising the trauma and trying too hard to be funny-funny. I didn’t find it, so I decided to write it. I wrote One Body as I went through the diagnostic and treatment process so that it would be a truthful account and not one written much later when the reality of the situation had been over-laid with relief.

The cancer experience made me think about what it had been like being born in a woman’s body and growing up and growing older in this body – from childhood to puberty in the hyper-sexist seventies, pregnancy, childbirth to menopause and all the tanning, plucking, exercising and obsessive slimming in between.

So, although One Body is structured around my cancer experience, it is about much more. Again, I’ve been touched by readers’ responses. Some react to the cancer stories, but most react to the story of what it has been like to be a woman (well, this woman) told with raw honesty. Readers like raw honesty.

I talk about all kinds of personal experiences in One Body – things I never thought I would dare to share with the world, but it is so freeing to finally be done with the shame that attaches itself to the female body. I’ve discovered that writing something on the page makes the shame evaporate. Empowering, indeed.

I find myself reading more and more memoir – I enjoy the feeling of a direct connection with the author and the trust they are putting in me, the reader. Likewise, I can’t stop writing memoir – it is rather addictive to take a long, unflinching look at different aspects of your life, to hear the penny drop as you make sense of something for the first time. I’ve always loved travelling and thought of myself as quite an adventurous sort – but just now exploring inside my own head and life is where the adventure is.

This blog is funded by Arts Council England as part of the Rewriting the North series of podcasts, talks, blogs and mentorship scheme.