Writing about a crisis might help you come to terms with it?

There is a strange contradiction in writing about a private experience and making it public. I’ve just written a book about a subject that for five years I not only avoided but found bitterly painful to talk about. To discuss my son Miles’s situation with anybody other than family or closest friends felt like a betrayal of his privacy; it was too intensely private to share. And now I’ve written a book about it.

Miles had a snowboarding accident in Austria in 2006. Aged just 29, he suffered a traumatic brain injury and I spent six weeks in Innsbruck, where he was in hospital.

Despite the horror of those weeks, the dread-filled walks to the hospital twice a day and the inert, profoundly damaged Miles I encountered every time, I had guessed they might be halcyon days. While different members of the family came and went and I remained in the quiet town with its clean cobbled streets and Tyrolean propriety, we were a family together in a bubble of privacy, isolated by our shared grief and protected by our anonymity. We had no need to present ourselves or explain our situation.

But back in London we were a family that had been visited by disaster, marked out, different. We had to explain what had happened to Miles. It felt like a grave breach of his privacy — he had been so diminished by his brain injury that to describe him was to incur people’s pity and pity for him I could not bear. He was a young man who had never once, in all his life, had to endure pity.

“What made you start to write about it?” people ask me, or, more often, “Was it cathartic?” The reason I started is that it felt necessary; I felt compelled to write. There was no catharsis, if that means to release, and thereby get relief from, repressed emotions. I simply needed to try to understand what had happened to Miles and to us as a family.

One day I came home from visiting him, went straight up to my desk and wrote about the moment of first confronting Miles at the hospital in Innsbruck. The scene, part of which is reproduced here, had remained vividly imprinted on my mind: the strange, empty terror I felt, that I knew all the family felt too, followed by the shock of seeing him unconscious and on a ventilator. In retrospect it was a moment of rupture in our lives, a point of no return.

Ifound that writing about it helped make sense of it. It wasn’t painful; I found to my surprise that I enjoyed the process. And so the book grew. As I retrieved the memories, I realised something more significant was happening. By writing about the extraordinary world Miles now inhabited, I could bear witness to his suffering and to the suffering of the thousands of people in his situation. And, so important to us as a family, I could reclaim his identity and pay tribute to the man he was before his accident.

He had been a young man defined by his energy and vitality, his humour and downto-earthness. He was adventurous, a risktaker, but also reflective and kind. Gifted, powerful, handsome, his future was full of promise. I wanted to retrieve that, to portray his brilliance and his flaws.

After Miles awoke from his initial coma — not the Hollywood awakening we had all come to expect — he had remained in what is known as a “minimally conscious state’” Unable to speak or control any aspect of his life, he was nevertheless at times aware enough to feel and indicate pain, humiliation, anger, misery, frustration, loneliness, boredom — the same sensations and emotions as before, but imprisoned in a twilight world of the profoundest solitude.

Releasing the book has been a strange process for me and for my other three children, Will, Claudia and Marina. Their support throughout the years following Miles’s accident was extraordinary and I could not have survived it in the way I did without them. Their support during the writing process was remarkable too. In many ways it was a collaborative venture. They read and edited every word; it was essential that they concurred with everything I wrote.

Now that it’s out there we are freshly vulnerable. Of course this applies to all writers, the intensely private writing process followed by exposure and scrutiny. In our case, we faced the exposure of both the book itself and of Miles. THE INDEPENDENT

Releasing the book has been a strange process for me and for my other three children, Will, Claudia and Marina. Their support throughout the years following Miles's accident was extraordinary and I could not have survived it in the way I did without them.