WRITING EVERY DAY SAVED ME
Hilary Fannin on how indulging your creative side could help you through these hard times
IN these days when we are stuck at home, books and music will matter more to most of us than ever before. The arts are a salve for the troubled soul, a way of escaping when there’s nowhere to go, a chance to forget your own life and live for a minute through the eyes of someone else.
But what if you feel you have your own book inside you? Now is the time, says writer Hilary Fannin, to get that book outside. She’s a firm believer in the therapeutic qualities of writing; a seasoned playwright, author and columnist, at 58 she has just published her first novel.
The Weight of Love is an evocative journey from the ’90s to the present day, examining love, loss and memory through an exploration of three friends, Ruth, Robin and Joseph.
Without giving too much away, it examines how memories can play tricks on you, how reality can be a harsh mirror for those fantasies from the past.
Hilary has been writing for the last 25 years but taking the plunge to write a novel was an easy decision.
‘The first book I wrote was a memoir called Hopscotch, which sounds very grand but was just about part of my life growing up in the late ’60s and early ’70s. That was factual so this is my first time writing fiction — I’m a bit of a late starter in that respect though I’ve written a number of plays and I write a column,’ Hilary explains.
‘I have been trying to make my living as a writer for the last 20 to 25 years really since I stopped acting.’
It’s an interesting concept for someone who would have been perceived as a successful actor to just stop, but for Hilary it helped her discover what her real creative purpose was.
‘I think acting gives people up — I don’t know if people give up acting,’ she says. ‘As a female actor of a certain age there is a dearth of work, or there has was a dearth of work.
‘Maybe it’s a little better now but you start out and you are kind of playing the younger parts, the young lover or the ingenue. And then as you get a lot older you end up playing somebody’s mother but there seems to be this fallow bit in between where there isn’t - or there certainly wasn’t - a lot of work for women.
‘Look at a Shakespeare play for example, you are going to have about a 20:1 ratio of male to female parts. Traditionally it is quite a maledominated business but it is changing a lot.’
And for Hilary, the route out was to start writing her own plays, instead of waiting to be called up.
‘I am quite an impatient person and I found it really hard just waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for an audition, waiting for a gig, waiting to find out if you got it,’ she says. ‘But the thing about writing is you are not waiting for permission, you can just do it. And you don’t need any expensive equipment, you can do it with a notebook and pen.’
Fannin grew up in Dublin with her brother and two sisters, a mum who was a singer before turning to drama teaching while her father was a cartoonist.
But it was an upbringing that was difficult for a number of reasons. The bailiffs arrived at her parents’ house when she was ten, thrusting them into a world of rentals and moving around various summer houses in Howth.
Like many of a similar age she was expected to leave school, leave the house and get a job, and support herself. In those days there was little talk of college.
‘It wasn’t available to me,’ Hilary says. I left school in 1979, there was no free education. My parents were broke. I didn’t come from that kind of stable environment. I was very weak academically and I barely got a Leaving Cert. College just was not an option for me.’
INSTEAD she worked — in child care, dog walking, pottery, waitressing and of course, acting all the while. ‘Everything and anything to make a few quid,’ Hilary says. ‘I did a lot of waitressing which I loved and I think I was a good waitress. It’s different now — it was a different world where there wasn’t that expectation that people would go to college.
‘We had our 40-year school reunion the other night and such a tiny percentage of us from our convent school actually went on to third level education. A lot of us did secretarial courses and things like that.
‘There was also no money in the ’80s — there was a very deep recession in this country so you had to be really flexible. I had to make a living. We all had to make a living. There wasn’t a home environment that was going to protect me if I didn’t.
‘My parents were there and I lived with them on and off over the years if I got very broke and couldn’t pay my rent. They were very welcoming and I could go back and stay with them for a while but they were freelancers as well — it wasn’t like anyone had a regular wage coming in.’
The arts and acting were her passions but it was a chance to work in plays with then-new writers like Dermot Bolger and Michael Harding at the Peacock Theatre that ignited a desire for something more than just being on stage.
‘I was in the rehearsal room when a lot of those plays were being written so I think in my heart and soul I was always more interested in the written word than the interpretation of that written word,’ she says. ‘I was really interested in how these writers were making it work.’
And it was getting a part in an RTÉ sitcom called Upwardly Mobile that gave Hilary the space to begin writing her first play.
‘I got cast in a few bits and pieces
of TV over the years and that was such a relief as I was very often broke,’ she says.
‘When you got a bit of TV work you had some money then so I would have a little bit of time to write and that’s what I did with my first play. I made enough money with Upwardly Mobile that I was able to write as well.
‘I was working my way towards writing all the time. I wish I had known that sooner as I would have got there a bit quicker,’ she laughs.
The plays came first, then the newspaper column, then Hopscotch and now The Weight Of Love, a book Hilary loved writing.
‘Hopscotch was very well received and the publisher asked me if I was thinking about writing something else. I wasn’t really, but then I thought — God I have this guy actually asking me if I want to write something – and I should probably consider that.
‘And then it occured to me that there is a great freedom in novel writing. With journalism and playwriting you are always dependent on somebody else giving you the gig whereas the thing about writing a novel is that it is like being on a long haul flight on your own. It’s really nice to get your teeth into a long piece of work that you are not looking for permission to do.’
The book took shape while Hilary was doing a Masters in Creative Writing — her first college course in her fifties which she was accepted onto because of her exceptional writing and experience.
IT WAS during that time in the Masters that I buttoned the novel together and it made a lot of sense to me. Part of me wants to say it’s an age thing. I now have the patience to throw myself into 90,000 words whereas maybe when I was younger I would have found that a bit more like drudgery than I do now,’ she says.
Ruth, Robin and Joseph joined Hilary on that long haul flight, journeying from the 1990s, growing up and growing old, but still harbouring secrets and passion from the times they spent scraping around London in their first forays of employment, with all the trials of being in your twenties and trying to work out what love really means.
‘I am interested in memory,’ Hilary says. ‘I throw everything away in my house all the time but mentally I am a bit of a hoarder. I am interested in the past and how it speaks to the present. So I was interested in how somebody pursued the fantasy of memory because we often remember something a certain way but really it’s a fantasy,’ she explains.
‘I knew I wanted to write about somebody who went back to find out how real her memories were. That was the starting point.
‘Ruth is thinking about what might have been. When she manages to retrace and find that old lover, it’s not as real as she has imagined. The reality doesn’t live up to expectation. I knew I wanted to write about that.’
But apart from that, there was no solid plan — Ruth’s life unfolded to Hilary quite often as she paced the hills of Howth.
‘I am sure there are novelists who plot and plan and know exactly what they are going to do but I couldn’t say I am one of those people,’ Hilary says, laughing. ‘In many ways the book revealed itself to me slowly.
‘Sometimes you have a question that is central to the book and I suppose my question was whether your fantasy can ever stand up to reality. Is memory a two-faced lying toe rag? That might be a more accurate description.’
The idea that burning passion is only for the young, is one that rankles with Hilary.
‘People make very very blunt assumptions about age — that people who are older don’t feel the same level of intensity that you do when you are younger and I would dispute that,’ she says.
‘Memory is wildly alive in people’s minds and that capacity for feeling doesn’t diminish as we age. And so Ruth realising who she loves, I think,was an important point for me to get to as a writer.
I wasn’t sure which way she was going to go. I did an awful lot of walking around to figure out what was going to happen and what she was going to do.
‘Then I would go home and something would happen and you would be very grateful the characters were doing something with their lives.’
It’s a weird time in the world now — Hilary’s walks round Howth are curtailed to once a day. She is at home looking after her two sons, one of whom has returned home from London and the other who is doing his Leaving Cert.
But this situation we all find ourselves in has made her determined that The Weight of Love will be her first novel, not her last.
‘It’s a very weird time and it is very hard to be launching a book in this environment,’ she says.
‘In another way you think about what really matters and for me I realise that it really matters to me now to write another book. Of course to take care of my kids and make sure they are ok first but in terms of my own personal ambition now, writing another book is what I want to do. It’s a really rare privilege to do something like this and I don’t take my luck for granted.’
Books are balm for the soul in times of trouble but so, Hilary says, is writing. She’d urge everyone in these times who finds themselves feeling stressed or low to put pen to paper.
‘It would be great if people were able to hold on to something of the stillness that maybe has been forced on them,’ she says. ‘I am talking to people who are saying they are getting to read more.
‘People are doing things like emptying out a box of old photographs and going through them, all of that is allowing your brain to quiet down and take stock of things, take stock of the past and allow ideas to come in.
READING and writing down your own memories, these are things that are of real value and often we overlook so much because there’s too much communication and not enough hearing. We are so busy communicating, we don’t hear anything.
‘Art has saved my life loads of times there were times when I felt I didn’t have anything to fall back on. There was a time in London when I was really skint and feeling really low and my brother said to me: “Just write every day. Just write for one hour a day, just sit down and write and at the end of a year you will have 365 hours of writing under your belt.
And that’s when I started to write and gather ideas that I am still splashing around in.
‘Everyone should write for an hour a day, it can be great. People used to say to me ‘How do you remember all that?’ but my thing is ‘How do you forget?’
Once you allow yourself to stay still long enough, memories will come back. Pieces of fabric, snippets of conversation and locations you remember as a child.
‘It’s very good for the head.’
O The Weight of Love by Hilary Fanning is out now.