On putting the painful past behind in her new book
Novelist Emma Healey tells Judith Woods how writing helped her repair her relationship with her mother
Write about what you know. It’s the rule of thumb for many a debut novelist. But when Emma Healey wrote the bestseller Elizabeth is Missing, she avoided straying into autobiographical territory.
She preferred the challenge of inhabiting Maud, an 82-year-old narrator in the throes of dementia but determined to discover the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, 60 years earlier. It was a risk that paid dividends when she received the 2015 Costa First Novel Award.
There was another reason for Healey’s reticence, however; to sift through her personal history would be to dwell on her bleakly morbid teenage years when she self-harmed and depression hung like a millstone round her neck.
It is now, in her second book, Whistle in the Dark, that she draws on her experience of a condition that threatened to destroy her.
“I felt so exhausted and low that just being alive was too much effort. I wanted to be dead,” recalls Healey, a girlish 33-year-old with long bronze hair, who is now happily married and a mother to Cora, aged 10 months.
“I would matter-of-factly say things like ‘I’m going to kill myself tomorrow’ and my poor mum would have to take time off work to watch over me. But, looking back, I wasn’t suicidal, because that would have required me to do something – throw myself down the stairs – and I was too lethargic.”
For her mother, Kathryn, an artist and graphic designer-turned-primary schoolteacher in her late 50s, the episode, which lasted the best part of two years, was a different sort of nightmare. “There is something so bewildering – and just plain wrong – about witnessing your child in distress and being powerless to help her,” recalls Kathryn. “Emma was hurting and stopped confiding in me, and that was very painful.
Healey now lives in Norwich with her husband Andy, so we meet in her mother’s arty, cluttered house by the edge of Wandsworth Common in south London.
Just as her first book was an homage to her paternal grandmother, so Whistle in the Dark – its subtitle, “How do you rescue someone who has already been found?” – feels like a tribute to her mother.
Protagonist Jen and her daughter, Lana, are on a painting holiday, when the teenager disappears. She is found four days later, dishevelled, ostensibly unharmed but dramatically altered. Robbed of all joy and energy, she can’t or won’t talk about what happened.
Yet this is no misery memoir, but authentically and empathetically written from a mother’s perspective – undoubtedly helped by Healey becoming a mother herself. After a traumatic birth, Cora spent her first few days in neonatal intensive care, and Healey has spoken openly about how bewildering she found early motherhood.
She and her mother are once again as close as ever they were; they talk quite openly, unguardedly, about events that once devastated their relationship and which sound downright shocking to outsiders.
“At one point I had to go around all the local chemists with a photograph of Emma asking them not to sell her pills,” admits Kathryn. “Another afternoon I got a phone call out of the blue from a social worker, telling me she was going to be placed in a psychiatric unit; if we didn’t agree for her to go voluntarily, she would be sectioned. And all the while we had no idea how she had come to be so depressed.”
Born and brought up in south London, Healey’s parents had split up by the time she was born, but remained in touch; she and her mother were close and, like the characters in the book, went away on painting breaks together. An only child, Healey was talented at art and English and attended a boys’ independent school that had just turned co-ed. It was not the best place for her.
“There was a huge amount of academic pressure,” says Healey. “We were all expected to get straight As at GCSE, but aside from that, there were 18 or 20 girls in a year of 100 boys and we felt permanently on show, at a time when our hormones were giving us skin breakouts and we scarcely felt comfortable in our own skins.”
Then the year group was moved around and Healey, already anxious, felt terribly isolated: “I know it doesn’t sound like much now,” she smiles ruefully. “But back when I was 15, it sometimes felt like the end of the world.
“At one point I cut myself; I wanted to show on the outside what I was feeling on the inside.”
But then something even more worrying happened. “I was hit by a debilitating exhaustion,” says Healey. “Most days I couldn’t get out of bed and when I did, I would hang on to Mum to support me. Recently I’ve read research about teenage depression being linked to chronic fatigue syndrome. ”
Healey had been born with hypermobility, which means her joints are too flexible, and along with the depression her joint pain became almost unbearable. Yet there was also a lot of guilt: “I used to wish something terrible would happen so I could be miserable legitimately.”
The turning point came when medical professionals decided Healey should be taken to a secure adult unit, “and if I didn’t go voluntarily I would be sectioned. Mum and Dad were there and really upset, but I actually felt relief at the idea of going somewhere and opting out of my life.”
Then along came a consultant psychiatrist who didn’t ask Healey how she felt. Instead, aware of her passion for art, he asked her what her favourite painting was. Healey told him it was by Caspar David Friedrich; a 19th-century German Romantic painter whose landscapes were drenched in symbolism and religious metaphor.
“We started having a conversation about Christianity,” recalls Healey. “He let me talk and challenged some of the opinions I voiced and it felt liberating to think about something other than how wretched I felt.
“The consultant said: ‘That isn’t the place for you, I don’t want you to start out on a psychiatric career. We need to work out a practical solution for you so you can get back on track’.”
Healey agreed to stay for a while at her grandmother’s in Bournemouth and sat four GCSES. Then came a year off. Anti-depressants were prescribed but time proved a better healer. She took a dress making course and started to write a Mills and Boon. “I wrote around 40,000 words which weren’t very good – I was trying to subvert the genre by setting it in a supermarket rather than an international art gallery – but the process was cathartic. All the same, I did not have any confidence that I could ever become an author.”
She studied book binding at Central St Martin’s school of art, then worked at a gallery, book editing – and finally undertook a year long course at the prestigious University of East Anglia, whose alumni include Ian Mcewan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain.
When the manuscript of Elizabeth is Missing was first shown to publishers, a fierce bidding war broke out and it was printed worldwide to an avalanche of praise.
“What was so unexpected and amazing was the way people wrote to me and came up to me at signings, thanking me for portraying the experience of living with dementia and with a dementia sufferer,” says Healey. “I’d love to think Whistle in the Dark might give the same sort of solace.”
Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey (£12.99, Viking) is out now. To order your copy for £10.99, plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk