Emotional Geology

From page to publication

If it weren’t for the courage and vision of Transita EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY would still be sitting on a slush-pile gathering dust and rejection slips. I was so convinced it was unpublishable that when I first met Transita's Nikki Read and Giles Lewis at a conference I actually told them all the reasons why they wouldn’t want to publish it. Giles just nodded, an odd glint in his eye, as I described a list of features that could form the core of a Trinny & Susannah “What Not to Write” handbook.

I’d started writing EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY just as a treat for myself. I was 47 and I couldn’t find the sort of thing I wanted to read in bookshops which were awash with chick-lit at the time. I was fed up with middle-aged women being portrayed as Somebody’s Mother, Somebody’s Wife, only allowed to pull the hero if they were thin and looked 39. So I decided I’d write a book for grown-ups - a thinking-woman’s romance that dealt with real issues, had believable characters, a yummy hero, but no easy answers. I made my heroine – as a matter of principle - 47. This was suicide in terms of finding a publisher, but I didn’t care - I was writing to amuse myself.

I had a wonderful time writing an off-beat love story about a sexy, middle-aged, manic-depressive textile artist and an equally fragile younger man, a teacher. (I wanted to put an intelligent, creative woman in the spotlight and ignore her age, just look at her heart and mind. I wanted my hero to do the same and I thought a younger man would be more likely to do that.)

Sitting in a dreary Norwich suburb, I set the novel on the beautiful, remote, Gaelic-speaking island of North Uist, off the west coast of Scotland, a place I knew well from family holidays. I sent the manuscript to Transita and – gasp! - they liked it. Even more miraculous - they didn’t want to change anything. My heroine wouldn’t have to have a face-lift or lie about her age! And so EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY became one of the first, ground-breaking Transita books.

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY defies categorisation. It’s a novel that occasionally breaks out in poems. It’s a study of the relationship between “madness” and creativity. It’s a love story. It’s comic, it’s tragic and some of it’s Gaelic. It was written with passion and paint-stripper honesty because I knew the book would never be published and frankly, Scarlett, I didn’t give a damn. I was having too much fun.

That title

People often ask me about that title.

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY is a book in which nothing much happens. All sorts of tumultuous events occurred in the past, but what the characters are actually dealing with in the present is fall-out. So I had the idea of using geology as a metaphor.

Rock is a concrete record of the past, of what happened to the Earth – a build-up of pressure, seismic upheaval, erosion. When you look at rock you're looking at layers of time.

I think our minds and our memories are like that - a record of what we’ve been through and the toll it has taken - so the “excavation” of the past (which is what happens in the novel) becomes emotional geology.

THE POEMS IN EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY

[Warning : SPOILERS!]

Poems in a novel? Why?

The poems portray Rose’s state of mind. “Gavin falling” (p. 111) is her recurring nightmare. “Sleeping on the sea” (p. 115) is the dream she has when she spends a chaste night with Calum, so it’s sensual but not sexual. It's all about Rose feeling safe, "moored to this man."

The actual sex poem (p. 235) is me ducking out of writing what I call “plumbing” (and thereby avoiding a nomination for the Bad Sex Award), but I also wanted to convey how Rose felt when making love with Calum. I wanted to show it entirely from her point of view and I did that as a poem.

“Fool’s Gold” (p. 267) is meant to convey a manic state of mind as Rose works late into the night on Gavin’s memorial quilt.

The problem with conveying mania from the inside, i.e. from Rose's point of view, was that I had to portray a state of mind unfamiliar (and rather alarming) to most people. As mania is a way of thinking and perceiving, I wanted to find a different vehicle for expression. The poems evolved spontaneously as a solution to this problem, but I always thought they'd ensure the book would never be published. Even when I found a publisher I waited for them to ask me to cut the poems, but they didn't, which is just as well because I wouldn't have done it. The integrity of the book meant more to me than publication (which some fellow writers have found hard to believe.)

The other reason the poems are there is because it's a book about a poet, about an anthology (called "Emotional Geology") and its therapeutic effects on both its author and readers. The novel is also about an exhibition of poems and textiles, so I thought poetry needed to feature. The poems should have been Calum’s of course, but as I wanted the reader to believe he was a gifted poet, I didn’t try to write them! I hoped my poems would disguise the hole where Calum’s should have been. I also hoped the descriptions of the quilts and Rose working on them would fulfil the same function, as they were a response to Calum's poems.

Readers have told me they can "see" the quilts. I hope they also "hear" Calum's poems.