Daniel Isn't Talking (25 page)

I cannot trust him. Perhaps if I tried hard enough I could make myself, I think about what Andy once told me.
He'll come back. Then he will go again
. I can see now that this is true. And when he goes next time, what will he take with him?

I put my lips against Stephen's cheek, my hand across his heart. I kiss him tenderly, as though my lips may bruise him. I realise that I am about to hurt him and that never, in all the years we were together, did I ever before deliberately do him harm. I find it impossible to speak. To say what I must say. I am thinking about what Penelope might feel if she were here with us. I'm thinking about Andy, waiting confidently in Wandsworth for a woman who cannot scare him away even with two young children, one autistic. If I consider them for a moment then I feel better about what I want to do, which is to tell Stephen goodbye. I will say this and everything that was us will recede even further; trickle away until eventually it is nothing. It is not nothing now. Not yet. Stephen is looking at me, hoping
it isn't too late. But I know what I will do and he knows, too, because he can see it in my face as I stand up, still touching his shoulders. He knows that I will go now. Already, he is looking away.

‘Will you do this one thing for me?' he says. His mouth is heavy, his eyes focus far off. In a clipped, curt manner he asks, ‘If it doesn't work out with him, will you let me have another chance?'

I find myself troubled by this question. It's his tone of voice, I suppose. Something has happened that he doesn't like. He has made an error of judgment; he is angry with himself and, of course, with me. And it is as though, in a single stroke, he has shifted all blame for our marriage onto me. Onto my whims and desires. At the same time he has cleverly cast his bid. He is smart. Maybe that is what I found so attractive about him. I do not find it so attractive now.

‘I'm not sure,' I say truthfully.

Stephen looks at me, raises his eyebrows. None of this conversation has gone the way he thought it would.

‘I have to go,' I tell him.

I start to walk away now, expecting he may try to stop me. All I can think, moving deliberately across the park, out the gates, down the road, is that I have walked away from my children's father and that I will have to keep walking. The sidewalk seems to shift; my legs feel as though they have stretched and no longer operate like normal legs. I trip and stumble, my strides uneven. This is hard for me. Hard for him. I have to think about each step and where I am going and that only a few blocks away are my children, waiting for me. When I reach the house I see Emily through the window. Her mouth opens in a smile and then she disappears from sight, returning
with Daniel, who points at me, then turns to his sister and says something that makes Emily laugh.

Stephen has not followed me. There's no sign of him when I look over my shoulder. I am grateful to him for this.

I ring Andy on his mobile and tell him I'm running late. ‘I'm just putting the kids in the car,' I say. ‘Don't worry.' But there's something about how I sound that he picks up on right away.

‘Don't hang up yet,' he says slowly.

I hold the phone to my ear. I don't speak or move. All of a sudden I don't know what I'm doing, where I'm going.

‘Melanie,' he says softly. ‘Take your time. I'm here. I'm just waiting for you. I'm not going anywhere.'

And so I take my time. Because there is no need to hurry; and anyway, I believe him.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?
I always loved books and admired writers. When I was nine years old, I wrote my first ran letter to a novelist named Nan Gilbert, who kindly wrote back, teasing me in a very nice way about a chocolate stain on my notepaper.

Did your family background influence your
career in any way?
My mother was a journalist working in Washington, DC, during the sixties and seventies, a very tough and interesting time to be a reporter. I was ten years old when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein famously exposed the Watergate scandal and I lived that chapter of American history through my mother and her reporter friends, who talked about it all the time. I had every intention of being a journalist. As a freshman in college I took seriously (and loved) the ‘expository writing' class that all freshmen were required to take. Eventually, it was suggested to me I try taking a fiction-writing course, so I applied for one under the direction of Mary Robison, who turned out to be exactly the kind of encouraging, smart teacher I needed (and whose work I admire hugely).

How and when did you start your first book
and how long did it take?
I wrote my first novel,
Dying Young
, in one of the all-night computer labs at the University of California, Irvine, surrounded
by little student geniuses who spent the early hours of each day frantically programming, and then hovering together around the screens on which they'd managed to create virtual porn.

In retrospect, it is a rather good thing to write your first novel in the middle of the night, in a windowless computer lab, and while being extremely annoyed at the people on the next table over. It causes you either to give up or write very fast. The novel was ready in about nine months.

When you first started writing
Daniel Isn't
Talking
, which is loosely based on your own
life, how did you separate reality and
fiction?
I wrote it in a single, very intense period, grabbing anything I felt was right for the narrative whether from a real or imagined life. Only after the first draft was assembled did I even consider the question of how much was ‘made up'. To me, it didn't matter. Even if I did take something from real life, I reworked it so much that it no longer reflected actual events.

How did your friends and family,
particularly your husband, react to the
fictionalizing of what is, in some respects, a
very personal and private story?
My brother and sister have no experience of children and certainly no experience of children with special needs. I think they were a bit bewildered by it. My husband loves
the book. In a way, the novel is a kind of narrative of our lives – not the exact events in our lives, not at all – but all the emotions that we've lived through since Nicholas's diagnosis.

What do you love or hate about Britain?
I've been in the UK a good chunk of my life. It feels like home now. Living in Britain is great. I love the footpaths and bridleways, how the countryside is varied and beautiful; I spend as much time as I can outdoors, which is so easy here because we don't have extreme weather like in America.

How do you manage to look after two
children, write and teach?
I didn't always do this, of course. For years when the children were small and then early on in Nicholas's diagnosis, I didn't write at all. It is only now that the children are much older, going to school, and able to occupy themselves happily for longer periods of time that I do any writing.

Do you think that fiction writing has a
moral and/or educational purpose? Or can it
simply be entertainment?
If
Daniel
educates people about autism it is because I know autism so intimately. I can describe it without realizing that I am doing so. I have forgotten, you see, what it is like not to know about autism. But fiction is not obliged to teach about a subject, no. If fiction educates people or reflects something about the way we live and think, it does so in a circuitous fashion, unobtrusively, because its
main emphasis is on specific characters and their own stories. Whatever ‘truth' is gleaned through the lives of these characters arrives in pieces, in small bites, sometimes in a contradictory and confounding manner, and it is this method of telling, this willingness to allow the story to deliver its own truth rather than injecting some kind of ‘big idea', that gives fiction its vitality and importance.

You teach writing in Oxford: do you find
that it helps or hinders your own work?
Talking about fiction is fun and the students are often really great to be with, very fired up and excited about their work. I get a lot out of it and I've met some wonderful people, wonderful writers.

Did you study writing?
I have benefited hugely from others writing about or talking about their work. When a writer I admire is genuinely trying to convey how he or she approaches stories or scenes, I am desperate to listen. Often, however, incidental comments made by writers have taught me the most. For example, I was talking to the poet Michael Longley about how I hadn't written for such a long time before
Daniel Isn't Talking
and how I couldn't understand why the novel arrived so easily after such a period. Michael nodded; he didn't look surprised. He's been writing for a lot longer than me. He said, ‘You know, sometimes silence is part of it.' And, of course, he was right. The freshness of the voice in
Daniel
is precisely because of the silence that preceded it.

What advice, if any, do you give your new
students when they first start to write?
There is no single piece of advice I could give all new writers because they are all so different, and because readers all want different things. I try to show students some ways of getting into and out of a scene, some ways to enhance their dialogue. I try to show them how to shape their work, and how to identify what they do well so that they can begin to see their strengths as well as their weaknesses. They need to see themselves as writers, believe in themselves enough to put in hundreds and hundreds of hours. Ultimately, that is a solitary journey, but I try to help them along the way.

When do you write?
Usually the mornings, but when I am really into a book I might write for up to eight hours in a day.

Where do you write?
I have an office in my house, nothing special, just a table and a keyboard.

Why do you write?
I have no idea. It's just part of me.

Pen or computer?
Definitely computer.

Silence or music?
Silence.

How do you start a book?
I don't think ‘Now I am going to write a book.' A story, a good story, is not dictated but discovered. I just begin with a few scenes in that uncertain, exciting time which may erupt into a novel or may collapse under me. I pretend I don't care; I'm just writing, nobody is watching. The delete key is available. But eventually, things change. The work begins to feel more solid. Characters take on such force and are there, alive and vibrant each morning. They take on such life that at times it feels like they are tugging at me. This, when it happens, is absolutely amazing, and when I am onto a good thing it will often write itself.

And finish?
The story will always have a definite shape so it finishes itself.

Do you have any writing rituals or
superstitions?
I don't like to talk about a book too much before I've written it.

Which living writer do you most admire?
Michael Ondaatje.

What or who inspires you?
Any good piece of writing, fiction or poetry, will inspire me to write something.

If you weren't a writer what job would you
do?
I don't know – I'd have to find something else I was good at, and that might take a while.

What's your guilty reading pleasure or
favourite trashy read?
No trash, but I do love books about horses, usually something by Mark Rashid or Buck Brannaman. I love working with horses and will spend hours reading about different approaches to their training and care.

During the years after my son, Nicholas, was diagnosed with autism I would never have considered writing about what it feels like to love a child so much and to know that this thing autism is going to hurt him, going to make his life harder than it should be. Around the time of Nicholas's diagnosis, I had no time to reflect, no time to write, no time to do anything but work toward helping this three-year-old boy who could not speak, play or respond to language. I was wholly given to everything that he needed – that my family needed – in order for him to attain some basic skills and to open up possibilities in his life. At first it was a case of trying to stem the regression that had taken hold – that is, keeping him from getting worse – that was the scariest time. Nothing else mattered to me and certainly I had no intentions of putting our experience on paper.

Two major shifts in my life enabled me to write
Daniel Isn't Talking
. The first – so simple and so longed for – was that Nicholas not only stopped becoming more remote and dysfunctional, he got much better. He is one of the many examples of children who have responded dramatically to good, intensive, early intervention. Just like Daniel in the book, he began to speak, to play, to become curious about life and interested in his sister and, eventually, in his peers. With this gradual change came a clearing in my own life. I was no longer entirely preoccupied with how to maximize his
learning every day, how to keep him talking, communicating, how to quell his fears about anything from dogs to escalators. I had time once again to think and reflect. Still, I did not return immediately to writing. I needed distance between my life now, with Nicholas as he is today, and what we faced those years ago. I needed to get away from, to disregard, the exact details of our lives and focus on the meaning of the story that eventually became the novel.