This week sees the publication of A Place for Everything– a book which has taken me almost seven years to bring out into the world. I started writing about my parents, and the struggles we as a family were facing, in my journal in 2013. The book will be published this Thursday, 9th July.
That 2013 journal became a blog called Good Grief which I started writing a year after my father died from an unusual and aggressive form of cancer just as my mother was being sectioned under the Mental Health Act for extreme anxiety.
Mum’s subsequent diagnosis of autism at the age of 72 had me trying out a longer piece of writing as a way of trying to make sense of everything we had been through as a family. I completed the manuscript of my memoir in 2018, the year my mother died. The book is out this week, almost two years to the day that I typed the final words of my first draft.
Not all books take this long to see the light of day. There have been times when I have wanted it see it on the shelves a lot sooner. However, I am glad this one has taken its time. In the past two years I have learned a lot about writing: about narrative structure, about setting the tone, about taking my readers with me on a journey that has been painful and a lot harder to write than any of my books for children. I have also learned a lot about myself. I have realised that my grief was mainly expressed in raw anger while I was writing down those first pages two years ago, but that now I am able to approach it in a more gentle and forgiving way.
That is partly why I have chosen the last chapter of the book to read to you in this video. It is a letter to my mother which I hope sums up my love for her and shows my readers that the anger has gone – and all that is left is love.
Anna Wilson 