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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
For over forty years, Bel Mooney has been one of this country's best-loved journalists and authors, and her hugely popular Daily Mail advice column reaches six million people every week. Far from being a detached and abstract figure, Bel doesn't shy away from sharing her own life experiences of grief, forgiveness and joy with her devoted readers, making her column at once both distinctly personal and thoroughly universal in relevance. A lifeline for many, some of her wise, compassionate and unflinchingly honest words of good counsel are gathered together here for the first time. This selection includes problems, responses and some of the wide-ranging mini essays that appear in the Mail as 'And Finally'. Punctuated by some of Bel's favourite uplifting quotations, this collection also includes 'what happened next' with some of those who received Bel's wisdom - be it about love, loss, break-ups or breakdowns. A heartfelt and inspirational collection, full of valuable insights and prefixed by a wide-ranging and candid introduction reflecting on what being an advice columnist has taught her, Bel Mooney's Lifelines is a book readers will return to again and again, each time discovering something new in the process.
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PRAISE FOR BEL MOONEY
‘An enchanting book – heart-breaking, but also heart-making.’JOANNA LUMLEY
‘A moving and honest story of the end of a marriage … rich, rare and engrossing.’ANTONIA FRASER
‘Bel Mooney is a courageous woman with an unbelievably generous heart.’RICHARD HOLLOWAY, AUTHOR AND FORMER BISHOP OF EDINBURGH
‘I could not put this book down.’VANESSA FELTZ
‘This dignified, generous, loving portrayal of the break-up of a long marriage is one many people will empathise with…’TRISHA ASHLEY, NOVELIST
‘In this time of confessional writing I have never read such an honest, evocative account …The way Bel Mooney describes the ageing process and coming to terms with what has happened in order to move on feels so relevant.’JOANNE GOOD, ACTRESS AND BBC RADIO PRESENTER
‘A profound disquisition … Buried in this novel is the stuff of greatness.’STEPHEN GLOVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘An impressive return to fiction. The ease with which Mooney handles both big ideas and smaller intimacies makes you hope she won’t leave it so long next time.’MELISSA KATSOULIS, THE TIMES
‘Deep questions, and Mooney is not afraid to tackle them head-on. She writes sensitively and tenderly … a remarkably good novelist.’GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
FROM DAILY MAIL READERS:
‘Thanks for all your advice in the dark days when your message of hope shone through.’PAUL
‘Each week when I read your column I am struck by your humanity, wisdom and depth of understanding – it is genuinely insightful and heartening to read the advice you give to those who are struggling.’SUE
‘Your words were like a balm … an epiphany to me, giving me peace of mind after nearly forty years. In short, a miracle.’LOUISA
‘I want you to know how grateful I am. Your words gave me courage and for the first time in twenty-two years I feel free.’DAISY
‘Your words are so full of wisdom and can only enhance and empower whoever takes the time to read them.’GEORGIE
‘Your words have helped me, changed my mind and made me a better person. You feel like my Fairy Godmother!’SUSAN
‘Your sensitive assessment of the situation has provided a new way of looking at the situation, and we’ll try to remember your good advice.’BILL AND SUE
‘As a 24-year-old who’s had a problem with low self-esteem and thinking I’m in love with someone when I wasn’t, I can’t tell you how great it was to read your words. Honestly, I just wanted to say thank you.’SARAH
For Sandra Parsons, without whom this would not have happened
Loveless hearts shall love tomorrow, hearts that have loved shall love anew,
Spring is young now, spring is singing, in the spring the world first grew.
Anonymous – Latin (c. fourth century)
…if you picture other people like you, you will no longer be alone. And when you share, you see that your own sorrow is not so big or special. You are only another person feeling sad, and soon it will pass and you will be another person feeling happy.
From The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce
After the final No there comes a Yes,
And on that Yes the future of the world depends.
Wallace Stevens
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
BEGINNINGS
ITWASNEVER a part of my life plan to write a newspaper advice column. That fact just serves to prove what I often say to readers – if you aren’t willing to open yourself up to the unexpected, you could miss out being (in Wordsworth’s phrase) ‘surprised by joy’. That’s how it was with me, in 2005, when my first advice column appeared in The Times. Despite initial doubts, I soon realised this was going to be a new vocation. I had been afraid that I couldn’t do it, that it would be depressing, that I would become imprisoned by the problems of others. It also worried me that I might be accused of being unqualified – even though it’s rather hard to define exactly what are the best qualifications for an ‘agony aunt’ (a title I dislike, as it patronises all concerned). What does it take to give advice to perfect strangers?
Then I thought, OK – I’ve been cheated and mistreated (as the Everly Brothers sang) and bullied and insecure and lonely and bereaved. I’ve behaved shamefully in the past but I’ve also done things along the way that make me proud. A sinner and a saint – yeah, that’s about right.
Growing up, I became aware of painful family problems. Raised in a Liverpool council flat, I am lucky enough (as a baby boomer) to epitomise social mobility. I married young and had three children, one of whom was stillborn. I cared for my sick daughter for many years and spent more time in hospitals than I would wish on anyone. My long career has contained some bitter disappointments but I learned to put them in perspective. In middle age, I endured the sudden collapse of my very long marriage and had to rebuild my life. A second marriage has brought me more contentment than I could have imagined. Now, in my seventieth year, I face ageing and think about death perhaps more than I should. In my life I’ve read a whole library of books, taken deep pleasure in art and music and interviewed countless people – all of this confirming what I probably realised subliminally as a child: that human existence is complex, interesting, disappointing, frightening, puzzling, mundane – and more full of quiet desperation than blazing joy.
After some thought, therefore, I realised I was as qualified as anybody to engage with the problems of others. A line in Virgil’s Aeneid sums up the thought: ‘Familiar with grief, I learn to help the unhappy.’
So, I began the new job. The Times column (called ‘Life and Other Issues’ ) quickly established itself and at first the letters and emails often made me weep or sometimes exclaim aloud in fury. How could people be so petty, so cruel, so lacking in self-awareness? And how can a human being (the one who wrote that pitiful letter I held in my hand) sustain such soul-sapping misery? For years I had contributed features and comment to the paper (and indeed to most national papers and many magazines), yet a freelance journalist is rarely party to his or her readers’ private realities. You write your article, possibly get feedback (before the days of online comment, this wasn’t common) then move on to the next assignment. But an advice columnist is quickly ‘in there’ with readers. I found that, with the safety that comes from talking to a stranger, people would often open up to me more than perhaps to a friend or family member, disclosing extremely intimate information about their lives.
It wasn’t long before I saw how the problems divided into categories. Listed in order of volume, they stack up like this:
On marriage – from women.
On relationships – from women.
On family problems – from men and women.
On marriage and relationships – from men.
On bereavement – from men and women.
On … just … angst. Loneliness, a sense of pointlessness and the question: ‘Why on earth are we living?’
Letters also arrived about problems with work and friendships, but not nearly so many. Painstakingly, I chose different subjects each week to keep the page fresh, although it won’t surprise you to hear that I could have easily written about bad and sad marriages and nothing else. At first, I felt overwhelmed by the misery – and horribly responsible. How do you cope upon receiving a pitiful, handwritten letter in which the writer says they’re so miserable they want to ‘end it all’ – worse, when there is no address to write back to? It was extremely distressing. One thing that surprised me, however, was an odd, ‘witchy’ sixth sense that led me to surmise this or that about the writer of a letter and incorporate those second guesses in a printed reply – and then hear back from them: ‘How did you know?’ Perhaps a literary training is just as useful as a counselling course – for reading between the lines and weighing the import of specific words chosen.
Some readers’ responses were very moving. For example, a man wrote to tell me that one year earlier he had read a letter in my column from a guy who was about to leave his wife for his mistress. Children were involved and so (mindful of the damage that can be done) I counselled extreme caution. But, just imagine – somewhere in Britain this other man was reading my words – addressing his own identical dilemma. That man studied my advice, pondered, and decided to stay with his wife. Then he waited a whole year before writing to tell me that it had worked – the advice and the marriage both. The intervening time had been tough but he and his wife had talked and sought help and talked some more … and he now knew they would stay together. So at last, he wrote, it was time to say thank you. Is it that surprising my husband found me snuffling quietly in front of my computer?
The realisation that this new job could be so useful made me humble. And when an unhappy man or woman closes a very, very long screed with, ‘Just writing this down and knowing you will read it has helped me’, I feel quietly glad to provide the outlet. When people are used to communicating by text or brief emails, sitting down to write a long letter (on paper or keyboard) can be cathartic. But editing such missives is my nightmare – and it makes replying harder, in a way, because I possess more knowledge than can appear on the page. Sometimes readers will write to question the judgement that I’ve made based on this knowledge – but, hey, nobody ever said this job was easy.
Given the time and effort I put into the column, therefore, it should come as no surprise how frustrated and irritated I feel when an unthinking person (perhaps at a party or a book signing) asks the cliché question: ‘Are the letters real?’ Do they not realise that it’s crass to suggest that my editor and I are con-merchants pretending to offer a helpful service? I fight the impulse to riposte, ‘I’ve written fiction and know the difference!’ – remaining polite. But I imagine inviting such cynics to visit my office at home and chucking a pile of letters or emails (always printed out for me to study) over his or her head, while yelling ‘Real? You want real? Feel the weight of that lot!’
HONESTY
When, after two years, I moved from The Times to the Daily Mail, there were more letters from a far larger and broader readership, yet the issues that kept men and women awake at night were the same. I became even more convinced that readers don’t want advice on emotional problems dealt out (as it were) from the anonymous safety of the confessional. When I looked at other problem pages (some written by well-qualified teams and doing an excellent job, but most by individuals who are equally dedicated) I noticed how they kept a distance. To be truthful, it’s not that hard to dish out advice based on the practical wisdom in a guide to relationships or one of the useful self-help books that abound. Nowadays, you can research website contacts and pass them on. It’s all good, all valuable – and I know advice columns can be very, very helpful – but only if written in a spirit that respects those who send the letters. In those early days, however, I met an established advice columnist at a party who airily waved away my earnest little questions with a casual, ‘Oh, just send them all off to counselling.’ Not good enough, I thought.
I wanted to be more honest, more personal. Surely an advice column might be a spectator sport – unless readers know you’re in the team too? During a long career, I’ve been a columnist for many newspapers and magazines, poured out my soul into six novels for adults, and conducted moving interviews for radio and television about bereavement and God (to name but two subjects). In none of it could I keep my distance. Glad to wear the heart-shaped team colours on my sleeve, I reached middle age immune to po-faced reservations about ‘personal journalism’ because of a certain pride that said heart was still exposed – bashed about, but beating as strongly as ever. How can you disguise the wobble in your voice when you feel moved during a radio interview? What is wrong with reaching out to people, just as you want them to reach right back to you? I discovered how powerfully my readers responded to stories from my own life and realised that to do the job well I had to give as much of my ‘all’ as it is possible to give.
Because the collapse (after thirty-five years) of my marriage to a well-known writer and broadcaster had been played out in public, readers felt they knew me. My 2010 memoir A Small Dog Saved My Life dealt frankly with the end of that marriage, as well as dogs as a force for healing – and prompted even more readers to write and say, ‘I know you’ve been through this too, so…’ Because I’ve been the subject of many profiles in newspapers and magazines over the years, they would comment, ‘I know you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, so…’ And the long history of ‘personal journalism’ helped too. For example, I once wrote a significant article about the agony of stillbirth (it appeared in The Guardian on 8 January 1976 and had far-reaching effects) and now, in this new incarnation as advice columnist, women found it easy to pour out their hearts to me when they lost their babies. And so on.
I discovered that the more I gave the more I received. Listen, people, I’d say (in different ways) – we’re all in this together, and believe me, a good education, house and job is no protection against pain. Believe me, I know.
LESSONS
My column appears in the hefty Saturday edition of the Daily Mail, with a potential readership of over six million people. I read, choose and edit all the letters myself – from readers who have ranged in age from a nine-year-old to the late nineties. They send problems, of course – but also letters of thanks, pretty cards carrying blessings, pictures of a beloved and much-missed spouse, sometimes with copies of touching wedding snaps in wartime. They send favourite poems, book recommendations and comments on what they have read, often sharing their own stories. They write about loneliness, longing and loss. From time to time (but very rarely) I receive a dose of abuse too – but this goes with the territory. A man whose wife has treated him badly will transfer his hatred of her on to me and berate me for ‘hating men’ (as if!). A woman will flex her bitchiest muscles to sneer – just because she has a different view from one I expressed on the page. We can’t all agree. Does it annoy me when people are rude? Yes. There’s no excuse for it, but the internet has coarsened discourse forever. In general, I realise how unhappy they are and make allowances. You have to cut some slack to wounded creatures who snarl.
‘What is the worst problem?’ people ask, or ‘Is there something you’ve learned from all the letters?’ Thinking of the sheaves of handwriting and stacks of computer printouts in boxes and cupboards within my untidy study, and unwilling to generalise, I say ‘no’. Once, a man clocked up 5,000 words pouring out the agony of his marriage in greater detail than even I had ever seen. Unusually, I emailed to ask if he’d be prepared to edit himself, because I thought the exercise might be helpful. Pleased by such attention, he came back with the stipulated 500 words, which I then printed. Yet I was haunted by the complexity of that first rambling letter – which, in my mind’s eye, appeared as a long corridor of locked doors, behind any one of which might have been the happy marriage he dreamed of, when first in love. His cries of anger and pain echoed in that corridor and nothing could help his wounded spirit – doomed to wander forever searching the lost room that would offer him rest and peace.
Sometimes I think this is the key to human life – that there is no key.
What do I find most heart-breaking about the letters I read each week? The fact that people are so stuck. Marooned. Entrapped. I visualise a helpless creature in a cage, holding the bars and sometimes rattling them in despair, looking out with pleading eyes, longing for escape.
One of my favourite poets, T. S. Eliot, writes, ‘We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key…’ As a teenager I loved the Joan Baez song, ‘There But for Fortune’ which begins, ‘Show me the prison, show me the jail, show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale…’ and hammers home the message of empathy and compassion: ‘There but for fortune go you or I.’ Years later, I still believe that we might all share the same fate, if it were not for accidents of parentage and tricks of destiny.
So, no judgements from me. Oh – apart from when somebody drives me mad. There are people who don’t want to be helped, but clutch their misery to their chests. The key to a (possible) new life doesn’t always lie in any help from outside, but in that locked-up victim deciding to seek a way out all by him or herself. And that’s when I might decide to use ‘tough love’. A critical reader once wrote to inform me that one or two of my replies were ‘too prescriptive’ – which ‘therapists and counsellors’ are not supposed to be. But listen, lady (I wrote back), I am not one of those! If readers ask me what I think, I will tell them – from my heart. Just as I would a friend. What’s the point of lazy sympathy? ‘There, there … poor old thing … you must do what you think best’? I have been called ‘bloody stupid’ in my time by a friend who wanted to make me see the error of my ways – so I sometimes dish that thought out too, although not in so many words.
I try to suggest solutions, to be helpful – even inspirational. But if men and women choose to remain locked up there is little you can do. Of course, you can advise counselling (that useful catch-all) but many people turn their backs on the suggestion, because, I suspect, they don’t want somebody to sit with them and slowly, carefully point out other ways of looking. (Nevertheless, I do often recommend the ‘talking cure’ just as that veteran advice columnist told me, because just making the first appointment is a step towards taking control.) Perhaps the fear is understandable, yet it can be rooted in ignorant prejudice too, as if there is shame in admitting you may be wrong. Sometimes they will be embarrassed – and that’s when I want to cry out through the page (or computer screen), ‘Look, I’ve been there too! I’ve gone to a stranger for help. Believe it – and just try listening!’ In the words of the American poet Mary Oliver, ‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.’
From time to time I’ve done a short course, to learn from others. I read books on mindfulness and happiness and spiritual quests, knowing how helpful they can be. But a key…? Ah, the great question – like the ancient wish to turn base metal into gold. I continue to read the novels and poetry that have always been the mainstay of my life, to haunt art galleries too (as I have since the age of eleven), wondering if the key to understanding is to be found there – in art. The answer is: sometimes. But not in an obvious way. You can be in a pub and hear a schmaltzy old song playing in the background, notice an elderly woman swaying to its tune with tears in her eyes and realise that this is ‘art’ too. For the few minutes when the dated lyric takes her back to a sacred (or possibly sexy) moment in her past, it holds the key to love and to loss, just like the ache of Schubert or Bach. The key is the moment of reaching out: the answering fizz of words or sound or image and that second when the electricity crackles across the void – and we are made one. All of us. Made one. It really is possible. But you have to open yourself to that electric shock.
Always I come back to the giving and the taking, the listening and the revealing.
OPENING OUT
The column had been running for just four months when the editor came up with an idea for ‘added value’. Each week I would write a column at the side of the double page called ‘And Finally’. This would give me 350 extra words (no more, no less) in which to share something important to me, or to pick up reader comments – or whatever. ‘Anything you like,’ he said. The idea was that this would help my page add up to more than a normal advice column. As well as giving sensible counsel, which often incorporated personal experience, I could write opinion and observation as well – outside the usual remit of the so-called ‘agony aunt’.
So, I added anecdotes about things I had seen and done, as well as the kind of news about charities and other worthwhile organisations/initiatives for which there is usually no room in a busy, crammed newspaper like the Daily Mail. Most important, perhaps, I could air reader responses to printed letters and my response to them in turn – allowing the ‘conversation’ to open out. Genuine communication. I’d celebrate family occasions or confess to feeling tired or unhappy. At such times kind readers would write words of comfort to the woman who is supposed to be comforting them – thus proving there’s communal consolation in all feeling ‘in it’ together. Sometimes a reader would stop me in the street or a shop and ask, ‘How did your house move go?’ because she had read my news in ‘And Finally’. I never mind this; on the contrary, I love the proof that readers genuinely feel they know me through the page. It’s even led to an elegant stranger pouring out her heart to me at a store opening about how her husband had walked out of their marriage, leaving her alone in her late fifties. ‘I know you know,’ she said. What greater compliment is there?
After a couple of years of writing ‘And Finally’, I suggested extra added value could come from a carefully chosen quotation – a ‘thought for the week’ – for the top of the column. I will seize any chance to offer inspiring words, no matter who has written them – and readers often told me they liked the quotations from great writers I included within answers. Literature has been my life since I first learned to read, so now I could pull out a line from (say) the new prize-winning novel and add it to the page, hoping readers might follow up and read the book. So now the four elements were in place: long letter, shorter letter, personal side column about anything at all and a top quotation, in poetry or prose, or occasionally a song lyric. And I should mention the picture. Each week illustrator Neil Webb interprets the main letter with imagination and a stylish sense of colour. This is the mix: something for everyone, with more general things to balance out the unhappiness of the letters.
CHANGING
Writing the column has changed me. I no longer weep at my desk – not through a hardening of the heart but simply because you have to get used to things and bear them, or you couldn’t carry on. A nurse in a children’s hospital once told me that, but at the time it was hard to understand. (My own daughter was her patient, so maybe that’s why.)
But one dark January day, two letters arrived in the same batch and left me howling (not crying) on the study floor. One was from a woman whose eleven-year-old son had been killed in a road traffic accident. She had read my memoir of love and loss and identified with it and wrote to tell me of her new spiritual quest. The other came from a woman my age whose husband had walked out of the family home, which had witnessed so much happiness in earlier years, to be with his mistress. She was bereaved and bewildered – a feeling I recognised. The raw grief within both those letters left me pole-axed and I felt helpless – realising the limitations of language. No glib words of comfort could be plucked from the air and offered with a Pollyanna smile. So I wrote back to both women privately to offer a virtual embrace. What else can you do but hold out a hand – even if that hand trembles before the enormity of sorrow?
Once I had answers; now I did not. No book I had read could solve what C. S. Lewis called ‘the problem of pain’. And I came to reflect (oddly enough) that running a problem page cures you of trust in the panacea of progressive politics. As a young woman I was so idealistic, and believed that with equal pay and other correct improvements of our society, the world would automatically become a better place. Politics and campaigning journalism could achieve this, I thought – and stifled my doubts, when (for example) the famous trade union leader I had interviewed was clearly a complete shit, even though on the ‘right’ side. Now, after ten years of writing an advice column, I have become convinced that although social improvements will help create a better society (of course, and that struggle can never cease), ‘agony’ is no respecter of privilege and it is fatuous to think that with the ‘right’ attitudes people will become better. All the liberal optimism in the world cannot salve the wounds of grief. Or teach people empathy – instructing them that you must not cross the road when you spot someone recently bereaved walking towards you. Or make people genuinely kind – beyond paying lip-service to compassion.
How can you go on believing in human, social or political perfectibility when proofs of the opposite come in every day? I’m a great admirer of the work of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), one of the most gifted twentieth-century political theorists and historians of ideas. This great man, who had witnessed revolutions, argued for nuance and tolerance. His writings express my feelings: a dislike of black-and-white ideas and arrogant claims to know ‘the truth’. How I hate conviction! Berlin quotes with approval the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant, who wrote: ‘Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.’ Writing my column has shown me how ‘crooked’ people are – not in the criminal sense, but as a tree can be bent, twisted, full of odd protuberances and flaws in the bark. No one solution fits them all.
Most of us muddle along in the centre ground, and the problem letters help me understand why. No matter how much money they have, people still mess up. How can you legislate for happiness? Yes, you can intervene and try to improve lives (of course we must – this is the Golden Rule) but if people do not want to seize whatever chances they have been given, I no longer believe that it is all the fault of society or capitalism or ‘the system’. You could say I respect people too much for that. Each one of us is in charge of our own soul. Squander that sacred duty if you like, but accept some blame when you do. And – most of all – look to your children. It is there that hope must lie – and yet the advice columnist discovers how people are damaged by their parents. Horrible people use their children as emotional footballs, and then they write to me. And it all continues.
So, do I feel jaded? Yes, sometimes – when I’m drowning and yearn for my old, easy buoyancy. These days I would call myself a realist – but it doesn’t seem such a bad thing. Not a cynic, at least.
Being an advice columnist has changed me in other ways too. I no longer spread myself thinly because I need to focus on this. What’s more, I lost all desire to write fiction – even for children (and my career as a children’s author had brought me enormous delight as well as success). The real stories I read every week drove out any wish to make up stories of my own. My imagination was blasted by truth. In that sense, my world has shrunk, yet how can that be when the letters have taken me into so many different worlds – some of which I would rather not enter? To do the job properly you can’t be juggling a score of other things. What’s more, I no longer want to travel very far – valuing my precious home and family all the more because my letters remind me every day that such blessings are not given to all.
THE SPIRIT
Since I always advise my readers to embrace change, I must do so myself. Although I have called myself an agnostic for years I find myself moving more and more towards faith – perhaps because I now fully understand the shattering, world-changing meaning of ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ What hope is there for humanity if we do not obey that injunction? Oh, I haven’t been born again – I’m still struggling along: sceptical, but devout too. However, I do believe we all need stories to help us make sense of our lives, and when the all-too-human stories I read make me sad, I must find solace somewhere. There are many good myths to live by, but I find my true home within the one that has shaped the culture I value so much. To cut to the chase – it’s all there for me within the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Sermon on the Mount: the visual and the verbal, the most sublime creativity and kindness. Since the essence of Christianity is self-sacrifice and forgiveness, I find it entirely relevant to what I do.
The pitiful, crumpled, handwritten letters I have just been reading (‘I have to tell somebody this … the fifty-two years of misery … he has no compassion for me … how can I bear this life, Bel?’) are a daily reminder of Auden’s declaration: ‘We must love one another or die.’ Or the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you.’ That idea is essential – and the basis of many of the ethical systems on which societies have been built. Expressions of it in various versions have existed in the classic literature of Greece and Rome, as well as in Islamic, Taoist, Sikh and other religious texts, and it nestles at the heart of Christianity. The pitilessness of the world forever calls it into question yet, tarnished though it may be, the call to greater goodness still shines in the darkness. If individuals enacted it within their own lives, there would be no more need of advice columns.
But they don’t.
And won’t.
No, I can no longer believe in the best, just the possibility of being – and becoming – better. Which means emotionally healed and morally ‘improved’. All of us. The letters I file under ‘angst’ are evidence of a spiritual need people rarely identify. The beginning of Carol Ann Duffy’s haunting poem ‘Prayer’ conveys the thought that the yearning, the longing, can bubble up spontaneously from deep within us: ‘Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer / utters itself.’ I have a habit of suggesting little rituals readers could carry out, and frequently hear back that they work. This is to invoke a sort of ancient magic (you have to try something) that modernity might describe as ‘autosuggestion’. But sometimes the great spiritual longing – the emptiness inside – can find expression only as a plea to God, the universe, the Tao, whatever. By all means write to an advice columnist to ask for help, but why not stand in the middle of a field and raise your head to the sky and ask for help there too? The directing of the spirit upwards and outwards (never mind its destination) can be the moment of escape from the imprisoning self. I repeat – you have to try something. It is the trying that counts, no matter how many failures occur along the way.
Now, since I have advocated honesty, I must confess something almost embarrassing: there are bright days when my own bruised spirit is healed by the realisation that I genuinely love my readers – these people I have never met. How odd is that? Looking at them as through a glass darkly I see my own flaws reflected back – and so what else can I do but ‘preach’ forgiveness? Sometimes I may cast a metaphorical stone, but only because I feel that is the most helpful thing to do, not because I feel superior to the unhappy, confused person who has written in – just more fortunate.
TRANSFORMATION
Often asked whether I intend to compile an ‘anthology’ of columns and/or a collection of quotations, my reply was a decisive ‘No’. Then one day (after an especially loving letter of appreciation from yet another stranger calling me a friend), I thought, ‘Why not?’ So, to put together this book I have drawn from the ‘And Finally’ columns (tweaked when necessary) and also from my replies to a wide range of letters. Sometimes I have simply précised the problem; other times I’ve included most of the letter as well. I should emphasise that all names have been changed – I always do, even if they don’t offer a pseudonym themselves.
Looking back through eight years’ worth of advice columns was a strange experience and made me rather gloomy. So many problems, going round and round – the unfaithful husbands, mean daughters-in-law, lonely grandparents, restless, unhappy wives, confused children – I was reminded of something Darwin wrote: ‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected…’ Yes, indeed. How can you put your life back together if you are still stamping furiously on the fragments? How can you help your family if you are deafened by your own angry criticisms of them? Each day my postbag brings proof of self-centredness and petty conflict and malice and meanness – all evidence that the Seven Deadly Sins still thrive in this world of ours.
But, set against all that, there is also the good news of kindness and the saving power of human love. Not so long ago a woman wrote to say a heartfelt thank you to me after five years because, in 2010, I printed her letter on the page and advised her to stay with the erring partner whom she loved but who had wounded her grievously by using pornography and going to prostitutes. Why would you advise a woman to stay with a man like that, one might wonder? I knew most readers would disagree, but my witchy sense kicked in, and so I counselled forgiveness and hard work on the relationship. Five years later she wrote to tell me he is a changed man, and they are getting married and are ‘SO happy’. This I believe in – the eternal struggle between darkness and light.
My hope is that there may be enough here to make you reflect on your own life, and possibly rethink. This miscellany of thoughts and emotions is punctuated by some of the favourite quotations I’ve used – which more than one reader regularly cuts out to think about for a week. You can read straight through, but I’d like to think these (mostly) short passages will be dipped into, just to see what’s there. After much thought I rejected the idea of structuring the text according to subject matter, because I want the collection to be as random as fate. Sections entitled ‘Marriage’ or ‘Family’ might deter readers who could still find something interesting within a subject not obviously relevant to their own lives.
The common theme is ‘Change’. Or the potential for transformation. Just as I have changed, so I know people must change in order to push their own lives forward – after great disappointment, divorce or death. The logic is inescapable: you have to change in order to transform your life. I want readers to look back at the problem and ask, ‘What have I learned?’ Then look forward (how terrifying that can be?), and ask, ‘How can I use this knowledge to make changes in my life and/or the lives of those around me?’ This is the process we must all go through, whatever we want from life. Transformation is, after all, at the heart of fairy and folk tales and the great myths; it is a current than runs through all cultures.
You may be on your knees, desperate and lonely, but unless you accept the necessity for change, no one will be able to help you. This is the core thread that runs through all the letters I have read in ten years. The need for – and fear of – change. And even though pessimism sometimes threatens, I cling to a faith in possibility, as long as we breathe. As the great Sam Cooke sang (in 1964):
There have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long,
But now I think I’m able to carry on,
It’s been a long time coming,
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.
You never step into the same river twice, and since the idea of change runs through most (if not all) of the content, like a river in full spate, there can be no divisions. So, for the most part, these extracts appear in the order they were written, but where there has been a follow-up I juxtapose it here.
If there is a particular problem besetting you, try opening the book to take a chance on what comes up. It may not be obviously relevant – but you never know what words will jump out at you, suggesting a new way of thinking about a general problem.
Let me give you an example of this glorious, accidental process. Once upon a time, utterly miserable after the irrevocable collapse of my first marriage, I walked into the John Lewis store in London’s Oxford Street and noticed the early spring displays in the basement household department. They were all crowned with jolly hanging placards that said, ‘RESTORE,’ ‘REFRESH’ and ‘RENEW’. I stood among the ironing boards and laundry baskets and shiny buckets in bright colours, gazing in wonder. ‘NEW START’ said another one – and those words told me what to do.
Writing my advice column, I sometimes feel like somebody leaning over the side of a canal holding out a stout rope to the person floundering in the water. I can’t swim – and know how it feels to be in there, cold and wet and longing for the lifeline to be held out towards your desperate hands. And suddenly realising, with gratitude, that you can reach and (oh, the effort…) reach … and be pulled out … and that there’s a friendly, protective embrace waiting to reassure you that you’ll soon be warm and dry again, and that it will be all right.
It really will.
At least, I hope.
It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely help another without helping himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (American essayist and poet, 1803–82)
