Yes, I’m scared, but not all the time. When I was first diagnosed I was terrified. I had no idea that the body could turn against itself and incubate its own enemy. I had never been seriously ill in my life before; now suddenly I was face to face with my own mortality. There was a moment when I saw my body in the mirror as if for the first time. Overnight my own flesh had become alien to me, the saboteur of all my hopes and dreams. It was incomprehensible, and so frightening, I cried.
‘I can’t die,’ I sobbed. ‘Not me. Not now.’
But I’m used to dying now. It’s become ordinary and unremarkable, something everybody, without exception, does at one time or another. If I’m afraid of anything it’s of dying badly, of getting caught up in some process that prolongs my life unnecessarily. I’ve put all the safeguards in place. I’ve completed an advanced health directive and given a copy to my palliative care specialist. I’ve made it clear in my conversations, both with him and with my family, that I want no life-saving interventions at the end, nothing designed to delay the inevitable. My doctor has promised to honour my wishes, but I can’t help worrying. I haven’t died before, so I sometimes get a bad case of beginner’s nerves, but they soon pass.
No, there is nothing good about dying. It is sad beyond belief. But it is part of life, and there is no escaping it. Once you grasp that fact, good things can result. I went through most of my life believing death was something that happened to other people. In my deluded state I imagined I had unlimited time to play with, so I took a fairly leisurely approach to life and didn’t really push myself. At least that is one explanation for why it took me so long to write my first novel. There were others. I had been trying to write the story of my parents for years, making character notes, outlining plots, embarking on one false start after another. But again and again I failed to breathe life into the thing, constrained by the fact that my parents were still alive to read what I had written.
Once my parents were dead I didn’t have to worry so much. I could say what I liked about them without hurting their feelings. And once I knew that my own death was looming, I could no longer make any excuses. It was now or never. I wouldn’t say that made the writing of my novel, Me and Mr Booker, any easier, but it spurred me on. This was my only chance to leave for posterity a piece of work that was truly mine. For years I’d worked on screenplays, but that was a collaborative process. And it is usual for screenplays to disappear into a bottom drawer, never to be seen again. I know that novels disappear too, but at least they still exist, whole works, whether hard copy or digital, as objects, and that has always been their appeal for me. A book stands alone. A screenplay is only a suggestion for a story, but a novel is the thing itself.
It was a feeling like no other, in late 2011, to hold a copy of my first novel in my hand. When Patricia Highsmith’s publisher sent her copies of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, she couldn’t believe how much space they occupied. It seemed so brazen to have made an object that took up room in the world. I knew what Highsmith meant. I’d stuck my neck out at last, staked my claim to be taken seriously as a writer, and here in my hand was the proof. Now, I thought, I can die happy.
Yes, I have regrets, but as soon as you start re-writing your past you realise how your failures and mistakes are what define you. Take them away and you’re nothing. But I do wonder where I’d be now if I’d made different choices, if I’d been bolder, smarter, more sure of what I wanted and how to get it. As it was, I seemed to stumble around, making life up as I went along. Looking back, I can make some sense of it, but at the time my life was all very makeshift and provisional, more dependent on luck than on planning or intent.
Still, as the British psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips says, we are all haunted by the life not lived, by the belief that we’ve missed out on something different and better. My favourite reverie is about the life I could have led in Paris if I’d chosen to stay there instead of returning home like I did. I was twenty-two. I’d run away. I was meant to be in Oxford studying for a postgraduate degree in history, but a few weeks into the first term I decided to quit. I found Oxford both intimidating and dull. My supervisor was an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, and he was keen for me to assist with his research. He could see I was struggling and he meant to be kind, but his offer felt more like a punishment than a helping hand, and I prevaricated.
I had a standing invitation from my cousin and his wife to visit them in Paris, so I emptied my bank account and bought a ticket. I remember standing on the deck of the ferry leaving Folkestone one blustery November afternoon and thinking that my life had just begun, that this was the start of my great adventure. France had always had a magical allure for me, ever since my high-school French classes with the effete Mr Collins. He made us draw maps of the country showing all the main rivers, geographical features and agricultural products. It seemed a land of such plenitude; I vowed to go there one day and see it for myself. As a sort of preparation for the voyage out Mr Collins gave each of us a French name. Mine was Jeanne. I took my new name as an invitation to adopt a whole new persona in a new language, someone more sophisticated and worldly than I was, a girl who knew her way around. It was the possibility of reinvention that I was drawn to—just as I still am. As soon as I stepped onto French soil I sensed my high-school alter ego spring back into life. Jeanne bought a packet of Gauloises to celebrate and smoked them on the train, while reading her copy of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. If only I could write like that, she thought, instantly dismissing her lingering doubts about quitting the academic life.
My cousin met me on Rue Mouffetard and I followed him around while he bought the ingredients for dinner. So many cheeses, wines, pastries, charcuterie. So much seafood, all so fresh it gleamed. And so much beauty, in the passing faces, in the sensual language, in the storybook houses winding down the hill. I could barely breathe for happiness. I could have stayed if I’d really wanted to. I was broke, but I could have found work if I’d tried. My cousin taught English, or I suppose there were au pair agencies I might have telephoned. I spoke bad French, but I could have learned the language. In fact, after two or three enchanted days, I went back to Oxford and investigated switching to an undergraduate course in French and Spanish, only to discover it wasn’t possible on my meagre resources. I could have asked my mother for a loan, but she was already in debt because of her divorce. And so I gave up on Paris and came home, imagining another chance might come one day to make my move, to slip into Jeanne’s skin and write my astonishing novels in my 5th arrondissement garret. No such luck. Naturally. But then that turned out to be fortunate, because other opportunities arose soon enough, as they do, and other chances to reinvent myself in ways I could never have predicted.
The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out. And it is always a better version of the life you’ve actually lived. The other life is more significant and more purposeful. It is impossibly free of setbacks and mishaps. This split between the dream and the reality can be the cause of intense dissatisfaction at times. But I am no longer plagued by restlessness. Now I see the life I’ve lived as the only life, a singularity, saturated with its own oneness. To envy the life of the alternative me, the one who stayed in Paris, or the one who became an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, seems like the purest kind of folly.