1. POINT OF DEPARTURE
Throughout her strained and straitened, single-parent childhood, Tanya Shadrick was taught stories of her forbears, country men and country women tied to labour and the land, limited to their own closed spheres. This inheritance included a small black box, containing the relics of a great-aunt who had died as a child, ‘knitted mittens, a gone-brittle ribbon, horribly soft locks of butter-coloured hair kept wrapped in waxed paper,’ which was a part of the litany that Shadrick was expected to learn, an emblematic record of her grandparents’ modest flights, the route from them to her, carefully plotted, recited, recorded.
Taking upon herself, with a child’s ingrained gravity, the role of her mother’s sole provider and protector, Shadrick was haunted by a repeated out-of-body experience, a terrifying sensation of flying through the air which was always followed by an even worse fall, a dwindling, an illusory, urgent reminder of just how small and alone she really was. Her recollection of those strange childhood encounters with the near-erasure of her essence came vividly into focus when she suffered a life-threatening haemorrhage soon after giving birth to her own son, and realised with terrible clarity the absolute lack of courage that had restricted her life up until that point: her sleeping First Life, founded upon her father’s desertion, her mother’s obsessive fears and disastrous second marriage, and a determined but in many ways ill-judged escape to university far from home. Unable to abandon her beloved husband, Nye, or the infant son whom she had not even had time to learn, Shadrick was nevertheless filled in that moment with a desire for flight.
In aviation terms, a black box is the flight recorder, the full disclosure account of what took place, the precise combination of mechanical, electrical and human errors and corrections in the air, and there are parallels everywhere in Shadrick’s astonishing memoir of her late-waking life. With immediacy and urgency, she unpacks her personal history, taking items from that figurative black box and arranging them, one by one, upon the eiderdown quilt for our scrutiny, placing her unprotected self in our hands.
I am consistently impressed by writers who are able to take me on a journey whilst demonstrating their trust in me as a reader. This is the surprisingly rare companionship established through language, through a quiet conspiracy of remembered phrases that echo and mirror, drawing me forward or propelling me back. Shadrick achieves this as it should be done, without fanfare or signalling (these virtues are intimate). It is a shared conversation between I, the author, and me, the reader; private, finding its mark. Her extraordinary book raises uncomfortable questions about our roles as daughters and as women, our own choices and our own dormancy, the witting and unwitting limitations we place upon ourselves, willingly or not, to placate our sense of who or what we should be and the expectations or fears of others. The pigeonholes into which we deliver the apportioned parts of ourselves. The doll’s-coffin shoeboxes into which we squeeze. The ways in which we are ‘deemed special, too much and nothing.’
In searching out the particular quotations for this review, I found myself going backwards and forwards, flicking through pages which each offered me not the proof I sought, but other fruit, supplying me with even more words, more ways. At every point compelled to wonder what might have happened in my own life had I turned left instead of right, had I made the braver choice then, then, or then, I was reminded that this writing which had inspired reflection and regret so readily was also to be taken (like medicine) as writing towards remedy and resolve. It is writing as launch pad.
2. TRAJECTORY
Shadrick’s Second Life began with the terrible near-death revelation she calls ‘the knife in the oyster’ (just one of the precise and admirable metaphors and similes she coins), and because I am, by both nature and nurture, an intensely private person, I stand in grateful awe of the unshelling that follows, the un-carapaced honesty of her account. This is writing that often feels physical, striking at stomach and breast. Its flagellating frankness summons images from old Anatomies, the carefully-dissected yet still visceral relationship of skeleton to skin and organs and blood made plain. Shadrick is a hollow-boned bird, at one with the curious wren, the jackdaws, the rooks that ride the wind over Firle Beacon, high on the Sussex Downs above the small town that was both cell and sanctuary to her.
There, enclosed by chalk and flint, Shadrick found for herself a community of women, like-minded mothers raising their children in sympathetic ways. This was motherhood as an art and a craft, an act of near-conventual devotion and communal dedication, harking back to the defining qualities of her grandmother and the other West Country farm women in whom strength and integrity and hard physical work were elevated to female graces, symbolised in her mind by the headscarves that they wore, which she would adopt to her colours in turn.
Yet she continued to chafe for liberation, expression, a wilder life, and ultimately found her defining creative space beside local Pells Pool, England’s oldest lido. There, over the course of two long summers, she embarked upon a mile of writing. Kneeling at a low table, supplicant, steward and scribe in one, she shepherded her own stories and the stories of others. Before she began, she was keenly aware that ‘to be a woman engaged in any public field is also to be a performer of womanhood,’ and in one of her most compelling and inspirational passages she describes precisely how she went about creating her artist’s persona.
I became voracious then in my study of women who had made their mark. How did they do it? Distinguish themselves from all the other talented hundreds of thousands who made the attempt? Artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo. The outstanding movie stars: Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn, Bacall. Our truly iconic writers: Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir. As I’d once learned from Mother, dressing each morning for her admirers and critics alike, so now from these women.
I read their biographies, looking for patterns in how they spoke, the choices they made. Wrote out their boldest statements, making a playbook for how to take up space and claim attention as a woman artist. Analysed next their physical selves: Hepworth’s overalls; O’Keefe’s almost monastic robes; Kahlo’s colourful outfits; the mix of beauty and masculine poise in those early Hollywood women.
Tanya Shadrick, The Cure for Sleep, p.186
But Shadrick’s commitment to the creation of those long, long writings, the Wild Patience Scrolls, and her furious pursuit of the new freedom that was both their cause and effect, placed a terrible strain upon her marriage to Nye. And in the winter season between, her yearning for flight brought her to an almost inevitable Icarus moment. Believing herself irredeemably scarred by her father’s desertion, the removal and withholding of his love, she had long sought the compensatory admiration of older men, and she confesses here her pursuit of that sun, on wings constructed from love and false logic in place of beeswax and feather, which culminated in an in extremis melting that, she says, ‘left pieces of me all over the local landscape.’
The awful complexity of Shadrick’s emotions, the honourable thing that she attempts, the frustration of her hopes and desires, the flight, the fall, and above all the scrupulousness with which she lays her faults bare, palpably afraid that I, the author, and me, the reader, will be forced apart by the telling, make these some of the most painful passages of the book, worse even than the physical shock of her time in hospital. But there is strength in them, too, a bold reckoning that goes towards making her the more measured force she will become, trapped no longer.
3. POINT OF ARRIVAL
Emerging bruised and cautious, accepting every invitation to speak, read, write, as though it were an act of atonement, or immersion, Shadrick felt her way tentatively forward. Early in this emotional rehabilitation, in place of ‘that bloody black box’ and the memories which had haunted her all her life, she rediscovered Nye’s sturdy inherited trunk, which had somehow become lost in plain sight, waiting patiently as Nye himself had waited, and which was packed with the ephemera of their shared family life, instead of remnants of a life that could so easily have been cut short.
And it restored to me now a sense of who I was. Who I belonged to and what I meant to them. What they meant to me, too.
Tanya Shadrick, The Cure for Sleep, p.285
And this is the true record of her flight: that trunk, this book, the quiet redemption of one journey’s end and another’s beginning; her Third Life.
Which of us is not familiar with that feeling at the edge of our soul that something is missing? Perhaps those who confront it in a moment of crisis are the lucky ones. For many, it remains a sick unease, nameless and half-formed, turning only occasionally in its sleep. In sharing her story, Tanya Shadrick has also shared the hope that we might examine our own flight record and admit more creativity, openness and courage into our lives. She does not call upon us to make grand gestures (unless that is what we want), but instead urges us quietly to examine the small, private, ways of waking, as she herself has done.
I want, I think, to become a landmark, myself, so that anyone reading this in my lifetime might travel here to find me aproned and headscarved, going along the chalk paths, over ridges, to the river. I want people to call my name and start a conversation. This will do for my work, however else I have to earn my money.
And it’s not, after all, a vocation handed me by divine revelation as I used to yearn for, nor an inherited role as Granny enjoyed on her farm. Neither does it come with any qualification, as the achievements of my first life yielded. It’s simply a way of using better what is best in me: my ability to listen and remember — a skill for helping others into voice and possibility.
Tanya Shadrick, The Cure for Sleep, pp.302-303
As though in perpetuation of Mary Oliver’s one wild and precious life, in her middle age Shadrick asks, ‘How can I better use my years remaining?’ Words that prompt, that give permission. She is a facilitator of dreams and an enabler of action. Her raison d’être has become the encouragement of others, the catch and release of other people’s stories, while her own flight has culminated in the very safest of landings, a place of responsibility and hope.
Is it coincidence that I first opened The Cure for Sleep as the earliest daffodils came into flower? Or that I am writing this review (at last) at the start of summer? It is, after all, a period that bridges almost exactly the grower’s hungry gap. Perhaps books choose their entrances into our lives. Perhaps some unconscious instinct holds the right book in abeyance until just the right moment, the moment of greatest need. (As I survey my overflowing shelves, I hope so.) Shadrick and I share several similar points of departure: our land-based rural backgrounds; a passionate affinity for the natural world in every season; fondness for nail polish of darkest red; the compulsion to read and to write, write, write, even when doing so involves all the grinding effort of engraving on glass, as she calls it. She describes herself as a ‘collector … archiving always against loss.’ I have always collected, too: facts, feathers, those hundreds of books. What subconscious insecurity, what careful provisioning against seasons of want! The satisfaction of the hus-wife, turned miserly and misplaced. We are close in age. Yet for every one thing that we have in common, a dozen set us apart. Our trajectories have been almost nothing alike. Shadrick seems in her own analysis so fierce, so physical, so educated, so erotic, that for the longest time I could find no ready way into this review. Anxious that her trust in me (me and I, our roles reversed), should not be frustrated, feeling at once enlarged and emboldened yet hampered and poorly-qualified — ‘special, too much and nothing’— I was daunted into inaction. I do not yet know where my own flight might land. But I’m sure I can hear Shadrick’s distinctive voice telling me exactly what she thinks of that; that this is, indeed, the whole point.
This is mighty. Compelling writing about a compelling book. This is the 'Rob Macfarlane introduction to 'The Living Mountain' by Nan Shepherd' but for 'The Cure for Sleep'. Your review - but it is so much more than that - is an explanation of why this book is a particular favourite of ours. Your words and phrases are enviable, an encouragement to this aspirant writer to sharpen up. I want to read your memoir ... 'A Life in Books', or somesuch ... your story set amidst the reviews you orchestrate. Your writing deserves to inspire in the way Tanya's does. A review I'll be rereading and learning from often, I suspect. Beautiful. Thank you. Barrie
“Perhaps books choose their entrances into our lives. Perhaps some unconscious instinct holds the right book in abeyance until just the right moment, the moment of greatest need. (As I survey my overflowing shelves, I hope so.)”
Much of what you wrote spoke to me; this is believe whole-heartedly.
I had never thought of it being three separate lives before; that clicks in for me like the perfect final block in a Lego castle. I am living a third life within one vessel. This one is calm, balanced, and open-hearted in a way the serves without servitude.
I love the review. It encourages me to write more, share more, and relieves me from the burden of unread books; knowing now they are patiently awaiting their perfect time to open their wisdom, when my heart is ready to receive the lessons within