Unexpected joy

Sometimes you meet people for the first time and you have the strange feeling that you’ve known each other for years. This sense of familiarity is exhilarating. In the space of an afternoon or an evening, you’ve established a deep connection with somebody whose path had never crossed yours before.

You think you’ve met a new friend. Maybe a friend for life. Of course, you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself too much. No. Still, this conversation you’re having is full of potential — potential for late dinners, days out and moral support for the tough times that you will inevitably go through.

That’s happened to me very recently. Not with someone I met in real life but with an author and her characters.

Last week, I bought Expectation, Anna Hope’s latest novel, and read it in three days.

I got it last Thursday from Waterstones after I attended an Extinction Rebellion event on Trafalgar Square, the XR Professionals. I normally order books from Hive, an online bookshop that supports independent bookshops. But Waterstones was impossible to ignore and I couldn’t resist the urge to buy Anna Hope’s third novel.

I opened the book the moment I sat down in the tube carriage. The man opposite was looking at me and smiling, probably mirroring my own happy face and maybe heartened to see a fellow passenger engrossed in a book.

Anna Hope had appeared on my Twitter timeline three days prior to that.

Could it be that it was same Anna Hope whose book, The Ballroom, I had read a couple of months ago in its French translation and thoroughly enjoyed? Is she both a very talented author and a climate activist?

Yes, she is.

Anna Hope is also a woman who struggled to become a mother, a mother of a young child and an author who writes very honestly about those life changing experiences that are not easy to share when you are in the thick of it — for fear of opening up the floods and then being unable to pick yourself up.

This exchange between Cate, who has a small baby, and Hannah, who is going through IVF, is spot on. Cate censors herself and ends up saying something Hannah finds very upsetting — although she doesn’t react to it.

‘What? What do you feel?’

Lonelylonelylonelyallthefuckingtime.

‘Sometimes I feel…’

‘What?’

‘That maybe it was irresponsible. Having a child at all.’

Expectation, page 80

Like one of Anna Hope’s characters, Hannah, I’ve been through IVF and got nothing out of it except for a sense of complete disempowerment and profound grief. Like her, I also got pregnant naturally — two months after writing this piece.

The pregnancy went smoothly. The birth and the year that followed less so. I was induced because of high blood pressure and ended up having a stressful emergency C-Section. Five days after giving birth, I had to go back to hospital and stayed there for 5 or 6 days.

My health played up for some time after I gave birth. I had massive flushes that looked almost like allergic reactions. The fact that I was extremely sleep deprived for what felt like an eternity probably didn’t help my overall sense of poor wellbeing.

I kept repeating to myself and my husband : « I wish it could be just a little bit easier ».

I didn’t experience post-natal stress depression, although I was certainly very anxious during the first few months of motherhood. I will forever remember answering in a very mechanic way the questions asked -just as mechanically- by the health visitor about my mental health 6 weeks after my son was born.

I wasn’t feeling good but what would have been the point in admitting it? All I needed was proper sleep, not something that any medication or therapy would have helped with. My son was a poor sleeper. I just had to deal with it, deal with the 45 minute breastfeeding sessions that kept me housebound for the first couple of months, deal with his reflux and keep sane despite of everything.

Nothing prepared me, nor my husband, for the soul destroying experience of sleep deprivation. The memory of the intense sadness I felt after my second IVF failed didn’t cushion the torture of going through nights upon nights of broken sleep. The intense joy the arrival of my son — the first grand-child and great grand-child on my side- was greeted with didn’t help much either.

Not long ago, after I read an article written by a women unable to have a child and very angry at her ever-complaining friends blessed with children, I was reflecting upon the difficulty -impossibility?- to communicate about tough times as a parent without causing offence to people who would give everything to be called ‘mum’ or ‘dad’.

Although tact and self-awareness are important, sharing life challenges with friends is equally crucial, I think.

Life can be hard in dozens of ways. Hardships are not equal, true, but they are necessarily comparable either and shouldn’t be compared. And if we all keep silent about our difficulties, how are we supposed to connect with each other in a deep, meaningful way?

Expectation is a piece of literature that solves this very conundrum, in my opinion.

Cate’s life, as a new mum in a new town with a newish husband, is very challenging. That doesn’t mean Hannah’s existence with this big baby-shaped hole in her existence is easy in comparison. Lissa’s life and her failed attempt to become a full fledged actress is not a pleasant experience either.

I love the way Anna Hope tears apart the notion of success and questions the appearances of stability. Who is the most stable women of the three friends? Who is the happiest, or the least unhappy? Through their lives, they all have their share of painful experiences. There is no winner and, above all, Anna Hope reminds us that friendship is not a competition.

I also like the fact that the story happens in a very specific time frame. It is set between 1987 and 2018, i.e. eight years into Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and eight years after the start of the austerity programme by David Cameron and Nick Clegg. The anti-globalisation demonstrations of the late 90s and the student demos against the tripling of the university fees are like a soundtrack playing in the background. So much has changed in the space of three decades in the UK…The contrast between the start of the first Tony Blair’s government and the austerity years — that we are still going through — couldn’t be any starker.

Climate change is also touched upon in the story. It’s at the back of the mind of the three friends right from the start and, by the time the book finishes, in 2018, it has grown into a “dark drop of ink swirled in clear water”.

“They worry about summer, which is coming earlier and lasting longer each year -a worry that taints their enjoyment of this beautiful May afternoon like a dark drop of ink swirled in clear water.” Expectation, page 322

I don’t think that there is a single hour of the day when I don’t think about the climate emergency — how it’s going to affect my life, my son’s life, my family’s life; how to raise awareness about it ; which actions to take to defeat doom sayers and mobilise people.

It’s probably not healthy. I am aware that I need to disconnect my mind time to time from all the disastrous things that are happening across the planet, especially in the evening.

I struggle to get immersed in fiction these days, though. But I haven’t had this issue with Expectation.

Getting absorbed into Anna Hope’s novel was such an joy!

It’s a profound book with some funny, lighter moments. It’s a good reminder that life doesn’t follow a straight line, nor should we pretend it does.

It’s a simple and yet powerful message, even more powerful because it comes from someone whose career hasn’t been a phenomenal success right from the start. Fortunately for us and for her, she turned to writing after not having much joy being an actress.

For all of these reasons, I want to pass the book onto my female friends.

I am looking forward to all the conversations that it can trigger — about all the up and downs of our lives and how we can shoulder each other from now on in the face of the climate emergency and the rest.