Is all writing just processing trauma you didn't know you had?

Joan Galt, Twitter

I was fascinated by finding this question on my Twitter feed this morning, for two reasons.

The first was the weird dream I'd had last night. I was living in a house – sort of like the one I'm living in now, but of course completely different, as usual in dreams – kind of square, with two storeys. The thing is, the house was a tardis. I mean, it travelled through time and space. The control for the time/space travel was a computer screen on a desk next to the front door. (Why was it there? No clue.) I was visiting various places. So far, so good.

Enter the Plot Device, I suppose, in the form of an outgoing – read 'bumptiously self-assertive' young woman, a gadabout convinced of her own irresistible charm and right to take over other people's lives. She managed to inveigle her way into my tardis house and, without my permission, decided to recharge her phone on my computer.

Which happened to be the control for the tardis. I managed to get rid of her. But the next time I tried to adjust my location, I found myself wrestling with an unruly touchscreen menu (apparently, even my subconscious hates touchscreens). The menu was full of things I hadn't put there and didn't want: fatuous holiday photos of people standing in front of monuments, selfies. . .aha, that woman visitor. She'd somehow downloaded her entire device contents onto my hard drive. It was going to be a bear to remove. . . I woke up, puzzled.

The second reason I was fascinated by Joan's question is that I've spent most of the weekend reading Mario Puzo. Puzo's an amazing writer, and I'm not talking about The Godfather, which according to him (and me) is an inferior work, even though it made his fortune. Puzo said that he could not have invented Don Corleone if he hadn't been thinking of his mother. That ferociously determined woman was the model for the Godfather. So instead of reading about the mafia, I read The Fortunate Pilgrim.

The Fortunate Pilgrim is autobiographical fiction. Puzo once wrote that when he set out to write the story, he modestly thought it would be about how misunderstood he was as a child. Instead, it became a book about his mother. He described her as loving, fierce, and ruthless. She had to be: she came to America as an illiterate peasant, married by proxy to a man she'd never met, because her family in Campania was so poor they couldn't even afford the traditional wedding gift of linens.

She was pregnant with their third child when her husband was killed in a work accident on the railway. She remarried and had more children: her second husband developed a mental illness and was so dangerous to himself and others that he had to be institutionalised. She raised her children with care and determination, often forced to deny them their dreams in order to enable the whole family to survive. They finally achieved financial stability, but at a terrible cost to herself. There was a lot of suffering in this woman's life.

I like to read autobiographies – not of people who were terribly famous, but of people who have gone through changes in their lives. I notice something about their stories: their childhood memories are usually vivid and written with a sensibility that is missing from their accounts of their adult lives. It's as if a different person had lived those years. I suspect this is a normal thing. Very few people, probably, carry their childlike ways of thinking into adulthood.

It strikes me that one barrier to an integrated life is the trauma that is so often left behind in childhood memories. The experiences we had that we were too young to process: a family death, a sudden change in circumstances, a historical event that had personal repercussions. When I was eleven years old my family moved to a city 500 miles from where I'd been born. It was a cultural shock for many reasons. The adults managed it okay, but looking back, I don't think I did. I was fortunate in that we moved again a year later, even farther from home but to a much more congenial place. But Chicago remains my least favourite place on the planet.

I admire those who have weathered traumas and are brave and thoughtful enough to share their insights. To write about them means to relive them: that takes courage. Sharing them requires generosity. Reading them and trying to understand is a small gesture of solidarity, I hope.

I'm grateful to Mario Puzo for his willingness to share his own and others' traumas. I hope to learn more from others' writings. In the meantime, I'm also hoping I figure out how to remove all the irrelevant selfies from my hard drive so that I can get the tardis back online.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

18.12.23 Front Page

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