Threshholds of Trauma: an essay

How do you use language to illuminate the darkest moments in a life? How do you recount the desolation of grief without further wounding yourself - or your readers? Can writing tether you to a place of safety when you are engulfed by vulnerability? These are questions Justy Phillips and Sian Prior were forced to contemplate whilst writing their recent memoirs.

In ‘Childless: a story of freedom and longing’ (Text Publishing) Sian Prior chronicles her long and complex quest to become a mother, and the reckoning that followed failure. She also revisits the scene of her father’s death by drowning, an ocean tragedy witnessed by her mother and two older siblings, and tries to understand the repercussions of that event on her life. ‘Legacy. Progeny. Dynasty’ she writes. ‘We accord these words such weight and dignity, and when I consider them, I feel as weightless as sea spume’

In ‘Ringed by Language: And Yet’ (Upswell) Justy Phillips carves an unexpected account of heart failure. Prose. Memoir. Essay. Other. It is a thickness felt through a life-limiting condition, swelled by the complex trauma of childhood sexual abuse. It is clear to her now that they are not two separate things, these durations. They are the ongoing event of one intelligent, fizzing thing.

Phillips and Prior have been in dialogue about these questions for several years. Considering language as felt experience, they share here a correspondence of writing difficult knowledge in the midst of complex trauma. Theirs is an invitation to move alongside—

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SP—In Ringed By Language. And Yet – page 17 – you write the line: 'I would take more care'. My question is: How do we take enough care when we're writing about the Terrible Things in our lives? Or is it impossible?

JP—I think this question names exactly the complex work of bringing into language one’s own lived experience. Held in this simple line are vast movements of space and time—durational entanglements that are at once, a writer looking back towards a childhood swept by trauma, and the desperate desire for a child to find some kind of safety in a world marked by increasing layers of compression. There is a double edge to this line too, a darkness that marks the impossible situation of that child. Just how difficult it is for a child groomed and abused by a pedophile to exert any kind of agency at all. As an adult, looking back towards that child, I feel all kinds of difficulty—the fragmented memories, the flashbacks, all the shapes that are missing. And yet, somehow the act of writing enables me to attend to the churning inside my body at the same time as carefully shaping that churn so that it might be absorbed by the bodies of my readers.

It is both a privilege and a compulsion to bring into language the most terrible things in our lives. But it is also a responsibility. As writers of difficult knowledge, we have to be so careful not to trigger or re-traumatise others. I can wish that others had taken more care of me when I was five or seven or nine, but as a writer, now, I can at least try to take good care of my readers. And perhaps in this movement of trying, I might also find agency to take better care of myself...'If I were a rock of blood sea, I might drill out this heart and flood it with something more spectacular…I would pay more attention…I would take more care.’

I also would like to begin with a question of care. In childless: a story of freedom and longing, some of the most gripping and devastating moments of this work are made felt in the ways you bring language to disappointment. I am thinking of all the ways a person can be let down: by her own body, partner, doctors, friends. I want to ask you two things: Firstly, how did you manage that process of writing, so vividly (and carefully), the limitations of others? And then, the limitations of your own body as you pushed time and again though this gruelling process of IVF?

This is no more evident than in the first few pages of Divergence, P123: “I’ve changed my mind,’ he says, ‘I don't want to do it.’ And then the phantom pain...

SP—Firstly: ah yes, the limitations of others. I had to take great care.

Care to allow my anger at the limitations of others – both ‘then’ and ‘now’ – to be represented authentically on the page, because that anger deserves representation, and is often quashed, especially by women.

Care not to allow that anger to spill over too violently onto the reader  - anger can make us feel afraid, and I didn’t want to frighten my reader.

Care not to harm (with my writing) some of the people whose limitations caused me pain, because I still care about some of those still living people, and because I was not interested in writing a revenge memoir.

Care not to appear to be taking too much care, because the reader can spot too much care-taking – and emotional inauthenticity – a mile away.

Care to ensure that my insights-with-hindsight included acknowledgment of how much I enabled some of those harms, by my actions, inactions and fierce unconscious needs.

Care to be compassionate towards my younger self and her anger, her needs, her limitations.

The writing of the memoir was itself an act of self-care, too, because it was a way of processing grief and of acknowledging and accepting the inevitability of limitations, both mine and others. 

Writing specifically about the limitations of my body was painful. It involved immersing myself in memories of physical pain – of multiple miscarriages, a prolapsed disc in my lower back and then surgery for that prolapsed disc – and in memories of the physical pain that accompanied my emotional distress (the ‘phantom pain’ you refer to) - the pain of feeling abandoned by my drowned father and by the lover who rejected me; the pain of failing over and over to become a mother; and the pain of finally abandoning my hopeless quest to have a child. But writing about it all was useful pain. Cathartic, alchemical pain. Demon-facing pain.

I’m not sure if I have been able to avoid triggering the pain of readers who may have been through some of the same difficult experiences. By representing those experiences on the page inevitably I risk reminding them of their own losses. What I tried to do – for them and for me – was to avoid dwelling too long with those memories. Write short chapters. Get in, get out, get on with it. And I tried to trust my imagined reader, that they WOULD be able to fill in any gaps with their own empathy and imagination.

Question for you: You write so beautifully about visual art – about visual images. That horse haunts me now. Are you able to articulate the ways other art forms inform your writing practice? Big question, I know.

JP—The horse you are referring to first appeared to me in the video work Time after Time (2003) by Anri Sala. A solitary horse trapped in the middle of an Albanian highway. This image is one of two existing artworks that make their way into Ringed by Language. And Yet. I too was haunted by this creature and the durational landscape of its fragility. As I watched the horse move its weight from one leg to another, trying desperately to ease the pain of its lameness, all I could see were the silhouettes of its holding. And all this feeling just welled up from somewhere deep inside. Ways of holding ribs and muscle. And it was terrifying. Waiting for the horse to be hit by a passing car. Waiting for its legs to fall from under the weight of its compromised carriage. Waiting for this collapse that never quite happens on screen—in the accumulation of these thresholds I found fragments of my own memory. Feeling. Collapse. And so I saw something of my own body—my own experience—in that horse. I asked myself if it would be right to include these kinds of abstracted re-memberings in the writing of this memoir—events that were not directly experienced by me—but without this horse, I just knew that I could not begin to talk about the violence, nor the blister-white headlights of the unseen.

The other artwork that holds this writing is not really an artwork per-se, but the thinking of an artist for whom I have huge admiration, as they crossed that invisible line of the Arctic Circle. It is as if I had willed myself onto that boat in the Arctic Ocean with the artist Roni Horn. Of what she saw that day, she writes: “The circle’s out there in plain sight on the water…If I didn’t already know the earth was curved, I never would have seen the arc at all.” Roni Horn taught me how to trust my memories of the past, regardless of how fragmented, how out-of-sequence, how empty and void they might appear to me. This artist taught me how to trust what I cannot see—and then to try (and I mean really try) to settle there long enough to overcome the fear and allow myself to feel a body in that place. I think this is how I invite other art forms to infiltrate and influence my writing.

You speak so beautifully about all the ways that you manifest care through your writing—care for yourself (your own anger and other needs), and your care towards others regardless of their role (ongoing character or future reader), I would also add the entanglement of fourth wall experiences through visual, durational and performance artworks, into this mix. As you wrote just now, writing memoir is itself an act of self-care. In this fragile book of mine, I needed, now and then, the careful companionship of other artists to surface and care for the most complex parts of myself.

I am so moved by the way you have written about your mother’s grief at losing your father in such a sudden and devastating way—and the ways in which this grief might have affected her ability to mother you as a young baby. I’m thinking of your memories of her not being able to smile (and therefore smile at you) across those formative, early years —a pain that was somehow stabilised in that shifting threshold between mother and child. How it would have been impossible for you at that young age to understand what exactly had been lost. My question to you is: Do you think that the act of writing can re-shape grief into something else? Something less rigid, less profuse?

SP: For me, the act of writing about my father’s death by drowning, my mother’s subsequent trauma and grief, and my unwanted childlessness, was a kind of permission-giving. In articulating my experiences and emotions on the page I could acknowledge I had a reason – and a right – to feel grief.

Many use the term ‘bearing witness’ these days to describe the act of telling their difficult personal stories. The word ‘witness’ makes me think of the law, and legal processes, and rights and responsibilities, all of which connote forms of rigidity, or at least formal frameworks. Using the rigid framework of a narrative structure to articulate my grief allowed me (belatedly) to feel I had a right to feel so bereft. And granting myself that right allowed me to start to ‘care for the most complex parts of myself’, as you so beautifully put it.

In ‘Childless’ I quote the poet Paul Kane who describes using poetry to contain his grief after his beloved wife died. Writing as containment strategy – yes. This is how it feels for me.

I must admit, though, that having to repeatedly talk about my experiences in public (in order to promote the book) has been gruelling, and the emotions provoked by those conversations have been hard to contain. Aa a former radio presenter I thought I’d be fine doing these interviews. My public persona in those contexts is usually quite a confident one. I thought the containment strategy would extend to the subsequent conversations, but it hasn’t. Verbalising those stories has been so exhausting and upsetting I’ve literally had to go and lie down after each interview.

Why is that? Because a conversation is inevitably less controlled, less contained? Because the sympathy I have felt from many interviewers has breached the walls? Why does sympathy sometimes make it harder?

Which leads me to my next questions for you. Have you had to talk about your book much in public? How has that been for you? Have you used any ‘containment strategies’ to manage the potential emotional duress of verbalising these experiences you’ve written about?

JP: Before I respond to this big question, could I pick up your thread of the ‘witness’ for a moment—I think it will help me to think and talk more openly about this oratory move from private to public. For me, the dissociation that split me apart from myself at the time of my childhood trauma meant that my experience of those events was borne both as participant (or victim) and witness. And in both bodies (detached and overwhelmed), I had no agency at all. When you write here about the act of witnessing as a form of rigidity, I felt instantly, those separated bodies of mine, as one continuous line. Brittle and absorbing. Here with you now, I can say that I feel a deep sense of grief for this body that was splintered into newly rigid shapes by the experience of such harrowing abuse.

And you— I am deeply moved by your ability to write so honestly about the difficulty of speaking your complex, personal experiences in public. Also, having listened to several of the radio interviews you mention here, I am floored by the grace and generosity with which you’ve managed to do this, despite your own, terrifying discomfort. So, finally to your question—Have I spoken much about my book in public? The very short answer is no. In writing this book, I came to understand very early on that thinking and feeling and writing and speaking are, for me, very different articulations.

For years, I have shaped in my mind the lines of writing that came to make this book—turning them over, letting them settle in just this way. And then one day I started to write about something else, and these lines, that had been so patient and steady for so long—just tumbled out. And even though, for the reader, so much of this content is challenging to confront, for me, it was at times, so beautiful to write. But, even after two and a half years of therapy and the love and care of so many good people, I remain unable to talk about what happened to me. My experience of speaking aloud my trauma remains a physically daunting and constantly complexifying thing. All I can say is that something happens to my body whenever I think about these things in close proximity with others. My torso goes solid. Fizzes inside. And I am alone.

You wrote so beautifully earlier about feeling that you finally have a right to feel bereft—at the loss of your father, your multiple miscarriages and failed IVF treatments—there must be such a sense of relief in this admission. I feel this too. Being able to write in words what happened to me has been something of a lifeline that I have been able to use to reach towards myself. Writing has been the relief that has sheltered me from having to expose myself to the felt experience of my trauma through dialogue. For this reason, I have not sought to verbalise with others, the experiences I’ve written about in this book. And maybe never will.

In Tender, a multi-art form work I’m currently developing with eight other artists, we’ve been looking into this concept of ‘lifelines’ in knitting, where a lifeline is defined as "a strand of yarn that is inserted into the work so that, if an error is encountered, it is easy to rip back to that point.” It leads me to memory of course—the possibility of ripping back—to re-member. ‘Remembrance’, the writer Ross Gibson reminds us, is ‘a bodily word drawn from two roots —‘memoir’: to be mindful; and ‘membrum’: a limb’. It is the method by which one puts a body back together again. Taking us back to a place of disruption or dissociation and an opportunity to re-build. I love the advice given in this quote from a knitting manual that goes on to suggest that one should, “leave lifelines in your work until the piece is complete." Perhaps I find it easier (more comfortable) to absorb the incompleteness of my experience in writing than in voice. [Interweave Knitting Glossary]

My question for you Sian surrounds this idea of a lifeline as a presence best left intact until a ‘piece’ feels complete. Is it possible for you to say something here about the lifelines and/or incompleteness of your grief?

SP: Thanks so much Justy. I love this sentence: ‘Writing has been the relief that has sheltered me from having to expose myself to the felt experience of my trauma through dialogue.’

Writing as shelter – this resonates for me – and perhaps the act of life writing has been a ‘lifeline’ throughout my life.

I have boxes and boxes of diaries and journals, some tiny and filled with tiny writing, some large and fancy and filled with only slightly less tiny writing. Writing for me has been deeply comforting. As a shy child and adolescent I wrote to myself to assuage my loneliness – ‘the dialogical Self’. These diaries are filled with observations of the world and of my emerging Self (Selves?), and questions I compulsively asked myself about the world and me, and confessions of what I now know were limerent feelings towards fantasy objects who I thought might be able to rescue me from this loneliness (usually boys/men but sometimes female friends too), and anxious admissions of entrapment – entrapped by shyness, by perfectionism, by my perceptions of what others expected of me. Writing these things down gave me some relief from the cacophony inside my mind. (I now teach short courses in Writing as Therapy and understand much better how writing can offer us many forms of emotional relief).

A few years ago I joined a group of women who got together to read out random excerpts of our youthful diaries to each other. It was called the Symphony Of Awkward and we used a toy bingo wheel to decide which dates or pages we should read out. Most of the other members were reading from childhood or very early adolescent diaries. The effect was often hilarious – our adult selves found these earnest scribblings about boys and birthday presents, fashion choices and pop stars, utterly entertaining.

But I was reading from journals written in my late teens and early twenties, and at times my contributions would entirely change the mood of the gathering. We would go from weeping with laughter to feeling deeply uncomfortable in the company of anxious young Sian, who’d written entries like, ‘What is wrong with me what is wrong with me what is WRONG with me???’ Seeing/feeling my vulnerability on the page was disturbing, even three and a half decades later.

So what has changed? I’m still writing about my life, but now I write for an imagined readership. I dare myself to craft those vulnerabilities into something that will hopefully be of interest – and of use – not just to myself but to others. I throw that lifeline out into the world.

I am messing with the metaphor now – perhaps, rather than the unravelled knitting image, I am thinking of a lifeline as something a lifesaver might use when trying to rescue drowners.

There are conflicting versions of the day my father drowned. Did he leap straight into the ocean and swim to the two young people in trouble in the wild surf? Or was there a surf reel with a belt attached that tethered him to the land? My mother died two years ago so there are no reliable witnesses left for me to ask. I suspect there was no lifeline. No method of retrieving him when he was the one in trouble.

Writing tethers me to a place of safety. I hope it will continue to do so ‘until the work is complete.’ 

My questions for you: did you have an imagined reader(ship) when you were writing ‘Ringed by language. And yet’? Did you consciously think about the effect of your words on the reader? If so, did that shape how/what you wrote? Or were you writing it entirely for yourself?

JP: Oh. Your diaries! I am always fascinated by people who keep diaries. I never wrote a word about anything as a child or adolescent BUT I would be so interested to read anything from the girl Justy—just to tether some part of my adult self to the language of that child.

To answer your question—as soon as I started writing this book and even before—when what was tumbling out felt something more like fitting, episodic prose, I knew that I was crafting the work for someone other than myself. There were moments of course, when I was writing out loud for myself—as a way of surfacing some too-difficult event for the first time. These moments (hours, days…) shook me to the core. To paraphrase the writer Brian Dillon, in these moments the writing was both the wound and its piercing act of precision. In some sense, I certainly wounded myself in the act of writing. But I was certain that I didn’t want to wound my readers. I wanted to open the cut and peel back the flesh and I wanted them to feel the complexity of this, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone (perhaps on account of being so irrecoverably hurt by the events of this book myself). You ask about an imagined readership—I think the people for whom my writing is most meaningful are those who are open to the felt experience of language. I write because I want people to feel something—and I mean really feel it with their whole body. Perhaps because this is what it took for me to write this book and I want to honour that work (and the years of silence that preceded it).

Did my idea of a future readership shape what and how I wrote? Yes and no. It is very very difficult to write trauma—to unlace it from the body and allow it to move alongside without it running away or burrowing down or flooding or returning thicker and deeper than before. As writers, we need to be very careful about the ways in which the things we allow to seep out of ourselves might be re-absorbed into the bodies of others. I know myself, that I am easily triggered by other people’s trauma. And many other people are too. In this sense, there were pages of writing that I removed—ways of being and being known that are too much to ask other people to absorb. I have been very careful about assembling a readership at the brink of this threshold.

When I refer to my book as an essay—I am speaking to its attempt (assay) to move back and forth between private and public—which for me is truly the act of publishing itself. But after all this, I would also answer to your question, no. Like any good artwork, in the end, the work must invent itself. Discomfort aside, what shapes the work is its compulsion to be told in just this way.

In terms of launching this book, I made a very conscious decision not to engage in a Q&A style event. I wanted the launch to be an artwork in itself. Alongside the book, I wrote a score for my dear friend and soprano, Maria Lurighi to vocalise. This utterly unique, live performance spoke to the discomfort of trauma (in ways that the book was unable to) as a radical and compelling force. Where the book is blade-sharp and spare, Maria’s performance was visceral and raw and in parts, incredibly uncomfortable. It was as if she looked inside my body and felt my rupturing organs into sound. And I could not love her more for this incredible gift.

And now my question for you. I recently read a quote by the Nobel winning author Annie Ernaux, in which she writes ‘These things have happened to me so that I might recount them’. It leaves me thinking about the power of narration and the otherness we inevitably bring to these accounts from the unconscious depths of our bodies. I am deeply moved by what you just shared about the conflicting versions of the day your father drowned. The fallibility of memory—the eye witness account. Do you think that if you wrote this book again–wrote it a hundred times even, that you could ever bring these events into language in any other way? I guess what I’m asking is do you believe in the power of something else at play here—the act of writing itself—to score over and over, the lived experience of our lives?

SP: I could have written this book and described these events a million different ways, and it wouldn’t necessarily be because of the inevitable fallibility of memory. Next week, or next year, or next decade, I might have a different view of how I remember – or imagine - those events. That’s one of the most intriguing things about memoir writing – the role of hindsight in generating new insights, in a constant cycle of epiphanies. The ever-emergent Self. The mutability of identity. There are some events in ‘Childless’ that I’ve written about in my first book too (‘Shy: a memoir’, 2014), both in quite different ways, including a relationship break-up and my father’s death. In part the differences in representation stem from the fact that, with the passage of time and/or with new information becoming available to me, I understand them differently in the present to how I understood them in the past.

In my first memoir ‘Shy’ the depiction of that particular relationship break-up was dominated by my shock and bafflement – ‘what just happened!?’ – probably because I wrote about it quite soon after it happened. Half a decade later, whilst writing ‘Childless’, I had a more nuanced view of what had happened, including about my role and responsibility in the erosion of the bonds between us.

It’s also about the prism through which you choose to view those past events. In ‘Shy’ I was focused on the emotional impact of that rejection because my research into shyness/social anxiety had revealed that the essence of social anxiety is a fear of rejection. So to be rejected by a lover was to be immersed in the thing I feared the most, as a shy person. In the second memoir, though, the focus was on a particular kind of grief. So I looked specifically at the ways my grief about being childless contributed to the problems in that relationship.

There were significant events impacting the mood of ‘Childless’ that I didn’t write about in the memoir. The narrative covers events in my life up until the end of 2019. What I don’t mention is that in 2017 my beloved mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers, and then cancer. It was a terrible time for her and for our whole family, a time of great grief. Although I was writing a grief memoir,  ’Childless’ was the story of a different kind of grief, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters. But my mother’s suffering probably impacted on the absence of any kind of happy ending in that second book.

I think you’re onto something important with your description of how the act of writing itself scores over and over the lived experience of our lives.

If you mean scoring as a kind of mark-making or groove-digging in our memory banks, then yes, writing absolutely does that. If we acknowledge that (as neuroscientists would argue) we recreate memories like jigsaw puzzles, filling in the gaps with our imaginations, then writing down a memory is like sticking down the jigsaw puzzle piece with glue. That particular version of events becomes somehow less uncertain or debatable once it’s written down. (Is this what you’ve found too?) It’s like we’ve filmed it, and that footage now pops up whenever we want to recall the memory (lordy, so many metaphors in one paragraph!). But of course other people involved in those events may have quite different versions in their memory banks, because they’ve filled in the gaps with other imagined details.

So how do we know what we can ‘believe’ in our own written depictions of our lives? I guess this is where the term ‘emotional truth’ comes in. Memories attach to emotions, so if I am remembering and writing about a scene in which I felt a particular emotion quite acutely, I am more likely to trust my version of that event than a less emotionally fraught episode.

As a memoirist you could drive yourself crazy wondering and worrying about the veracity of your storytelling. These ambiguities are inevitable. The best solutions I’ve found to deal with those anxieties about authenticity are to: 1) try to be ethical in your approach to writing about others, 2) try to be as hard on yourself as you are on others, 3) acknowledge the ‘lure and blur of the real’ as (I think) David Shields describes it. Let the reader in on your quandaries.

So my final question to you – if you were asked to write a list of do’s and don’ts specifically around writing personal narrative non fiction about trauma, what would they be?

JP: Do—allow yourself to write what needs to be written. What is written does not need to be read. For me, writing my trauma enabled me to move it (temporarily, even) beyond the thresholds of my own body. I thought it might stay out there. I thought it might somehow empty itself so that something new might come inside and inhabit that space in its place. But to my surprise, almost immediately I wanted to put that knowledge—those feelings—back inside again. Seeing my trauma for the first time, in words, as an external shape of its own–—only then did I realise that I wanted—needed—it back again. I don’t think I can even articulate why.

Don’t—be afraid of wanting to hold on to what you just gave away.

(This essay was co-written by Sian Prior and Justy Phillips in February 2023)