sarah eve kelly

1. My mother is coming to visit. Today. She is landing at Heathrow at 8:35 tonight, which means that I’m leaving Cambridge to pick her up at around six. It is now three o’clock. I know for a fact that there is a hairball on the bathroom floor. Salmon for supper last night so the kitchen, predictably, smells awesome. There is a cold cup of coffee and an open bottle of Diet Coke on the dining room table next to me. I am currently dressed in fleece with my horrid hair up in a clip. I am not remotely ready for this.

2. I realised about an hour ago that my second novel doesn’t have a plot. I was merrily setting about to introduce Edmund Spenser as a character and BANZAI, it comes to me: there is no plot. This is problematic. Something to think about on the train.

3. I can’t think of a third thing.

4. It occurs to me that there is a powerful post in submitting for examination the things I will miss about England when I leave it and return to Canada. I spend so much time complaining about how England is not like Canada that turning such whining on its head may well be a useful exercise. Watch this space.

5. I have to learn Portuguese. There are minute-books chock-full of remarkable information about eighteenth-century maternity hospitals, and these minute-books are all in Portuguese. From my plinth of ignorance I imagine that having one Romance language - French - is going to be helpful to me in this. But that is a problem for the summer. Right now, the hairball on the bathroom floor is of considerably more moment.

6. This week I put my main character through a miscarriage. Today, reading the scene over, I realised that if I ever find success as an author, I will probably have a Wikipedia entry. Two books, two miscarriages. I’m getting frightfully good at them. John Irving’s Wikipedia entry has a graph of recurring themes running through his novels. I wonder if I will have one, under ‘miscarriage’, ’stillbirth’, ‘fertility issues’. I wonder, indeed, what it says about me that I keep returning to this theme in my work when it has not affected my life. My dissertation is about pregnancy and childbirth, and my fiction keeps returning to it. Is it because I know more about midwives than I used to? Am I just interested in women’s history, finding reproductive ritual the widest avenue of exploring them? I sort of hope not. That would be lame. But the alternative - that I have a fixation with fertility - is sort of lamer still. I mean, how typical can you get? Sarah turns thirty; Sarah starts writing feverishly about pregnancy gone bad. I have plumbed the depths of my psyche - or the depths that can be reached with a few fingers of vodka - and I genuinely don’t think that this is a personal concern of mine. And yet I’m fascinated by it. But see #2. Infertility - or the threat of it - does not a plot make. I’ve painted myself into a corner, and this particular corner doesn’t have any floor left.

That is all for now. Three posts in a week - this is mad. I’m trying to figure out what I’m avoiding. I can’t think too hard on that, though, lest an avalanche of answers falls on my head.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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