The Art of Not Falling Apart

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The truth,” says the Bible, “will set you free.” You don’t have to believe every story in it to agree. Truth is liberating. Truth is vital. Life is too short for lies. I’ve decided that I’m going to live my life in the way I want and I don’t care what any political editor thinks. CHRISTINA: I’ve already mentioned Mimi Khalvati and one of the things she talks about is difficulty, really. For me, poetry is kind of the king of the art forms. But I haven’t even tried, because I didn’t think I would be any good. And obviously, that’s not a particularly helpful attitude to have, but poetry – good poetry – is really, really, really difficult. In fact, good art of any kind is really, really, really difficult. And I suppose the lesson I think one would get from her… I mean, she’s talking more about her life than her poetry, but I think the lessons apply to both… is that it’s never easy.

CHRISTINA: It was amazing. Many of them were known to me already. Quite a few of them are good friends, because I didn’t want to treat this as a kind of abstract intellectual project. People can talk theoretically about how they got through this, that and the other, but you only really know how they’ve got through it when you know them quite well. MARK: So Mimi Khalvati, who I know is a good friend of yours, Christina – she was on last season, talking about this same idea in relation to poetry. We ended up calling the interview ‘Poetry as Discovery’… I felt like falling apart when I did not get the job I prepared for over two months for (failing the interview score by one stupid point) and did not get the flat I wanted because it turned out not to be as splendid as I thought and could have been a potential waste of money. So the new life I was wrapping up for this new year came all crumbling down within the first month. MARK: Your story interwoven with all these other stories, going in and out and some of them reappear later on. But people share the most extraordinary things with you. Their love letters were in German, but the telegram my father sent my mother, four months after they met, was in English: “Will you marry me?” My mother’s reply was one word: “Yes.” They married three years later, in the white church next to my mother’s grandparents’ farm. My mother carried a bouquet of cornflowers and pink roses. When my father died, 47 years later, he was still bringing her flowers.When your job is the only thing holding your life together, what happens when you get fired? Journalist Christina Patterson explains how she weathered the storm in this funny, frank book." Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year , 2018

At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work. CHRISTINA: How interesting. I had no idea that that was a technique in hypnosis or hypnotherapy. That’s fascinating. The author uses intense imagery and while that's great, it wore on me a bit from time to time. Having someone stare out the window and watch planes taking off into the sky and describing them as floating off like a children's balloon was good...a full paragraph to describe the face of a waitress, maybe not so much. There were times I didn't feel like the details were taking me anywhere either. Overall the story does a great job of coming full circle, although there were a few aspects/characters that we spent time with, and more detail, only to have them left somewhat up in the air. Again, not that big of a deal, but I was actually pretty interested in what happened with them, which is a credit to Dawson's writing.

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CHRISTINA: Well, you don’t get better than Larkin, really, do you? And funnily enough, a few lines from one of his poems is the epigraph to my book. I decided to write it because I had just been made redundant and found myself facing my 50th birthday without a partner, a family, or a job. I didn’t know if I could still earn a living as a journalist, but I still had the skills, and I decided to use them to do the kind of interviews I had never done before. After years of interviewing famous people about their success, I wanted to talk to people about their losses and disappointments, to find out what has got other people through. MARK: But I mean, the thing that strikes me… because it’s quite an unusual structure to the book – which I think is beautifully done.