Mirrors

Not long ago, I had a rather large fight with my mum.

"You need," she told me, "to stop writing about That Man."

Mum, incidentally, always calls The Boy 'That Man' because - as she points out - "he is a fully grown, 31 year old adult, and not a child who cannot be held responsible for how he behaves, Holly, which is clearly how you are trying to depict him". A fact that is not without some truth, obviously, because she's my mum and they are actually usually right even though we often resent them for it.

"Don't tell me what to write about, mum," I replied angrily.

"There's no need to write about love, that's all I'm saying. Write about other things instead."

"Mum! I'll write about what I want to write about! It's my bloody blog!"

"He has done enough harm already, Holly. Don't let him damage your writing too. Your writing is so much better without him in it. We want to read about other stuff instead."

At which point, I thoroughly lost my temper.

"I'm not a fictional character, serialised for public amusement, mum. I don't tailor my thoughts and feelings to cultivate some kind of invisible audience. I'm a real person, with real thoughts, and real feelings, and if I want to write about my bloody ex-boyfriend every single day of the week and alienate everyone in the entire world, then I will sodding do so, okay?"

"I'll stop reading," she threatened.

"Then stop sodding reading!" I shouted at her. "I don't care!"

"I'm just saying," she said, trying to appease me, "that it's time to let go, baby. He is not worth your thoughts, or your time, or your emotions. He never was, and he never will be. That soulless little prick doesn't know what he has lost, and he is worth nothing. And he is especially not worth your writing."

Which shut me up immediately, because - unlike me - my mum never swears unless extremely provoked; and extremely provoked she clearly was.

Of course, on some level - a level I dislike admitting but will anyway - she's absolutely right. There are distinct and set limits to how much you can talk about an ex-boyfriend, or a boyfriend, or a potential boyfriend, or a wannabe boyfriend - whether publicly or privately: whether on a blog or in a pub - without sounding bonkers, sad, obsessed and like a girl, as my dad would put it. Women all over the world spend their time discussing, analysing and thinking about the opposite sex and the harms done to them, or the potential for harm that could be done to them, or the prospect of harm that will be done to them in the future; time that could be put to a lot of other good uses, and could create a lot of things that would last a lot longer than bitterness, hope or lust. My dad only has to say the words Liz Jones to abruptly shut me up about anything male at all; nobody wants to be an enraged, crazy old cat woman who writes for The Daily Mail. Not even - I would imagine - Liz Jones herself. She seems to want to be somebody else entirely.

It is therefore true: my writing is better without him, just as my sanity is better without him and my life is probably vastly improved, if considerably emptier.

The problem I have, though, is that if writing doesn't tell the truth, it doesn't really say anything at all. If art is a mirror held up to life, then it is the responsibility of that mirror to be accurate, and to be brave, and to show what is there: not what looks better, or what sounds better, or makes everybody else feel better and a little less uncomfortable. It is too easy to preserve face at the expense of emotional honesty: too cheap to flatten experience into something that makes the writer look good. Simply: if writers cannot write with honesty - with a candid view of the human heart - then what the hell is the point of them writing at all? They're just putting together words that sound pretty and they're communicating nothing. Infinitely worse, they are deceiving the world by showing it a reflection that is not. Something that - with enough writers, and enough mirrors - could be believed, eventually, as truth. And - with enough readers, and enough conviction - could become exactly that.

Nobody needs all of the truth, all of the time. Fiction is fiction because it is life: tailored, cut up and sewn together as it may or may not have happened, and so much the better for it. Thus this blog is therefore also part fiction: much is done, and felt, and seen, without being recorded here, for - done properly - privacy and dignity can always be maintained, no matter the circumstances. But - and this is the one and only rule of writing: the only rule that can never be broken - you cannot touch the human heart without writing the human heart. You cannot say something if the thing you are saying is not true, in one shape or another. Because the heart is the one thing that never changes: the one thing that remains the same, and that draws humanity together, when everything else pulls it apart. Flawed, erratic, embarrassing; irregular, crude and contradictory. And wonderfully, wonderfully real.

There is a time for comedy, there is a time for tragedy: there are times for as many types of writing as there are readers to read them. But if writers shy away from honesty and truth in any of these, then they are simply making marks on paper: if they cannot try to shine a new light on the world as is - at the same time as creating a new one - then they are writing for a world that is not this one. If the emotions of the heart, both romantic and otherwise - love, loyalty, hate, revenge, bitterness, confusion, insecurity, jealousy, obsession, pain, hurt - are swept under the carpet by writers as being unworthy of writing about, or of embarrassing the writer, then the writer becomes more important than the writing and the writing is lost. If Shakespeare or Eliot or Dickens or Hardy had been less honest with the human heart in all of its guises, their books and plays would have died with them. For it is the human heart in them that has lasted; not the context they are written in.

It is true that it is time to put The Boy behind me, but it is also true that I am finding it very hard: that I am still hurting, and missing, and loving, even if quietly and deeply and behind the scenes. And - while it is important that I move on with my writing as I move on with my life, which I am doing as best I can - it is also true that if I totally ignore what my heart is doing in my writing for the sake of embarrassment, I am being dishonest to myself, I am being dishonest to my readers, and I am being dishonest to our hearts: all of them. Because I am saying what is not true: that the heart understands embarrassment, and knows timing, and lets go when it should and holds on when it can. That it is consistent, and knowable, and vaguely controllable. And if I pretend that the heart is something other than it is, then I am not doing justice to it - mine, or yours - and I am not doing justice to the power of the mirror I can attempt to hold up.

I will not spend my life talking about either a man or a boy. I will not spend all of my time writing about love, or hurt, or any of the other things that happen to all of us, whether we like it or not. There are many things in life to talk about, to think about and to occupy ourselves with: things that are of equal importance and relevance. But I will also not pretend that these things do not exist, or that I feel something that I do not, and don't feel something that I do. That the heart behaves as you want it to: respectably, and with decorum.

Because if I want to write much, much better - and I do, and always will - then I need to put myself second to my writing, and hold up the clearest, brightest, most honest mirror I can find.

Even - dare I say it - if it upsets my mum.