I love this piece. It seems like a simple narrative but there is so much deepwork here. He writes about his own writing. He knows his topic. He is trying to write something that doesn’t want to be written. He is in a Citadines apartment in Paris, near Les Halles, all set to direct his errant creativity, until the occurrence of an inexplicable body horror: an eruption, a carbuncle, a papule which swells and grows without explanation on his inner thigh. He describes his confusion, trying to seeking medical care in a place where you don’t have the normal supports. You can feel his rising anxiety as the Thing throbs and expands until it bursts in a surge of blood and pain. And pus no doubt.
It was 2023. He was trying to finish a novel which he had been writing and rewriting, each time reaching a certain length (137 pages) until he had to throw it away and start again. Only after his grisly wound was drained was he able to return to his writing which suddenly became something different. His novel, Minor Black Figures, emerged,due to be published in October 2025.
I spent six weeks in Paris in 2024, staying in an old rental apartment. The entire city was going mad in preparations for the Olympics. I was working on a half-drafted novel, a kind of auto-fiction about my experiences in Paris in the early 1980s. It was about woman stuff and the post 70s painting scene and the rise of anti-theory and the “New Philosophers”. But I was too sick to write it, or it was making me sick. I was dizzy all the time and felt constantly confused. I couldn’t manage the stairs and corridors of the metro. The book I had planned refused to co-operate. Too many characters appeared and kept on doing contemporary things, like try to work out how to buy a travel pass from a digital dispenser in an apparently abandoned metro station. Instead of writing my novel I had a major panic attack in Le Petit Palais, a glorious art gallery full of lesser known paintings from the past three centuries.
Le Petit Palais, Paris, May 2025.
There were endless corridors of incredible old paintings. This was one of my favourites. I stood in front of it, wondering at how in the 17th century a virtually unknown painter had produced this picture from his own imagination (since there were no photographs then, remember, no image libraries, no Pixabay) and here it was four centuries later in Paris and so was I, and I couldn’t step away from it.
Allaert van Everdingen. L’Orage (The Storm): oil on linen, 1650.
But suddenly I knew I had to lie down, and there is nowhere to do that in Le Petit Palais. I started to panic. My partner shepherded me around with rising anxiety. I said we had to leave at once. Outside, a set of metal barriers had appeared and no vehicles were allowed to stop in front of the building, or anywhere near it. Police were patrolling up and down. Where to go? What to do? I panicked even more. After what seemed like hours we managed to get back to the apartment. I decided I had to just stay home for a while and not go near that book I had come here to write.
It definitely did not want to be written. It was full of my usual preoccupations about mothers and daughters and trauma and inter-generational rivalries. After a time I decided I had to find a doctor. It was so easy! An amazing midnight home visit by a local doctor provided a diagnosis of a mystery virus and consequent high blood pressure. He gave me a script for some magic pills which were procured next morning from the Green Cross pharmacy across the square. I felt better but still couldn’t write anything other than my diary.
After that, I went back to Sydney and thought maybe my book should be about having a panic attack in Paris. It could still be about that early 1980s era, but instead of a “normal” novel it would be a memoir of the present superimposed on a certain past which may, or may not, have existed in its recollected form. I realised I could salvage my original title, Paris Vertigo, which was perfect for this purpose. It could be any length: a Substack piece, a novella, a novelistic memoir. Not a poem, though.
It would probably push aside my daily diary writing, which in any case is no longer daily, and never has anything very interesting in it because I never have time to write it properly. I am so over-committed. So why not add one more probably unachievable task? Brandon Taylor’s Paris story inspired me to think it might be possible.
BELOW: The lobby of the Hotel de Nice, where some of PARIS VERTIGO takes place.
I have been struggling for years with a problem which has held me back from my literary destiny (ha ha). Fortunately, Joan Didion suddenly if posthumously stepped onto the dancefloor of the writers’ parlour. She died in December 2021, aged 87. Her raw diaries are about to be cooked in April. A segment of her unpublished work, consisting of journal entries addressed to her late husband John Gregory Dunne, will be published. There is a history to the discovery of these diaries and the decision to publish them without further edits but I won’t go into it here. The book titled Notes to John include reflections on her experiences as she attempts to make sense of her husband’s sudden death, her weird and frustrating relationship with her daughter Quintana Roo and her difficulties with work, alcohol, depression and anxiety. Her interactions with her psychiatrist reflect on this.
She left these diaries perfectly arranged so it is reasonable to assume she wanted them to survive and therefore to be read. Don’t we all who keep diaries secretly hope there is some enduring place for them? For many writers, especially women, diaries have been an inseparable part of their identity. Quite a few writers now publish their own diaries, or extracts from them, or cite them in their memoirs.
I know there are “issues” with Joan Didion. She is seen as conservative, pro-Republican, reliant on men, ideologically suspect. I’ve been seeing her more clearly through Lili Anolik’s book Didionand Babitz (2024) and will probably write more about it shortly. For now, though, it is something in Joan Didion’s early work that is on my mind – something I read once and then forgot about, which has just resurfaced.
Mostly it was her book The Year of MagicalThinking (2005) which became important to me. She wrote it after the sudden death by heart attack of her husband, at a time when her adult daughter was suffering a severe illness. The atmosphere of her book enfolded me when I first began to write my own mortality memoir Regret Horizon (still unpublished). My mother died in 2008. She didn’t die suddenly but weakened slowly and defiantly until passing away in hospital at 93 after an accident with her dentures. My book turned out nothing like Didion’s: I surprised myself by writing an almost ethnographic account of my mother’s final year of life, my own mismanagement of it, and the immediate consequences of her death.
Later her book Blue Nights (2011) reflected on her life with her daughter, who was born at almost exactly the same time as my first child (in early 1966) and died in 2005 aged 39. I was still trying to draft my book. I didn’t want to go into my relationship with my own children, although that necessarily suffused the story and I couldn’t repress it altogether.
In the recent burst of pre-publicity surrounding her diaries I came across reference to something which hit me with one of those “OMG yes” moments.
Her first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968. In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” she talked about writing not as a means of recording facts but a way of capturing moments in all their specificity, giving a kind of enduring existence to the flickering and pulsing of emotion and impression before they disappeared altogether. She wrote about the need to recognize the people we used to be.
I read that essay around 1970 while trying to deal with the notebooks I had written while “in the field” doing research in First Nations communities in remote Arnhem Land, carrying out a project for a higher degree. The topic of my research was supposed to be “the women’s point of view” in an indigenous community still closely embedded in the pre-invasion way of life. I tried to do the right thing, to keep accurate accounts of behaviour and conversation, to find out what women thought about traditional marriage arrangements and social organization and struggled to find a way to write that was somehow scientific and objective and academically acceptable. Given that there were no existing examples of such a project that I knew of, I had no guidelines to follow.
I very soon discovered I could not possibly write this kind of thing. Instead, I was writing notes which were more like diaries because of the way I experienced the events I needed to write about. My two-year-old son was with me. I was a mother. There was no way around that, no “objective” position available. The things that happened as day followed day and the dry season became the wet season and I slowly learnt the indigenous language and spent most of my time with other mothers and children created a personal life for us in that community, and outside it as well. This existence seemed to have nothing to do with the “professional” persona through whom I was supposed to be demonstrating my academic and objective research capacities which was the reason for us being there in the first place.
Any anthropologist who did old-school fieldwork in those times experienced something like this, but it was particularly powerful for me, a very young woman, a mother with a small child. Moreover not long I arrived “in the field” I discovered I was pregnant with a second child, conceived just before I left Sydney where my husband was pursuing his own activities. In “researching” women’s lives in that community I became a different self. I was given an identity, with people assigned as my kinfolk and expectations of my behaviour arising from those relationships. My “fieldnotes” became more and more a diary, and I realised that the writer was neither the person living in that community in those moments, nor the person who came from a prestigious University far away in the city. The actual writer was an intermediary being who came into existence at night as the cockroaches scuttled across the concrete floor in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp and my son slept in the old caravan next door.
Time passed, my pregnancy progressed, I had to go back to Sydney for the birth.
Later, trying to make sense of this writing which was neither and both field-notes and diary, a new and different writer emerged. This person had to reflect on the embodied feelings, the conditions of daily existence, the conversations, the rituals shared, the moments remembered, an entirely discontinuous reality which now lay bizarrely in the past. It seemed almost impossible that this was the same person now writing an academic thesis in sunny Sydney, a new baby in a basket and a husband dealing with his own traumas.
What I finally wrote was very distant from the original research proposal. It turned out to be about child-bearing and child-rearing, something most professional anthropologists were completely uninterested in. It was published to almost complete silence. In the confusing times which followed, I wrote academic works. I went to a different “field”, this time with my husband and two young children, and the problem of writing and identity was even worse, capped off by the fact that my son set fire to our tent and caravan, thus incinerating eight months of fieldnotes and diaries.
Much much later my academic career was nearing its end. My mother was dying, and so was my ex-husband. I had to write about, that year and its aftermath. I wrote bits and pieces, draft after draft, various chapters, discarded, rewrote, but couldn’t bring the project to an end. I began a final edit and still didn’t like it. I needed the book to change. I didn’t know who this writer was either and didn’t like any of the versions of her who came forward as “author”.
Then suddenly I rediscovered this quote from Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook”, from the 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
I’d had so many bad nights but had not considered that it was those irritating people I used to be hammering at the door. These entities all seemed to have a hand in my book, toiling over paragraphs, edited out superfluities, then put more in. They were all trying to write my book. Outlook and expression and desire, indeed the very reasons for the writing, seemed to be constantly changing. All writers understand that the “author” is not the ”writer”, but what if there are several of them vying for dominance? Perhaps all “authors” suffer from MPD. Except for writers of rapid release genre fiction, who will now be the instruments of AI. But that is another topic.
I had turned it all outwards: I thought it was the real people in my life making demands on me, and I was trying to write this memoir to make amends to them. But it wasn’t them I had to make amends to, it was the old entities who had occupied the placeholder “me”. How Joan Didion, at such an early age (she would she would have been 34 in 1968), could have come to this blasting insight seems amazing. Now Joan is back in my life I am re-reading her with different ears and eyes and maybe I will find out. And if I can keep on good enough terms with those other denizen/components of the authorial entity, I will be able to finally let the book go – publish it, or let it perish.
Some recent notes on Joan Didion:
Nathan Heller. “What we get wrong about Joan Didion”. The New Yorker, 25 Jan 2021.
Karina Longworth (Substack podcast): “Lili Anolik on Joan Didion + John Wayne”. 30Jan 2025.
Cerys Davies. “Joan Didion’s diary of post-therapy notes is going to be published”. LA Times, 5 February 2025.
Daniel Lavery. “A Sneak Peek at the Upcoming and Never-Before-Read Joan Didion Diaries”. The Chantner. Substack. 18 February 2025.
Marissa Vivian. “Hemingway: What Her Words Reveal About the Ethics of Publishing her own Diary”. Substack. 8 February 2025.
I have reached a point in my writing and publishing activities where I must seriously ask: why publish at all? I haven’t published much yet but I have a lot of plans and proposals in the mix and several are at the point of fulfilment. Various things have held me up – some in the “real world” but others in that weird interior zone where the writer actually feels most alive but also most threatened and alarmed and fearful and excited, something which I suspect only other similarly benighted souls will understand. There really should be psychiatric services for writers, to help them work out what they are doing and why.
But as time passes, and especially with the impact of AI, the question becomes more acute than ever. There are 32.8 million published titles on Amazon now and more every day. It is possible that AI written books are flooding the market, although there seems to be no way to work out if this is true or not. Amazon now will only allow you to publish something like THREE BOOKS A DAY. Can this be true? Nobody can write three books a day. However the various online writers forums I participate in do seem to have members who think nothing of writing a book in two or three or four weeks: that is from start to finish, including editing, proofreading and maybe designing the covers as well. The fans of these writers are passionate and apparently faithful. They expect the writer’s new books ASAP and pre-order slavishly, or so it seems.
THE DASH AND DOLLY EFFECT
I just finished watching a mystery drama mini-series on Netflix, The Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman as a popular writer, Greer Garrison Winbury, whose books are about the endless romance of Dash and Dolly. The readers imagine these are the writer herself and her husband Tag, played by Liev Schreiber, who in real life is alcoholic, louche, unfaithful and most unattractive. Based on a 2018 novel of the same name by Elin Hildebrand, the story is about the interpenetration of fictional and real life, and its negotiation in contemporary culture. [It’s what my favourite analytic writer of the moment, Hans-Joachim Maaz calls “Die Falsche Leben” – FALSE LIFE. If you speak German there are interviews with him on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN6i6MYBbjI but only one of his books has been published in English.]
A brilliantly disturbing scene takes place at the launch of Greer’s 32nd novel in the series, when the “real world” life of Dash and Dolly comes to a crashing end in a bookstore full of passionate fans. As the truth of their relationship emerges – and a horrible truth it is – the fans fall into despair and horror, worse than anything they ever imagined. The scenario of this story emerges from the very peculiar intersection right now between writers and readers, amidst the technical possibilities of rapid production where fictions drawn out into endless series of almost identical stories, become the source of recognition and success for glamorous lady writers in particular, and sites of identity for readers obviously deprived of whatever it is they crave in the way of success, love, happiness and recognition. Readers’ identification with fictional characters is at the heart of this process.
WHY DON’T I WANT TO WRITE BOOKS ABOUT DASH AND DOLLY?
It’s called “writing to market” in online writing circles, and ever since I was first introduced to this term around a decade ago at a seminar at the Australian Society of Authors I have been wrestling with the concept from many angles. It’s the baked beans problem again. The fact is, I want to use the agency and freedom of independent publishing but I don’t want to “write to market”.
I know this raises almost terminal issues. What I write isn’t any of the popular genres which work so well on Amazon. I can’t even work out what genre I am writing in. Some is memoir, yes, and maybe some is literary fiction. most of my books will appeal mainly to “classic” readers, that is, women of a certain age who buy books in book-shops and go to literary events and festivals, but they don’t buy independently published print-on-demand books and they all hate Amazon. My “take” on things doesn’t quite fit the mould either. My perspectives are too diverse, the experiences I draw on are far from the “normal” life, let alone the “false” one which prevails today. I will put a Paypal button on these books for Australian/New Zealand readers who want paperback versions and see if that works for those who don’t or won’t buy through Amazon. The independent bookshops’ prices are absurd: my book Revolutionary Baby finished up costing those who ordered it from their favourite independent bookshop over $30.00, even though I know the cost of production in Australia is in the order of $7.00.
Should I bother going on and publishing the other three novels I have written? They are all set in the 1980s which now feels like a hundred centuries ago. The memoirs are set even earlier: 1960s, 1970s. But I guess that makes them historical. There is a special category for that on Amazon.
As for doing something completely different: I have written the first volume of a series which I plan to publish under a pen name. It is a post-apocalyptic narrative set in 2050 and “stars” two female characters, young women with distinctive talents and histories. It needs a final edit. I don’t plan to spend money on Amazon or Facebook ads.
All I can be sure of is that the books I have written will exist in print and/or electronic copies in a few libraries, and a few will receive them as gifts from me and maybe want to pass them on. Is that enough?
Things have changed for Regret Horizon, so long delayed, yet again. It is hard to explain briefly, but I have put the publication, due originally for November 2023, on hold again, as some re-edits have led to the need to consult again with some of those appearing in the book. Also, I have realised it is a memoir, not the first in the Outside the Frame series, so that leads to some different authorial comments. There has even been a strong suggestion that I shouldn’t publish it at all, which forced me to think again about why I wanted to do so in the first place. What a series of twists and turns all this leads to! Anyway, a possible publication date has now been pushed out to early next year, and we will see what other options may come up in the meantime.
Planned for publication in November 2023, this is a project I have been working on for several years. It has changed over the time of writing, and I have changed along with it.
REGRET HORIZON
BOOK ONE IN THE SERIES “OUTSIDE THE FRAME”.
It is a true story of a single year, 2008, when both my mother and my ex-husband died within two weeks of each other. It is a meditation on contemporary rituals of death and its aftermath and the inability of our narratives to prepare us for the impossible dilemmas of mortality.
The narrator, who is and is not “me”, is caught by the desire to be objective and tell the truth, to admit her failings and obsessions, but also to acknowledge the social and medical issues around very old age in our society. It is an exploration of the complicated nature of family loyalties, a book about failure and delusion, inter-generational conflict, and the cruelty of old age.
Yes, it has been a long time since I last wrote here. So much has happened. I have filled up three diaries already and it isn’t over yet. My first book of the memoirs project Regret Horizon seemed to disappear over the Regret Horizon and into the mists of past time. Where I thought this was a final volume, turns out there will need to be at least one more, to take us from the end of Regret Horizon to the actual genuine real end, and we know there will be one. It is one which I can foresee and expect but cannot know when it will arrive, or how it will turn out. Most estimate a few years, but anything can happen. I will write a post or two about this very strange experience when I can, next year probably. And maybe I’ll be writing the actual volume by then.
But here is the good news. I have finished revision of the two books of short stories, Keith has done the covers for the ebooks (still finalising the print books) and all going well they should be available in early November through Amazon in both print and Kindle versions, as well as other ebook retailers and in paperback through Ingram Spark. You can order from your local bookstore if you are in Australia and hopefully there will be a Paypal button on this site at least. Website orders for customers in Australia only.
And Regret Horizon is nearly finished too. I am going to have a special order made from a local printer on quality paper for signed orders and my own gifts and maybe the local independent bookstores will stock some as well. I had such a struggle knowing what to do about getting feedback from the people in it, but finally I decided to give up on that and let the cards fall where they may. Still thinking about the final cover, now it looks pretty boring next to Keith’s fabulous cover art for the short stories (below).
So I guess this is a kind of pre-launch announcement. Congratulations to me – but there is still a way to go before I can push the “publish” button.
Final cover images for Revolutionary Baby and Radiant Sands, September 2019. Copyright Keith Draws/Annette Hamilton
For reasons only a psychoanalyst could clearly state, I don’t seem able to get this book finished. I have promised to send it out to the family members who are mentioned in it for their comments and permission to use their real names. I have asked the designer to stand by to do the covers. I have promised myself it is #1 on the priorities list. But no matter what I do I just can’t get it to a point where I can send it out.
The biggest issue has been endlessly rewriting the first chapter. I realise this is because I don’t really know what I want to project in this so-important introductory bit. I have been struggling between two positions: a kind of grovelling excuse-seeking for having been such a dreadful mother and partner and sister and daughter (and probably everything else) all my life and not having realised it, and the desire to say look here, you guys, I was doing my best! I came from another era! I had a miserable confused childhood just like everybody else who was born close to World War 2! And I think I worked incredibly hard and tried everything to keep the show on the road. If it didn’t turn out so well for you all, I am sorry, but I can’t go to my afterlife taking all the blame! I couldn’t be a perfect person. What a surprise! But I guess I am still regretting that.
If my emotions throughout 2018 seemed unstable, the beginning of 2019 has been even worse. Maybe writing a memoir was not the best idea, under the circumstances. A part of me wants to just forget about it right now, today, put the project aside and go back to painting my landscapes and writing about art. Of course none of it makes the slightest bit of difference and it is dawning on me that nobody, I mean nobody, cares in the least what I write or don’t write. It is, to follow my perpetual aqua-marine metaphorical inclination, all just water under the bridge. Or to quote my recent favourite ballad:
And instead of being someone with the world to win I’m just driftwood on the river of regret.
This is from a song sung by Ernest Tubb in 1959. The original version is on Youtube here – I think I worked out how to embed a song in a post – always something new to learn!
As this song seems so completely apposite to my memoir I set about finding out how to get permission to use these two lines as opening quote in Regret Horizon. What a fascinating business this copyright stuff is. I will write a post about it when I have an outcome.
Meanwhile I’ll just keep on drifting with Ernest Tubb and try to take the deeper philosophical meanings on board.
So my memoir of the year my mother and my ex-husband died is almost finished. Procrastinating about sending it out to the family and trying to do the final edits. Every time I open the file I find myself making changes, not just a few, but a lot. I still don’t feel clear about it. And the question of the title has been holding things up. From the start, the working title was A Dying Year. Feedback? Oh, that sounds so sad/distressing/upsetting. And who is dying? Is it you? Is this yet another PityParty by someone on the way out? No, no, not that! Well, what then?
So it got a new title, and a new slant, because I realised by the time I had finished the penultimate draft that my main feeling about everything was my awfulness, and how much I still don’t understand, and how much I feel regret for what I had done and not done in those last few months.
Somehow water, rivers and seas, threaded through everything I felt throughout the process of writing this book. So when I found Jordan Cantelo’s wonderful photograph, “Ocean Horizon”, it spoke to me profoundly. Jordan gave me permission to use it for the cover, and asked for no payment, which was truly generous of him. I love his work. I will write something more about it later.
I am very close now to getting the memoir finished. Here’s the draft cover. There are a few different variants. Keith my designer will finalise it. I am so grateful to talented Western Australian photographer Jordan Cantelo for his generous permission to use his photograph Ocean Horizon for the cover image. Visit his site to see more of his outstanding work at http://jordancantelo.com/
The title has changed to Regret Horizon and there are several reasons for that. I sent a semi-final version to one of the main characters in the book and she read it twice in a few days and came back with a lot of changes. She said I’d got quite a few things “wrong”. Some were factual things, some were more interpretations and opinions. But it threw me. How far do I have to go to include the views of the people I am writing about? They are all real people with their own points of view and their own desires and hopes in terms of how they might appear in someone’s book, especially when it’s their own mother/grandmother/partner/ex-partner’s wife/sister and so on. I’m so close to publishing this book, but equally close to abandoning the project altogether. I’m going to wait until I get some other comments and feedback, meanwhile I’m in Procrastination City.
New Year’s Resolution: open an Instagram
account. At least I’d feel I was doing something. Got some great photos since
New Year’s Day so I’ll be seeing you or rather you won’t be seeing me but you’ll
be seeing what I see. Which, in a way, is what a Memoir really is all about.
So Volume 1, Regret Horizons, is almost ready. A cover design is underway with final elements to be provided by Keith. The text is written. After going through the issues haunting Knausgaard (thanks, Uncle Gunnar, for the vital prompt about defamation, invasion of privacy, legal questions) all the most contentious parts have been pared down to the very barest minimum, with only tiny hints instead of full-bodied assertion. Wimpy I know. “Tell your own truth” says my counsellor and I know where he’s coming from and I want to, but I can’t, at least not in this book.
What will happen to my book if I Botox it?
Thought I had covered all bases although there were still a few itchy spots remaining. But I need them in the story for it to make sense for me. I can’t eliminate everything, like some kind of textual Botox. Now it’s time to give it to the rellos to make sure they agree to having their names used, or to indicate otherwise. Only tried it with one so far and pages of comment about “what really happened” have come back. Needless to say it’s not my version. Now I have to decide how to handle this.
The others will probably have their own comments to throw into the mix. One at least is likely to be even more what – concerned? Outraged? What to do? I understand exactly how Knausgaard felt when he tried to reconcile his recollections of cleaning up his father’s trashed house full of filth and empty bottles with Uncle Gunnar’s totally different version. I’ll probably have to do what he did, and write about that too. Oh god, so the book isn’t finished after all!
Annette Hamilton - Writer 