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Inspirations

CHARLOTTE MENDELSON

FIRST DRAFT: Withholding Information

A published author compares a segment of her book in relation to an earlier draft, discussing how – and why – she made her editing choices.

DRAFT

‘Of course,’ said Claudia, looking at them each in turn, ‘of course, darlings, it may be my last book.’

A strange roaring seemed to rise and swell behind her, as if coming up from between the table-legs, or from deep in the walls of the house. Frances felt the others staring – at their mother, their father, even at her – but sight and touch and everything extraneous seemed to have been burnt away and one thought only repeated itself: of course. She is ill. She is dying. This is the bad thing that was waiting for us all along.

‘I have had a diagnosis, a medical diagnosis, which means that I—’

Em began to sob. ‘What?’ said Sim, scowling. ‘You can’t have. You can’t.’

‘Well, I do. It’s, it’s a cerebral aneurysm.’

Frances gazed at her. There was still a roaring, as if the contents of the room were falling into the centre. Her mother’s voice was a distant boom.

‘It’s – well, actually,’ said Claudia, and the effort to keep her voice steady was making her, Frances noted quite calmly, grip the sides of the table. ‘It’s a weakness; one of the arteries is a bit—’

‘But in your brain,’ shouted Sim. ‘Isn’t it?’ Tears were streaming over his cheekbones, dripping off his jaw and chin. He rubbed at them savagely with his sleeve. ‘Just say it.’

‘Well, yes,’ said their mother.

Em’s face was pink and white, smudged with crying. She tucked her hair behind her ears with shaking hands. ‘But it’s – they can treat it, can’t they?’ she asked. ‘They must be able to—’

‘I’ve been offered treatment,’ said their mother. ‘But...well, they don’t think there’s much point—’

Tears were falling on to Leo’s legs, darkening the flannel; he gripped his big man’s knees with shaking hands. Frances held out hers and he took it; they squeezed each other’s fingers to the point of pain.

‘And we’ve no idea how long it might be until it...until it….’ Claudia swallowed. ‘It could be years, or, well, less, which is why I’m telling you. Please stop wailing, Frances.’

‘I’m not,’ said Frances automatically.

‘I’m going upstairs to rest now,’ said her mother, ‘and when I come down again I want us all to carry on as before. I know it’s hard but….Please. Please, darlings. I am relying on you. Don’t let me down.’

PUBLISHED VERSION

‘I…’ begins Claudia. ‘I asked you to, to come…God, where do I start?’

It is only now that she understands what she has begun. If she tells them the truth, they will cry. They will try to delay her book and the Seder, thinking that it is for the best. They will treat her as if she is flawed and finite, as if she is the one who needs protection – and that is before one of them confides in a friend, who tells another, and by tomorrow the whole of London will know.

She cannot do it. She was wrong to try. And what if the doctors are mistaken? She could have years ahead, a decade, two. Perhaps, she concedes, if all goes well, she will try to slow down, a little. But, in the meantime, why upset them? Why not stick to her original plan, despite what the specialist said, and keep this to herself?

Every eye is upon her. She tries to look solemn but she feels buoyant, as if she has pulled off a startling, glamorous crime.

Every eye is upon her. She tries to look solemn but she feels buoyant, as if she has pulled off a startling, glamorous crime. There is, too, the unmistakable satisfaction of holding an audience, hot in the palm of one’s hand.

‘So,’ she begins.

She catches Simeon’s eye. He is feigning relaxation on the sofa but one of his square knees is jiggling. She has frightened him. He shifts uncomfortably. How tired he looks. If only Leo were to move on to a chair he could lie down properly.

Time to begin. ‘There’s a reason I’ve gathered you all,’ she says. ‘It’s to say thank you.’

They gape and blink. Emily whispers something in Simeon’s ear.

‘Why?’ says Frances.

‘Well, why shouldn’t I? I do realize what a strain it all is, the interviews and so forth, me so tense. You’ve all been brilliant and it’s looking so good, it really is going to be big[….]

‘But I know it’s hard,’ Claudia continues. ‘So I wanted to say that it is appreciated, darlings. By me, and your father—’

‘Hrrhrm,’ agrees Norman.

‘And also – I know this sounds silly…It means so much to me that you’re all behind me now.

Excerpted from When We Were Bad (Picador, 2008)

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New Writing

From Issue 35 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2007

THE WORK

It’s the story of four grown-up children of an incredibly charismatic, difficult mother who is also a woman rabbi. (I wanted to call it Fifty Ways To Leave Your Mother.) It’s about whether you dare choose the life that will make you happy rather than your family happy. Everyone in this apparently perfect family has a big secret that’s going to tear them apart – but none of them realise everyone else has got a secret. So it’s partly about that kind of loneliness within families too. By this scene, we’ve already seen that one son is in love with the wrong woman, that the married daughter isn’t in love with her husband, that Claudia, the mother, has discovered that she’s got this life-threatening health problem. All this is happening in the run up to her next book release, so everything is charged with tension. In theory everything should be marvellous and full of happiness, but actually everything is going more and more horribly wrong.

These drafts show the options I struggled with: Either Claudia thinks ‘I’m going to have to tell them and we will keep it a huge secret,’ or she thinks ‘Actually, I’m going to keep it a secret and hopefully it won’t affect anything.’ And that’s Claudia’s problem with everything: she can’t face terrible things so she buries them. It’s the family’s downfall, really. They’ve all internalised it.

My early idea fed into how the family is projected to the outside world, that Claudia would want them all to face things together. It was only later that I realised, actually, that it’s truer for Claudia to keep smiling and not tell anyone, that she’d see this awful secret as her burden only. I found the original draft very hard to write, and, in retrospect, I think it was because it wasn’t true; she wouldn’t gather them all around and share the news. That’s exactly what she wouldn’t do. It’s what she spent the last 25 years not doing.

For me, writing the first draft and all the trillions of subsequent drafts, it’s all about getting to know the characters so you can work out how they’re going to behave. Writing is about staying true to the characters, working with that to drive the plot forward. The biggest compliment I ever get is, ‘I stayed up until three in the morning reading your book!’ I want people to think, ‘Oh my god! What’s going to happen?’ It’s a very effective way to keep people turning the pages.

My earlier draft would have killed the narrative – it just would have been a story about someone who was about to die. As a writer, you have to sow your seeds carefully, and keep sowing them all along the road of the story. I wanted to keep the secrets – and the drama – going, all the way through.’

PHOTO © Kate Eshelby