I’ve always admired the prolific nature of Meena’s relationship with writing. I am also prolific, but my output is spread across various media because I continue to earn my livelihood primarily as an art critic and columnist, and my books simply take too long to write because I have to live every sentence before it can be committed to long-hand, then to print. So even while I related to her post, I felt palpably envious that she could construe a literary timeline upon which her life could be cast. 

Because I turned 37 last week, I have thought about how seven years have passed since my debut book, but I always have to double-check and count using my fingers, which means the number is not sitting in my brain, occupying my conscious memory. It had taken me seven years to write that book. Since 2017, I have been working on the sequel, and while I had originally thought it wouldn’t take an eternity, it really has, because I had to almost completely shed the person I was who wrote that first book, not out of shame or embarrassment, but because I had a clear vision of the authorial voice I wanted to embody in this sequel. In the first book I was a protagonist to whom things or events happened, which I processed and alchemised. But I wanted to transform into a subject with agency, who determined the decisions I made and took ownership over them.

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Reading Meena’s status took me back to the last conversation we had, more than a year ago, when she was still in the UK. I had just finished reading her exceptional book, When I Hit You, Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, which had made me want to see her and hear her voice. She had just about woken up and had time because her partner was taking care of the kids. I loved meeting her as a mother, and getting a sense of how she was coping with the enormous demands that accompany this journey. She had kept her motherhood so private, so completely outside the scrutiny of social media, a decision I deeply respected. We spoke about how our lives intersected, about sharing an agent, about the books we were working on, and so much more, but also about so many of our similarities.

When I was younger I think I also considered my life in terms of who I was with at the time, but I also had a sense of a backstory, which consisted not of the books I was authoring, but the books I had read that were shaping my consciousness. In the last seven years these constitute a clear set of books—Babette’s Feast by Karen Blixen, Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace; and I suppose I could spin an entire story around how these books have in certain ways completely framed everything about how my life has unfolded since my first book was published. 

One of the things Meena said she loved about our agent, David Godwin, was that he always gave you the space you needed to write, without pushing you or building within you a false sense of urgency. I have enjoyed having that space. When I am asked when my next book will be ready I respond saying that’s a question I’d love to have an answer to too. There’s a freedom in not knowing and in allowing it to unfold in its own time, in not paying heed to the world’s pressure to create an output, to do what seems timely to the writerly body, not death-defying for the sake of it. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.