Instead of walking along a river or through a field, I’m pacing back and forth across our living room, my arms folded around a wriggling warmth. It is 4am. The streetlight outside makes our world feel like there are two moons, and in my bone-deep tiredness that makes perfect sense to me: things carved, halved, doubled. Normally, I would be writing to you about a long walk, with a book in my pocket, and I’d create a map for those who would like to do the walk too. This month it’s a little different. The map for my night-time walk is too small to plot - though, really, if we zoom out, it’s years and years long.
Last month I gave birth to our daughter. She’s an adorable tornado, one we’ve been summoning for years: weathering cycles of IVF, living in all the in-between spaces, falling in and out of orbit. My book Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit, a collection of poems about IVF, disability and folklore, was an attempt to articulate that time, hauling words out of the depths like a fisherman. In many ways, it feels like I have written her into existence. She already feels coated in stories. For one, her egg collection date fell on World Book Day, and I had a bizarre but lovely experience in the operating theatre. The anaesthetist and nurses were making conversation, asking what I did for a living, and when I said I was an author they spoke of their own children and who they’d dressed up as for World Book Day. Then they got out their phones and bought copies of the picture books I’d written to give to their children, before sending me to sleep with a promise that they’d try to harvest a child for me too. A few weeks later, on a walk through fields of bluebells with my brother, I got a call from the lab to let me know how many embryos had made it this time, a series of numbers and letters — and she was in there, among them, waiting to be rearranged into a name.
Books have kept me company and anchored me throughout my life, and I’m curious as to how reading will slot into this new world. So far, as expected, I’ve read very little, but what I have read has echoed in surprising ways. I’ve found myself gravitating towards old favourites. I packed Northern Lights by Philip Pullman in my hospital bag — which is, of course, where it stayed, but there was something comforting about knowing it was there: this beloved childhood favourite, a story about travelling between worlds and exploring new lands.
Yesterday, I rummaged through my bookshelves and pulled out a copy of Rebecca Perry’s poetry collection little armoured — again, an old favourite. Her poem ‘Wasp’ is one I always return to, and some of the lines echo around my brain now as I make whooshing noises, pacing back and forth, rocking us both.‘Little nuzzler,’ Rebecca writes: ‘little nuzzler, nuzzling a neck. / Little alien, little feeler, little zebra. Little dinosaur legs.’ I think back to Pullman’s Northern Lights and contemplate my daughter as a daemon, as an ever-changing soul. In the half-light, I can almost see her shape-shifting from one animal to another, furry and warm, and softly sighing.
I’ve also been relistening to Michel Faber’s novel The Book of Strange New Things. I have been collecting fragments of the story across many nights for many weeks, and I’m not even halfway through. It’s an eerie tale about a man called Peter who is sent across the universe to speak with an alien life form. In many ways, it reminds me of Northern Lights and His Dark Materials, especially Mary Malone and her encounter with the mulefa. Faber writes about the timelessness of space in a way that mirrors my current tiredness: the discombobulating awe, the vastness, the lack of gravity. Yes, I think to myself, continuing to make those white noise sounds that are supposed to mimic being inside a womb —but could equally be the pulsing sound of a strange space engine— yes to weightlessness, to newness, to unfathomable science.
In the darkness, I can just make out the outline of another book placed rather optimistically on the coffee table: My Work by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. I adored Ravn’s book The Employees — again, a story set in space, and I don’t read many of those, so I’m not sure why this pattern has set in now. Presented as a series of interviews between humans and humanoids, The Employees is a conversation about what makes us human, and in my opinion can also be read as an extended metaphor for IVF. Her new novel is very different. It is an exploration of motherhood, part fiction, part essay, part poetry and memoir. Somewhat ironically, I don’t know when I’ll have time to get to it, but I’m looking forward to it, nonetheless. It appears to be a patient book, and I’m sure it will wait for these bizarre nights to get shorter.
Of course, there is also the daytime. When the sun rises, my night-time pacing and whooshing give way to some snatched outdoor moments. My husband, my daughter and I like to walk through the woods, amazed that spring has happened while we’ve been hibernating indoors. The bluebells are up again and I think back to this time last year when so many threads were unknitting themselves, remaking and reshaping, and I received that phone call. I think about the years of potential narratives branching out in all directions, some disappearing into the undergrowth; not knowing if this path would bring us out here, either — out into the woods, where all the best stories are born. I am so grateful that we have somehow made it here. I’m also aware of all the other versions of this tale. I hold onto all of them, tightly, watching the three of us: storied and storying, sleepily walking into spaces we haven’t read before.
Jen Campbell is a bestselling author. She has written twelve books for children and adults, the latest of which is Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit. She also writes for TOAST Book Club.
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