[Interview_3] Jonathan Taylor

Jonathan Taylor's memoir, Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007) has been described as a “a beautifully constructed and often profound piece of work” which “stands as a fine testimonial to man whose life was a mystery.”

Taylor has written two academic books, Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2007) and Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003) and has co-edited the collection of essays, Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Writing, 1800-2000 (Sussex Academic Press, 2005) with Dr. Andrew Dix.

In this, the last of a two-part interview, Taylor speaks about Take Me Home, how it got published and how has been received by readers.

Who is your target audience?

I would say my target audience has various layers.

Obviously, people who have experienced Parkinson's disease or dementia in their family (or in themselves) are central to who the book is for.

The book is also for carers, and intended as a way of encapsulating the experience of care in a realistic way; I don’t think there are many books of this kind which deal with the subject in an experiential and personal way.

In more general terms, the book is for people who enjoy reading literary memoirs and biographies. There are elements to stories like mine which everyone can associate with: family secrets, hidden histories, illness and mourning are, of course, universal concerns.

How did you choose a publisher for the book?

I chose the publisher, Granta, primarily because they published at least two of the books which influenced me the most: Linda Grant's Remind Me Who I Am Again?, and Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Granta specialise in this kind of work, and they were always my first choice. I was overjoyed when they accepted the book, and they have been great ever since really looking after me and the book. Ian Jack (ex-editor of Granta) went through my book word by word, editing it with me, making the book much better than the original manuscript.

How would you compare Take Me Home to the other books you have written?

Before Take Me Home -- up till now -- I've only written academic books -- works of literary criticism. These really helped in learning how to write in a flowing style. Writing formally is a really useful discipline -- it forces you to listen to every sentence and make sure everything links up "logically."

My next book is in very early stages at the moment, but I'm trying to write a novel which is partly based on my own experiences and partly fictional. Years ago, one night, I was rather, shall we say, drunk, and I invited a homeless person back to the house I was living in at the time -- to feed them everything in the fridge. On request, we then listened to some Debussy together. I never saw the person again, but the experience forms the basis of the novel I'm currently trying to write.

How did you go about writing Take Me Home?

I wrote Take Me Home over a number of years, constructing chapters out of fragmentary memories, and working out ways of turning isolated experiences into a narrative. At the same time, I was doing a lot of research -- interviewing relatives, contacting people who'd been "lost" for years, and searching for documents about some of his experiences.

There was so much that had been lost, hidden or forgotten -- a whole life in the Isle of Man, Oldham and afterwards which was shrouded by mystery. I really got caught up with the research. Then I suppose the majority of the actual writing was done in 2005.

Were you writing everyday?

When I was in full flow with Take Me Home, I was writing almost every day.

Coincidentally (and luckily), I got a sabbatical from my day job (lecturing) in 2005, so I had the chance to really get to grips with the book. I was sitting down at 8 am every morning and writing 1,000 words before lunch -- and then, after lunch, doing other jobs or editing what I'd done in the morning.

Although I'd written substantial amounts of the book before (and continued to redraft after) the sabbatical, those six or seven months of solid writing were essential. Otherwise, I don't think I'd ever have got it done.

I'd done a great deal of ground work before this period, so when it came to sitting down and writing, I found it relatively easy to write in quantity -- it flowed surprisingly easily, possibly also because I always felt there was something compelling me to write it. Somehow, I had to get it on the page. So, at that time, it wasn't hard to write at all.

Having said that, I never really believed I might finish the book: it felt like such an Everest. Even in the final rewrites, oddly enough, I felt utterly daunted by the magnitude of the task.

I suppose the problem here was the same thing that made it easy to write: I knew exactly what I wanted to get down, so I was daunted by getting to the end of a story I already knew.

My experience of writing in 2005 isn't representative -- normally, I find it very difficult to sit down and write at all. There are always other things to do: carpets to hoover; lopsided shelves to put up.

I think writing works best when I've got a substantial amount of time -- at least a week -- in which to sit down and write every day.

I do sometimes write in the evenings, or at times, around my job, but this is very difficult to do and often results in "bitty" work. It's suitable for short stories, but for longer work I really need proper periods of solid writing.

Generally speaking, I write all but the most first of first drafts on the computer. This isn't because I like computers(!), but because word processors are helpful for editing. I'm a very painstaking writer, and I like to edit the sentence I've just written over and over again -- and a word processor is useful for that.

How has the book been received so far?

I've been overjoyed how the memoir has been received. Most importantly, all members of my family and friends have loved it.

I've also had various letters and emails from carers who have associated with various elements of the book. Those reactions are clearly more precious than any formal reviews. But it has also received really good reviews in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement and on Oneword Radio.

I never expected to receive this kind of feedback, and have, of course, been overjoyed and surprised in equal measure.

All these people seem to understand what the book attempts to be: an honest literary memoir about my experiences and my father’s illness.

Inevitably, I’ve also received a few more negative reactions, for example, on amazon.co.uk. I expected this – I mean, if you write a book like this, then you're opening yourself up to criticism. I am myself more than aware of the ethical questions surrounding what I’ve done, and have wrestled with them continually. I believe, though that many of the negative reactions are because people have misunderstood the genre of the book, thinking its some kind of medical textbook rather than what it is: a literary memoir, an exploration of personal experiences.

Related articles:

• Jonathan Taylor [Interview_2], Conversations with Writers, February 7, 2008
• Jonathan Taylor [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, August 10, 2007

[Interview_2] Jonathan Taylor

Jonathan Taylor has written and published a memoir, Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007).

In addition to Take Me Home, he has written two academic books, Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2007) and Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003) and has co-edited the collection of essays, Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Writing, 1800-2000 (Sussex Academic Press, 2005) with Dr. Andrew Dix.

Taylor is also co-founder and co-director of Crystal Clear Creators, an arts organisation and not-for-profit company, which records, publishes, produces and promotes new writing, particularly for radio.

Currently Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in Leicester where he specialises in prose writing, memoir-writing, radio writing and literature of the nineteenth-century.

In this, the first of two interviews, Jonathan Taylor speaks about how the process of writing Take Me Home helped him understand his experiences as an informal carer as well as his relationship with his father.

What motivated you to start working on the memoir?

I always felt there was a real imperative behind my writing it -- when I was writing it, I just felt I had to do it.

I wanted to write something which could help me understand what had happened to my father and my relationship with him -- something that (retrospectively) would help me understand the "story" of his illness.

There were so many hidden complexities in his life and illness that I wanted to unravel them, and I thought writing the book would help me do that. I also wanted to write the kind of book which I would have liked to have read when I was caring for him -- the kind of book which would have helped me to understand my experience and conflicting emotions as a carer.

Did writing the book help you understand these emotions?

I think it helped by making sense of what had happened to us and what the illness meant.

If nothing else, I learnt that certain elements of his illness had names. Putting names to things sometimes helps, I suppose.

At the time it was happening, I just saw the symptoms and didn't understand -- or often thought he was being deliberately irritating. For example, he suffered from Capgras Syndrome, which means that the sufferer becomes convinced that a "significant other" isn't him or herself, but is a someone impersonating him or her.

My father became convinced for a long while that I wasn't me, but was being impersonated by an old colleague at work whom he hadn’t got on with. At the time, I just thought he was angry at me, and the disease had made him forget who I was. But retrospectively, I came across an academic research paper written about my relationship with my father, which said that he suffered from Capgras Syndrome. Being able to put a name to his inability to recognise me helped me to understand what had happened.

I suppose the difficulty is that it also made me feel bad for being so impatient with him; when I realise that so many of the things I got cross with him about (repeating things over and over, misrecognising me, repeating actions over and over) were real symptoms and recognised conditions, I can't help feeling guilt about my impatience with him at the time.

So, that understanding is a two-edged sword in some ways.

All carers, I think, have to deal with guilt over how they behaved, what they did.

Impossible standards for carers are set in the media and on television, and they suffer terribly from guilt when they're not always patient angels, but human beings who get cross, frustrated, impatient and so on. I wanted to show that that's normal -- that a carer can't be 100% happy and patient all the time.

The guilt is an inevitable part of the process, but it helps (hopefully) to know that other carers feel the same, that other carers get cross too.

Another way in which writing the book was both a positive and a "negative" experience in one was that a lot of what I uncovered didn’t really add up. I realised that my father would remain a bit of an enigma, however hard I tried to find more out. For example, the father that I knew and the father that my half-brother knew as a boy seem to be two wholly different people, and it’s impossible to reconcile our views of him as children. I had to come to accept that my father was a hugely complicated and contradictory person; that was the "conclusion" to the book -- that there was no conclusion, no simple way of understanding him.

How old were you when you started caring for your father?

I suppose it was round about when I was 17ish that I really started looking after him (in 1990).

What did your duties involve?

I used to take over from my mother (who was his full-time carer) for a few days at a time, when she went down to Torquay to visit her parents (who were themselves ill). The responsibilities and duties changed radically over time, but they obviously involved 24 hour care -- everything from feeding him, organising the medication, moving him about the house, putting him to bed, picking him up when he fell, toiletting and so on and so forth. Every single part of the day was devoted to a particular job or routine.

How did this affect you?

I think it had a deep effect on me as a person, though it’s hard to know what without having something to measure it against.

On the one hand, I felt proud to look after him -- I felt I was doing something important, something that needed to be done -- and I loved him very much. On the other hand, it exposed to me all the worst parts of my nature at the same time. I suppose care often does that.

All I can say is that, since his death, I have missed caring for him terribly -- because very few things feel as important or worthwhile, however well or badly I did it back then.

Do you feel you had adequate support?

The whole family supported each other -- we all took up different roles "round" my father, caring for him in different ways (for example, my sister is a doctor, so she dealt with many of the medical matters, and, indeed, saved his life on one or more occasions).

Outside the family, we saw the best and the worst of the modern health system. There were some wonderful individuals who helped, but the institutions (such as hospitals) were often very poor. They don’t cater well for Parkinsonians, or people suffering from degenerative disorders. On a simple level, for instance, Parkinson’s sufferers often have complicated pill regimes -- but the pill regimes often don’t fit into the hospital routines, and pills are forgotten or switched around for no good reason.

Hospitals, I think, deal well most of the time when things are at crisis point, but slow, degenerative disorders often meet with institutional neglect and a general malaise.

When did you decide you wanted to write about these experiences?

The very first inkling I had that I could write about my experience was way back, in 1998, when I discovered that I had a half-brother I'd never heard of. At the same time, I found out that my father had been married before.

As these revelations started, I remember my mother turning to me and saying, "Gosh, it'd make a good book, wouldn't it?" That was when I first thought about it.

Then I first started working on the memoir seriously in 2001, when my father died. In that sense, the memoir is a memorial to him.

How did you find out about your half-brother?

One Christmas (1998), my mother sat me down at the kitchen table and placed a series of letters in front of me. One of them was from the Salvation Army tracing service. Colin (my half-brother) had decided to trace my father after 30 years of not seeing him.

Did your mother know about his previous marriage?

Yes -- in fact, I’ve gradually realised that most people knew apart from us (his children from his second marriage)!

How did these revelations make you feel?

I wasn’t totally surprised, I suppose, in that we had always wondered where he’d been before he met my mother. There were years of his life he didn’t talk about, so (as an imaginative kid) I used to make up all sorts of fantasy stories about that time. It’s also possible that, because of the trauma of his first marriage and, indeed, because of the Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) he may or may not have had after his first nervous breakdown, that it really was all blotted out.

I’ve got to know my half-brother well now, and that’s been a real delight -- he is the spitting image of my father, looks-wise. So it’s been a strange, but positive experience. I also understand why my father didn’t talk about these things, why these things were hidden. After all, we were young children and wouldn’t have understood -- and then, by the time we would in the 1990s, he was very ill, and probably couldn’t talk about them very easily.

Related articles:

• Jonathan Taylor [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, August 10, 2007
• Jonathan Taylor [Interview_3], Conversations with Writers, February 11, 2008