Get Booked – Michael Waterhouse, The Ladder 060223

You are listening to Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield, for Women's and Men's Radio Station. Welcome to today's show. Now, can there ever be a clear-cut, unambiguous moment when life is so unbearable that helping someone to die is not only right but an act of loving kindness? The Ladder, today's book, begins on a remote Scottish island where Gary A recent widower is living under an assumed name. Wracked with doubts and fears and grief that often overwhelms him, he decides to design a lasting tribute to his lost wife, a celebration of her life and her love of colour. But will the memorial he creates arouse suspicions amongst the islanders and make them ask more questions Gary would rather not answer? Michael Waterhouse's first novel, Prodigal, was recommended in The Times by Joan Bakewell as a first novel of enormous power and inspirational. And this time Joan Bakewell says that she read the whole book in one sitting, and I 100% understand why. It is fantastic. And later on in today's show, we're going to be talking to the author about The Ladder, which was released on the 24th of January of this Yeah. I've also just had a delicious delivery from Watkins Publishing, couple of books that hopefully you'll be hearing more from the authors on Get Booked in the coming weeks and months. The first one, Wilder Journeys: True Stories of Nature, Adventure and Connection, edited by Laurie King and Miriam Lanswood. Follow the call of the wild with these incredible true stories from an international group of nature lovers, nomads, and adventurers. I cannot wait to get stuck into this. In these pages, you are invited to share the wisdom they gained on their wild journeys. You will walk across the Australian desert with American explorer Angela Maxwell, live with Hamza Yasin and a family of eagles in Scotland, Survive for 10 years in an Australian forest with Gregory Smith. Hunt in the wilderness with Miriam Lanswood in New Zealand. Chart Karl Buschby's passage through the formidable Darién Gap and harness the healing power of the sea by forming a surfing collective for people of color in California with David Molana. These and many other extraordinary Extraordinary adventure stories await. Cannot wait. And the COVID just looks fantastic. One of those ones that you want to shove on your coffee table. Shove, I say, so delicately. And the next one, The Fear by Christiane Spence. What is fear? What are we afraid of and why? And how do states of fearfulness shape our personalities? Relationships, and entire societies. I suspect if I manage to get Christiana on the show, this might have to be, say, a triple show just to vaguely get in the conversations I'd like to have with her. Fusing autobiographical writing about motherhood, heartbreak, death, and trauma alongside reflections on terrorism, gender, and our wider culture. The Fear seeks to answer these questions, from gaslighting to political violence, and from scapegoating to psychoanalysis. The Fear stares deep into the abyss, searching for the demons, horrors, and spectres that destabilize and haunt us all, and finding out how these fears and the way that we respond to them shape us as people people and societies. From the personal to the political, The Fear is an attempt to work out how we can find freedom even in the face of endemic threat, manipulation, and power plays. It shows that rather than being merely a destructive force, fear can be the start of transformation and a trigger of resistance rather than defeat. I love this because I'm a huge fan of positive attribution. Find something that's trying to knock you off kilter and make it work for you. Brilliant. Cannot wait to get stuck into those today. Next up, we have today's guest, Michael Waterhouse. Okay, next up on Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station, as promised, we have the author Michael Waterhouse chatting to us about his book The Ladder that was released on the 24th of January of this year. The Ladder is such a beautifully written book about humanity, love, loss, and escape. The fluidity of narrative in which this book is written leads to a paradoxically easy reading slant to an otherwise emotionally charged story, opening the conversation around assisted suicide with an equal and unjudgmental rounded take on the subject. Joining us now is Michael. Thank you for joining us on Get Booked. Well, thank you for inviting me on the show. You're very welcome, and congratulations on your publication day and being able to actually have a book release party in real life. Yeah, tremendous. And it was a good turnout. It really was. It was, it was full. You should have really got a bigger place. It's good though. I think there's been so many online, uh, parties that it's kind of— it's like nice to do the real thing. Yeah, you work for quite often years on a book, and I think COVID took that away from some of the authors. And it— no, it was brilliant, and it was great to meet you. And, uh, yeah, and And luckily you've done an extract of the book which we'll play out towards the end of the show as well. But let's get stuck straight into it. If you can tell our listeners a little bit about the inspiration behind writing this book. Sure. I mean, it's happened over quite a long period. I mean, first and foremost, as you say, it's a love story, but it is a love story about what happens to love when one partner, in this case Kim, develops a debilitating illness, and that presents their, their love with a huge challenge. It all goes back ultimately to the fact that my mother died of motor neuron disease quite a long time ago, 1993 as a matter of fact. And it was, as you can imagine, a terrible thing to witness. She in fact was saved the very worst of it and died of pneumonia. So she doesn't actually go through the full crippling illness that Kim does in the book. But it got me thinking about a lot of things. It got me thinking about the subject of assisted dying. We, you know, we were thinking as a family, what happens, you know, if my mother gets to a condition in which she can do nothing for herself? And frankly wants to die. And it also got me thinking about wanting to write a story about it. But what I didn't want to do was to write a tub-thumping polemic about, you know, the need to reform the law. I wanted to write a novel which would be, as you say, full of humanity, have all the kind of contradictions that we human beings experience. And I didn't want to rush into it, and it's taken me 29 years, but I thought that was about the right time. So in a sense, I'm on schedule. On schedule. Well, congratulations. Yeah. Do you know what? It's such a toughie because in the situation in The Ladder, Kim is a very active person. And so the fact that she loses something that she values more than some people, it's, it's got an added level of cruelty. But, you know, it's still a cruel disease no matter how active you are. And I love— that's true. Yeah. And, and I love the way that it's not just one person telling the story. It comes from both sides. You can kind of see how she loses a grasp on reality and what's happening and even just the ability to sometimes register what's happening to yourself. And then it moves to a stage where you can't register it because you can no longer use your fingers. You can't write anymore. You can't speak anymore. There's some fantastic devices out there that can help you at least say what you want to say, and it'll transcribe it into words. But it's just when you lose the ability to do that, as well. It's, it's the disease that just keeps on taking, isn't it? It is. It's a very, very brutal condition. I think we all know about it a bit because Stephen Hawking, of course, had motor neuron disease, and we know that over the years we got used to hearing his voice, which of course wasn't his voice, through the agency of a computer. And as you say, there are resources available for people who lose the ability to speak, to communicate by that means. Voice banking, I think it was termed. It is called voice banking. That's quite right. As a matter of fact, Kim is advised about voice banking and doesn't quite live to the point of making use of it for reasons I won't go in. I don't want to spoil people's enjoyment of the novel. It's interesting what you say about her being active. I, you know, the imagination in a sense delivers these characters to you. And I realized that Kim had to be a very active person. She loves cycling, swimming. She, her idea, ideal holiday is going up to the Scottish Highlands and plunging around in bogs in the rain. And what was quite interesting was that I, what I didn't know until I was listening to Jim Al-Khalili's program last week on Radio 4, The Life Scientific, you know, in which he interviews eminent scientists. And he was talking to someone who's a specialist on motor neuron disease, and she has identified a correlation between people who are highly physical, physically active, and a susceptibility to getting the disease, which is absolutely counterintuitive. I think it's what you wouldn't expect. But actually, people who are professional athletes in some cases or like Kim, very, very active sporty people can be more susceptible. I think bizarrely as well, people who are more active are more likely to notice it sooner. Yes, of course. Yes, I think that's right. I mean, because, you know, as an active sporty person, you are that much more conscious of your body. Kim first becomes aware of something not being quite right when she goes to open up her shop one morning. She is a florist, and she— one of the important themes of the novel is that she has an absolute love of color. And so she, you know, starts this florist shop and has— it just takes enormous pleasure in the variety of colors that the flowers give her. But one morning she goes to the shop and she's fiddling with her keys and she realizes that she hasn't dropped them. She does get the lock open, but it's not quite right. And she, something intuitively tells her that something has gone wrong. But being the kind of person she is, someone who is very dismissive of fuss and, you know, tends to sort of not think about it if she has a cold or anything like that, She, she's aware of it, but then she dismisses it. And it takes a number of incidents of that kind for her to recognize that something is happening to her. Well, and unfortunately, I mean, you go into a lot of detail, well, enough detail for us to understand. This is what I love about books as well. It helps the reader to understand a little bit more about the process and the diagnosis. And you get diagnosed with MND by a process of elimination, and especially for, for women. Um, I hope this is okay to say, and in the age of Kim, as you kind of hit 40, 42, 43, that's when there's various things to do with the menopause or different life stages where we do start being a little bit more forgetful, or we're running around doing this, that, and whatever. And sometimes we just chalk up certain deficiencies to do with hormonal changes and just been run ragged. So it's a bit of a minefield. Yes, absolutely. That's a very good point you make. She really, I suppose, and this is the one reason why, in a sense, I needed these dual narratives, Kim's own narrative, but also her partner's, Gary's narrative. It's Gary really who pushes forward the recognition that that something is happening to her. They go to a New Year's Eve party and she drops a glass of wine and spills red wine all over the host's carpet and then subsequently collapses. And of course everyone thinks it's drink, but it's not. As you would, yeah. And it's Gary who pushes through the idea that she needs to go and see her GP in the first instance and then to have a number of tests. And it takes time because, as you say, you know, people don't have a ready-made set of symptoms which equal motor neuron disease. Motor neuron disease, particularly in the early stages, mimics a lot of other potential conditions. And so they only arrive at the diagnosis having said, well, it's not that, it's not that, and it's not the other. And, you know, she is bewildered by it when she's told, but convinced, as a lot of people are, that the answer must be to keep up the regime of exercise and indeed step up the regime of her exercise. But that's just wearing his hair. Yeah. As it happens, if you, develop the disease and then go to a clinic, you will probably be advised not to be too extreme about exercise because it's likely to have a deleterious effect and make the condition worse, which again is a bit counterintuitive, isn't it? It's, you think if you're wasting away, your muscles are in decline, the way to fight it is just to do a lot more exercise. Well, it turns out that's not right. Well, everybody's always full of advice when faced with a friend or a loved one that has some horrific news such as that. But I do, in a really kind of heartwarming way, it was when she has to tell people that she has been diagnosed with MND, and it's that if you effing mention Stephen Hawking, I am going to lose it. But yet people, the only really famous case of MND, because we just don't know that much about it, is Stephen Hawking. And yet, paradoxically, he lived absurdly longer than, than anybody. Well, he was a medical phenomenon. Yeah, absolutely right. By and large, and this was certainly true of my mother, she was fairly typical, you are advised that you are likely to die— the way they put it is within 2 years of the onset of the illness.. And a lot of people confuse that with the diagnosis. You know, you may be diagnosed some time, some considerable time after the disease has begun. And that's what happened to my mother. That's what happens to Kim. It's not what happened to Stephen Hawking, who was quite remarkable. I mean, he was supported by every kind of medical and technological support that, you know, could be provided. But nonetheless, he was a phenomenon. I went to meet him on one occasion. Oh, wow. I was making a series of films for Channel 4 about the history of British science, and I went to interview him. Um, and the funny thing was that in order to, as it were, warm up the interview, I was telling him about previous film I'd made, which was very different indeed, which was about Marilyn Monroe. And this was partly prompted by the fact that he was an absolute fan of Marilyn Monroe, had lots of photographs of her all around his office. Um, and so we got into this rather bizarre conversation quite off message, nothing to do with science and all about Marilyn Monroe. And that then drifted into his other interest, which was Michael Jackson, who had recently died. So it's quite a bizarre but interesting encounter. Well, this is, this is an interesting point that you bring up as well, because a lot of people say, may, who have no idea about MND, they will look at somebody in a wheelchair that is dribbling, cannot hold their own face up, cannot move. And you— they make the assumption that the mind correlates to that, and it doesn't in any way, shape, or form. No. And it's, it's such a, it's such a tough one where people need to be informed as to, I suppose, what to expect and what to understand, and that you can still speak to people directly, that they just might need a little bit more help. Well, you can still speak to anybody, even if they can't respond. But I, I think it's a really important message to get out there. Yes, it is. I mean, motor neuron disease does, of course, like many complicated conditions, affect people in different ways. When my mother was diagnosed, I remember talking to the consultant about what I observed of her intellectual deterioration. And he said, well, it doesn't affect the mind. And I said, well, something's going on. And he said, well, it's probably emotional changes that are happening. So my mother became very, in some ways she was quite peremptory. You know, if she wanted a glass of whiskey, she'd tell you whiskey and you had to pour her a glass. And if it wasn't a big enough measure, she'd just raise her hand to indicate that the level needed to be higher. Higher, please, higher. But in other circumstances, she became really emotional and friendly. She, if we took her out for a meal, for example, she would, she'd been quite often get up from the table slowly and embrace the waitress and tell her what a wonderful job she'd done. I love that. And so she had this kind of outpouring of affection. And I would say that she did experience some loss of memory and some loss of immediate understanding of what was going on around her. But other people, their intellects are unaffected. You know, one would have to say that about Stephen Hawking, of course. And I suppose with motor neuron disease, if you encounter someone with it, you have to be adaptable to what's going on in their life and not, as you say, jump to any conclusions. Well, the more we understand about each other, the better we can all be to each other. Indeed. I mean, we haven't yet talked about the subject of assisted dying, um, which is the backdrop to the novel. This is so important in this novel because obviously you— the way you portray it, it's so fantastically done, but you get to a stage where you know that you— that somebody else is even having to wash you, take you to the toilet and wait there and kind of hold you up while you're on there. And there is absolutely no dignity in that when you can't even talk and communicate with the person that you love anymore, or even, you know, if it's a carer, no matter who you've got doing this for you. Um, and what, what is the quality of life? That's the big question, isn't it? That is the big question, and it's extremely complicated. As listeners will hear, the piece that I recorded from the novel is a scene in which Kim is— she thinks she's on her own, and she starts to try to sing. It's a song by Robert Burns about her love of the Highlands, his love of the Highlands. And Gary, who's working upstairs, sort of hears this noise and thinks that, you know, she's crying perhaps. And he realizes then that she's not crying, she's singing. And he goes to listen to it, and he finds it deeply affecting, partly because she's beautiful in a sense. She has lost the ability to sing, She can't really sustain proper speech, let alone a tune. But he finds it beautiful because she's trying. And it also pulls him up short because it makes him ask the question, well, if she's capable of this kind of happiness in this moment, what does that mean for the rest of her life? Does it mean that the rest of it, which is pretty damn ghastly, is in some sense bearable? And that I I think is where I hope that the novel would rest, poised between the argument that says she's lost everything, she's in physical pain, she can do nothing for herself almost, certainly by, you know, the latter, the later part of the novel. There is no quality of life. And yet there are moments, just moments, when she appears to experience happiness. And then you ask, Well, what is the right thing to do, you know? When is that point of no return? When is, you know, yeah, if you suddenly make that decision that the time is now, if for example assisted suicide was legal, and then it doesn't happen that day, and the next day there's a moment of joy, and you kind of think, wow, I could have taken that away from them. And it's a tough one because people have different ideas of quality of life as well. It's so open to abuse, I suppose, in a way. No, that is certainly the word that is a feature of the debates that take part, take place in Parliament when this subject is brought before them. I mean, I suppose one has to remember that there are much more straightforward cases where people particularly in cases of motor neuron disease, are so utterly debilitated and can do nothing for themselves and have made it clear to those around them that they want to die. And that doesn't change day to day. They simply want to die. And obviously legislation would— a reform of legislation would hope to help them. Yeah. The reason it doesn't change law, is that there are all sorts of other cases which are more ambivalent and, as you say, open to abuse. Basically, it's what they call the slippery slope argument. In other words, you know, you have cases which are straightforward. Someone ought to be allowed to die. They ought to be allowed to be assisted to die because their life has no quality. They have no dignity. And they ought to be allowed to go. But when you're framing legislation, you have to take account of all sorts of other circumstances, such as Kim's, where it's unclear that she unequivocally wants to die. And then, of course, the other end of the slippery slope, people worry about the old and vulnerable who might be put under pressure by, you know, let's call them greedy relatives who want to get hold of their houses and their money. And they don't want to be a burden anymore. That's right, who are trying to persuade this person that that person is a burden and really ought to move on, you know, from life. And any legislation would have to protect those individuals. The trouble is that in my view, Parliament walks away from this issue rather than trying to find solutions to it. So, you know, they had a bill in the House of Lords last year, and it was voted down in March, you know, fairly balanced voting, 178 against, 145 in favor. Oh, wow. But you have to set that against the fact that any survey of the public produces a figure of around 84% of people who are in favor of changing the laws regarding assisted dying in cases of terminal illness. So there is a mismatch there. And, you know, lots of other countries, several US states, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, they've all changed their laws to make assisted dying possible. They've found ways of framing legislation to protect the old and the vulnerable from abuse of the law to their satisfaction. And, you know, it appears to work for those countries. And, you know, I ask the question, why not us? Well, you would think we have enough intelligent people working in positions of power to be able to come up with a suitable response. However, I do think us Brits are fantastic in so many ways, but we have lots of varying opinions. Give us an inch and we take a mile. And we— there isn't one package that's going to suit all. And we do like to have a good old complain every now and again. And I think we're kind of ruining it for ourselves. Um, and there is the element of religion as well. There are many religious groups that would be appalled by the concept. And yes, I mean, I have— suicide, let alone assisted suicide, is hugely frowned upon. Well, indeed. Although, of course, the irony of that is that suicide is not illegal. If you have a condition like MND and you are able to take your own life, unassisted, then no one is going to say that that is against law. Yeah, I mean, I do have in the novel someone of deep religious faith whose view was that when his wife was dying, that they had both to endure it for the duration it lasted. Because it was his will. Well, in the 1810s, He maintains in the novel that it's a shared faith and that they were both of the same conviction. Although, you know, as someone is in decline, one wonders whether that would hold true right to the end. But in a sense, one has to, I think, simply respect that people have religious views. They believe that life is given to them by God, and it is not theirs to to take away. It's God's to decide when their life should end. And, you know, people are entitled to their views. I think the question it raises for me is, where is compassion in all that? You know, surely one thing we share, believers and non-believers, is the view that someone who is in the most profound state of suffering should be regarded and treated with compassion. And that's where I stand, I think, on the subject of reforming the law, that it is simply cruel to deny people the opportunity to end their lives if their lives have ceased to be of any value to them. I wholeheartedly agree. I, I, I'm definitely a supporter of Gary in the book and I just think the way that you put across both sides was so balanced and compassionate without any judgment that I think it's a helpful book for anybody to read, dependent on what their views are. Yeah. Sorry, irrelevant of what their views are. I think it's beautifully, beautifully written. I absolutely loved it. And how many years did you say it took you to write it? Well, it took me— I mean, it's ludicrous, but I, in a sense, I've been thinking about it for about 29 years, but that's misleading. I actually started writing it in 2018. It took me a long time to find a way into the story, and then the image of Gary living on this remote Scottish island under an assumed name came to me. And I realized that I wanted to start the novel with Gary in his grief some months on from Kim's death. And so we learn that Kim has died quite early on in the novel. And Gary is struggling with a combination of deep grief and guilt, but we don't know what he feels guilty about. But the fact that he's moved to this island, he's living under an assumed name, makes us ask questions about, you know, what it is that he's done and why he's felt he has to essentially flee his previous life. I don't think the guilt is necessarily one particular thing. There must be so much guilt for anybody who's had to help somebody through an illness like that, because you might quite normally and quite rationally feel angry, and yet you're not the one dying. You can feel, um, so many different emotions about what is happening, and it's not just happening to the person Kim in the story, it's happening to Gary too, or Greg. Um, and it's— there's so many different elements of guilt you can feel while going through that horrendous, you know, up until pretty much 2 years of quite affected life. Um, yeah, it's incredible. That's, that's absolutely right, Hazel. And of course, as the carer, um, he feels he has to play down his own sense of anger, his own, his own living grief while she is there dying. You know, people talk about anticipatory grief, which is something that happens when you know that the person you love is going to die and you start a process of anticipating what it's going to be like to lose them. And he goes through that, and it's a complicated emotion. And one that he can't really voice because his duty is to care for her and love her and, as it were, be the optimistic side of her life. Well, he didn't lose her the day she died. No, no, no, indeed. And of course, the title of the book, The Ladder, is all to do with the way in which he wants to hang on to his memories of her. And he wants to create a memorial, a tribute to her that will celebrate everything about her, and especially her love of colour that is rooted in, you know, the florist shop that she ran and loved for many years. So anyway, I'm not going to tell you exactly what the tribute is. Let's not ruin it for them. No, people should read the book. But Yes, you're absolutely right. He— she— her memory lives on in more than memory. He wants to make his memories of her in some sense tangible, physical. Yeah, I love that, and I— it completely came across. Just to point out to our listeners, where can people find out more about you? Do you have a website? You're on Instagram, I do believe. Do you? I'm on Instagram. I don't have a website, although I am being encouraged by the publisher to create one. So I will have one shortly. Well, you've got a couple of books out now. You have another book, Prodigal. Yes, Prodigal was published 3 years ago, and Prodigal is the story essentially of a very troubled young man. The story— I seem to enjoy having dual narratives, so What happens to Steve is that he joins the army and is in Afghanistan and goes looking with a small patrol for his translator who has gone missing one day. And in the process, he is ambushed and he is taken hostage and he finds himself in the same room— excuse me— with Rashid, his translator. And one of the narratives is about their conversation, their life together. But it alternates with the life of his parents, who are singers and who live in Hampshire. And so we are learning about how they deal with his absence, because they know nothing about what has happened to him. And so we learn about their life, but also about their recollections of the very difficult time they had when Steve was a teenager and an alcoholic. So it's a complicated story, but a great page-turner, I'm told. So you jump at it. Well, yeah, you're not a fluffy writer, are you? No. A couple of questions I like to ask all of the guests here on Get Booked are, Or somebody that they admire in the public eye, just to increase a bit of positivity out there. Okay. Yes, I, I was, it was interesting you asked that question. I mean, you gave me forewarning about that. And the person I came up with was Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer. And I think I admire her hugely because for many years she has stood up for the underdog.. And in a way, that's one of the things I'm interested in. You know, it is perhaps the wrong term to describe someone who's suffering from MND in a, at a terminal stage as an underdog, but nonetheless they are, their voice finds difficulty in being heard. And it's that kind of person that Helena Kennedy stands up for. And you know, to use the cliché, speaks truth to power. Um, so I admire her hugely. I love that. I'm just checking her out now, helena kennedy.co.uk, to find out a little bit more. Um, yeah, definitely. Um, and something else I'd like to ask as well is for 3 top tips on trying to get a good level of mental health, mental well-being. Um, 3? Gosh, I don't know that I've got 3. I've certainly got one. Good. Well, sometimes all it matters, it's not quantity, it's quality, isn't it? Well, mine would be not to cross bridges before you come to them. I've realized in my maturity that when I was younger, I used to anticipate problems and be made stressful about them and wrestle with them, lose sleep over them. And then those problems would turn out to either disappear or not to be anything like as bad as I feared they were going to be. And so I think that I would say don't cross bridges until you come to them. If there are problems ahead, just give them a little time and try and ignore them until absolutely you have to deal with them, because Getting stressed about things that may not happen is, is one of the time wasters that an awful lot of us, I think, indulge in. Well, it's a great issue with anxiety, isn't it? Anxiety is all about pressing about something that could happen in the future, not necessarily— we're not— we don't know what's going to happen in the future. I think that's absolutely fantastic. I've actually written it down. I love it because I think, I think that's one of those things that I should possibly get framed. Brilliant advice, and thank you so much, Michael, for joining us on Get Booked. I really enjoyed our chat, and I hope that all of the listeners have taken something and it's contributed to their understanding of MND, but also the issues we face with assisted suicide and, and quality of life, and to be less judgmental about other people's decisions because we never actually know what's going on in somebody's personal life. Yes. Could I just say, on the subject of MND, there is hope. It is a dreadful condition, and there is currently no cure, but there are trials going on now for what you might call wonder drugs, which are very likely to improve the condition of people suffering from it. Not cure it, not even, you know, stop it from killing you, but at least allow you to enjoy a greater quality of life for a bit longer. And one can only welcome this, this. And one day, one day they will find a cure. One day. Well, small steps are better than no steps at all. Absolutely. Great. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and I wish you all the best of luck with the Zelada, and I look forward to hearing about the next book. Ah, right. Well, so the next book, I suppose the exciting bit about it is that it's quite a lot of it is set in the Namibian desert. Oh, wow, wow. And it's set there because the, it's really, the book is about truth and lies in the modern world. And, but it's set in the world of archaeology, partly at a university in the south of England and partly, as I say, in the desert. In Namibia. And I think it's, you know, this won't come as a huge surprise to listeners, you know, we're all worried about truth in the modern world, you know, the manipulation of truth by Trump and his cohorts. But there are also other dimensions to the subject of truth, like, you know, there's a bit of a problem with plagiarism, in universities and colleges. And I suppose what I'm trying to do as I write this novel is to bring together all these concerns and to present a story which actually, I hope, invites the reader to say, "How do you know when a story is true?" Wow. A lot of things are subjective. I love the idea of that book. It sounds absolutely fantastic. I could have easily chatted to you for so much longer, but we've just come to the end. And thank you so much for joining us on Get Booked, and I can't wait to speak to you again on the show about the new book. Great. Well, thank you for inviting me, Hazel. It was a great pleasure. You're welcome. I was at work in my bedroom, listening to Sibelius's violin concerto and editing on my laptop a piece from one of our regular contributors on what to do in the event that a crisis—an epidemic, say, or a terrorist attack—occurs in the country you're visiting and the airports shut. It was standard advice: contact the embassy or consulate, inform family, stay inside, consult FCO and airline websites regularly. At first I thought it was the sound of her distress, crying. I turned off the music and then I realised that she was singing. I knew that if she saw me she'd stop immediately and so I moved as quietly as I could to the top of the stairs. It was just possible to lean over the banister and not be seen. She'd wheeled her chair to the window overlooking the garden. We only have a small patch, and I'm afraid it's become overgrown of late. She must have wanted to enjoy its wildness. It was raining outside, the trees gusting, a beech in particular bowing in front of her. And there she was singing Robert Burns. My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, my heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer. To me it was beautiful. She couldn't sing, of course. Her diaphragm and the muscles in her larynx are too weak to produce consistently audible speech, let alone something tuneful. But that didn't matter. She was trying, and it was close enough, in my view, to be a recognisable song. I'm pulled up short by an incident of this sort, the fierce happiness of it. She snatches these fleeting moments from the daily schedule of her misery. She enjoyed our outing to Winchelsea. Yesterday she awoke from a dream that had transported her through space. Her eyes were bright as she told me about it. In a way I hadn't seen for months. She stopped for perhaps a minute or two, gathered her strength, her breath, then started again. Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow, farewell to the straths and green valleys below, farewell to the forests and wild hanging woods. Episodes like this make me question what's happening to her and what is best to do. What, as they say, is the direction of travel? If she's capable of such intervals of happiness, does that make the rest, the diabolical rest, bearable? I don't know. If there is respite, how can we talk about the Swiss option? We dance around the subject, masking the truth in euphemism, afraid, I think, to acknowledge that we're speaking of her murder. It's a vile, unvarnished word, but that's what it amounts to. Yet there are other days, other stark instances, when she shrinks from view, retreats into her frailty, pale and helpless, silently pleading for release. Chasing the wild deer and following the roe, my heart's in the Highlands wherever I go. Her song ended. She spotted me above her and smiled her delinquent smile. That was a reading from today's guest, Michael Waterhouse, of his latest book, The Ladder. Fantastic, and thank you so much to Michael for joining us on Get Booked. Get Booked is a show all about literature, reading, and the power of words. And a great example of this is a poem I came across actually on Instagram a couple of weeks ago, and I thoroughly love it. It is by the author Abdullah Shoaib, and it's called Pretty Ugly. Now I'm going to read this to you twice because that is what is intended. It is a poem that if you say it top to bottom bottom, it comes across a particular way. If you read it bottom to top, it has a completely different meaning. And I love this. It just exemplifies the power of words and the words we use to each other and to ourselves. This is Pretty Ugly. I'm very ugly, so don't try to convince me that I'm a very beautiful person, because at the end of the day, I hate myself in every single way. And I'm not going to lie to myself by saying there is beauty inside of me that matters. So rest assured, I will remind myself that I am a worthless, terrible person, and nothing you say will make me believe I still deserve love. Because no matter what, I am not good enough to be loved, and I'm in no position to believe that Beauty does exist within me. Because whenever I look in the mirror, I always think, am I as ugly as people say? Now I'm going to read it bottom up, exactly the same poem. Am I as ugly as people say? Because whenever I look in the mirror, I always think, beauty does exist within me. And I am in no position to believe that I am not good enough to be loved, because no matter what, I still deserve love. And nothing you say will make me believe that I am a worthless, terrible person. So rest assured, I will remind myself there is beauty inside of me that matters. And I'm not going to lie to myself by saying, I hate myself in every single way because at the end of the day I am a very beautiful person, so don't try to convince me that I'm very ugly. How powerful is that? I just think it's absolutely fantastic. If you want to catch up on previous Get Booked shows, you can do if you pop onto womensradiostation.com/shows/getbooked. GetBooked or on our SoundCloud. It's now time for a quick recap of one of our previous shows. Thank you so much for listening to me, your host Hazel Butterfield, for GetBooked, the women's and men's radio station. Right, it is time to welcome Laura to the show. I'm so happy to have you on the show and discuss not only the book Single Bold Female and so much more. Being a huge book fan yourself and a foodie, such a great combo in my eyes. So let's kick off with you. At the beginning, I described you as an author, journalist, podcaster, and a foodie, but there is so much more. You obviously like to keep busy, Laura. Oh, I really do. I'm exceptionally busy, especially also reading all those books. Like, reading takes a lot of time, and I really love it, but I'm just always trying to get through a massive pile of books. Yeah, the TBRs. But do you, like myself, do you sit there reading the books and saying, this is work, I have to do this. This is not me just having time off. I do a little bit, yeah. I also really enjoy it, and I do— I do— I have taught myself to speed read if I'm not enjoying a book. Yes, I've done something vaguely similar as well, because occasionally you kind of know you need to read something, but it's not always as much of a page-turner. Yeah, as you thought it may be. And slightly off-air, I was saying that, you know, I quite often have to do a lot of traipsing around for football with my kids, and although whinge about it— it means that I get to sit in a car for a couple of hours at a time and just read. And quite lovely. Yeah. I have to say my top tip is Audible speeding up the play of a book because if you're not enjoying it, I will put mine to 1.5 speed and then just sometimes I'll even go higher than that and you've just got the narrator just going blubblublublub but I can still say that I've read that book. Do you ever feel that sometimes it has an effect on your— how you're chatting and you end up talking a little bit at a higher tempo? I don't think so, because usually when I'm listening to an audiobook, it's when I'm spending loads of time by myself. So I don't— I don't then start speaking after it, really. I did, um, I did a show recently with Judy May Murphy, who is a poet, and we were talking about how she embarks set on reading all the classics since the first day of lockdown just to get through it. And even if she just read a page a day. And I've never read Pride and Prejudice. I said, I really feel like I should do it, being, you know, a book fan. And she said, yeah, cool, but get it on Audible and speed it up. Yeah, I like that. There's so many different ways that you can get into books, whether, you know, I think especially in lockdown there's been a lot more people going back to reading because they had the time and realized the mental health benefits and also just the escape and how much better your brain feels for spending an hour reading instead of Candy Crush. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And instead of Instagram. Yes, because Instagram makes us feel so much better about ourselves. So let's jump straight in with Single Bold Female. Um, congratulations, it's Absolutely fantastic. A bit of a reminder to all of our listeners that it was released in hardcover and Kindle 14th of April, and it's coming out in paperback on the 19th of January of next year. Uh, fantastic book. It's getting some really good reviews. You must be so happy. Yeah, it's had amazing reviews. I, I was, um, as a debut author, I told myself at the beginning that I was not going to read any reviews because I think I saw some stuff on Goodreads where you can see reviews before it comes out. And I was like, oh, I don't think I can handle that. Like, you would— there would be a review where someone said loads of good things, but they might have said one little bad thing, and then, um, or one little minor criticism, and I'd be like, oh, I don't know. And that would make me think about it. So I said, I'm not going to read any reviews. And then my partner was reading them for me, and he would tell me when there was a good one, and he would read it out or screenshot it for me. And after a while, I was like, 'Do you know what? All the reviews are good, so I'm okay. I can read them.' So now I actually do go on and look at the reviews, but sort of with caution, and when I'm feeling okay that day. I wouldn't do it when I was feeling particularly fragile. Yeah, it's about understanding our mindset in that present moment. I think we're such bizarre creatures because we can have 100 people saying nice things to us and then one person says something rubbish or not as positive, and yeah, we're crushed. Absolutely. Yeah, the— it's like the weighting of criticism is so much heavier than the weighting of positive feedback. Um, but I heard, I think it was Dolly Alderton said years ago that if you're feeling down on yourself or you've read a bad review of your own book or a criticism of your own work, go to the page online of a book that you really, really love, or an author you really, really love, and, and have a look through their reviews and read a 1-star review of their book that you would give 5 stars, and you'll see that it's just such a subjective thing, and nobody ever gets fully 5 stars from everyone, and there's no single book in the world that everyone loves. Well, that's because we're all, we're all different. Um, that's such a great tip. I remember I wrote a blog post once about why it bothers us so much when someone says something negative to us, because it's, it's incredibly easy to just be nice, but it takes a lot more effort to go out of your way to say something negative to somebody. And I think that's why it affects us, because somebody's gone out of their way to do it. Yeah, I suppose so. But then in the world of reviews, and when you're putting a product out in the world, you're inviting feedback, both good and bad, because you're trying to help other people decide whether they like that book or whether they like that slow cooker or whatever. So when you put yourself out there in the world with either a blog or music or a book or a TV show or whatever it is you're doing in the public eye, unfortunately you invite that criticism and feedback on yourself, on your person. And we do tend to take these things personally, even though my book is not— a criticism of my book is not necessarily a criticism of me as a person, but you can't help taking it that way because our work is so creative and so personal. But, um, yeah, unfortunately it's what comes with doing a public product. And also I think especially when it's a debut, because you get to a stage— I've spoken to authors when they're like 4th, 5th book in and they're just, it's like water off a duck's back. They've kind of honed their, their talent and their technique and they're just so used to it. And also if you get to the stage where you're releasing 4 or 5 books, you're like, enough people like it, I'm good. Yeah, it really depends on the person. So I think, so, you know, some people can be 10 books in, 20 books in, and they still really feel wounded by criticism. So I think it just depends. I don't have a thick skin, unfortunately. I have a thick skin depending on the minutes of the day. Hmm. It really can change. Um, but yeah, sometimes— I mean, this is the power of affirmations, which I used to think a couple of years ago was very woo-woo, but you know, we need to speak more positive— positively to ourselves, and it can rewire our brains and what we're capable of and capable of receiving. Um, but yeah, and so Single Bald Female, it is inspired by your real life but not based on your life. Exactly, yeah. So it's about a woman called Jess who is a magazine journalist. She's 31, she's in a very happy relationship living in a flat with the cat with her partner Johnny, and, um, she basically breaks up with Johnny and gets diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time., and it's about what happens after that. It's about the experience she has, the friends, the new friends she makes along the way, how it changes the way she feels about work, the way she feels about herself, her confidence. Um, she's also grieving the loss of her mother, and it's about, um, there's a storyline about baking and how she used to bake with her mother and how she's kind of given up baking. So it's really about this whole experience that she, she goes through after this double whammy of breakup and breast cancer. And I did— when you said that she split up with her partner, I remember reading that book, reading that part of the book, and I was just thinking, that's such a bold move. And I found it really inspiring and actually quite uplifting that she had the strength to not just go 'Oh, I've got to face something. I need somebody by my side,' regardless of whether it's the right or wrong relationship. I found that really empowering. Yeah, well, I think— I mean, I don't want to give too many spoilers away as to what happens with that relationship as well, but I think that in real life, being— going through something like cancer, you either want to be in a really, really good relationship or you want to be on your own. There is nothing worse than going through something awful like cancer or whatever it may be in the wrong relationship, because then you've got— I'm going to again, the double whammy of the burden of this bad relationship as well as what you're going through with cancer treatment. So yeah, that would be my advice to anyone diagnosed with a very serious illness, would be if you think you're in the wrong relationship, try and go it alone instead.