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Website of Kate Armstrong

I wrote 'The Storyteller' (Holland House, 2016). I'm writing my next novel.

‘The Storyteller’
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Life is feeling distinctly odd. This summer having gone as it’s gone, I’m currently back up at a dose of medication I was last on six years ago and I can feel it in every cell. I’m also unable to work full time: negotiations with my psychiatrist settled at half-time for the next month, which is enough to ensure distraction and that my colleagues are not left in the lurch, but which doesn’t push my brain past the level of activity I can sustain without dissociative collapse. (We hope so at least.) Here’s the oddness. Usually I either bounce back from my collapses absurdly fast (out of hospital one day, back in the office the next) or I find myself in deep despair that I will never re-emerge, never work again. This time external events have been too big, have come too closely on each other’s heels, for me just to bounce back. As has sometimes been the case before, it seems currently that I have nothing left to fight with: I’m done. Yet I’m not panicking I will be like this forever. I’m depressed, but in the physiological sense of having drained my nervous system, not cognitively, and not in the way I’m behaving. I have a friend who preaches radical acceptance of what is, however bad the situation may be. To my astonishment I seem to be in that place. And so to solutions. The road out of this hole must be gentle, but it also requires consistent effort. Despite the battering my pride is taking, I’m sticking to the limits at work. I’m going more regularly to support groups. I’m diligently taking exercise with the specific intention of raising my mood. I’m eating and sleeping in a balanced way on a clear schedule. None of that provides a magic wand. Frankly, it’s drudgery with no obvious gain; but it’s necessary. From where I am my brain is going to take time to settle again. The wonder is that over the past years I seem to have learned to take time and to take care. And so onwards we go - one day and one step at a time. #depression #mentalhealthawareness #selfcare #acceptance

Writing fiction I avoid having models: experience shows that what I produce is better when I actively eschew influence (as far as that is ever possible). Memoir seems to be different. I need help in wrangling my content. I need outside examples of achieved objectivity in order to find my own. So I’m tearing these four books apart - over and over again.

Something of a hiatus for the last few days. We’re currently holed up in Devon. A week ago we were in the hospital in Sallanches, reassured that what could have been a fatal climbing fall resulted only in twisted ligaments and a lot of bruises and scrapes (almost entirely not mine) - plus all the psychological ramifications of shock. It’s hard to have a more meaningful reaction. On one hand that’s two climbing accidents in six weeks, despite my never having been near one before. On the other hand, this accident (unlike the last) turned out roughly ok. In the context, the sea is reassuringly flat, and the cliff paths (on which I at least am able to go wandering) soft and gradual.

Well, I am unexpectedly down at sea level with energy for little other than reading. Last night was my first Agatha Christie, and also my last. Today brings an unread (by me) classic by a writer whom I love. One step at a time.

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Booker Prize Review: 4 3 2 1, by Paul Auster. (Am I the first?)

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Booker Prize Review: Autumn, by Ali Smith (Hmmm.)

Booker Prize Review: Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie. (Short and sweet.)

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