The books I was jealous of are memoirs. A doctor’s diaries. A barrister’s cases. They happened, and the writer was there, and that is why people trust them.
So the obvious thing was to write down what happened to me. I started. I stopped after about a page and a half.
Whose story it is
A doctor can write about a night on the ward and change the patient’s name. The patient was ill. It is not a secret that people get ill.
What I know about families, I know because a court or a council gave me the right to walk into their lives. They did not invite me. They told me things because they had to, on some of the worst days they will ever have.
Those stories are not mine. I was only in the room because of my job, and the job does not come with publication rights.
I could have changed the names. But a mother would know her own kitchen. A child, grown up, would know his own car. You can disguise a case from everybody except the people in it, and they are the only ones who matter.
What making it up allowed
Everything, as it turned out.
In a memoir I would have had to be careful. I would have left out the worst day and the best line, because somebody might be recognised. I would have been fair to everybody and the book would have been beige.
Because Billy is invented, I could follow him home. Because Jade is invented, she could say the thing that no parent has ever been able to say to me in a meeting, with a chair and an advocate and a time limit, and I could leave it unanswered on the page.
Because Maisie is invented, she could be worse at her job than I would like to admit to having been. She makes the mistakes. I got to watch.
Is it true, then?
Not one event in it happened.
All of it is what it is like. The meeting rooms are right. The forms are right. The feeling on a doorstep is right, and so is the feeling in the car afterwards. I have had a manager like Heather and a mentor like Ray, and I have sat in supervision and said “fine”.
I think of it as true the way a map is true. It is not the place, and nobody lives in it, but you can find your way with it.
What a novel can do that a report cannot
A report has to come to a view. It has to weigh what it has seen and say, on balance, what should happen. I have written a great many and I believe in them.
A novel does not have to decide. It can show a father who has done something terrible turning up on time, every fortnight, with a bag from McDonald’s, and it can refuse to tell you what to think about him. It can let you like him, and let you feel bad about that.
I could never put that in a court bundle, and it is the truest thing I know about the work.
Who I wrote it for
For whoever is in their first year, first.
Then for the people who love them, and have been told “I can’t talk about it” and have no way of knowing what it is they are not being told.
And for anybody who has been on the other side of the door. I do not expect you to forgive us. I did want you to know that some of us lie awake too.
The first entry is here, if you would like to see whether we get on.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: To the person who rang it in