'Re-writing the hurt' (Jeanette Winterson)

Podcasts can fill me with dread because *sometimes* they are dull and you (often) can't fast-forward. I listened last night - lying down with my eyes closed - to a Jeanette Winterson podcast from 2012, it is a joy and delight. Her clarity and honesty soar and you could listen to her forever. She talks about 're-writing the hurt' in order to be able to cope with the narrative or the memory of what happened. On the writing of truth versus fiction she says she realised - with sadness - after Oranges are Not the Only Fruit that she had written a story that she 'could live with', the other was too painful, she 'could not survive it'. 

As I write slowly, slowly about my Pakistani father, often weeks, even months, with no writing - always thinking, though, always - I understand this more than ever: the stories we (re)write often make the truth bearable. I often say truth comes more easily through fiction. I think it's one reason I had to fictionalise my illness for The State of Me - the physical hell and wilderness of  this illness  -  being a political football, to hell with actual patients - is just too painful.

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I'm reading (non-fiction) The Upstairs Wife by Rafia Zakaria. It's beautifully written and the Partition elements resonate for me, particularly descriptions of Saddar in Karachi, as that is where my father's family migrated to from north India in late 1940s/early 1950s.

I'm also reading (fiction) Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, which is funny and clever and heartbreaking, told from the point of view of three polar bears, an unnamed grandmother/memoirist, her daughter Tosca (though Barbara, her trainer, narrates parts too), and Tosca's son Knut (based on the real Knut in Berlin Zoo). The memoirist polar bear starts off in the circus and when being trained to get up on hind-legs by appliance of heat says: 'I'd always thought it was the floor feeling pain - not me - so it was the floor that had to change - not me - to make the pain go away'.

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I watched Toni Erdmann on DVD a couple of weeks ago, very different, funny and quirky, if a little unsettling. It is three hours long though and I had to watch it in two parts, no big hardship. It doesn't feel long, and that is the main thing. And is a film that leaves you feeling happy.