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Background to the book by Vanessa Gorman
More than ten years ago I had
an idea to write a scrapbook which used many
forms to tell a story of love and spirituality
in our time. I began collecting articles and
essays, quotes and poems, the detritus of romantic
notions.
I have always loved reading memoir
and kept a haphazard journal of my own life
and thoughts. I fell in love at thirty-three
and began keeping a journal of life with my
partner Michael as we navigated our way through
the modern minefield of love and gender relations,
arguing about commitment versus freedom and
when or even if to have a baby (me desperately
for, him against). I eventually got pregnant
and then our baby daughter Layla died eight
hours after birth. In the months after her death
my journal became a kind of lifeline for me.
A place to put my deepest thoughts, emotions
and fears without worrying about judgment from
others.
Friends I eventually showed some
of my writing to, suggested I should try to
write a book. I put together a proposal and
Penguin gave me an advance and a deadline which
is the only way I could force myself to do it
with the delightful distraction of a toddler
underfoot. I found a family day care place for
two days and the wonderful Elizabeth came to
mind my son Raphael at home on the other afternoons
so I could write.
The book, Layla's Story-
A memoir of sex, love, loss and longing
chronicles a ten year period in my life both
before and after losing my daughter. Through
a scrapbook of narrative, letters, journal,
emails, poems, quotes, graphics and photos I
tell the story of falling in love with Michael,
terminating a pregnancy, leaving the city for
a seachange, arguing about the baby issue, getting
pregnant, losing the baby, the terrible grief
that followed, the redemption of having my son
and the joys of life with a new partner and
child.
To be frank I was also attempting
to write a self help book disguised as a memoir.
I have bought a few self help books over the
years but rarely finished them. A personal narrative
story struck me as a more interesting way to
share the process of coping with grief and healing
from loss.
Traditionally, losing a baby was
not seen as a big death, the assumption being
that you didn’t know that person therefore
it couldn’t hurt that much. So I suppose
I have been trying to describe the devastation
of this loss. How it shakes you to the very
core. How you discover new sides to yourself
(some of them dark and appalling). How to heal
and ways to find joy in your life again. And
of course it is another way to make meaning
from the devastation and celebrate Layla’s
short but powerful life. Ultimately, I wanted
it to be a transmission from one heart to another.
I began writing the book when
my son Raphael was 19 months old and wrote my
way through another pregnancy, nurturing both
babies in their creation. I worked on the editing
process for the first two months of my new daughter’s
life, trying to make my brain work through a
stew of tiredness.
People have asked me if it was
hard to write. Why relive this kind of pain?
Writing was a way of keeping her memory alive,
celebrating her short life. It was a way to
make sense of the loss and possibly give voice
to the pain we all share through bereavement.
Yes, parts of it were hard to write but it was
harder to live through. The writing in fact
helped me work through a lot of the grief and
begin to see it as ‘just a story’
- one of six billion stories on the planet.
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