INTERVIEW: Jade Angeles Fitton on writing Hermit

In advance of the publication of Into Being, about the transformative power of memoir, I am sharing the interviews that I did as part of my research ... this is the second

In this series of interviews I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves or their place in the world. I will also ask about how they navigate difficult territory for themselves and those they love, and what has shifted or changed as a result of this process. My findings from these interviews have formed the foundation of my research for INTO BEING: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform, which will be published by Manchester University Press on October 7th. You can pre oder it here:

My second interviewee is Jade Angeles Fitton, whose memoir Hermit (Penguin, 2023) follows her escape from an abusive relationship into a life of solitude, a chance for recovery and self reflection, but also to find liberation as a woman living alone. It is beautifully written, combining nature writing with research into why lesser known hermits have been drawn to a life of solitude through the centuries, but what I loved most about this memoir is the expansive quality of the writing. The chapters towards the end when Jade is in Lundy during the pandemic really draw the reader into the experience of living so simply and so cut off from the rest of the world. As Jade transforms through this experience, becoming one with the landscape that surrounds her, we as reader find ourselves transforming alongside her.

Jade Angeles Fitton is a writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Independent, Vogue, Times Literary Supplement, and The Financial Times. Her poetry has been published in a number of magazines including The Moth. She lives in rural Devon with David and Ghost Dog.

How did you land on your idea?

It was an organic and chaotic process. The idea came about through living it. I’d written a short piece for The Guardian about being a modern-day hermit while having the experience of living alone in remote locations and loving it. This meant I was interested in hermits and recluses and the question of where, if anywhere, I fitted in—I was always most interested in those, like myself, that didn’t fit the hermit archetype of ‘old man with beard in the woods’, I wanted to explore people on the fringes who had been overlooked by both recent and ancient history. But I hadn’t really planned on writing any more than that initial piece. A few people had told me my life was eccentric and would make an interesting book, but I wasn’t interested in writing personal narrative. If I’m completely honest, I wasn’t interested because I was scared. But a couple of years after that piece was published an agent got in touch having read my piece and asked to hear more about my story – his response was: this is a book! I dared myself to do it, and it evolved from there.

You were writing a novel when your agent got in touch, how did writing the memoir compare?

I had no undergraduate degree but was lucky to be accepted to do a Masters at London Metropolitan University. There, I studied creative non-fiction for a module and took to it like I couldn’t have imagined. My teacher, Anne Karpf, opened my eyes to how creative you can be with nonfiction. It requires a lot of skill and awareness, and a lot of objectivity to be able to write your story without it being self-pitying, self-aggrandising or boring (I don’t claim to always achieve this, but I always try). I do think starting a journal while I was living alone was pivotal in my appreciation of non-fiction. I just love writing about things that are actually happening or have actually happened and how deeply we can explore and inhabit those moments. My fiction always involved real-life events, but disguised; not hermits, but typically a lone woman living an isolated existence, or an isolated woman living on the peripheries of existence. With memoir you don’t have to transmogrify the experience but you do have to hold on tightly to that thread of experience and not get distracted by other tangents of your life. You can just write about what happened and lay it on the page. I began to appreciate that the art is in making that into an interesting or beautiful experience for the reader.

It takes a boldness and a preparedness to be honest and to expose yourself through writing personal narrative. In Hermit you’re balancing two very different things: the abusive relationship you were in, with this need to be solitary, although it feels essential to our understanding of the present day to know where you’d come from. Were they always part of the same story, or did they come at different stages in writing?

I initially did not want to write about the relationship at all. I knew it needed to be referenced, so the reader has some sense of where I was coming from and why I ended up living in a barn on my own, but I skimmed over it at first. In the first draft I hid behind the research, which probably made it quite boring. But my editor said that the reader has to understand why this experience of solitude was so powerful and so transformative for me in order for them to also feel it. My editor was such an important guide throughout. I wanted to do the best job I could, and the only way to do this was to open up. So I had to put myself in a position that made me incredibly uncomfortable. I’m a private person. I don’t like revealing my vulnerabilities, or exposing myself in any way at all, really. So it took a leap of faith for me to lay it on the line: this is my story, here it is.

To protect myself emotionally I had to remove the vulnerable part of myself while writing it—disconnect from it, which I think anyone who’s gone through a trauma develops a (slightly unhealthy) knack of. Someone suggested that maybe I didn’t have much sympathy for myself within that relationship, but personally I afford myself the sympathy I think I deserve and I’m still very frustrated with how blind I was, how I behaved and how I allowed myself to be manipulated for so long, and so I was writing it from a slightly critical point of view. I think, perhaps, the degree of compassion that I afford myself increases throughout the book as my behaviour towards myself improves.

Relationships like the one I had are infuriating to be around; I lost friends because of it. And I didn’t want to alienate readers. I was conscious of laying out the defining moments of the relationship and how those moments led to me being in this barn in the middle of nowhere—but no more than that. However, I found the editing of it, and having to keep going back to that point in my life, incredibly difficult. At one point during the edit I went out to buy some printing paper from a shop ten minutes away from where I live, and I ended up driving down to Cornwall to try and find the spot my grandmother’s ashes were scattered because I just needed to get away from it…and perhaps I wanted to be close to someone who knew me before all of this had happened.

Did this book feel necessary?

As a woman if you are on your own, you are commonly seen as worse off. If you don’t have a boyfriend or your friends around, or children, you’re seen as crazy or lonely, or sad. And if you’re single and you’re not with your friends then it’s as if you have somehow failed the sisterhood. But alone I was the happiest I’d ever been, and the more I researched I realised I wasn’t alone in feeling like this. I also really wanted to say ‘it’s okay to be left’. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be abandoned, to not be wanted—there’s a special kind of freedom to be found there. I wasn’t initially the heroine of my own story: I didn’t leave the relationship. I didn’t take charge of the situation. I stayed in it to the end, and I was left.

But I didn’t write it thinking ‘this is an important book’. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to write with authenticity. When someone close to me suggested writing this book might help other people I dodged the notion like a jinx. I worried that by simply having such an ambition I would be setting myself up to fail (I worry a lot!), but if it could happen by happy accident then that felt honest. After publication I did get messages, mostly from women, saying they related to the story and it had helped them. And that helped me accept that my experience was valid, which was something that had been denied to me at the time. It was also very moving to hear positive things from people who live a secluded life that is not necessarily of their own volition, and from those who’ve either felt ambivalent or ‘bad’ about their desire for reclusion.

Did your voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into your research?

The voice was always there. The first couple of pages in the published book are the first couple of pages I wrote. It was having the confidence to allow my voice to lead the story, rather than be led by research, and for my story to be the thread, then I could see where the research slotted in.

I get up very early to write before anyone else or anything else is conscious, and I write from a very instinctual place—it feels like an old part of me; it’s a more ego-less part of me and has no qualms about revealing embarrassing or shameful things about myself. Which can make living with the exposure of these revelations quite uncomfortable at times for the everyday me!

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

Very carefully. I had an obligation of love towards my family members. A duty to not put them through any more discomfort or pain than I felt was necessary to tell the story. I could have gone into more detail about my parents’ break-up and losing our family home, and the catastrophic aftershock, but it didn’t feel like it was vital to the story. I think the greatest display of love a writer can show is to keep other people’s secrets. To not even disguise them through fiction. Some things are sacred and, in my opinion, there are places you just don’t go. So I was very careful when it came to writing about people who are a part of the story but weren’t the main thread of the story. And I felt a big responsibility to do that.

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

I didn’t because I didn’t want people to have to read anything painful about me if it wasn’t going to get cleared through legal. But the only query the lawyer had was about my mum. They asked if she might sue me for writing that she took LSD and walking into Trinity College Chapel. Her response was: ‘No darling, won’t sue’ and I just copied and pasted her response. If only all resolutions could be that easy!

Once it was cleared, I showed the manuscript to people who were closest to me: my mum, my dad, my sister and my husband. But those were the only people I showed it to before proofs. Everyone was fine with it. My sister was amazing. I think it helped my sister understand me better; because I’m not ‘a talker’ sometimes people think I’m shutting them out. It’s been a difficult thing but also a good thing for the people I love. It’s opened up conversations.

I was very nervous about what my husband’s parents would think. They met me when I was really together and doing my Masters, which kind of felt like a fraudulent version of myself. I was terrified of them reading Hermit and seeing a different version of me. But they’ve been cheerleaders of the book. I’ve been accepted as the whole of me.

Did you write a proposal for this book, or did you write it in its entirety first? Did you sell it on proposal or the entire manuscript?

Yes, I wrote 10,000 word proposal. It took me about three months until I was happy with it. I was trying to find the balance of the personal and the universal, the research and my story, which I think I lost in the first draft. I lost a bit of confidence. I worked very hard on that proposal. But I also felt it was a big gamble. We made an exclusive submission to my editor at Hutchinson Heinemann. I was on Lundy by then.

Had you read much memoir before writing Hermit, and if so what about it appeals to you?

I had read some during the Masters. I read H is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald and The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot. And loved them both. Lady Sings The Blues by Billie Holiday is a masterpiece. A few others, such as Featherhood, by Charlie Gilmore. I’d had a raven chick called Rookie that I’d nurtured, and so I connected with that. The more I read, the more I like the form.

Most people have been through some kind of trauma, or lived through shame and humiliation, and they are such isolating feelings. You always think your experience is yours and yours alone and no one else will have gone through that, but I think the best memoirs are the ones that probably divulge a little bit too much, because that’s what makes it feel real and how people connect to it. I was so nervous handing out the proofs of Hermit to booksellers. I went to Dogberry & Finch, a bookshop in Okehampton, and it turned out Kate, the owner, had already received a proof and had read it already, and she said, ‘Everyone has a past’. I almost burst into tears.

There is a lot of research in your book – was it important to the way the narrative developed, ie, did it shift your understanding of events?

When I began my research, I realised there is often a pattern to our behaviours—I found that very moving, particularly my research into the ancient past. I really felt a connection with Saint Endelienta who came over from Wales and stopped off in Lundy, and loved the island so much she built her chapel before going off with her siblings to convert the unruly population of Devon and Cornwall. I could imagine going to this island hundreds of years ago and felt how little we’ve changed, the same fundamental parts of ourselves searching out the same things, just doing it by different roads. In recent history, the research with Sean Caton, the performance artist, being an ornamental hermit painted blue and his friend giving their audience psychedelics was fascinating. And his was an example of a story that would have otherwise been lost. Both Sean and Saint Endelienta were looking for the same thing: trying to get closer to what is intangible and no one can put into words, what we’re all searching for through different experiences.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

I instinctively protected myself by absenting my heart a bit. I went into it with bravado: ‘I’m fine. This won’t hurt me any more than it’s already hurt me.’ I didn’t have a therapist and didn’t feel the desire to talk to people about it. But then I became over-sensitive and would burst into tears over silly things like overcooking some lentils, and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to have a break’. Sometimes you just need to accept it’s going to be difficult. People say that writing a memoir will make you stronger. I assumed that would happen through the writing alone—this was naïve of me. Of course, to become stronger, you need to go through something difficult. Now, three months after publication, I feel more grounded and less afraid, less like the world is going to explode. I’ve done it. The pin has been pulled. Writing memoir is different from a lot of people’s jobs, but it is a job. Your emotions, your soul, are entangled in it, but you’ve still got to get up everyday and meet it— there is no other way.

Do you think personal narrative is a platform for exploring the unspeakable? Lifting the veil? Or even the unthinkable?

What’s always drawn me to writing is trying to access that place and feeling and experience, transforming a moment in time or a personal experience into something that has layers and is transcendental to a certain extent in regards to time, space, experience and emotion. That’s the magic of writing and of writing well. That’s why I’ve come to appreciate creative nonfiction, as it’s such a magical way to honour the experience of living. The best of creative nonfiction is alchemical. It transforms shit to gold.

When we write memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

Someone said to me, ‘You shouldn’t write your story because it defines you.’ And to a certain extent that might be true, but I choose to view it in a more optimistic way. I might choose to write this part of my story now, but the next book will be different, and everyone’s story continues to evolve. Writing is like the distillation of experience. If it were a stone, it would be quartz—the hardest most sparkling bits that are left after everything else is worn away. I tried to write about what it was to live through a particular experience. Soon, I hope to write about living through another experience, and then what is associated with me will expand.

In Hermit there are passages particularly in the later sections, where you write from within the experience of solitude, in an expansive and imaginary way which really draws the reader in, and I imagine reflected the way you were feeling – a kind of heightened awareness. Did you aim to write in this embodied way, or did it happen naturally? And what do you think are the benefits of writing in this way? Is the embodied writing a more welcoming space for the reader. Does it help them understand what you are feeling?

I hope so. I wanted to write Hermit from an unguarded position where I didn’t have to protect myself from the judgement of others. My mission there was to tune in to the island: be with it, and to feel it and see it, all its past and future. It’s a very liminal space. It’s a place of migration, the coming and going of boats and birds and waves. Writing from a place where you feel tuned in and turned on is probably the most exciting place. You’re trying to be a vessel through which you can transcribe and put into words the experience of being there and what that might have felt like for other people. It was the closest I’ve been to tripping without being on drugs, the closest I’ve got to experiencing time-travel. And I was obviously taking notes voraciously while I was there.

How did it feel when your book was first published? Were you prepared for those feelings?

I was very scared of it. I didn’t get my copy until a week or two before it was published. The physical book felt like a very big thing. I found it difficult to even look at initially, so I left it on the window seat so I’d have to walk past it and force myself to get used to its presence. It just felt too big for me. But when it was published, more than anything, it was a relief. I’d been waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning feeling terrified about it being out there, but once it was published the book became its own thing and I had to slowly let go. I’m separated from it now and I wish it well. I am ready for the next.