Memories of the Future

Letters of an examined life

Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when

anna wharton

and I discovered each other’s work we both thought: ‘now this is a woman I could sit down and chat for hours over a bottle of wine’. Yet geography – and the miles between us – made that impossible. So instead we committed to writing letters to one another, to discuss life, memoir, writing craft and more. And in this series, Memories of the Future: letters of an examined life, we will share those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.

I am publishing Letter #1 today, Anna will respond in Letter #2 on her own Substack (annawharton.substack.com) on Friday. We would love you, not only to follow our thoughts, but of course, add your own in the comments if what we are discussing resonates – perhaps your replies will make it into our letters too?

Letter #1

Dear Anna

Have you ever thought that we are all connected, that beneath the surface of things there is an innate pattern waiting to be discovered. It is only a matter of taking notice.

This week an image kept bubbling into my mind. It is of me standing in a kitchen in a house by the sea, my arms folded. My husband of the time is in this image but he is in the shadows and I cannot look at him. There is another person in the room too, a close friend: she stands beside me and her presence is bigger than his, than my children’s – who are there, but not there – than mine even. When recently I reminded her of this image, she said all she remembers from that holiday is that me and my husband took it in turns to go running, and she wondered what we were running from.

I had not thought about this holiday, this house, this moment, for many years, just as I do not often return to my marriage in my mind. I cannot easily think of the home we created together because it was the loveliest house that I ever lived in, and suddenly I had to leave. But memory has a strange way of appearing, of reminding us to stop and listen, of saying: what about this? And we as writers are inclined to stop and to dig. To return to see if the memory might teach us something.

I remember a photo on the wall. It is of a family. It’s on the corridor to the bedrooms which I recall being yellow or blue. The whole house it seemed was painted in yellow and blue, like a sailor’s outfit, like Petit Bateau. ‘We all stood at that photo and stared,’ my friend remembers. She and her husband, me with mine. Our four children at our thighs and knees. The photo is of a mother and father and two boys smiling to the camera. A family portrait. A unit. Intact. We could just about see the ghost of our curious faces reflected in the glass.

Their toothbrushes were left in the bathroom, a half-squeezed tube of toothpaste – the bed half made – as if they had suddenly got up and fled.

– ‘No, but you can stay at my friend’s house,’ my sister in law had said when we’d enquired if we could stay at their holiday home for the weekend. ‘But they recently had a horrific thing happen.’

The dad and one of his sons had been knocked from the hull of a boat and had been sucked under the propeller, the dad had survived but his son had not. Mostly, when I passed the photo in the corridor I tried not to look. I didn’t want to see the pain, the sudden loss, the horror of their son and the image of his body there and then not. The father had tried to save him and had failed. Imagine the images they had each time they closed their eyes.

The house was eerie and quiet, I recall, as if even the ghosts had left, or had they not been given a chance to stop? The toothpaste abandoned. A cushion out of place on the floor. There was only absence. A grey view out of the window. The air hanging between cold walls, untouched. The chill on our faces.

A perfect family axed. The house trembling under the weight of grief.

I stood against the counter, and I could not look at my husband, and he shrank back into the shadows. I don’t know where my children are in this image, they are voices in the distance, behind closed doors, circling echoes – or maybe I cannot hear them because they were not given a chance to speak. It is just me and him and it is absence. Just me and him and this chasm that neither of us are able to traverse.

I wonder now if this was the first time I realised it was over between us, that point of no return.

But I return to you Anna, a writer like me who is circling her memories, difficult parts of the past which most people choose not to visit. Our marriages, our husbands, the important but difficult relationships in our life. You have a child, too. Is it better, do you think, to fold those memories away, tucked and contained between two heavy linen sheets, or do we unwrap them, pressing out the creases, reading the imbedded wrinkles that hold stories in their design? Do we look closely with the conviction there is something greater beyond the experience of one person and someone they once loved? Do we allow ourselves to think it matters?

I’d love to hear of those memories that haunt you, and of what you feel about writing them down.

Love and solidarity, your pen pal, Lily