Biographies,
memoirs,
where to begin...
I like to write and I like to make something beautiful with my words. I write about me mainly, partly because I do not have the wide exciting imagination so many other people have. I write about things many people have not experienced; about having a nurse follow me wherever I go for week after week, or skiing over frozen Lakes, sitting becalmed in Mid Atlantic, about living in a reality no one else does. I also write about things that we all experience or at least I hope some of us experience some of this; falling in love when you have given up on love, walking on the beach at dawn, listening to the crows across the road; trying to hold it together when the twins are having a terrible tantrum and lastly witnessing the death of people I love and learning so much from them and the people who loved them.
Feathers in My Soul
My first memoir. It was about the sea and beaches and rocks and life and published by Chipmunka Publishing. I will be honest here. It could have been a good book but was published at what should have been the first of many drafts. I really would only recommend reading it if you have a stomach for bad grammar and really, really want to know more about my life when I was growing up.
Start
Start and is published by Fledgling Press; this I am truly delighted with. do look further at the extract provided and at its reviews here.
This biography does not gloss over or glamorise mental illness, instead it highlights that people can, and do, live full and positive lives.
I take you through my recollections of detention under the Mental Health act, learning to live with a new family, and coping with the symptoms that I still struggles to accept are an illness. You will read about my preparations to address the United Nations in my role working with the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland.
Start is available from Amazon and major book retailers.
Blackbird Singing
Blackbird Singing is a continuation of those years in START, it tells tales of some of the things that have happened to Graham since START was published.
It is a musing, a meandering through real life. It is not about drama, although there is drama. It is not about devastation, although there is devastation. This is a book about living, about understanding, about learning, about growing, about love and also grief; about summers walking the dog by the sea and winters when we are too tired to think.
It is about answering the alarm when the world is so surreal and dark that school and work seem like an absurdity and because it is Graham, it is about the world of mental illness and compulsory treatment and trying to live a normal life when everyone says there is no such thing as normal.
...the future
I am working on another book: at the moment it is called: Blackbird Singing; a diary of beginnings and endings. It is about life with a brand new family when I am already approaching old age. But more than that, it is set over the last few years of my Partner’s father’s death from prostate cancer. It is pretty much finished. I am busy finding out if it is worth publishing, I will let you know as the months go by.
I also want to write another book; well I have loads of books I want to write! But the one I can see looming but looming brightly, is the one about my Dad. He was very different to me; had an exciting life of flying jet fighters, running businesses, going ocean racing. He wrote a memoir too, I am inclined to write using that as well as talking about my own complex memories of a lovely man who died just a short time ago.