MANY writers have a book-not-written, a literary pipe dream kept on the back burner till the time is right. But how many have a book they know they never want to write? This is how Jenni Fagan felt about her memoir Ootlin, the story of her life in the care system up to the age of 16. It’s a harrowing record of neglect and abuse and a fiercely powerful testament of survival.
It’s out this autumn after a year’s delay, and the story of its writing is almost as extraordinary as the story itself. When Fagan was 23, living alone in a tiny housing association flat suffering from what she now knows as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), she sat down to write “an extended suicide note”. Borrowing a typewriter from a neighbour, she wrote for 14 hours a day.
Then she locked the manuscript in a suitcase and vowed never to look at it again. Somehow, the act of doing so enabled her to continue. It freed her to write other things: books of poetry, her extraordinary first novel The Panopticon, for which she was selected as one of the Granta Best of the Young British Novelists in 2013, further acclaimed novels The Sunlight Pilgrims, Luckenbooth and Hex, an adaptation of The Panopticon for the National Theatre of Scotland, scripts for film and television.
Then came 2020, and Fagan fell dangerously ill with covid-19. “I was very ill for about 18 days and delirious for a chunk of that. I felt like I was going to die, and I thought - as you do in such moments - if I die at this point, what are the things I should have done that I’ve not done? I was also having a conversation with God, as you do in these times, whatever your version of God is, asking: what can I trade for my life? The answer was Ootlin.
“When I recovered I really wanted to backtrack. It was not cathartic, it was incredibly traumatising. Rewriting it was one of the worst things I’ve ever done in my life, and I did it through a global pandemic when I wasn’t seeing people and had long covid.
It has probably been the most difficult thing I will ever, ever do.” Having read Ootlin, I begin to understand why. Fagan was “born” into the care system; the decision to take her from her mother was made while she was still in the womb.
In her first seven years, she lived at 14 addresses, had her name changed four times. In 16 years, she had two adoptions, numerous foster placements, many short- and long-term stays in children’s homes and hostels, and suffered a catalogue of neglect, cruelty and abuse. She brings to the telling of this story all her considerable powers as a writer and it is devastating.
It’s also a damning indictment of a system meant to protect vulnerable young people. Throughout the book, danger signs are missed, key questions are left unasked. When Fagan finally got access to her social work files through the Freedom of Information Act, they were full of redactions.
Always, on her journey through the system, she was preceded by a story the professionals had written about her which identified her as the problem. But one is also aware of incredible strength, a bright spirit burning even through terrible circumstances. Almost from when she can hold a pencil, she was writing: poems, diaries, her version of her story in her voice.
There were books from the mobile library which offered glimpses of another kind of life. In her teens, she named her literary and artistic “parents” in place of the family she never had. “Had I not been able to imagine another life, had I not been able to imagine that the people who raised me were wrong in the messages they gave me about who I was, I would not be alive,” she says.
“I was terrified, but I had also survived things most people don’t. I knew that for me to continue in the world that I was in, I would have to give up my soul, and I wasn’t willing to do it. I was a very powerful young woman and I was able to leave care without that part of me being extinguished.
” Although she left school at 15 with no qualifications, she knew she could write. She took night classes in her twenties and, at the age of 30, enrolled at Greenwich University. Her degree was followed by an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and more recently a PhD in Edinburgh.
She excelled in all of them. The publication of The Panopticon felt like the arrival of a fully formed talent. Despite media interest in her story - particularly since the book is about a young woman in the care system - she never talked about it.
She wanted her literary work to stand on its own terms, not be pigeon-holed according to her personal experience. She is still concerned about how the story is told: it’s too easy, she says, to make somone sound like a victim. And Fagan is no victim.
The book she has written is fierce and angry, “more politically important than anything else I might write”. She has a PhD in the structures of society and she uses that knowledge to critique the systems in which she grew up - and within which we all live. “In the pandemic I was watching governments all over the world flex their muscles in ways that have been unprecedented in my lifetime.
People, maybe for the first time in their lives, were feeling helpless to a system that I very much recognised. I felt I had a unique viewpoint to offer as somebody who has studied what it means to be raised by government policy in a very specific and extreme way, and who has gone on to survive, develop a body of work, have a voice, have a platform. I feel there’s a moral obligation to be creating art that actually serves a purpose.
“Children in care don’t exist in a little bubble. We are all living within a policy-based, state-raised society, and we are all impacted by that. How the most vulnerable people in society are treated and what is seen as acceptable towards them will, at some point, potentially, be extended to you.
Looking at the structures of society and offering another way of considering them is a deeply political act and a deeply creative act. To me that’s what art is.” Jenni Fagan is at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 17 August at 4pm to talk about her new poetry collection, A Swan’s Neck on a Butcher Block, on 22 August at 6.
45pm to talk about Ootlin, and on 23 August at 3.30pm with New Zealand writer essa may ranapiri..
