The Psychopath: A True Story(4)

THE PURGE

As per Mum’s wishes, and only two days after she died, I attended my first writing workshop at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The day after her funeral I went to the second of the workshops. It was a creative writing session attended by about twenty people, all sitting in a circle with notebooks in hand. The first exercise we had to do was to tell the others three things that had happened to us recently that we could write a story about. Each person said their piece and then it came to me.

‘Well, in April I found out my husband was a bigamist and a con man who actively impregnates women to rip them off for money; last week my mum died; and yesterday she set fire to Mortonhall Crematorium after her funeral.’

As you can imagine, the reaction was rather like I had set off a small explosion in the centre of the group and their shocked faces made me laugh out loud. I must have looked totally insane.

Then the next person said, ‘How on earth can I follow that?’

The third session I attended was a ‘Life Writing’ discussion, in which the literary agent Jenny Brown talked to a publisher about the sort of work they commissioned. During the session I asked a question and at the end I leapt out of my seat to catch the presenters before they left the theatre. I blurted out a quick summary of my story and they both gave me their cards asking to meet me for a further chat.

I met with Jenny Brown in a little café just near her offices. We sat down and I explained in detail what had happened. Jenny was brilliant and very encouraging. At first she said that I would need a ghostwriter as I had never written or published anything before but I explained that I wanted to tell the story in my own words and use any book I created to start a new life. She suggested I send her a chapter to see what she thought and her response when I did was lovely. She wrote, ‘Well, the one thing that is clear is that you don’t need a ghostwriter!’ It was very encouraging and boosted my confidence enormously.

The first publishers I met were bowled over by the story as well. We had one meeting and they offered me an advance. I found that fascinating – I was a complete unknown, and they had no idea if I could write, but the story was so extraordinary that it warranted paying me an advance to see if I could produce a book! If my mother could have been anything she wanted, she would have been an author, and for me to get a publishing deal only a month after she had died felt like honouring her. I was deeply sad that she was not alive to see that happen but I did feel that I was doing her proud.

So finally I set about putting down on paper what had happened and how. It was difficult to start with because all the thoughts would tumble and rush about in my head. It was like trying to find the end of a huge ball of tightly knotted spaghetti in my mind. There was too much noise and confusion. So I wrote the most recent and dramatic thing first – the phone call from the other wife and meeting her. Doing that freed up some space in my head, and loosened the knot. It let me find the end of another part of the story.

I got up every morning at 5 a.m. and wrote for two hours before the kids woke up. I got them up, breakfasted and off to school and nursery. Then I would go to a café for a few hours and write, pouring everything out into notebooks that I carried around with me everywhere.

That tangled ball of spaghetti in my head started to unravel and with each chapter I could see the situation more clearly. Each time I found the end of a thought and started to write it down it was like the spaghetti became words and lines on the page. Writing ordered the thoughts that had swirled around my befuddled head for years, solidifying them into something tangible – like Dumbledore, magically pulling memories out of my head and transferring them to a ‘pensieve’, Dumbledore’s magic basin for holding memories and thoughts, to free up space. It was a proactive healing process and incredibly cathartic. The more I wrote, the faster and more urgent the writing became, like I was purging the whole experience from my mind.

It took me just three months to write the first draft of the whole book because I was so driven to release it. Afterwards I felt liberated.

I had taken the first step and reclaimed my mind. That area of my life, my thought processes, were mine again and I was back in the driving seat. There was still a long road to full recovery but mentally I was now stronger and more in control.

Writing it down brought up questions though. Why had Will Jordan done what he had done? What reasons did he have for choosing me? And, more importantly, what made me vulnerable to him? I could see his actions and the reality of what my situation had been with more clarity after writing it down, but I couldn’t make sense of the ‘how’ or the ‘why’.

I have always believed in personal responsibility – a simple concept of looking at any situation from the perspective of your own actions. Put simply, you can’t change the past but you can learn from it; you also can’t change other people, but you can change yourself, and thereby affect how others around you act. Being personally responsible means choosing the ability to respond to any given situation based on your own actions. But that meant looking at my own actions and analysing what I had done (or not done) that had caused this to happen to me. What was it about me that showed Will Jordan that I was a target? How was it that I was so taken in by his charm that my natural defences were not raised, and I fell heavily in love, letting him into my head? What could I learn that would ensure I would never be victimised by someone like him again?