The making of a book

A friend has just had her first book published. It's wonderful. I thought I'd tell you about it.

My friend was always an artist. From the moment I met her she was someone who did that for a living. Maybe the first I’d met.

I couldn’t get my head around it, it was so different to the world I was navigating in my 20s. She had commissions. The work was in the kind of places you spend a lot of time in as a young parent in London. Local parks and playgrounds, schools. Art in those spaces - public art - I later realised I found reassuring. Bright, colourful, bold, the kind of thing a small child notices and responds to, the kind of decor that draws you into the fabric of a place.

Public art says, there are people who came before you, and they knew you would need this. Public art is a community making itself felt.

Later my friend turned to teaching. She gets comprehensive school kids to make art. Helps them learn how to use materials to express themselves, how to speak in different mediums. Perhaps a few have found their voice because of her. 

My friend is is always making something. She always has a mosaic or an item of clothing or a quilt on the go. Some project or other. Art can be a job or a series of commissions, but it’s also a habit, a compulsion. Sit with her in front of a football match and the needlework comes out. The sketching for some new piece. I feel dowdy and distracted by comparison, like someone suddenly conscious they should have dressed better for a photograph - all potential and regret and nothing to show for either. It seems automatic in her, though of course that’s easy to say and not true. Work takes work. You need to squeeze in what matters along with everything else, squeeze out what gets in the way. It’s a matter of priorities.

Get started, then keep going. As easy and as impossible as that. I wish I was even a tenth as productive as she is. Hers is an eye honed through years of habitual practice. Her photographs of the holidays we’ve taken together, four families who first connected in that time of life before family, holed up in a European house, or a remote cottage, or camping, children counted in double figures now, are always the best. 

My friend is the only person who could persuade my wife to buy me a Dylan record. When Bowie died, it was her I texted first. This is who we are both attracted to. Artists with a compulsion. Who just kept going.

There is discourse of late about the unfair distinction between art and craft, which is really a distinction between fine and folk art, between the ‘important’ and the ‘domestic’, which is at some level a distinction between male and female expression. The Swedish have a word for the practice that blends this - konsthantverk. Thanks to my friend, I have quietly and matter-of-factly over 20 years osmotically come to understand the politics of this. Not that she had to explain it; the work spoke enough. The act was the statement is the philosophy. This kind of stitching - both figurative and literal - is a way to see and make sense of the world as valid as any. It is art that starts with the material of life, goes from there. It stitches life into art and vice versa.

Like me, my friend always read. Like me she started writing online - we had blogs at the same time, that early noughties moment, both of us thinking more clearly about what we were doing through the act of writing. We swapped and recommended books, of course. She was better than I was on current writers. Told me about Jennifer Egan and Kamila Shamsie, told me which music bios were worth getting. The older I get, I realise, the less I keep up. I’m behind on new books as well as music. The older I get the more I go on whispers and rumours and recommendations and serendipity. You will never win against the FOMO of the publishing calendar, but you can’t beat the unexpected find in a second-hand shop. The older I get the more I value the inherited, the discovered, acts of reclamation. 

Now my friend has written a book. A proper, actual book. It’s not, of course, a standard book. It is a graphic novel, a hand made thing. It is also a memoir - of a person, and in a way of the twentieth century. It is an act of reclamation, the ‘important’ as seen through the ‘domestic’. It is an act of inheritance and also an exploration of it, a writer finding their voice as they uncover their story. It is beautiful, layered, and collage-like, a book of found objects and remembered conversations and memories re-created. It is full of fragments and off-cuts and treasured keepsakes and forgotten details. Its title, Elena: A Hand Made Life, is perfect, because Elena’s life was an act of pragmatic self-determination, the life of a woman shaped by community and by the compulsion to simply keep going. It’s also a perfect title beause the art of Elena’s grand-daughter, my friend, the author of the book, is the product of a lifetime spent stitching, making, connecting, interpreting, seeing, rendering. She uses her art to draw you into the fabric of a life.

In a review in The Observer, Rachel Cooke said she’d like to wrap my friend’s book in brown paper and string and give a copy to everyone she knows. The love that went into and comes off this book is palpable, and infectious.

How heartening to know you don’t need to be the author’s friend to appreciate her art. 

You can order Elena: A Hand Made Life here. I hope you do.