OPENING STICKY CLOSET DOORS

We have a closet door that is always sticking. It’s the kind of closet where we shove in things that we don’t want to deal with, but can’t yet throw out. And part of the deal with the stickiness of this door is that you know its difficulty will make it even easier to keep closed and ignore what’s behind. To me, writing is about opening those kinds of sticky doors. The kind of doors your characters will do everything they can to convince you are not there. Closed closets, complete with wallpaper over the top.

More than ten years ago, Harold Fry stepped into my imagination and transformed my world. He had been around me since my father’s death. Writing about his journey to save his dying friend in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry helped me in some way to bear my own grief. He also helped me fulfill my deeply held longing to finish writing a book that someone might consider for publication. I have a lot to thank Harold for. And after that, he made his way, without me, into the minds of other people, who read his story and met him within their own imaginations. There were crazy times. Whistle-stop book tours that took me all over the world, including China. One day twenty Spanish journalists pitched up outside our house. But there were many quiet meetings, too. I am thinking now of a man I was introduced to who was staying in a shelter for the homeless where the book had been available as a free gift. This man warmly told me it was the best book he’d ever read. This was quickly qualified as being the only book he’d read. Followed by the fact that he hadn’t read it because he couldn’t. Other people from the shelter had told him the story, chapter by chapter, as he held the book in his hands. That was a gift. For me, I mean. When someone is so generous as to tell you why your story means something to them, it is as close as I come to understanding why I keep doing it. Why I keep trying to find the moment where the ordinary spills outward and acquires a more numinous quality, like a kind of halo.

When the book was first published, another reader, a very well-read woman this time, came up to me at a book-signing and said, “You do know this is a trilogy?” (Actually, what she said was, “You do know this is a triptych?”) In some ways, this was music to my ears. I was missing the characters so much, I felt sort of bereaved all over again. And I could see there were characters who had not been fully realized in Harold’s story because they could not be. But I also knew that I had no intention of doing what she was asking me to do. She pointed out that as far as Maureen—Harold’s difficult wife—was concerned, there was still, in effect, a closet door I had left closed. But the problem was that I shared Maureen’s point of view. I didn’t wish to open it. I wasn’t ready to face what Maureen has to face. I write about characters with a complexity I recognize I need to know better, but Maureen was a step too far.

What I did do was tackle the second book. I wrote The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy as a companion story, neither a sequel nor a prequel, but a free-standing novel you might read without having picked up the first one, or that you could—if you so desired—read side by side with Harold, finding little juxtapositions and echoes along the way. I had spoken a lot about Queenie when doing book events and signings, and it seemed right to give her a voice. Not just her back story—the story of how she came to be working in a brewery as an accountant in the first place. (Queenie was not a properly trained accountant, I always knew that.) There was the story of her friendship with David and how her unexpressed love for Harold drove her to a compromised place with his son. There was the story, too, of what happened to her after she left Harold. But the books and characters that interest me are those that challenge my own way of thinking—and here was an invitation to explore the world of the hospice where Queenie was dying, a world which had frightened my father when he was dying, and consequently frightened me, too.

So there. Queenie had been brought into the open. I had faced my own insecurities and misconceptions about the hospice. After that, I happily got on with other books, other characters, other questions and ideas.

But I left Maureen’s closet door closed.

And, mostly, I would say I got away with it.

Except I knew I hadn’t.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and, with it, lockdown. We all experienced what Maureen experiences when Harold begins his walk to Queenie: that sense of existing within the confines of the same four walls, that strange disabling of time and boundaries that occurs when routine is taken away and you are left alone with yourself. And I thought a lot about Maureen. I thought how grief and loss can become our identity, one that can keep us out on our own, not with the dead but not with the living either. I thought about how hard it is to move on without feeling deep down that you have betrayed the person you have lost. I thought about my own relationship with my father, and how, even fifteen years after his death, I had never really allowed myself to say goodbye. I realized I was ready to try to help Maureen make that difficult journey of reconciliation that she needs to make, alone and apart from Harold. I thought, if these characters are still so strongly in my mind, then why not write about them?

So here we pick up Harold and Maureen in 2022, ten years after the walk that changed Harold’s life, and Maureen’s, too. They have lived through the pandemic. Harold is at ease with himself. The walk has brought him a kind of peace. He and Maureen had been living in a kind of cold void, unable to talk about the terrible loss that left them estranged, and now they are able to reconnect. But even though their marriage has been healed by his walk, Maureen knows that something inside her still has not healed. She has not been out. She has not made that solitary journey into the unfamiliar. Besides, I felt I had set something up with Harold’s pilgrimage—something about the kindness, the beauty of strangers, I suppose—that I needed to test. To see if it was the same ten years later, given how much the world has changed. And the result is this book.

So my reader was right (as readers generally are). It was a trilogy, after all, and maybe even a triptych. This is the end of the journey for me and Harold and his wife, Maureen, and his old friend, Queenie, and it is the end, too, of the tragedy of the young man they loved, all three of them. The closets have been opened and we have looked at what was inside, and let it go. It was not so daunting, after all.

The moment I handed in the final draft of this book, I went into the garden and something happened. I saw—in the shadows of my imagination—a new set of characters, a new set of questions. It was as if they had been politely standing out of view for a long time, each with a suitcase—which is a kind of portable closet, after all—ready to talk to me as soon as I was ready.

So I kept gardening and I began to listen as new doors opened.

June 2022