Flight: I Start to Date in London & Discover A Woman Writer “rejoicing fiercely in her aloneness"

Welcome to Flight, the memoir about my first year of traveling around Europe in search of a new life after leaving my old one as a professor, wife, and mother in New Orleans in 2022.

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Recap

It’s November 2022. I left home at the end of September. I’m staying in North London, near Hampstead Heath. Since I was in a big, English-speaking city, I decided to try my hand at dating (for the first time since my divorce) and created a profile on a dating app. My first couple of days on it were rather dispiriting. But as you’ll see in this next installment, things start to look up when I finally connect with a man who seems quite interesting, in the best kind of way.

ICYMI: You can read the last installment here:

The Commotion of Love

Part I

When I was in Paris, I did something I swore I wouldn’t do—I bought a book. As someone living out of a small suitcase and backpack for a year, I had no business walking into San Francisco Books, or browsing the shelves of small paperbacks, thinking, I could fit one or two into my backpack and hardly notice it.

I don’t remember why I pulled a tan, nondescript book from the shelf. There was a feather on the cover. The back said the book was too personal for the author to publish in her lifetime. What did she write that was so taboo? I’m a sucker for a mystery like that. Repressed stories, buried tales—they often seem to be by and about women.

I bought the book, stuffed it in my backpack, and the next day got on a train for the south of France. I almost forgot about it until I was packing to leave.

The author is Janet Frame, a New Zealand writer I’d never heard of. She wrote Towards Another Summer in 1963, and Virago published it three years after her death, in 2007. The blurb on the front calls it a “deeply personal novel of exile and loneliness.” The cover says, “Grace longs to find her place in the world, but first she must learn to be comfortable in her own skin, feathers and all.” No wonder I bought the book. (And have I mentioned that I LOVE birds?)

Most of all, I long for representations of rootless women like myself, to help me make sense of this need to fly away, to help me feel not so entirely alone in my flight.

On a gray morning, rain dripping on the windows, I start reading and discover that Grace, the protagonist, is a blocked writer living in London. She starts to feel like a migratory bird, sensing the pull of her New Zealand home.

I look up Janet Frame and learn that she lived in London for many years, but was hardly an exile. She was an expat. She chose to leave home.

So why call this a novel of “exile”? I suppose there is usually a tinge of exile in the life of an expat—that feeling of not belonging at home that forces you out into the world in search of someplace where you feel you belong.

I’ve long romanticized the idea of being an expat—preferably sitting at a sidewalk cafe with a pen and notebook in my hand, watching the world walk by and taking notes. It reminds me of the position of the poet that Walt Whitman described: both “in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

Grace is like that, living on her own, living in the world of her writing, fretting over an invitation to the country and imagining herself as a bird. She awakes and feels feathers growing, feathers she needs for her flight home.

I wonder if I’m migrating, in a way, back to England. It feels like it could be an almost-forgotten home.

It’s clear that Grace is becoming confused about which place is home—New Zealand or England. She tells a man interviewing her, “This is my home now.” He presses her. Doesn’t she want to go back? It’s so much more beautiful there.

Soon Grace doesn’t know where she is or where she is going: “I’m not there. I’m nowhere.”

#

I’m not writing much, because I'm in London and there is so much to do and see. And I don’t really want to be so out of the game.

I spend my days on the Tube, visiting museums and historic homes, and walking on Hampstead Heath.

When I pause for lunch or coffee, I get out my phone and open the dating app. I swipe and swipe and swipe.

Elliot: Three selfies, all staring into the mirror. No smile in any of them. Looks like he’s pissed off, in fact. Yet he describes himself as “Funny, happy, romantic at heart.”

Charlie: One photo, holding three puppies and kitten. “Am a loving and kindhearted man looking for a good partner that am going to spend my life with forever.” And ever and ever.

Ben: Eight pictures, all wearing sunglasses. Is he in the MI-6 or a witness protection program? His entire profile: “Not sure what to put here will fill in later.”

Neo: Photoshopped picture, overlaid with aquarium full of tropical fish. “Boy looking for girl.”

D: In every picture he’s posed with a (different) beautiful woman. “Irish, non-vanilla, BS-free, adventurous man seeks happy, optimistic woman with a great sense of humour and a cracking bum :)”

Mike: “METAL HEAD.”

This is getting depressing.

#

Reading Towards Another Summer, Grace’s painful sense of alienation seeps into me. Being a bird captures not only her feeling of homesickness, but also her difference, as a writer, from everyone around her.

At first, she is relieved to discover her “true identity” as a bird. “For so long she had felt not-human, yet had been unable to move towards an alternative species.” Her writing flourishes. She can enter into her story and characters more easily. The door of the world shut behind her, people gone, “rejoicing fiercely in her aloneness, she is anything now, nothing human.”

I wonder if Dora ever rejoiced fiercely in her aloneness? My friend Patricia, the one who told me about the dating app, seems to. Like Grace, she is also a writer. “I don’t have the energy for a man anymore,” she told me. “They take too much. And I have so many things left to write.”

Utterly happy to live in this chaotic realm of creation, Grace wonders, “Whatever moored me?” She has ascended so far beyond earth that she no longer sees the people, the animals, or “commotions of love” down below. Yet, when she wakes, she is confused. “Which world do I inhabit?”

It seems as if all would be well were it not for an insistent invitation from the critic who has interviewed her to join him and his family in the country for a weekend. He pulls her out of her writer’s identity and into the “commotions” of family life. The idea of sharing their house paralyzes her. She imagines not knowing when to get up in the morning, what to talk about, or how to tell them that she is a bird. What will they say?

The idea of going into the country for the weekend and the idea of journeying all the way back to New Zealand have collided. “Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world.”

This “secret safe inner world” reminds me of Dora Maar’s secret self—these sanctuaries that seem to be their only true refuges—inviolable places, where creation happens.

As I read about Grace, transfixed by her creative flights, I wonder what it takes to sustain a creative life. Seclusion, certainly, but also alienation? Transformation into a bird? What happens if you live in that secret place too long? Could you perhaps dip in and out and still have love in your life? Because it’s got to be lonely there. Or does “the commotion of love” pull you too far out of it?

This is what I want to know: Can I have love and writing, the two things I want most?

#

I want to be in the “commotion of love.” Its messiness and unpredictability. I want it to run over me—but not crush me. I want the weight of it.

I want to feel a man’s body on top of mine. I want to be held but not trapped.

I want to figure out what I’m looking for. It’s going to take some trial and error. Lots of error, probably. Lots of trying and failing and fucking things up. Then maybe one day I will turn over the right stone. Or at least a stone with something alive underneath it.

#

Sean: Selfie of his mole-covered back in the mirror. “Kind, normal, intelligent bloke looking for my partner in crime.”

Jade: “Mind of an Angel, body of a Human, and a heart of Glass.”

Luca: “BDSM BONDAGE LFR KINKY SUBMISSION” . . .

Andy: Pictures standing in front of a motorcycle, in the cockpit of a plane, and on top of a mountain. “Financially secure with own house, car, teeth etc.” (Are we getting so old we have to say whether we have our own teeth?)

Gareth: His profile begins: “I am a human being. If you’re also a human being that’s really good start!!” Only photo: selfie taken on the beach, showing body from head down.

Lonely Traveler: No pictures of him, just a sunset. “I’ll be in Portsmouth from Nov. 5-19. We live only once . . .”

Peter: A picture of his (someone’s?) bookshelves. That’s new. Mostly novels—Elinor Oliphant, Franzen, Huxley, Dickens. But then, a picture of him straddling a motorcycle. Is he intentionally mixing genres? Or just trying to cast his net as widely as possible?

Jesus, can I just find a smart, interesting guy who doesn’t make me wonder what awful experiment has been done on the male half of the species?

#

I look up Janet Frame’s biography. I learn that her mind, her “secret safe inner world,” was nearly taken from her during the decade she was hospitalized on and off in a psychiatric ward in New Zealand with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She endured extensive rounds of electro-shock therapy. Writing saved her, and not just figuratively. When her first book was published and won a major literary award, her doctors canceled a scheduled lobotomy.

Later, in London, she was told that she was not schizophrenic. She felt a certain loss, not having a name for what set her apart. She had always felt cut off from others, alone in her difference.

Janet Frame left no instructions for the publication of Towards Another Summer. It was an “embarrassingly personal” book, she once wrote. She was Grace, Grace was her, and the weekend stay was a real event with real people. I imagine the novel was too revelatory of her secret self. Yet she left two neatly bound manuscripts in two separate locations. Her executors took that as a sign that she wanted it to be published after her death.

Not long after writing Toward Another Summer, she did migrate back to New Zealand, and she stayed for the rest of her life, traveling often to England and the U.S., publishing prolifically and winning every literary award in her home country. She was a national treasure and was shortlisted more than once for the Nobel Prize.

According to her literary trust, she chose not to marry and live a conventional life. She resisted the idea that she was “crazy” for choosing solitude and “her ‘own world’—her writing.” She rarely appeared in public events, which contributed to the idea that she was mentally unstable.

When men like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon retreat from the world, they are geniuses. When women do, like Janet Frame and Dora Maar, they are called crazy.

When she died in 2004, obituary headlines identified her as “Reclusive Writer Janet Frame” or “Reclusive, but World-Renowned, Writer.” What if they had said instead, “Writer Jane Frame, Who Rejoiced Fiercely in Her Solitude”?

#

I get strange messages from men. Things like, Hello (and nothing else), or Hi, how’s your evening going? (as if we already know each other and they can’t think of anything else to say). When I respond, which is not always, they answer my questions without asking any in return.

One guy, who appears to be French, begins, Are you as beautiful inside as you are outside? Followed by a slew of roses and heart emojis. It’s nice to hear someone say I’m beautiful. But clearly he’s insane.

Then just before bed, I get a message from a guy named Daniel.

Thank you for reading! Next time—surprise, surprise—I go on a date! And as I read the rest of Towards Another Summer, I’m led into an intriguing episode in Janet Frame’s life. Turns out she did experience “the commotion of love.”

I love hearing from you, as always. Do share your thoughts in the comments.

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Until next time,

Anne

Want to learn more about me? You can get the full overview of my story here: