Dropping The Mask, Setting Fire To The Persona

Last night I had my first book event in the UK in almost a decade. It felt a little like slipping on a pair of much-loved shoes, shoes that had disappeared in the back of the closet, shoes that felt utterly familiar, and at the same time, completely different.

It isn’t just that I’m talking about Rewilding, a memoir, my own life, but that I am a seismically different person to the woman who last sat in front of a crowd and talked about her latest book.

I write about the persona in Rewilding. About how I inhabited the persona of a glamorous, confident bestselling author for years, that the persona felt not only safe, but essential. It was easy to hide inside that sparkly persona, and the woman who was hiding was desperate to be loved. I stepped into the spotlight, sparkling, wanting so badly to be loved. Everything was a performance, and I did it well.

Last night was the first time I have appeared in front of a crowd without the persona. It wasn’t frightening, but did feel different. Rather than amuse, tell funny stories, try and be loved, I was entirely real. I was lucky in that I had a wonderful interviewer, the novelist Caroline Corcoran. We worked on the same magazine thirty years ago - More - and her journalism background showed. She hadn’t just read Rewilding, she had put real thought into the questions, into the small nuances that struck her, that had her thinking about it for days afterwards (you would be astonished at how many interviewers, whether in real life or for a podcast, don’t read the book. They read the publicity, watch a few interviews, then ask questions that are pertinent, but a little generic).

I was as honest as I have ever been, although in truth, I’ve always been honest, it has just always gone hand-in-hand with needing to be loved, and because I didn’t think the real me was loveable, I told those truths behind the sparkling persona.

There are other unexpected delights that come from dropping the constructs and being absolutely authentic. I have had a few dates recently with someone very lovely. I don’t know what will happen, but do know that right from the get-go, our conversations felt different, marked by honesty. I was past the flings and situationships, I told him; I was holding out for the big magic. It’s a little scary to be quite so revealing, to tell the truth to a romantic prospect, but, it very quickly gets rid of the ones who are not looking for the same thing.

He did not, in fact, run. Each time I told the truth, he asked more questions, revealed more of himself, both of us adjusting to what it’s like to be completely honest. And then he sent me a picture of his Saturday morning - he was stretched out on a sofa, a copy of Rewilding on his lap, which was ever so slightly terrifying. I wondered if he might disappear after discovering everything about me, and found myself slightly anxious all day, wondering what he would think. His response came that evening, having read the entire book in a day.