Simple twists of fate

Now that I can look back on 64 years of it, life has turned out to be some­thing of an im­pro­vised sur­prise. For in­stance, I never ex­pected to have to deal with an at­tack of OCD at age four­teen that re­mained un­di­ag­nosed for six years and which has left me de­pen­dent on (mild) anx­i­olyt­ics. I never thought I would learn Dutch (my part­ner’s na­tive lan­guage) or half-live in the lake­side town of Bany­oles. I never imag­ined that I and well over a mil­lion other British res­i­dents in Eu­rope would be dis­en­fran­chised by a British ref­er­en­dum we weren’t al­lowed to vote in. I never thought I would be­come a fa­ther until I did. And so forth. But maybe the most un­pre­dictable thing of all has been the writ­ing. In my teens I churned out sev­eral turgid (and hap­pily un­pub­lish­able) short sto­ries, not to men­tion an equally un­pub­lish­able novel. In my early twen­ties I pub­lished a few ar­ti­cles and a cou­ple of sto­ries in an­ar­chist mag­a­zines in the UK at the same time as I built up a vast col­lec­tion of re­jec­tion slips from var­i­ous non-an­ar­chist pub­lish­ers and mag­a­zines, mainly be­cause my writ­ten voice in Eng­lish, and I knew it only too well, was stunted and weak for rea­sons that would take too long to ex­plain here. It stayed that way after I moved to Barcelona in 1984. Then, one day in 1989, I met a poet and desk­top pub­lisher who was launch­ing a se­ries of chap­books. He sug­gested I try to write some­thing for him in Cata­lan. When I did so, the prose felt freer and more lively than any­thing I’d ever done in my mother tongue. He pub­lished the re­sult and, a few years later, an en­tire novel. I went on to write a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries which won a fairly pres­ti­gious award, and that led to me being taken on by a major Barcelona-based pub­lisher, for whom I wrote a road book in the course of a 30-day jour­ney to those parts of Cat­alo­nia that I’d never vis­ited (and which un­ex­pect­edly made it onto the best-seller lists for a month or so). After that came an­other novel, an au­to­bi­og­ra­phy and seven books of non-fic­tion (all in Cata­lan). In 2006, I got an idea for a novel set in Eng­land and with mainly Eng­lish char­ac­ters, so I wrote it in Eng­lish; thanks to the dis­ci­pline of writ­ing in a sec­ond lan­guage for ten years, my writ­ten voice now sounded much stronger, at least to me and my agent, who got so frus­trated with what she called the ’snooty’ re­jec­tions from Eng­lish pub­lish­ers, that she pub­lished the book her­self. It got pos­i­tive re­views, mainly from Amer­i­can mag­a­zines. I went on to write five more nov­els in Eng­lish, all of which were re­jected in the UK, so, with my agent’s ap­proval, I fi­nally de­cided to self-pub­lish. Friends in Lon­don and Barcelona put me in touch with a pro­fes­sional proof­reader and a graphic de­signer ditto. The first of these nov­els got pos­i­tive re­views, also mainly in the US. I re­cently brought out the sec­ond one, which got the best re­views I’ve ever had, yet again mainly in the States (by the time you read this, I will still be cel­e­brat­ing). Every­thing - not just the writ­ing - has not only been com­pletely dif­fer­ent from any­thing I could have re­motely fore­seen half a cen­tury ago, but feels as if it has hap­pened to me by the purest of chances. Every­thing, per­haps, ex­cept for the name I chose as an im­print for my self-pub­lished books: Eng­land-Is-A-Bitch Pro­duc­tions.

opin­ion