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One of the forms of love I've found in these conversations is in purpose or creativity. I used to think this was about leaving something behind, a thing that would outlive you. But as I listened to Sheila Heti reflect on writing as a way of loving people she had never met, and to this week's guest Sara Collins talk about it as “a reciprocal exchange of that acknowledgement that we’re here, travelling this Earth together,” I understood it differently. Not just as an opportunity to leave a mark on the world, but to find another way to connect to the people in it. To say, as Sara does below, “This is what it means, this is how it feels, do you feel it too?”
Like any form of love, though, fulfilling purpose requires time. I am still figuring out how to be a loving friend, partner, sister, mother and daughter, while also pursuing my ambitions to read and write. All I know is that, like Sara, I don’t want to leave this life without having tried to love as widely as possible, even if that is likely to be a messy process. I found her honesty on this topic, and on the need to short-change different forms of love at different points, so reassuring, and I hope you do too.
A former lawyer, Sara is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a novel Margaret Atwood described as 'deep-diving, elegant...Wide Sargasso Sea meets Beloved meets Alias Grace.' In a year when looking for a romantic relationship might feel difficult, I also wanted to ask her what it felt like to fall in love again after a divorce when she least expected to, and about first love, friendship and bringing two families together.
NL: You once said that writing requires a little selfishness. I was grateful for your honesty about that, because I’ve found that when you write you do have to be absent from people you love, and I’m still figuring out where the line is between how much absence my relationships can withstand and how much they benefit from. Given you have five children and a prolific writing career, is that a struggle for you too?
SC: Yes. Part of the reason I am honest about this is because if my family read interviews in which I pretended things were other than they are, they would jump on it straight away. It’s just not the case that you can devote yourself wholeheartedly to any kind of career - particularly a creative one - and then still give love in its complete form to the people that need to be loved in your life, including yourself. Step one is that we must be honest about that. I am old enough to be fed up of the myth that women can have it all. I think if you’re fortunate enough, which I have been, to be in a position where you can do one thing at a time, it’s always better. That doesn’t necessarily mean giving up work - although I did - but it means sometimes short-changing work to love yourself or your children or your partner. Sometimes work takes a back seat to that. I didn’t do anything for a long period of time when I focused on loving my children, and I can only hope that that period of time means that they will forgive me now. It’s not that I focus less on loving them; I love them the same, but I focus less on actively loving them. And I think that might be okay, because they are older now and need me less. So I can finally be selfish. But anyone who tells you that it doesn’t require a bit of selfishness to produce a novel, or a certain kind of art — the kind that requires obsession — is fooling themselves or fooling you. I’ve had to make my peace with that, and I hope my family will too.
The way you describe that period of investing more time with your kids when they were younger so that your relationship can withstand absence now reminds me of friendship. Because although it makes me sad that I’ve lost an everyday intimacy with friends who now live far away, I am hoping that the foundations we built when we shared every inch of our lives might sustain the love when we can’t see each other as much.
That’s a good comparison, because the feelings of love will always be there, but the time you spend demonstrating the love, or acting on it, will have to shift depending on where you are in your relationships and your life. The trick is making sure to engage in the relationships when they are most necessary and productive, in order to be able to manage it all. But I’ve never seen myself as someone who could get to the end of my life without having tried to do it all. I wasn’t going to feel fulfilled if I had just been an excellent mother, but I wasn’t going to feel fulfilled if I had just been a published writer either. And you’re right, the other loving relationships in my life are longstanding friendships, and I don’t think some of those survived the writing. It’s hard for me to admit that. It’s something that I put to the back of my mind, but there are friends who did not understand why I was suddenly less available. I’ve learned my lesson now, which is to communicate my disappearance better. You do have to try to calibrate the time you spend on those relationships, to come back to them when you can so that they can sustain themselves when you’re unable to be there.
Do you think writing is a form of love in your life, or is it more that it helps you access self-love and what you desire outside of a relationship with anyone else?
For me, art is the deepest form of love for life and a way of expressing that. This is going to sound weird, because I describe it as the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s also an exuberant recognition of how marvellous it is to be alive. It’s a reciprocal exchange of that acknowledgement that we’re here, travelling this Earth together. It’s a way of saying: this is what it means, this is how it feels, do you feel it too? That’s a form of love; a love for all of humanity. It’s a love that spreads its arms very, very wide, I feel.
When I was trying to write my book I was struck by the similarities between loving and writing: the need to be vulnerable, to locate truth, to expose yourself, to be disciplined, to try to be seen and to see others.
It’s a wonderful analogy, writing and love. The requirements for honesty make love uncomfortable at times, because it requires this painful [process of] looking in the mirror. You have to examine yourself and what you’re offering to others. Love is not a one-way street. It requires honesty about things you might not want to recognise, which is the same for writing. If you’re anything like me, you could resist that. Most of us resist the deepest layers of self-understanding, for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is protection. It can be painful to face certain truths about yourself. But the project of living a meaningful life is if you can be self-aware enough to do that, and then to adjust your behaviour with other people accordingly. That leads to the most fulfilling relationships.
I think I had a similar situation to you with my first love, because we met around 13 but I kept circling back to it until I was around 29, for around 16 years. How old were you when you met your first husband?
Your story is similar to mine. I was 17. It was the summer before I went to university and it was my first serious feeling. It wasn’t love at first sight, obviously, but I must have convinced myself it was. I feel it’s different for this generation. They don’t have to commit themselves to the first person, they can go out and have fun and then leave the serious stuff until they feel ready for it. But I was always very serious. My notion of the world was built largely from books, rather than experience. All of that contributed to me, like you, returning to that first love. By the time we got married at 27 we already had one child, and then we had our second. We are now good friends and our youngest is 19, so it worked out as it was meant to. It was a road I had to take to understand myself more and also to have those girls. For that I’m very grateful.
There are people, including my parents, who have successful long-term relationships with their childhood sweethearts, but I took a long time to understand myself and to grow up. I now think I needed to do both things outside of a romantic relationship, on my own, even though I resisted that.
I think it was the same for me. There are some people who know themselves and settle early on into the life they want, so they don’t change significantly, whereas I am so different now. I’ve completely turned away from what it was I thought I was heading for in my 20s. I always think about my children this way too: they’re not the children they were when they were five or ten. There’s a sense of mourning as they grow up, because you lose those older versions of them, but as I get older I realise I’ve lost versions of myself too.
After your divorce, when you started dating your husband Iain, did you introduce your children? Or did you keep your romantic relationship separate?
The kids met early on. They sort of knew each other because my husband and I met at work when we were both married to other people, not in an affair way, just in a colleagues way. We kind of knew each other and our spouses in that sort of tangential way that you know people at work. Then he became a widower around about the same time I became divorced. He is also a lawyer and we were the only single parents in the firm, living the same life in a way. That’s when we became friends. It was a friendship that, with hindsight, probably was heading that way, but we honestly didn’t see it. In my first romantic moment with my husband my internal dialogue was, But this is Iain from work. This is so strange. It took a while to quiet that inner voice.
Was there something wonderful about falling in love at a point when you both knew who you were and what you wanted? I imagine it’s different to dating in your 20s when you’re still figuring out who you are.
Definitely, and you appreciate love more when you worry not going to get a second chance and then you do. After I got divorced I remember saying to my close friend, “That’s it for me. I’m not interested in any relationships unless…,” and I had this long, impossible list. It was almost like I developed the list because I knew there would never be one man who would meet all the criteria. He had to be at least as successful as me, he had to have his own children and not want any more, blah, blah, blah. I might even have put, “a lawyer, so he understands that I have to work all the time.” Minute details like that. And then he came along.
Was there a moment when the idea of meeting someone new felt impossible?
Absolutely. It’s the same thing I say to people who feel it’s impossible to write a novel: so many people who have written a novel and so many people who have fallen in love a second time also felt that way. There I was, in my early thirties, closing the door on a relationship. I distinctly remember saying to a friend, “I’m resigning myself to being a single parent without any hope of romantic love”. I had low self-esteem, which is something I only realise now. I was also a single parent, which can make you think, Who would want to date me? I don’t think it’s true that the right person would be put off by that, but you can feel that way. So I did think, It won’t happen. But it wasn’t long after that that Iain and I started dating.
When you fell in love you merged two families. What have you learnt about how to do that? Because you seem to have done it so well.
Yes, though not without challenges. I don’t want people to think it was easy. Some of my children lost their mum, so I was very sensitive to that and aware of how difficult it was for them. The only rule of thumb I had was, if it had been me, how would I want a new mum to treat my children? That’s all you can do. But it’s still difficult if you’ve been single parents for a while and the kids are used to having their parent to themselves. Suddenly they have to share them, which is not easy. I think the recipes for success are if everyone wants happiness. It helps if the kids like each other and you’re not forcing them to, and if they have good relationships with their own parents. Having said that, it is still more difficult than a relationship where you don’t have to think about anyone but the two of you. It’s not like normal dating — and it shouldn’t be. If it feels like normal dating then you’re being selfish about it. I did not always get it right and you have to be prepared to ask for forgiveness when you make mistakes. Also, each of my kids lost something. Some lost their exclusive relationship with their dad, others lost their exclusive relationship with me. For all that we gained — and we gained a lot — these are relationships that start with loss: either bereavement or divorce. You’re trying to make something good in spite of that.
I know you and Iain have been together for 14 years. In that time what have you learnt about sustaining a loving relationship?
I was a baby in relationships before this, including my first marriage. I used to be obsessed with a Mills & Boon type romance, and the idea that love was chasing a high all the time. The challenge of making love last is to find the high in friendship, then connection in surmounting obstacles together, and in the mundane moments too. No one writes about the small compromises you have to make to keep a relationship going. But what you discover is how fulfilling it can be to feel secure. To feel you have someone’s back and they have yours; to feel you’ve built something together; to feel like family. When you feel connected to someone you’ve chosen to love that is a more wonderful feeling, but it’s harder to write about. The one thing you need in a narrative is tension, but you don’t need that in an actual love story. We’re addicted to that, I think, and we try to replicate the feeling. It’s a destructive trap a lot of us fall into.
When you were talking about your novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton, you said that the idea behind it was that love is transcendent in the face of everything else, and that includes self-love. Frannie goes through very difficult experiences, so did you mean that love can help us transcend even the worst things that happen?
Yes, and it’s important that you mention self-love. Sometimes that might be our only quota of love, but it is more than enough. You cannot control the quality of someone else’s love for you, you can only control the quality of your love for yourself. Everything else depends on luck and other people. Frannie was coming to terms with that fact: she could love herself and that would be enough.
What do you wish you’d known about love?
That it doesn’t always last. That you can adjust to the different forms it takes and phases it goes through without feeling like you’ve lost something. Not everyone you love will necessarily be someone you love forever — and that’s okay.
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