Behind the story
Meanjin has just published a memoir piece that I wrote about my son, and it is the rawest and most personal piece of writing that I have ever published. ‘Untethered’ tells the story of how my 10 year old was discovered, by accident, to have an extremely rare and fatal asymptomatic congenital heart condition. So far as we know, he is the first person in Australia to be found alive with this condition. Usually children die, from the age of 10 onwards, while playing sport, having never known anything was wrong with their heart.
I’m not going to retell the story here; the Meanjin piece does that. Instead I want to talk about the writing process. As with all memoir, this is only one slice of the story. One year captured in 6000 words. My first draft was 10,000 words but I knew no one would publish it. So I pared it right back, and the piece is better for it.
I took it to my writers group. One writer said it was the best thing I’d ever written. Another made the astute observation that this was really the story of my heart, as I faced my son’s mortality and dealt with the grief of potentially losing him. He was right, though I hadn’t realised it. If my son were to write his own story — and perhaps one day he will — it would be different.
Readers often assume that writing about traumatic experiences is cathartic. This wasn’t. I wrote much of it while we were actually going through it. Reliving each scene on the page was painful. As I wrote, shaping every sentence, I often cried.