Starting a novel is easy when set aside starting a life. Putting aside the ‘when and where’ of conception and the decisions (or not) our parents make, just the fact that we are born knowing nothing and having to come to grips with the world from afresh puts writing a novel firmly in second place on the difficult list. Yet for the most part those very early years are wholly lost to us. Whatever we take in we imbibe, and remember merely chance glimpses of what are in fact years of sustained information. A brief face we recall when we were eighteen months old, a voice, a dog . . . who knows.
So much of those beginnings for all of us simply cannot be recalled but we now know what we are, who we are, depends upon those years. Unlike writing a novel where we can agonise over every sentence and change single words to effect, whatever our young years were they are fixed and unalterable. We actually don’t consciously think about them at all but our attitudes and many of our reactions to events taps into those experiences more than our adult conscious minds.
Dr Bruce Perry writes that those first three years lay down characteristics that take years of work to undo or redo (if they need to be) in the older child. A time when we are so simple and utterly vulnerable, is the time that can make us a saint or a psychotic.
Which is why sometimes the simplest written of all novels carries the greatest weight for in writing as in life, you must never overlook the forgotten.