HOW I CAME TO WRITE LOVE AFFAIR

I spent an afternoon with my friend Gail Rebuck. It was a Bank Holiday in London – a lovely lazy day. Light poured through the huge first floor windows of her Regents Park home. Twenty-five years ago, Gail was my first editor at Century. Now she is Chairman of Random House in the UK. That day, she uttered seven fateful words: “Leslie, you need to write a memoir.”

“A memoir?”

“It will be the bridge between the work you have done so far and what you will do in the future. It’s the only way you can reach people from the depth of who you are, with what you’ve learned from all that’s happened to you.”

“I could never write a memoir, Gail,” I said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin. Besides, if I were to tell the truth about my early life, nobody would believe it and the tabloid press would have a field day with it.”

“So what? We live in a tabloid world. Look at it this way: That will only mean that more people get to read it. Then maybe more lives will be transformed by what you have lived out and learned to heal.”

“I can’t imagine being able to write such a book.”

“Think about it.”

“OK .”

We left it at that. I went away with the words “no way” on my mind. I was in a mild state of shock that Gail could make such a suggestion, given the strange nature of my past and the horrors that ensued from it – horrors I have spent much of my life trying to clear. But I had made a promise to think about it and I would.

I decided to ask my two closest friends what they thought. “Gail thinks I should write a memoir,” I told them. “The very thought of it terrifies me. I don’t think I can. Besides, why should I go back and unearth all the traumas to tell my story? I am not even sure I’d survive the process. What do you think?” The response from each of them was immediate and clear: “Do it.”

Two weeks later, after much soul searching, I decided that these three people, for whom I had much respect and affection, were right. I rang Gail. “You’re right about my writing that book,” I said. “I want to call it Love Affair.”

Originally I thought - rather naively - that I could write this book in six months. In the end it took me more than four years during which I literally retreated into my home behind a walled garden and plunged the depths. What a passage.

From such beginnings this book was born. I had little idea that day, where the writing of it would take me. Often we think we have ‘handled’ challenges in our life. Then we find ourselves doing the same stupid things over and over again. I certainly have. And wonder why. Why does one or another part of our life never seem to come right? Why do we feel helpless to change that?

Or maybe we have come to a place of relative comfort, as I had. We have wonderful friends and loving family, and many blessings to celebrate. Without ever articulating it – even to myself – I had come to feel that, like a magic carpet on which I could ride, the good life I had created would continue to keep me safe forever. Then something unexpected occurs – maybe somebody dies or flashes of long forgotten memories come to the surface, or perhaps we get sick or badly injured. Suddenly the “magic carpet” is ripped out from under us. We find ourselves tumbling through the sky and we wonder – with a strange detachment – if it is going to kill us.

In my case, it was not just revisiting lost memories that brought such things to the surface when I began to write Love Affair. Something mysterious within me had awakened. I could not name it but it seemed to be present with me day and night. An unseen threat? A benevolent guide? A dark shadow from my past? I didn’t know.

When my work on this book began, I did not realize I had access to masses of research materials, inherited on the deaths of my father, my mother, their parents and our ancestors before them. I had never looked at most of them: Diaries, medical records, itineraries, thousands of photographs, dozens of reels of 8mm and 16mm film documenting my family’s lives and revealing much about my parents and their ancestors – especially on my father’s side. Some had only come into my hands two years before when, as a consequence of a step-father’s death, my mother’s private papers, personal notes, books and journals were sent to me by his lawyers.

Letters, many yellow at the edges, had been dutifully stuffed back into envelopes after having been opened. They were tied with string or held together by rubber bands long past their use-by-date. When I tried to slide them off, some disintegrated in my hands. Some written long before I was born told of frustration, love, excitement and despair in the lives of those who wrote them.

The papers, including the letters, were often so descriptive that, together with my father’s itineraries, and the reports of dozens of people whom I interviewed for the book, the task of pinpointing when and where various events took place turned out to be easier than I had anticipated. I began by reading and dating them according to the postmark. Going through all these materials took me back more than a century, plunging me into another time, another world. As I read, vivid memories began to surface – smells and sounds, fragments of events and places. Slowly I began to pull them together. I felt like I was trying to mend a broken mirror or staring at the jumbled pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Gradually, I began to gaze into that jigsaw puzzle, then to live in it. As this happened, my whole life was turned upside down. I had looked on the task of writing this book as a mechanical process of gathering together intricate and demanding information, creating a certain order out of it all, and producing a narrative of events telling what had happened to me and my family. The more I came to live in this broken-mirror-world, the more I came face to face with the shattered depths of my own life and the lives of others who make up this story – my parents, their parents before them and back and back. Intricate patterns emerged – variations on bloodline themes – as one generation gave birth to the next. They were unmistakable.

If I have learned only one thing from the years I lived between my birth and my father’s death it is this: We are, each of us, perpetrator and victim: the rapist and the raped, the torturer and the tortured. For us to become who, at the core of our being, we truly are, we must be willing to dive deep into our own darkness and illuminate it. Darkness longs for light to bring it comfort. Light is drawn to darkness to deepen its compassion and reveal its value.

It is my prayer that the writing of Love Affair brings comfort and peace to all who participated in the story it tells. I hope too that the book becomes a reassurance to anyone reading the book who has had to live a life against all odds and wonder if it can be done. I know now that it can. But then, that’s another story.