Memoir #1, I Made A Garden For You Out Of Grief
The opening of my memoir pitch, out on submission now
Last year, I gained an agent, Abi Fellows. My previous agent, Faye Bender, is wonderful but based in New York. I’ve been living in the U.K. for a while, and we both thought a London agent best placed to sell my new, London-set, work. With Faye’s blessing, I met Abi in May.
As a mid-career writer, I wanted to talk about strategy. I had a trilogy ready (which Abi had read) but we agreed I needed to signal a change in my work and offer publishers an easier sell before sending them the trilogy.
We planned a memoir pitch and a slim novel about recovery and football. I researched and wrote the memoir pitch over June 2025, and Abi sent it to publishers in mid-July. As of writing, it hasn’t sold but it’s very meaningful to me. I thought I’d share the opening here.
In the first year after I lost my daughter, a woman on a helpline told me I should get angry; that I wasn’t angry enough.
Angry at what? I asked.
At nature, she said. At the world that took your children from you.
carrying you
December was strange. I slept only when my body couldn’t remain awake. I was delighted. “I have a daughter!” I would say, pacing beside the sink waiting for the kettle to boil, and then I would tell the empty kitchen your name. I held you in December. I held you for the last time in December. I was four times the size with love and bemused no one else commented on my rotundity. I was in so much pain.
We had to go home, to pack up. We were moving out of the flat by the sea. It felt like the whole place had betrayed you. The sewage in the water and the rubbish strewn streets and the maternity unit under investigation for mother and baby deaths were harbingers of an environment that was not interested in sustaining life. There was a sense of failure, whether it had failed us or we had failed. I felt animal, early human, refugee; moving on from where we could not find purchase to somewhere we might. I had a sense we were looking for an island, for our whole family, yourself included. Another sense that we were walking your path with you, and this was part of it—getting us to dry ground.
I sat in the packed car on the kerb outside and counted our blessings. Goodbye to where my children lived. Goodbye to the me who lived here. To the times I walked in the snow with your older sibling. To the bed where I rested with them on the 2nd anniversary of the Covid pandemic. To where I lost them, in late March 2021. To the couch I sat on every day for a full month, crying and putting together their memory box and watching Greys Anatomy. Where I saw evidence of you, full-throated, irrepressible, insistent You, on a pink and white test in June and nodded, Yep, because you should have been here already. Because I had already known you were there.
People say a lot of thoughtless things. This too shall pass. Everything for a reason. Time heals. One thing people say, when you give birth to a child you’ve lost, is I’m so sorry. Their faces contract with sadness. No one ever says, congratulations. On becoming a mother. On becoming a parent after years of trying. On having a child to love.
I have a daughter. Her name is—!
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