Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

time as we all do, and partly by the fading body, but in order to challenge linear time, I try and live in total time. I recognise that life has an inside as well as an outside and that events separated by years lie side by side imaginatively and emotionally.
    Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
    I like the line in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – ‘ that which is only living/Can only die ’. That’s time’s arrow, the flight from womb to tomb. But life is more than an arrow.
    The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can’t write my own; never could. Not Oranges . Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact.
    The fact is that I am going to miss out twenty-five years. Maybe later . . .

12
    The Night Sea Voyage

    W
HEN I WAS LITTLE – THE size that hides under tables and climbs into drawers – I climbed into a drawer believing that the drawer was a ship and the rug a sea.
    I found my message in a bottle. I found a birth certificate. On the certificate were the names of my birth parents.
    I never told anyone about this.
    I never wanted to find my birth parents – if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive. I had no understanding of family life. I had no idea that you could like your parents, or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.
    I was a loner. I was self-invented. I didn’t believe in biology or biography. I believed in myself. Parents? What for? Except to hurt you.
    But when I was thirty and I wrote the TV scripts for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , I called the main character Jess. She is Jeanette in the book, but TV is so literal, and it was hard enough to fight for ambiguity and playfulness and use your own name, even when the thing was filed under Literature. File it under TV drama and I thought I would find myself tied to a ‘true’ story forever.
    That happened anyway . . . but I tried.

    So I had to choose a name, and I chose the name on the birth certificate I had found. It seemed that my mother’s name was Jessica, so I would call my character Jess.
    Oranges won everything – BAFTAs, RTS awards, a script award for me at Cannes, numerous foreign prizes – and it was a big talking point in 1990, because of the content, and because of the way we handled the content. It was a landmark for gay culture, and I hope it was a cultural landmark too. I think it was. A 2008 poll of Best Ever BBC Dramas put Oranges at number 8.
    I reckoned with all the fuss, including and especially in the tabloid press (end of decency as we know it, etc.), that my mother Jess would hear about it, and put two and two together.
    No.
    Flash forward to 2007 and I have done nothing about finding my past. It isn’t ‘my past’, is it? I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn’t a method; it’s me.
    I was writing a novel called The Stone Gods . It is set in the future, though the second section is set in the past. It imagines our world in its protean state being discovered by an advanced but destructive civilisation whose own planet is dying. A mission is sent to Planet Blue. The mission does not return.
    Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as memory and warning.
    The Passion : ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’
    Written on the Body : ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’
    The PowerBook: ‘To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.’
    Weight: ‘The free man never thinks of escape.’
    The Stone Gods: ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.’
    In my previous novel, Lighthousekeeping , I had been working with