NEWSFLASH: I interrupt regular programming to announce that I have written a book! A memoir, specifically, about my first year as a mother. It’s called Not Quite to Plan and will be hitting the amazon virtual shelves in early October (providing I can get my head around the software). For those of you hankering after a printed copy, please send your most responsible carrier pigeon to India: a pigeon will be easier to deal with than the postal service here.
Here’s how the book came about.
I have always loved to write. At least, for as long as I can remember I have loved to write. I have scrappy memories of scrawling and sketching a family newspaper every month or so when I couldn't have been more than eight years old. Even back then, my content drew heavily from personal experience and I am pretty sure every edition of the family newsrag featured a story about my cat. Living in a house which fronted onto a main road meant that these cat stories were, more often than not, obituaries. I suppose I should say 'featured a story about one of my many cats'. RIP.
Many years later, this handwritten, single page of fairly uninteresting observations about my house, garden and the aforementioned tragic felines grew into a series of emails about my exploration of Taipei during my year abroad while studying Chinese at university. These emails then morphed into a blog when blogs became a thing and what started out as A Milla’s Tale then became Milla Light during the year I lived in New York. The name was a defiant move to get ahead of the many, many jokes made about my name and a certain very famous but decidedly tasteless beer. I also decided that the moniker was fitting: my blog was a lighter (and sometimes abridged) version of the experiences I was having in real life.
Despite a considerable upgrade in style and delivery method since my humble beginnings as a child scrounging money for postage stamps to send my words (and the odd very poor cat drawing) out, the content has continued to be inspired entirely by my life.
I have always loosely followed an ethos of 'the worse the experience, the better the story'. I say ‘loosely’ because I have never put myself in any real danger for the sake of a good anecdote (unless you count camping a night illegally on the Great Wall of China as dangerous … but that’s another story entirely). I simply mean that I find great comfort (and often amusement) in focusing more on how I will describe a difficult situation to friends and family afterwards, instead of letting myself be dragged down by the real time fear, sadness or physical unpleasantness of whatever is going on.
This was only partially the case with Not Quite to Plan however. It is the story of my first year as a mother to Jasper; a year which most certainly did not go to plan. It was a year which engulfed me. Not only was I grappling with first-time motherhood, but I was also dealing with first-time expat motherhood, cut off from my family by the global pandemic. And then on top of these challenges, the country I was living in as an expat was Myanmar: where the military ousted the elected government in February 2021. Jasper was just two months old.
I did keep a journal for a couple of months during the coup, and I kept an angry diary of my pregnancy nausea, (purely as a warning should I ever consider putting myself through that hormonal assault a second time) but for the most part, I didn’t have the heart to write. The weight of what I was living through was too great for me to raise a single objective thought: let alone to put a positive spin on things. My short-lived and unpolished coup journal came about when I realised that our day-to-day existence had become almost too absurd to be believable. I knew I had to start writing things down or I wouldn’t be able to trust my own memory when I looked back on it later.
‘Later’ turned out to be shortly after I arrived here in India. Getting to India was no smooth journey (as most of you know), but even before Jasper and I joined Dylan after a 6-month involuntary separation, I knew that I was ready to start writing again; to document our life in India, but also, perhaps to make sense of Jasper’s extraordinary first year of life. Before leaving Jersey (where Jasper and I had been stuck) I resurrected my then-dormant Milla Light blog, giving it yet another facelift, and resolved to write regularly, for as long as we are in India, so that Dylan and I remember all the gritty details and so we have an anthology of stories to tell Jasper as he grows up.
The more I wrote about life in India, the more I felt ready to write about the journey that had brought us here. I dug up and read back through my coup journal and was shocked by some of the events that I had already blocked out of my mind. I filled in some gaps with the help of Google and old emails and messages to and from friends and family. As I rebuilt the timeline of what we’d been through, I knew that this wasn’t simply a series of blog posts or a collection of essays: it was a full blown book. An adventure, perhaps? A thriller? A travel saga? But no. I also saw, as I processed what I had collected, that I had to write it as a memoir because trying to turn it into ‘fiction based on real events’ would make it more than improbable - it would make it implausible.
And so that’s how it became 322 pages of memoir: recounting a true story that is quite possibly stranger and less believable than any fiction I could have concocted.
Not Quite to Plan is, first and foremost, for Jasper. It’s the story of his arrival, his first year of life and his role in helping me through some of the toughest challenges I have ever faced. I hope that when he is old enough, he will be able to read it and understand just how much strength I drew from him during those months of uncertainty. It is also for our friends and relatives, so that you can understand at least a little of the Myanmar fabric which is so intricately woven into our little family’s story. It is also partly a love letter to the Myanmar I fell for all those years before the coup finally forced us to leave.
Photos: Any excuse to share images of Myanmar's unrivalled beauty and serenity.
I hope that you will enjoy reading my story as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Don't get me wrong, it wasn’t easy to relive that year, but I am immensely proud of what I have created, and I look forward to sharing it with you all.
Launching in October - mark your diaries and/ or prepare to be bombarded by reminders to buy it!
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