Recently I was thrown out of a bookshop. Bookshops aren’t
known for confrontation and prejudice, but the world of publishing is a class
system, like any other class.
I know a few things about prejudice. I suffer from Schizophrenia.
I have been excluded in several different situations in my life. Everything
from friendships, to work, at church and even a dentist. Discrimination is
usually about fear, but more so in mental health. In publishing there are a
great many difficulties and obstacles in the way of anyone who wants a career
in writing. Class can be one of them.
A degree from Oxford or Cambridge or any good English degree
will get you past a few hurdles, least of all how to write. But the largest one
is money. If you can prove you can make money for your agent, your publisher or
television and film company then you’re in the door. And that’s fine. But what
if you have a background like mine?
Welcome to the world of the Dalit Caste Writer. We are the
untouchables of the publishing industry. Do be an untouchable, you need the
following attributes: no English degree, no agent, no publisher and most
importantly you need to be vain and stupid enough to publish your own work. If
you have all four of these things, then you are a Dalit; an untouchable.
The fact is there are thousands, maybe even hundreds of
thousands of people, writing terrible books and sending manuscripts to a
limited number of agents and publishers and there are thousands of self
publishers, pushing their books onto the booksellers; of which there are only
handful. This is why the Dalit Caste Writer exists. We self create our own
exclusion, due to our huge numbers.
In my time, I have written to vast numbers of people asking
to help me with my career. When I became unwell at the age of 20, I knew my
life was all but over. The diagnosis of Schizophrenia doesn’t come along
straight away. First you’re put into a pre-Schizophrenia bracket called
Schizophreniform, when you have had all the symptoms for at least six months
then you get the dreaded and most life changing diagnosis in the medical
literature. Once there you will be feared, dreaded even, wherever you go.
Friends and family alike will freak out badly if you say or do anything weird.
I have been cast out of a dentist’s chair mid exam, asked to leave a church, a
super-market and recently a bookshop, because staff felt threatened.
You may be wondering at this stage why I’ve combined writing
and mental illness in the same story. The manager who threw me out of the
bookshop, was engaged in conversation with me, as if I was a customer, right up
until the point she realised I was a self-published author. And that’s when she
changed from listening and engaging, to calling security. It seemed to me that once
an industry insider like her realises she’s talking to a self-publisher, it
triggers an instant aggressive response. This is because she realised that she
could treat me in any way she wanted. She was not dealing with a human being
any more. The mentally ill are equally as repugnant to many people. We are a
threat. We don’t understand the difference between right and wrong, which makes
us unable to cope with moral dilemmas and questions. Therefore we can’t be
trusted.
The second reason I have bundled the two together, was because
of the role writing was supposed to take in my life, after I became ill. I
wanted to be a writer from a young age. I started two novels when I was around
18 years old and they were terrible. I had no inspiration, no ideas. After I had
a religious psychotic breakdown, I had masses of stuff to write about. Doesn’t
make me a good writer, I just had stuff to write about. By the time I was
twenty-five I decided to try a career in writing. I got work as a journalist, I
published my first book to test out my ideas. All good. Got some excellent
feedback, which was unexpected. Writing was supposed to be my niche, my way out
of my terrible circumstances, having been very unwell, homeless, friendless,
penniless and unable to work with others because of my paranoid delusions and
thought broadcasts and delusions of telepathy etc. At that time I suffered from
every symptom in a long list of symptoms. Writing could be done in solitude. I
barely had to leave my desk and I could (maybe) earn a living. But since then
writing has become a source of extreme disappointment and depression and
feelings of utter hopelessness. The reason? No-one and I mean no-one will read
my work, answer my letters, emails and calls and those I have cornered at the Cheltenham
Literature Festival, just simply refused to help. This feeling of being
besieged by writers like me, is something I can understand. But at the same
time, it doesn’t help me at all. I just wanted one chance, to escape a life
which is killing me. Like some pathetic X-Factor contestant I find myself
having invested far too much emotional energy in hoping that writing will help
me escape the illness, the economic trap I’m stuck in and give me a little
self-respect for a change. Do I blame the culture of wanting to become a
writer, do I blame the rudeness and ignorance of the publishing industry, or do
I blame myself, for wanting a future that just wasn’t and never has been
available to me? Should I give up and lead a solitary and excluded way of life?
According to recent life expectancy figures, I’ve got fifteen years of my life left
(I’m 38). I lost my whole adult life, on this cruel and relentless illness. And
when it kills me (and it will), my family will mourn my passing and then the
other 7 billion people on Earth will experience one more unremarkable day.
What gets to me, and really I shouldn’t let it, is that one
of the most prestigious Literature Festivals in the world sits a hundred yards
away from my house each year. I look at it as if it’s a mirage. I walk past it
with my head down and a pang of anxiety and anger in the pit of my stomach. I
can’t possibly be this close to world’s finest writers, publishers and agents
and yet so far away it may as well be in Timbuktu. It is all of those things.
Close but far away. The white tents and The Times stands and the occasional
glimpse of Mariella Fostrop, or Lord Winston; the Cheltenham Literature
Festival attendants whizzing around moving stock and directing customers to
right tent for the right event. All the bustle, the big television broadcasting
trucks. All of it a mirage. I am an untouchable and I cannot reach out and
touch them, because they are not there. Not for me anyway.
