The Obsessive Diary

I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and him; in my mind I was in bliss. For six months I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, made candles for the candle shop, labelled bottles for the incense shop, fired chai pots in the pottery, struck up friendships in the high street, fetched wa...

It seems these are a litany of relationships gone wrong, choices made to do with men and not to do with me. That’s what happens when you write a memoir. A thirty-thousand-foot view, you get to see the pattern of the streets. That summer of 1994 I was supposed to be starting an artist’s collective with the girl I’d met at the Chelsea Town Hall. We’d had it all mapped out. There was a building off P...

Subscribe to Kit de Waal : This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

I always found, “Empty nest?” a supremely irritating phrase, yet it happened yesterday. Though they’ve both been away from home since they were sixteen, when I got back on Saturday from the two hour round trip to east London delivering Blake to university, Jacobi already a week into his new life at the opposite end of town, this home felt exactly like that. A nest that was empty. It’s never felt l...

A photograph was sent to me last week by a Dakini goddess. She didn’t know I was writing this memoir, could not have known that the photo would arrive precisely at the point where the story and image coincide. Isn’t that beautiful? This process brushes with magic. Such is the way of digging and time travel. On the day it was taken I’m drifting arm in arm with my friend through the Harvest Fair, it...

Who knew that a bursting fallopian tube would burst the sense of what’s the point? I woke up with the gloves off, a nineteen-year-old in a raver's paradise, Manchester at the height of her powers. The hospital ward of pink fluffy slippers and women with no wombs held me for a week of painful recovery. My mother came to see me. So did the boy. And then I put on my brown corduroy hotpants and Minnie...

Let’s roll forward. It’s 1990, Manchester. I am in my first year at university, not yet living in the house where I would meet the boy who’d been kidnapped by his father from his mother’s arms. I am in Fallowfield halls of residence, three flights up from the smooth walkways of campus. The Haçienda is open but I haven’t been there yet. I’m trying to fit in and forget about the boy who is no longer...

Did you catch the LIVE I did with Alisa Kennedy Jones yesterday? If not, here it is: It was a blast. Alisa has become a friend and colleague, but way before I knew her I fell in love with her memoir, Gotham Girl Interrupted: My Misadventures in Motherhood, Romance, and Epilepsy Alisa writes like she’s talking right at you, her brilliant brain firing on all cylinders and then some. I knew nothing a...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

My friends got me out. Realising I was missing from the weekends in Harare they came to see me. I remember Eddy, who wanted to be a policeman one day, sat on the floor in the hall while I faced the priest in his kitchen. He heard me tell the priest that I would report him, and he heard the priest reply no one would believe me, which turned out to be right. But my friends got me out and we went to...

My mum, who hates planes, who has a fear of flying, who at this very moment is lying in a hospital bed in the endgame of life, did something reckless and caring and got on a plane and landed in Harare and found me at the priest’s house up to my neck in painkillers, sleeping pills and whisky. The priest, large and fat, who liked to make out his pillar-ness in the community, had a wife who was small...

Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood before thirty children and tried to teach them things I thought I knew; the alphabet, how to spell “definitely”. In my hut I learnt to make dinner with one pot, a relentless vegetable stew that Willy eschewed for beer at the pub with the friends...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

A bunch of White, English, public-school kids off to teach in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong. We gathered at Heathrow, I said goodbye to my mother, we flew to Harare via a skidding touchdown in snowy Sofia. At a farmstead we put up our brand-new tents and drank beer and tried out our thin camping mattresses on each other as if we were still in Chelsea. We met the priest in whose care we we...

His footsteps on the stairs, not the boy (I’d got him) but my father whose ferry had not left for France because of the hurricane that had ripped through England, ripping it apart. He’d turned his Porsche around and returned to London, parked it in the garage below my sister’s flat and seen the door kicked open. I was on my knees when I saw his feet, his shoes, looked up, saw him. I was scrubbing...

Home was a tall, cold house in London; intellectual, artistic, my father a writer, my mother an architect, guests, lodgers, friends and strangers, the bedrooms full of us and them, paintings on the walls, politics at the table. I moved amongst it all being pretty and clever, a seventies childhood of lentils and greens and feeling unseen, the house too full, my mother too busy, my father rarely the...

I rang him from a payphone in the arrivals hall. I hadn’t told him I was coming. I saw him weaving through the crowds of families reunited, suitcases, children, the sunshine of Israel glinting through the glass walls. He wore a yellow T-shirt. Sensible trousers. His tendrils of black hair were gone. For the first time I noticed his eyes were a little too close together. He took me by the arm and t...

I sat with the Rabbi in his plush, Regency room, red cushions, a view of the park. I told him I wanted to convert to Judaism. At school I had sided with the Jewish girls, opted for Jewish prayers instead of Christian, I felt that those beginnings at a private girls’ school on Harley Street had come full circle, it was meant to be. I told the Rabbi I was committed. My feet were bare, he was kind, h...

I found my voice in the hands of a self-styled Colonel Kurtz on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. A white man running from something, he’d decided himself a temple father, fat under a palm tree handing out easy wisdoms to lost girls like me. My Israeli and I had gone to Bangkok to renew our Indian visas; with our passports stamped we travelled out to the islands for a bit more beach life, Colonel...

The Israeli was handsome and unkind. I grew fat on German pastries, he poked my backside and said so. His cool Israeli friends came over and sat about smoking chillums; a complicated series of rituals which I got wrong. How to mix the charas and tobacco in your palm, how to pack it and wrap your special ragged cloth about the base, the boom shanker throw of a prayer and touch to the forehead, how...

My boyfriend and I took off on the motorbike, a Royal Enfield Bullet heavy with luggage, and purring. We headed first to meet his brother – also estranged until now – for a few nights of giant beetles flying into my hair and then north up the Western Ghats. The monsoon chased us. We’d mistimed our travels and no matter how fast we rode, the rains caught up. We stopped soaked and freezing in tea pl...

When I was eighteen, I met a boy who told me a story of being kidnapped from his mother when he was four years old. He was taken to England by his father, never to see her again. In my mind I saw a room in southern India, gossamer curtains, a broad messy bed of white sheets, a mother sleeping with a child in her arms. I saw a man creep in, he was a pilot so I put him in pilot’s uniform, no jacket....

The days are beginning to meld into each other and it’s only August, the beginning of my working year that will end next June. Such a long way off yet it’ll pass in a flash, I know it will, time is doing that, I’m getting older and it is speeding up. Thank god I’m sober or else there’s a good chance I’d miss it completely. That’s one of the unmistakable boons of not drinking. Yes, I’m here all the...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Housekeeping: I’ll be LIVE in conversation with Orna Ross tomorrow, Wednesday 13th 12:30pm BST. Orna is the founder of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), the global membership association empowering writers to create great books, reach more readers, and build successful publishing businesses . Their campaigns advocate for indie authors in the literary and publishing sectors, while their m...