I was right. Janine had been right. Emma was right. Just shy of a year later, Evidence is currently number seven on the Sunday Times bestseller list and has been sitting between there and number three for seven and a half weeks. The book is hot pink for optics and marketing. On its back cover is a picture of me, sitting against a textured concrete wall, lit and airbrushed to heaven.
*
I wait for the clapping to die. I show the even white plates in my mouth again and make a small joke about the venue. Ahead of me: a gallery of curious faces, bodies and hands. The booze I swallowed in the greenroom is dancing its way down, lighting me up like the city at night, shifting me into glittering performance. My voice warms the room. Everyone is laughing in their seats. The joke, whatever it was, worked. I begin to read from page 55, the moment when the prettier, more successful twin sees their long-lost mother for the first time. The catch is this; the mother and the daughter are both eight years old. Both at the same time. I get a startling rush of something cruel, or smothering.
Here it is again, this fog, this near-blue thing. But it is dimmer than blue, more solemn than blue. It is heaving and formless, filling me to the eyes. It is trying its best to sink me, and there is no help anywhere, nothing vaguely resembling land. All I can see for miles is the pink, pink book. A person in a rust-coloured hat is speaking at the mic, moving their hands a lot. I try to focus in on their face, but the room appears to be darkening.
“Can I ask about your mother?” they say with a careful tone. “Can I ask about yours?” I shoot back, and everyone laughs. “Only joking,” I tell them, grinning with these teeth.
“What of the daughters in the novel?” a different person with a Scottish accent is asking. “Is that part largely autobiographical, or—”
“No,” I cut them off. “The girls were metaphors.”
“I want to talk about words,” says someone else, who is close to tears. “I am a new mother, and mothering brings me purpose, but not enough to function. I am called to write and make art so that I do not feel as isolated as I do, but I’m stuck. I can’t get started because of this growing lack of connection to myself—to anything these days. Like you, or, sorry, like the woman in the book, the ordinary feels so uninspiring, so monotonous. I don’t know how you managed to record this experience so precisely. Either way, you seem to have the answers.”
I don’t have any answers.
I open my mouth to say this, but the person carries on.
“Writing is what I want to do—what I always expected to find myself doing—and I’ve always taken it for granted that I’d somehow make it into a career. I’m not sure how it happens, but these days I don’t have the words. The world is burning. I feel it. I feel so demotivated, like an imposter of sorts, as though nothing I create will be real, because I am not in fact real, and as I give all daily motivation up to domestic chores and caregiving, I’m scared I might be getting farther away from anything that is only mine. Even though what I am actively doing—keeping a child alive—feels like the realest task, the only necessary task, I don’t feel real anymore. I don’t belong to me anymore. That’s it—I don’t feel mine. Every night, I say to myself, Tomorrow you’ll start. Tomorrow you’ll exist enough to trust your work; but for now someone needs me and I can’t remember to think about myself. How can a person who cannot prove themselves real produce anything of resonance, anything of note?”
This person is intense. The audience is dead quiet. I need an answer, but I’m coming up short. I want to say, I don’t know, how can anyone know what is real? and don’t you know we’re made up of dead and dying things and that’s all we are?
But you don’t have this option when you have somehow been named someone who knows something about some things. This happens when you write a book and said book does well on the charts and all that. It feels like a racket, an ominous trick.
“Sorry. That was quite long-winded. Sorry,” the woman says, returning the mic to the usher and taking her seat, looking very much like a person who exposed too much of themself in public. I move it along by saying some practiced sentence about feeling your feet on the ground; about looking around yourself, returning to your breath, taking note of the people places and things that you know are, in fact, Real. But the cruelness is upon me again. I say, “If you really were called to start, you would have started.” The woman nods her head, goes into her book bag, pulls out a pen and paper and begins to take notes, and I suddenly feel a recognizable heaviness. I cannot hear my voice so much anymore, but I think I say a thing that I might want to hear. I say that even when you go into a room and leave, the air has changed because you were there; are there, forever. I talk about how the air around us bends, how every person changes the shape of the living world.
“Write about not having the answer,” I hear myself say. “Write about the imposter body, or the harrowing, unpleasant nature of parenthood, and how nothing is as you hoped. Write about not knowing.” Then the mouth that I am using makes another joke that makes everyone laugh a little more. I call the sad mother back to the mic. The sad mother puts away her notebook and pen. I ask some questions, gently teasing until her cheeks flush. When we are done, she flops back down onto her chair, self-aware but high on the attention, I think.
I’m sweating by now, because of the sudden threat of colour, clinging off the beams above our heads and resting on the seats in the hardback chairs. The worse-than-blue has been hanging around for weeks, taunting me because tomorrow is my birthday. Tomorrow is our birthday, and I don’t want to talk about it.
I glimpse my profile in the side monitor. We decided on a dress that is not my colour at all but has a magical cut. Ordinarily, you couldn’t pay me to wear purple, but this is somewhat short of it, indigo in the shade, the unmissable hue of forget-me-nots under the hot lights. The designer is one to watch, and I have never worn anything that has held me together so well. It is the kind of dress that makes people pay attention. My hair is wavy today, blown out and decadent. My face is contoured, gorgeously lit, smooth as a mannequin’s. I look like the thing with eyes on the back of the book.
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From The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Copyright © 2025 by Utter, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
