When Writing Your Novel (Maybe) Manifests Your Breakup

The last piece I wrote for Lit Hub, over three years ago, was about the sunk cost fallacy; a uniquely human tendency to continue pouring time, money and resources into a doomed project, investment, or relationship, not because we believe it shows promise, but because we’ve already sacrificed so much, and we desperately need that sacrifice to mean something. It’s a deeply flawed approach to life, but we all do it.

At the time of writing that piece, I had just entered back into a relationship that spanned many years and had become a sort of reverse “will they won’t they?”—as in, will they or won’t they finally see sense and go their separate ways? Breaking up wasn’t the problem—we broke up many, many times in fact, and each ending felt more brutal and, seemingly, more final than the last—we just couldn’t seem to stay broken.

Reading my words back today, I couldn’t help but laugh at my former self, waxing lyrical about the pitfalls of staying in something that’s long past its sell by date, all the while blithely embarking on round four (or maybe five, I’ve lost count) of a relationship that was doomed from day one. I’m laughing not because I was lying to myself but because I was telling myself the truth, in plain black and white, giving myself sage advice that I was either unwilling or unable to take.

*

During that fourth (fifth?) and final leg of our relationship, I had just begun work on my second novel, Better by Far, but I found myself struggling to write. This in itself should have alerted me to the fact that something was very, very wrong, because I only struggle to write when I’m depressed. But instead of admitting to the cause of my depression, or indeed removing said cause from my life, I did what all good avoidant women do—I went on holiday.

The only two things that brought me joy at that time were yoga and being alone, so I found a hippy dippy yoga retreat in the middle of the Andalucian countryside and off I went. This was late 2021. People were still reluctant to travel post-Covid. So the retreat center had dropped their prices, meaning I could stay for an entire month. Bliss.

*

I packed light, bringing only my laptop, some comfy clothing, and an idea for my second novel—an exploration of liminality, the physical or figurative space between two states of being. Or “life’s little limbos,” as I’ve come to call them. I was inspired by the many stories I’d heard during covid, of couples forced to live together long after their relationship had ended.

And also by a previous breakup with my then-boyfriend; we had moved in together and fallen immediately apart, but since there were three months left on the lease, and since we didn’t want to lose our deposit, we decided to share the place, week on, week off, until the lease ran out. An absolutely batshit plan, I’ll grant you, but my God I got some great material out of it.

I wanted to begin my book with a breakup (again), then watch this couple continue to share an apartment. Each week would be told from the perspective of whomever was currently living there, and in this way I could explore the figurative liminal space between their grief and healing, against the backdrop of a physical limbo, a home that would feel more and more like a waiting room as the story progressed.

*

I had been walking around with this seed of an idea for nearly a year. And I had tried many times to plant it, but it refused to take root. Then one day, sitting in the Spanish sunshine, it came to me. A real Eureka moment. I grabbed my notepad and jotted down the first line of the story. Then in proper writer fashion, I took the rest of the day off.

“I’m supposed to be writing a book, but instead I find myself writing to you.”

This one sentence acted as a sort of blueprint for the whole novel, and contained three key elements I hadn’t figured out until putting it to paper:

1. This story wasn’t just about a break up, or indeed liminality. It was about the symbiotic relationship between trauma and art.

2. It would be told in the second person, with the narrator, Kate, addressing all her thoughts to her ex-boyfriend, Finn. His absence would imbue him with a ghostly quality, bringing old wounds to the surface, and forcing Kate to face the grief surrounding her mother’s death.

3. The book Kate couldn’t write, would become the one I could.

I wrote the first two chapters that month, then went back to London and soldiered on with both my book and my relationship for another year, transmuting all my difficult days into Kate’s own.

When I couldn’t write, neither could she, and we explored that experience together on the page. When she couldn’t sleep, neither could I, and soon her nightmares were indistinguishable from mine. When my boyfriend and I fought, this fueled Kate’s fury towards Finn. When he and I reconciled, she softened again. We shared grief and fears, loves and losses, side by side, hand in hand, all the while aware, on some level, of the creeping sense that we were both living out of alignment with some deeper knowing.

One day, for no discernible reason, it suddenly became apparent to me that Kate and Finn’s break up should take place on Halloween, and so I wrote that into her reality. I then learned, alongside Kate, of the significance of Halloween, or Oiche Shamhna, as it’s called in Ireland, to the ancient Celts—it’s a day of liminality, and the thinning of the veil between worlds.

Following this, Kate began to reconnect to her Irish roots, rediscovering the language of her ancestors, as well as their rites and rituals, and through her, so did I. Many people, places and practices passed through her world and into mine.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend and I had moved in together, again, and all the same problems we experienced the first time around were, unsurprisingly, still there. That saying, “fool me once…” hits much harder when you keep fooling yourself. Shame on me, I suppose.

*

A year after writing that first line, I returned to the same retreat center. But this time was different. My relationship had gone from bad to worse and taken me with it. I was constantly anxious, physically ill, totally depleted, and losing hair by the handful. I had met with dieticians and nutritionists, taken concoctions of vitamins and herbal remedies, gone for tests and scans to try and figure out what was wrong with me, but nobody could find the answer. Which is to say, nobody could find an answer outside of the one I already knew, but refused to admit.

I hadn’t written in months, and I’d just begun to find my words again when I got a call to say my mother had been admitted to hospital with some mystery illness. For a few days it was touch and go, waiting to hear if the cancer she had beaten years before had come back, keeping one eye on flight times in case I needed to get on a plane to Dublin, wondering whether, this time, she’d be strong enough to fight it again.

I turned to my boyfriend for solace and found none. Then I turned to my friends, who showed up for me in ways that only served to highlight how thoroughly he was letting me down. I even joined in on one of the yoga retreats being held at the center, and felt more held by the strangers I met that week than I did by my own partner.

I wrote voraciously, partly to stay distracted, partly because I was way behind deadline, and partly because spending time with Kate was easier than ever during those bleak few weeks. After all, she knew what it was to lose a mother, and a partner, and so it felt strangely appropriate to live inside her head, and to hit rock bottom alongside her.

Thankfully, my mother recovered. The cancer hadn’t returned. The illness remained a mystery. And she was released from hospital without much ado. But the experience had taught me a lesson I could no longer ignore.

*

I returned to London on October 30th, arriving late that night and heading straight to bed, where I lay next to my boyfriend all night, bracing myself for what I knew had to happen. The next day, we got up, had breakfast, and broke up. It wasn’t until the shock had worn off that I realized it was Halloween.

I found myself wondering if I had somehow manifested my own break up, written it into being, perhaps. But I think it’s more likely that some part of me had been aware, the entire time, of its inevitability, and that knowledge was leaking out of me through my writing. The fact that I got the exact date right was, admittedly, a little spooky, and I still can’t account for that detail. Or the fact my art had helped prepare me for the heartbreak to come, to preemptively grieve my loss in a way that one of my characters had already spoken about in relation to her art.

After that, a thousand tiny synchronicities occurred, none of which I can tell you about without spoiling the end of the book. Suffice to say I frequently faced moments that were like shot for shot replays of scenes I had already written, or heard lines of dialogue I’d put in my characters’ mouths months before.

The timeline of Kate and Finn’s breakup ran parallel to my own, making days and dates and milestones align so frequently that it eventually stopped feeling strange—when the song that scored my writing process found its way back into my life exactly a year later, on Halloween, through a woman I had randomly met that day in a cemetery of all places, I just laughed because, of course.

*

Manifestation has become a bit of a buzzword lately, and it’s been twisted into meaning that we can simply conjure things into being, but I think there’s a subtler magic at play….

Our deeper knowing can be suppressed but never silenced, and it speaks to us in ways we don’t always perceive. It is fluent in the language of dreams and poetry and prose, and, as a last resort, the language of pain. It will hurt us, if necessary, to make itself heard—like any pain, it’s there to warn us—but it needn’t come to that; at any given moment we can simply listen.

We can stop stacking evidence in columns, stop weighing pros and cons, and notice our subconscious seeping out of us like ink, making marks in the world that point us in the right direction. We can choose to look, instead of looking away, and practice getting comfortable with what we see.

______________________________

Better by Far by Hazel Hayes is available via Dutton.