sleeping in a library

(the feeling of writing a book)

When I was fifteen years old, I flew alone for the first time—to Wisconsin, where I spent the summer with my aunt and her small twins. They took me to a drive-in movie and we watched The Lion King, my cousins perched atop the car as Simba sang. I wrote down everything I saw and felt in gossamer-thin blue aerogrammes and sent them to my best friend at home. Twenty-five years later, at one of the sweet twins’ weddings, I met a friend of my aunt’s. ‘I remember you,’ she said. ‘You wore floaty dresses and spent a lot of time in the library.’ In those few words, she captured the essence of fifteen-year-old me, and of almost all the selves I have been since.

I think of that book-loving girl (long hair flicking, floaty dress wafting) as I take a cross-country train on a rainy Tuesday morning, on my way to spend two nights sleeping (and working) in—oh, teenage dream come true—a library. The train is delayed, and as we wait for the track to be cleared of branches, I pick up my book—Cacophony of Bone by

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

, whose writing is re-shaping how I think about words, causing me to re-imagine what a book can be. Her words read like a poem, an incantation, a secret, a heartbeat: the book’s pages are fluid, light-scattered and moth-dusted. ‘There is such meaning in what finds us, and when it does.’ I underscore this line with an orange pencil and look out through the window at raindrops streaming down the glass.

When I arrive in Wales at Gladstone’s Library, it is almost dusk. There is a thin mist of drizzle, and a jackdaw sits on the gold weathervane. The building is intimidatingly prepossessing, with rain-dark red stone, tall chimneys and leaded windows, but the welcome inside is warm. I did not, as my children imagined, pack a sleeping bag with which to snuggle down amidst the book stacks. In fact, I have a bedroom which exudes monastic calm—a single bed with a slate blue Welsh blanket, a desk with a mint green radio, and a narrow window looking out onto a graveyard.

This view is soothing to me—the first home I shared with my husband backed onto an overgrown Victorian cemetery. Each September we would pick blackberries and make Cemetery Jam and later, when our first son was born, I wheeled his pram around and around the graves, showing him the sun dancing through the leaves, and my favourite angels. From the train I saw late September blackberries on the railway embankment; in their tangle a blue-black magpie and then later, another—two for joy.

I take an early supper in the restaurant: at every occupied table sits a woman, alone with a book. We eat in pleasant, contained quiet— two starters, a glass of wine, a pudding—we take our time, we turn our pages. Later, in the dark, I lie in my bed and listen to the church bells ring out the hours as the wind flails against the walls. I have come to this grand old residential library to work on my book—after a summer of scant writing and snatched moments of incomplete thought, I am grateful to be here in these muted pockets of window-light, breathing the scent of wood and old books.

In the morning I wait outside the reading room door. I step into a silent, oak panelled, book-lined room with a tall vaulted ceiling and high, arched windows. Light pools in patches on the parquet floor. As I stand and wonder, other writers take their seats at lamp-lit desks, heads bowed. Upstairs, on the mezzanine, I find a corner desk and settle myself, cocooned by books. Piling the printed pages of my manuscript draft on the oak desktop, I look across the balcony to the opposite window. Sunbeams float into the room like whispers. For so long my writing has existed in the margins, but now it is at my centre and it anchors me. I stay at the desk for almost twelve hours, stopping only for brief meals. Away from my phone (from the noise of constant notifications and the meeting of other people’s needs) I am serene and focussed.

I hold the book draft in my hand, surprised by the paper’s solidity—the weight of my words. I take a pink pen to the pages, making corrections, coaxing meaning to emerge, strengthening connective threads. So much of writing is finding space for thought and in recent months my own thoughts have been caught and bound, as if by tenacious vines. Here, under the vaulted roof, my thoughts can fly free. At first, they spin up to the ceiling, fizzing like fireworks, but as I settle they slow down, floating serenely over the balcony, white-winged moths. Writing is a strange, solitary thing—it takes time and the enchantment of stillness to coax thoughts into the dust-dancing light.

After two nights, when I reluctantly close the reading room door behind me to take the train home, I carry with me the sheaf of annotated pages that is beginning to feel like a book. Behind my eyelids, I can still see mottled light dappling carved wooden pillars and fluttering over gold-edged spines. I try to retain a sense of quiet, holding the hush deep inside me, in the place where my teenage self still twirls along a sidewalk in her floaty dress, as she makes her way to the library.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

PS: Update…I wrote a book! You can pre-order Chasing Fog here. If you’re not in the UK, Blackwells offer free worldwide delivery.

{This post is from my occasional series ‘The Feeling of Writing a Book’. You’ll find the rest of the series here.}