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Tanya Shadrick on Using Bedtime Stories as Adult Calls to Adventure
Tanya Shadrick's memoir of a late-waking life describes the transformation that the author underwent after recovering from near-death. Both a celebration of life's second chances and a profound reflection on the emotional straitjackets that society forces people into, The Cure for Sleep is powered by a deep love of literature. In this exclusive piece, Tanya recalls how the 'fairy-tale logic' of her childhood reading informed the direction that her life took and recommends works that mine folklore and mythology in pursuit of a more immediate form of living.
Like many children of my generation, my first encounter with fable came through the Ladybird Well Loved Tales series. Living on short rations with my single mother in a remote rural hamlet, these small books with their bright quasi-medieval illustrations were my treasures in an otherwise bleak upbringing.
It wasn’t the girls transformed by wish or wand who thrilled me. The stories that cast a spell had a bolder energy: Jack swapping the milk cow for the magic beans, Rumplestiltskin spinning straw into gold, the Little Red Hen eating whole the loaf of bread she’d made without help from the lazier animals. Puss in Boots. Him in particular. How he parlayed an empty sack (all the miller’s third son got as inheritance) into a castle and king’s daughter for his poor master. The me of three, of four, believed I might save Mother this way, by making our fortune or finding her a new husband.
But with her disastrous second marriage – made when I was just nine – my worldview narrowed, dulled. Like most who are without a secure home or safety net, I put aside childish things and placed my faith in effort, going to school each day like a man to a mine or a farmer to his field. Education as a manual labour through which – lesson by lesson, year by year – I’d tunnel beyond home and town.
But when I did at last get away to university? I studied poetry in the same dogged way: Virgil, Dante; Eliot, Pound; Hughes and Heaney; Sexton, Plath. Learning hundreds of quotes by heart not for the joy of learning but only to pass the exams that might secure a job that would keep me safe. I met my husband at twenty, married at twenty-five, got a mortgage soon after. We worked and saved, spending our few leisure hours living vicariously through the more exciting lives of dead and distant authors.
The regret I experienced during the minutes of my sudden near-death was shameful. What a coward I’d been. And my return to life after surgery was even more painful. I’d had my awakening too late, just as I’d become truly trapped in my life as a new mother in a small town…
But during the endless-seeming nights of reading to my son and then my daughter, I began to keep company once more with those trickster figures from my own childhood. And came to wonder – fingers throbbing against the pages – if I might start getting further and faster in life by living as they did? What might happen to my days if I adopted their fairy-tale logic? If I strayed from the path and struck bargains with strangers?
My transformation was neither quick, nor easy. But as soon as I opened myself up to chance and connection, life started to grow a little brighter, a bit wilder. I gave my first few child-free hours to the local hospice, offering myself as a scribe to those who – unlike me – really were approaching their last days. I decided next to write a mile beside my town’s historic lido in the children’s school hours on pool-length scrolls of paper, and did: a performance piece that gained me a month-long foreign residency and then Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. I promised to publish the diaries of a dying woman met only once, and was able to share in her elderly parents’ joy when her Wild Woman Swimming journals were longlisted, posthumously, for the Wainwright Prize.
As in fable, I also made mistakes as I worked to expand my life. And exposed myself, too, to harsh criticism as I dared to rewrite the roles of woman, wife and mother in a small town. The shock to my system from all that was immense – and yet I’ve never once regretted this second self as I did my first one.
In my new life as an artist and writer, the books I recommend most passionately to those I teach and mentor are ones which likewise draw on myth and fable to guide us to a more vivid way of living. And I’ve written The Cure for Sleep in the hope it might become a ration of courage for anyone setting out on their own journey from routine into risk and possibility. My story as both quiet invitation and company for the road.
Essential Reading for Bolder Living
If Woman Rose Rooted: A Life-changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie
A passionate song to a different kind of femininity, a rallying, feminist cry for the rewilding of womanhood.
The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde
Reaching deep into literature, anthropology and psychology Lewis Hyde's modern masterpiece has at its heart the simple and important idea that a 'gift' can inspire and change our lives.
Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture by Lewis Hyde
Hyde revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.
The Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass by Martin Shaw
At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives - identity, technology, trust, love, politics and a global pandemic - celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole: three metaphors to help us understand our world.
Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes
For centuries, the 'wild woman' has been repressed by a male-orientated value system which trivialises women's emotions. Using a combination of time-honoured stories and contemporary casework, Estes reveals that the 'wild woman' in us is innately healthy, passionate and wise.
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