Reading this NYT article about Anna Burns, the Man Booker Prize winner, 54, who hasn’t written in years because of debilitating pain due to botched back surgery, I am thinking about all those who are struggling unseen, their creativity blocked or diminished by pain and fatigue. I know, I’ve been struggling for years. My first novel was published in 2017, ironically after I’d gotten on Disability for arthritis of the spine. I write as often as I can, but it’s a narrow balance between enough pain meds to allow me to focus and just a bit too much, making me unable to create (though I’m not woozy, and can do housework and mindless tasks, even some finances).
Anyway, here are snippets, but read the whole article yourself:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/books/anna-burns-interview-booker-prize-milkman-no-bones.html
The New Booker Prize Winner Who May Never Write Again
BRIGHTON, England — Anna Burns sounded almost giddy one recent Monday as we sat in a restaurant here in Brighton, on England’s southern coast. The week before she had won the Man Booker Prize for “Milkman,” her third novel, about an unnamed 18-year-old coerced into a relationship at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. The win wasn’t the only reason for her excitement.
“I can feel I’m on the cusp of something,” she said.
Burns suffers from “lower back and nerve pain,” she said, the result of a botched operation. “Nerves pain,” she suddenly added, correcting herself. “There’s plenty of nerves involved.” Thanks to the Booker, which includes a $64,000 prize, she may get treatment in Germany without having to worry about the cost.
“If it’s successful, I’ll be able to write again,” she said. “I haven’t written in four and a half years.” The last writing she did was finishing “Milkman,” a process that dragged out for months because of the pain.
She had tried standing desks, she said. And various chairs. “But it’s not just the physical pain. It’s the whole emotional stress that goes with it.”
Oh, boy, do I know that! The fear of never being out of pain again (not so irrational, given the current hostility to opioid meds) or of never creating again. The feeling of being “less than” those who move around without even thinking much about it. Not to mention the financial fears:
…But even with the fuss around it, Burns’s victory touched many with her honesty about what the prize meant to her financially (“I will pay my debts,” she told the BBC the morning after her win). In the acknowledgments section of “Milkman,” she thanks her local food bank, which she has relied on to get by; Homelink, a charity that gave her a low-interest loan to pay her rent; and Britain’s “Housing and Council Tax Benefit system.”
She even thanks the British courts service because, she said, judges restored her disability benefit after it was cut.
She was lucky, and knows it. How many out there aren’t so lucky — unable to be creative because their lives are just one big struggle for survival? What does it say about so-called “developed nations” when they don’t support their citizens or give them a decent quality of life? Kudos to Britain for doing the basics in this case (and let’s not forget Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who was on Britain’s welfare rolls as she was writing), but clearly, Burns didn’t get enough medical help to keep writing and her writing is valued. This, to me, is one more BIG reason to push for Medicare for all!