When Sarah Anderson established the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill in 1979, she did so in the belief that: ‘When you travel you often want to know more about a country than can be found in a guide book: reading about a place makes any trip, however short, more worthwhile, and reading widely about a country and finding out about its art, history and natural history makes travelling far more interesting.’ For over twenty years the bookshop has allowed readers and travellers to do just that - along the way providing the model for Hugh Grant’s bookshop in the film Notting Hill. She is also the author of Sarah Anderson's Travel Companion: Africa and the Middle East, editor of The Virago Book of Spirituality and co-author (with Miranda Davies) of Inside Notting Hill. Since 2004 she has concentrated full time on her writing and painting.
In May 1957, when she was ten years old, Anderson discovered a painful lump just below her left elbow. She was diagnosed with malignant synoviama or synovial sarcoma, an extremely rare and particularly aggressive form of soft-tissue cancer. A little over six months after the initial diagnosis, her left arm was amputated. Anderson’s latest book, Halfway to Venus: A One-Armed Journey is both a personal memoir and a ‘journey of exploration and discovery, through literature and art and real life, about arms and their significance.’ In telling her story, Anderson traces the history of her own responses towards the loss of her arm and life without it, and examines the attitudes of others towards those who have lost a limb. Halfway to Venus is both the unforgettable record of a personal journey and an erudite exploration of the role of hands, arms and touch across cultures and history. This voyage of discovery takes in Lord Nelson, the history of prosthetic limbs, the role of one-armed and armless characters in literature, attitudes towards the body in different cultures, palmistry and the Venus de Milo. It is also the story of a life lived boldly and to the full, a memorable and insightful account of Anderson’s travels, career and personal relationships.
In the first chapter of her book Anderson makes it clear that, in common with many of her peers, she was not encouraged to talk about her feelings as a child. She describes this as ‘sowing the seeds’ of her ‘emotional independence’, and reviewers have remarked admiringly on the book’s lack of any trace of self-pity. Likewise, at the end of Halfway to Venus she reflects on the ways in which today’s widespread ‘victim culture’ can be profoundly unhelpful and destructive. However, one of the book’s central themes is also a close examination of the ways in which a ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude towards adversity can be both enabling and restrictive. The book’s unflinching engagement with how we deal with loss is both moving and profound. I should also mention that Halfway to Venus is a model of precise and elegant prose.
I interviewed Sarah Anderson to find out more about the background to the book and how she came to write it.
PV: Many thanks for agreeing to this interview with donowdo.com, Sarah. Would you tell our readers a little about how you came to write Halfway to Venus, and about the process of writing it?
SA: I have been writing the book on and off for 15 years. I didn’t want to do it as just a therapeutic process and bury it in a drawer (as some people suggested). I felt passionately that I had something important to say and I wanted to do it this way – combining different cultural aspects, fiction, history, art etc … Of course this meant that it didn’t fall neatly into any category and that’s what I was told by publishers ‘We love it, but it won’t sell as it doesn’t fall into any category. Can’t you make it into a straight memoir?’
I didn’t want to make it into a misery memoir and as far as I was concerned this was like a red rag to a bull – I think it will sell - so I decided to publish it myself.
PV: In the book you refer to the writing process as ‘often painful’. If it’s not too intrusive a question, what were the hardest parts or aspects of the book to write?
SA: The hardest parts of the book to write were when I was told I had to have my arm amputated and the aftermath of that. The reason being that while I was writing, I felt exactly what that little girl felt 50 years ago and that was extremely painful – the events and feelings were just as vivid.
PV: Among other things, the book can be seen a tribute to the power of literature to deepen our engagement with our own experiences. Were there any writers or books you found particularly inspirational for your own work?
SA: I found the stories of other people who’d had to contend with extreme difficulties, and managed them without self-pity, inspirational. For example Leona Bruckner’s Triumph of Love, Louise Baker’s Out on a Limb, Harold Russell’s Victory in My Hands, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. Some better written than others – but all demonstrating the power of the human spirit in times of adversity.
PV: Halfway to Venus not only recounts your own experience of losing your arm and of life without it, but is also an account of the way that other people respond as a result. In what ways, if any, have people’s attitudes to the body changed over the years covered in the book? In what ways do people’s attitudes tend to vary according to country and culture, in your experience?
SA: My experience spans half a century and although I think I would have been treated differently in hospital (visits were limited then, siblings weren’t allowed and now I would have been given a great deal of therapy both physical and emotional) – I don’t actually think that in the UK attitudes have changed that much. People still tie themselves up in knots with embarrassment when they have to ask a difficult question or realise they’ve made an inappropriate remark about my arm.
That wasn’t the case in America in the 1960s when I first went and still isn’t today. Actually, I think in many ways things are probably worse today than they were then, because the ethos of the perfect body is so prevalent and peer pressure is so strong. Something that struck me at several points in the book was that often friends and family members you talked to during the process of writing the book did not remember events that you recall vividly, and that had affected you deeply.
PV: Did you find that surprising?
SA: As you know, memory is very selective and what was incredibly important to me was important in different ways to my family and friends. I think we are always surprised when people don’t remember things that have been important to us (‘Ah yes I remember it well …’) and people have different ways of dealing with things.
I suspect that my mother, sadly now dead, buried much of what had been a very difficult time for her. I had certainly buried a lot. And I think it wasn’t until I started writing that certain things came flooding back to me.
PV: Halfway to Venus seems to me to contain three interweoven narratives (or perhaps ‘journeys’). There’s the story of your life and the intellectual narrative of your exploration of loss, touch, and attitudes towards the body across time and culture. There’s also a third narrative element to the book, I think, in the ways in which your own attitudes to your experiences at different stages of your life are re-examined and analyzed during the process of writing. Indeed, the book ends with a reflection on the ways in which writing the book has changed you. Was that an aspect of the writing process that you anticipated?
SA: That’s a very interesting question – when I started the book I don’t think I knew what direction it would go in and I found the interweaving of those three journeys fascinating – the way in which things connect and bounce off each other. When I was doing my research there was a lot of relief that other people had felt like I had and I discovered that many of my coping mechanisms (for example being in denial) were the norm. Has the book changed me? Well what’s certainly changed is this aspect of denial – I’ve done a complete reversal and have now gone into full exposure mode!
This does feel odd as for most of the time I don’t give having one arm a second thought – but I felt I had something important to say and made a pact with myself that for this year – 2008 – I would be out to the world about it. I can then go back to my burrow … Another positive aspect is that I think people can be more open with me now that I’ve been open to them. To quote Robert Lowell ‘Why not say what happened?’
PV: It has certainly resulted in a remarkable and powerful book. To end the interview on a slightly different note: The Travel Bookshop, which you founded in 1979 (and which moved to its current location at 13-15 Blenheim Crescent in 1982), inspired the bookshop in the film Notting Hill. In Halfway to Venus you mention Richard Curtis coming in to the shop for a few days to take notes and sample the atmosphere. How close was the film to your experience of life as a bookseller?
SA: Not very! However some of the conversations that take place in the shop in the film were certainly based on things that Richard Curtis had heard when he was taking notes in the Travel Bookshop. People asking for non-travel related books and not being put off by the ‘This is a Travel Bookshop’ response. One of the things that I noticed in the film were that there were shelves and shelves of the same book - something that doesn’t happen in bookshops where every book has to fight for a space. What astonishes me is that - ten years after the film came out - the shop is still a pilgrimage site for thousands of people who come and take photographs of it - day and night. It’s probably the only travel bookshop in the world to be a tourist attraction in its own right!
PV: Many thanks, Sarah, for talking to donowdo.com. Please allow me to wish Halfway to Venus all the success it so richly deserves.
Halfway to Venus: A One-Armed Journey by Sarah Anderson published by Umbrella Books on May 6th 2008. For more information visit www.umbrellabooks.com.