This week’s guest in the attic is my very good friend, Natasha Lester.
Ten years ago when I started writing, Natasha was one of the first authors to offer me a helping hand, an encouraging word or an answer to a question. Over the years, we’ve become firm friends and writing buddies, although Covid has interrupted our fortnightly writing chatting sessions. (Well, we do *some* writing.) I can’t tell you how much this lady has taught me and how much admiration and respect I have for her, her writing and her work ethic.
Natasha’s post is about writing in the time of covid, about her dad’s Alzheimer’s and about the need for stories now more than ever. As the daughter of someone who was taken prematurely by Alzheimer’s, this piece really spoke to me.
If you’d like to read an earlier post of Natasha’s for the attic, you’ll find it here.
Natasha Lester worked as a marketing executive for L’Oreal before penning the New York Times and internationally bestselling novel The Paris Orphan. She is also the author of the USA Today bestseller The Paris Seamstress. Her latest book, The Paris Secret, is out now.
When she’s not writing, she loves collecting vintage fashion, traveling, reading, practicing yoga and playing with her three children. Natasha lives in Perth, Western Australia.
If you’d like to read more about Natasha and her books, you can find her on her website, Facebook and Instagram.
You can buy The Paris Secret from the following outlets: Booktopia, Amazon, Audible, Dymocks and QBD Books.
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These Are the Times for Stories
“But these are not the times for such stories.
The stories of 1944 are darker, crosshatched with despair.”
I wrote those lines last year in a book I’m working on for 2021 called The Riviera House. In the same book, I’m writing about people queuing to buy food, shops empty of provisions, curfews imposed to keep people inside their homes.
The book is set eighty years ago in wartime Paris but, as I’ve been editing it over the past few weeks, I feel eerily as if I’m writing about our present. Of course wartime is deadly and continues for years and leaves everlasting scars on those who suffer through it and I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus pandemic is like a war; it’s just that I can see the parallels in some of the events in my story, events that I thought were things that only happened in a time long past.
My father has advanced Alzheimer’s. He’s had it for about fourteen years, since he was sixty. He still knows that I’m a familiar person and his face always lifts into a smile when he sees me, in a way it doesn’t with strangers. But it’s been many years since he’s known my name, or been able to say I’m his daughter.
Alzheimers takes people’s stories from them as it steals their minds. It takes away their ability to understand stories too.
My father is, right now, in a secure eight bed mental health facility for older adults after he went through a phase earlier this year when his Alzheimer’s caused him to become aggressive. A psychologist who visited the facility a few weeks ago was unfortunately diagnosed with COVID-19, thus putting the facility into lockdown. Nobody was allowed to visit my father for two weeks.
How do you explain to a person for whom words mean nothing that his family hasn’t abandoned him, that those familiar people who make him smile haven’t simply vanished, never to return?
At the same time, I have a new book out called The Paris Secret. This means I need to tell a story about my story: talking about the book on social media, in videos and in blog posts. Part of me wonders whether it’s crass to be marketing my book when people are dying in their tens of thousands all around the world, when people are losing jobs and livelihoods, when fathers sit in mental health facilities, lonely, but lacking the ability to articulate their sorrow.
Another part of me remembers that two and a half years of work went into the book, that I love the story and the characters, that perhaps stories about other times and other places, other hopes and other fears, other worlds and other lives might make a difference to even a handful of people right now.
I don’t know which part of me is right, but the latter half takes strength from the many emails from readers who have sent their mums a copy of The Paris Secret for Easter in lieu of paying a visit which might put their loved ones at risk. They offer the solace of story instead.
It will be a long time before I’m allowed to see my father again. Having three kids means I’m a perilous kind of visitor and not welcome at the facility, which I understand. We can’t move my father out of the facility and back to regular aged care right now as aged care facilities can’t take the risk of accepting new residents. So he’s stuck and I’m stuck.
I wonder if, whenever I’m finally able to see him again, he’ll smile when he sees me. Will he still remember that he knows me, or will he walk right past me? Will this prolonged absence mean he loses the last few sentences he still possesses of the story that connects us together?
Stories reach through time.
That’s what I decide as I sit in my attic and write about people queuing to buy food, shops empty of provisions, curfews imposed to keep people inside their homes.
I write about love and loss and heartbreak and joy and tears and smiles and laughter. I write about the despair, and the joy. Because that is what stories are made of. They are made of everything: emotions and words. Feelings and sentences. Hearts and paragraphs.
I don’t know what that means for someone like my father who is missing the words and the sentences and the paragraphs in that equation. When I used to visit him, I would take out my phone and turn on a playlist of the songs he used to listen to when I was young. His Alzheimer’s did not stop him from humming along to the songs, from tapping the table in time to the music. He sings in his own way, unintelligible to most, but it has meaning to me: it means there are still connections being made in his brain; that there is still a way to reach into him and find the person inside the ruined mind and the weakening body.
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I still have the playlist on my phone. I still have hope that I’ll be able to play it for him again one day and, while he might have forgotten to smile at me by then, he will still hum along to the music. He will still be in there, somewhere, touched by the story in the song.
So yes, even though the stories of 2020 might be darker, crosshatched with despair, we still need them. Keep writing, and keep reading, always.
GIVEAWAY!
I have a very special giveaway coming up later in the week, with not one, but two gorgeous books to win.
Stay tuned!
So touching and powerful. Yes, we do need the stories of now and before. We do need to leave something to be able to keep making those memories and connections.
Thank you Natasha. And thank you Louise.
Thank you Vikki – so glad it resonated with you.
I found it touching and powerful, too, Vikki! You’re right about continuing to make memories and connections. Thanks for reading. ❤️
Having attended one of Natashas writing courses on turning your memoir into a life story this is such a powerful piece of writing so pertinent to many families at the moment and more personal than Natashas very enjoyable fiction always meticulously researched.A very talented lady
Thank you Hilary.
What a moving post. Thank you to both of you, Natasha and Louise, for giving it to us.
I think stories are all the more important now.
Couldn’t agree more, Theresa: we’ll always need stories. Keep writing them and keep reading them. 🙂
Thanks so much Theresa!
Yes, Natasha’s very talented indeed, Hilary! Hope your writing is going well. 🙂
Beautiful, thank you. I now have more books to add to my list and I am feeling encouraged to keep writing.
Definitely keep writing! And all the best with it.
Yes, another book on the toppling TBR pile! 😅
What a tender and touching post. And I agree – we need stories now more than ever.
Congratulations Natasha on your latest book The Paris Secret, and thank you Louise & Natasha for this post.
Thank you Fiona. Hope you’re staying safe and well at this time.
It’s a beautiful post and you’re so right about needing stories now—I can’t really think of a time when we don’t or won’t need them, so we’d better keep writing them. 😃
It is utterly devastating when your person loses their words. I know. My heart aches for you, Natasha. I recognise the fear of wondering if that small glimmer of recognition will still be there when next you meet. I also recognise the disconnect of having a new book, my first novel, and celebrating/promoting it at a time when there is so much pain and loss in the world. I’ve no answer on the latter beyond we must because life always goes on, even if not in the same way. Stories are a wonderful distraction at such times and needed. That thought helps me feel I’m doing the right thing, keeping calm and carrying on.
Beautiful sentiments, Christine. We must continue to create. ❤️
Thanks Christine – take care and all the best with your book.
Oh, I’m so sorry about your father Natasha… and the fact you can’t currently visit. My dad had vascular dementia. It meant he (mostly) remembered the past but wasn’t able to store new memories. It’s frustrating when they’re often otherwise healthy and – your dad might have been the same – there’s a period of time when they realise what’s happening and it’s so sad and frustrating for them. It’s almost a relief then when they move past that point and don’t know what they ‘don’t remember’.
I hope he stays well and you get to visit soon. x
I relate to your story, Deb. My dad had Alzheimer’s and was only 71 when he died. Until the end stages, he was physically healthy—the only organ failing him was his brain. So hard to watch. My love to you. 💛
Hi Deborah, you’re right, it is a relief when they get past the point of understanding they are losing their memory because that is so painful to watch. All stages with dementia are tough, aren’t they – some more so than others. I would say this year with Dad has been the toughest time because he is so physically able, but so mentally incapable. So sorry to hear about your dad too. x
So sorry to hear about your father. 60 is such a young age to be diagnosed. I remember my grandmother had alzheimer’s. I was only a child, but I remember visiting her with my father and I could see the sadness in his eyes. And then one day, she recongised us both. It was only very fleeting, but that moment shared between the three of us will be something I will always remember and cherish.
I hope that you are able to visit your father soon, just to be with him – for you both. These are such hard times we are in now and we need each other more than ever.
And you are so right. We need stories more than ever now. Stories to help us escape. Stories to share experiences. Stories to remember the past. Stories that stay with us through their heartfelt emotions and meaning. And your stories do all those things.
What a beautiful moment to share with your grandmother, Jodi. And I agree that we need stories more than ever right now. Hope you’re taking care, too. x
Thanks Jodi. It’s such a cruel disease and I think it’s cruellest for the person with dementia when they can see, understand and fear what’s happening to them. Then that passes and it becomes cruellest to people like my as she becomes a parent to her husband. At least I knew he’s being well cared for in the facility he’s in and that’s something to be grateful for.
What a beautiful and heartbreaking post. Thanks for sharing so honestly of your own experiences at this time, Natasha. Big love. And thanks Louise for bringing this post to us all in what is a brilliant collection of articles by writers.
Glad you liked it, Holden. I do have a wonderful collection of articles by writers now—maybe I should do something with them one day? 🤔
Thank you Holden. Hope you’re doing okay. And yes, big thanks to Louise for supporting other writers and creating this series, which always has something worth reading,
This was such a beautiful heartfelt post. Thank you so much for sharing Natasha and also Louise for creating spaces for writers to write and seek fellowship.
So glad you were moved by Natasha’s gorgeous post, Skylar! ❤️