01.2
The time in her life that Clare Allan felt safest was at university, in the cathedral town of Durham, which appeared to her like a magical stage set. Unlike school, where Clare's towering height had made her stand out as a target for abuse, Durham was an institution that allowed her to fit in and play a part. She forgot the past, put the future on hold and began to discover herself as a writer. What she feared were vacations, glimpses of an endless world outside that had no structures to hold her. Sooner or later, she intuited, "the game would be up".
None of Clare's early books was published, but they all contained that kind of intuition. First there was a novella entitled A Queen Called Lear. After university, while working as a telesales agent in London, she wrote a novel about a telesales agent who pretends to be a blues singer and is forced to live out the lie. Then came a version of Hamlet, constructed around the symbol of old certainty that is Durham cathedral, but set in a new, post-Thatcherite world in which all certainty has gone.
Three-quarters of the way into her Hamlet, however, Clare stopped functioning. "I had always imagined that somehow I would turn into someone else," she says. "Then I realised that wasn't going to happen; and I was stuck with me." She was walking down Tottenham Court Road when the realisation came. She kept on walking. For months, Clare walked around London, pausing at her flat merely to sleep. Time seemed to have shrunk into minuscule interludes of consciousness. She couldn't imagine even five minutes ahead. She thought someone had stolen her passport, and her identity. She ate less and less, until she could feel the bones in her feet crunching on the ground. Gradually, she felt herself vanishing.
Clare's long walk stopped in 1995, when a GP grabbed her at a drop-in clinic, and she was referred to a psychiatric day centre attached to the Whittington hospital. This turned out to be another institution where she could fit in and play a part. Though conditions were grim and treatment sparse, Clare was allowed to be, or not to be, without interference. But the part she had to play, as the price of admission, was that of a mad woman.
In the 10 years Clare has subsequently spent passing through a revolving psychiatric door, it has never been clear exactly what her illness is. She has had psychotic breaks, been high and low, heard voices, self-harmed, attempted suicide; and she has been variously diagnosed with developing schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, paranoid psychosis and depression. "None of it was really me," she says. "They are just different ways of looking at something."
Such diagnostic promiscuity exposes an instability underlying psychiatric concepts. Yet there has been consistency to Clare's experience. It lies not in her fluctuating symptoms, but in the "phenomenology" of her illness-the profound, recurrent feeling she gets that she simply does not exist.
Institutionalisation gave Clare a "holding pen", and it also provided a subject that allowed her to write her way out of it. Though psychiatrists saw her literary ambitions as a delusion, her first published novel, Poppy Shakespeare, has been longlisted for the Orange prize. It is about two women - a narrator called "N" who is desperate to stay inside the system, and Poppy, who is desperate to get out. By the end of the story, "N" and Poppy have switched places. To the extent that this is autobiographical, Clare leaves herself with one foot out and one foot in.
"Writing a novel and having it published is a very definite way of existing in the world," she says. "But suddenly being visible, and people being able to have a piece of you from a bookshop, is not exactly straightforward."
In fact, Clare sees her psychological denouement coming about less because of her book than because of her social worker - a woman of extraordinary resolve who has seen Clare every week for more than 10 years, who refused ever to fill in the "diagnosis" box on her assessment forms, and who persisted in imagining an existence for her outside of the psychiatric system. This has not been therapy or analysis, but the supplanting of institutional props by a sustaining relationship.
Clare can now imagine a future for herself and, because she is playing the part of a writer, is professionally inclined to look back for explanations - both biological predispositions and psychological narratives. Yet, while she's found a way of being in the world, she still faces a paradox of causality when it comes to the origins of her illness. "It's hard to say you've been ill because of who you are," she says, "if you feel that you don't exist."
- Andrew Linklater, The Guardian, Saturday 28th April 2007