Terri White’s Shelf Life

Terri White grew up in a small North East Derbyshire ex-mining town, dreaming of London (and, dream of cinematic dreams, New York!) After twenty-one years in the capital (and three-and-a-half in New York), she headed back northwards with her small ginger son and the man she made him with. They now live at the foot of Saddleworth Moor.

Terri spent those two decades editing magazines – including Time Out New York and EMPIRE – being named Editor of the Year three times by the British Society of Magazine Editors, and receiving their lifetime achievement award, the Mark Boxer, when she left the industry (because it’s a hellscape for women who have babies and/or aren’t independently wealthy). Terri was made a Fellow of the RSA for her work in magazines and journalism.

Terri wrote an essay for Ted Kessler’s book on fathers, My Old Man (Canongate, 2016), and her memoir, Coming Undone, was also published by Canongate in The Great Lockdown Debut Book Disappointment of 2020. Earlier this year, Terri’s short play Body Count was staged at The Playhouse in Liverpool and she’s now developing it into a full piece of work. She’s also adapting Coming Undone for the screen (if it doesn’t kill her first).

Terri has a column in The Sunday Times and writes for the likes of New Statesman, ELLE, The Observer Magazine, and British Vogue. She’s usually scratching around at the intersection of life writing and class, VAWG, social justice and film and TV. She’s the current Chair of Judges for the Gordon Burn Prize.

How and where are you?
As I start this, I’m at my desk in the mezzanine of our house. I’ve always longed to have an attic room to write in (when working on Coming Undone, I regularly booked into hotel attics), and while it’s not technically a room, when I look up, all I see is sky.

How am I? Knackered. It was nigh-on 2am when I put the key in the door last night. A simple two-hour train journey from London to the Northwest became a many-hours nightmare. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, right?! Unless, you know, you’re someone who lives outside of London and has had to use a train, ever. Don’t get me started. My evolution into a crippling train bore has been deeply hurtful. I used to be interesting! I blame the Tories.

…. And now as I finish this, I’m back at my desk in the mezzanine, four days having passed since that first sentence. Chicken pox struck my three-year-old son, and my mothering skills were in demand. Last night, he was driven (loudly) mad by itching. Neither of us slept. When I close my eyes I see white smears of calamine lotion marching over red hills. Did I mention I’m knackered?

What are you reading right now?
I read tens and tens (and tens and tens) of books over the last couple of months for the Gordon Burn Prize longlisting. It was a delight (Oh, what am I doing today? Reading!), but still prescribed reading, so I’m giddy to return to entirely my own choices. That said, I fell desperately for books I’d have likely not picked up otherwise, so there’s a lesson in there. One I’d definitely have learned by now if I wasn’t so tired.

On the go, straight out of the gate: Insane by Rainald Goetz (ever since my time in a psych ward, I’ve looked for stories of the madness of madness. This doesn’t disappoint. It’s bloody terrifying), and Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm. A memoir of sorts built from photographs and essays. Which, as she had no truck with biography or life writing, preferring a critical, journalistic approach (deployed with such power in The Silent Woman) caused obvious tension on the page. I love it.

This year, I’ve also had a play or screenplay always in hand, and am finishing 2023 with Blasted by Sarah Kane, because I know how to have a festive time of it. Snowball?

And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
Film is one of my great loves – which is handy, having spent six years as Editor-in-Chief of a film magazine – and I love to watch, still. Last week I finally saw Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, only managing an all-caps “FUCK ME” when I emerged, blinking. For me, it’s all about cinema. Every single time I take my seat and the lights fall, the screen lighting up, I get the exact feeling as I did the very first time. Those seconds are complete magic. Time, reality suspended. Every nerve poised, waiting to transmit. Conversely, I have a thing for true crime TV shows with low production values and binary narratives.

I’ve neglected music somewhat this year, partly because my toddler now takes the lead on communal music (playing The Beatles on a loop for the last 18 months), and because I spent several months working on a script that came with a very specific playlist. I could listen to that and only that while I worked. But this year, as in so many others, Mick Head, Cass McCombs, and Taylor Swift kept my emotional lines clean. Which made it even more fun when Self Esteem would appear and fuck them up.

What did you read as a child?
No violins necessary, but books weren’t plentiful in my house. So, I read literally anything. The Reader’s Digest Medical Book (only problematic when I diagnosed myself with… everything), the very unexpected copy of The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley I found in my nana’s front bedroom. But I loved to read, and write stories, so thank god for school, libraries and the Menzies in Chesterfield that took a chunk of my babysitting/paper round/waitressing money.

That sustained me until I met my first boyfriend at 16 and had a life-changing book summer. Oh god, it wasn’t down to him (come on, now. He wore Kouros), but to his parents, both teachers, both massive readers with stacked bookshelves. It was the Summer of 1997, the hot weeks, and months before I went to university. I worked in a cardboard factory, but don’t remember the long shifts, the sweat that must have appeared in the hottest August on record. What I do remember is the dinner table they invited me to sit at, spoke to me across. The books they passed over: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I read everything Morrison had ever written, read Cunningham’s (then) other two novels, as much Alice Walker as I could get my hands on. With each crack of a spine, a new part of the world opened up to me, and welcomed me in.

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
I owe everything to the working-class writers who refused to yield their voice and experience, who wouldn’t be sold their own reality, made grotesque in its otherness, or (even worse) made palatable. Andrea Dunbar, Terence Davies, Alan Sillitoe, Caroline Aherne, Alan Clarke, Shane Meadows.

I read Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire at University while suffocating in the aftermath of the violence and abuse of my childhood – it was a flare in the darkness. Recognising a life like mine, was one thing. Seeing it printed on the pages of a book was another. It wasn’t just hope, it was an answer.

These days I’m most excited by women whose writing, in whatever medium, is challenging, disruptive, and really, really fucking good. Cash Carraway. Charlotte Regan. Michaela Coel. Adelle Stripe. Wendy Erskine. Sheena Patel. Heidi James. Jenni Fagan. I read them, watch them, and remember not to be so nesh.

What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
Most people were dead kind about Coming Undone (maybe they thought I’d been through enough!), but I did avoid Goodreads and Amazon – I’m not sure who’d truly have skin thick enough to absorb negative comments about something so personal and painful.

I did become aware of some chat about the graphic nature of the book’s self-harm scenes (in amongst the general obliteration of self). Specifically, that I’d been irresponsible in writing the detail, had made it appear ‘glamorous’ (by virtue of being as a magazine editor in New York at the same time). When I heard that, I was furious. Red-hot, turn the walls to rubble, rage.

I was furious at what felt like a demand for civility. I was furious that our experiences as working-class women, as women abused as girls, are dismissed, and disappeared. That our stories are ‘allowed’ so long as they follow the poverty to riches, pain to happiness, victim to boss-bitch arcs. As long as we soften the edges and blunt the blade.

I knew my intentions: my deep desire to show the reality of something we’d rather pan away from as we sink into our steam-cleaned settees. To confront the violence of it. To dig out the roots of it. But then I realised that my intentions, motivations, beliefs, and feelings don’t matter, because they don’t exist anymore. When the book left me, went out into the world, it became something new. It continues to live and breathe and change through the readings, feelings, and perspectives of others. It’s not ‘mine’ to feel so angry about. (Am I still furious? Of course I fucking am, mate.)

Tell us a little about your creative process.
It depends on what I’m writ…actually, I don’t think it does. No, it doesn’t! I’m having an epiphany! Regardless of whether it’s a script, journalism, or book, I start off each project with calm, organised days, and then, by the death throes, I see sleeping and eating as enemies of time; think only about the words, and worlds, on the page. I’ve tried every other way of doing it. It’s the only one that works. And it all happens at my desk, which I leave once in the morning for coffee, and once in the afternoon to use the loo.

The biggest change to my creative process has been having a kid. My previous single-life approach of ‘I write best by the light of the moon with a good Rioja and a cigarette’ has been swapped for hardcore writing assaults in whatever time I have before I need to feed/collect/play with another human.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
Canongate were frankly an absolute dream to work with. They were sensitive and thoughtful with the material of the book, but also with me as a human being. They fully supported my push into difficult, disturbing places; my unwillingness for certain conventions; the stories I had no interest in telling when telling my story. More broadly, I do despair of how far we are away from publishing being anything close to a meritocracy, and the sneering (what naivete! Publishing isn’t fair, tough shit!) when mentioned as a hope, an ambition. I’d like my son to grow up in a world where writing, painting and filmmaking aren’t the play things of the upper classes, undeserved luxuries for everyone else. Where inherited wealth and inherited privilege don’t count for quite so much. Where voice, idea, heart, and talent win. Where writers can pay their bills, can exist. Christ, I’m 44, and I’d quite like to die in that world, actually. Naïve? Yeah, baby. Always.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Just write. The only two words of writing advice truly worth listening to.

What are you working on right now?
The play I’m writing has infiltrated my dreams, which is usually a sign that something is working, creatively. A bloody novel that I keep withdrawing from and returning to, like a particularly bad boyfriend. Some bits of poetry that might become something, or absolutely nothing. And fragments of memoir I’ve written over the last couple of years. Perhaps they’ll be a book, when and if it’s time. I’m in the early days of a new non-fiction book and a filmmaking project for 2024. Did I mention I was tired? What a remarkable life, though. Writing. The only one that ever made sense.