In this series of interviews I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves or their place in the world. I will also ask about how they navigate difficult territory for themselves and those they love, and what has shifted or changed as a result of this process.

My first interviewee is Noreen Masud, and my questions are related to her recently published memoir, A Flat Place, which is about flat landscapes, but also about the flat and bleak experience of living with complex post traumatic stress. Masud writes about specific flat lands, but as a metaphor for exploring this emotional and psychological space, and the result is compelling. This is one of the best memoirs I’ve read so far this year. I loved the surprising nature of it, the quirky narrative voice and perspective on the world. It is a book about exile, racism and growing up under patriarchal rule, but it’s also about the relief of finding a place we can understand, and where we might be understood.

Noreen Masud is a lecturer in twentieth century English literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her first book, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language came out with Oxford University Press in 2022; her first creative nonfiction book A Flat Place came out with Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Melville House (US) in 2023.

How did you land on your idea?

It started as, simply, a trade book about flat landscapes. My agent got in touch with me, after I was announced as one of the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers 2020, and asked if I’d thought of writing a book for a non-academic audience. So we worked together on the proposal and sample chapters. My memory of the process is this: I wrote some passages about my walks through the Cambridgeshire fens, and sent them to my agent. He wrote back saying, essentially: Noreen, I don’t really understand this – this is strange – you describe strange reactions to these landscapes, and I don’t know where they are coming from. So after a little of this back-and-forth, I wrote back apologetically – a rushed note, saying, I’m so sorry it’s weird, I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and that probably filters the way I respond to things around me. And my agent replied: we probably need to make that an explicit part of the book. That’s how I remember it happening.

Had you explored it previously through other mediums, ie fiction, or straight nonfiction? How has writing memoir been different?

In terms of the work on flatness, I’d been writing an academic literary monograph about flat landscapes in twentieth century literature – D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and others – which is now nearly finished. A Flat Place felt like the shadow to this book: the elephant in the room of the process. If literary criticism feels, to me, like reaching beyond what is obvious, writing memoir has felt like coming right back into the foreground of what is obvious – what is so close to me, rather than so far away, that it’s also barely visible. Instead of ignoring the little cries and whispers in my mind, as I have to do to an extent when I write academic work, writing memoir meant tuning into them. Both require painful patience and both are worth it.

Did it feel essential for you to explore this subject in this way? Was it urgent? Persistent?

I’ve felt possessed by my past – swept up by it – all my life, even as it was happening. Possessed by my inability to narrate it, or to make it something that mattered, that had weight. Every part of it feels so strange. So I’d made several attempts to write about it, over the years. In 2019, when I was desperately unwell – as I describe in the book – I wrote a lot in an agony, in a different form. Passages of that made their way into A Flat Place.

Writing it, giving my life a finished form, making it into a paper object distinct from myself – rather than something shapeless which suffuses my whole body and interrupts me when I try to speak, with a voice only I can hear – has been an extraordinary relief. The book is separate from me now. It has shape and is written with as much integrity and beauty as I can muster. So now I can do something else.

Did your voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into your research?

I’m not sure when it happened – when I felt confident about my voice. But I do know that when I did the life-writing I describe in the previous answer, in 2019, I could not bear to be present in the book. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be an ‘I’. I had to write in the third person, and I couldn’t be a human being. I had to be a little fish with no name, designated X. A little silver minnow. Something very small, who could dart away and hide when she needed to, whom no one could see, which took up no space. Gradually, as I wrote, X disappeared and I could take my place in the story. But I had to be a minnow first.

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

I made a decision that I wasn’t going to write in detail about living people whom I didn’t love, or where there was too much active pain to be just to them. So I could write about my father, who is dead and whom I didn’t love, and I could write about my mother, who is alive but whom I love. Writing the chapter about my mother – where we visit Orkney’s flat islands together – was very frightening but also felt completely natural. Existential, but also a chance to take a huge leap towards honesty and intimacy.

I also made a decision not to tell a story which seems like the turning-point in my life – the meat of ‘what happened to me’. In the book, I describe my decision not to tell that story. Primarily it’s to protect the person who lies at the heart of that story – whose story it really is. But that silence became an asset in the end, I think. It allowed me to be straight with readers – to say to them: if I told this story, you’d think it was the point, the ‘peak’ in the bare landscape to focus on gladly. But it’s not the point. I’m going to withhold it. And you might have to cope with that, and to think about how it makes you feel, to have to sit with a story with no centre. Which is what I have to do, as a person with cPTSD.

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

I shared the whole book with my mother, and asked her to flag anything she wasn’t happy with – I emphasised that I might not be able to make all the changes she requested, but that I would do my best to make responsive edits as far as I possibly could. In the end, she only asked for one change: I had noted that she converted to Islam when she married my father, and she asked me to add the word ‘officially’ – she had officially converted. Other parts caused her pain, I think, but she didn’t ask me to change them. She felt that the chapter on Orkney framed her as foolish, which stunned me – I think my mother is very mysterious and unusual, and I will spend the rest of my life musing on what makes her tick, but never ever foolish. Quite the opposite – I’m the fool in that relationship. That was an interesting lesson. You can’t predict what other people will find painful or troubling in what you write.

I don’t know how the book as a whole felt to her in the end. I’m not even sure if she’s read it all. She has been very generous. She wrote back to me saying that she didn’t remember everything I had written about, but she was so sorry that there had been so much pain. What a perfect response. I feel much closer to her now – I was aching to hear that, I think.

All my sisters had a different reaction. None of them wanted to read the whole thing. One asked to see the bits about her, to sign them off; one didn’t want to see any of it. Forget-me-Not, the sister who features most (I have changed all the names) was happy for me to talk through with her the parts which mentioned her, over the phone. Her one request – I talk in the book about her epileptic seizures – was that I represent epilepsy fairly and accurately. I hope I’ve done that. We didn’t know it was epilepsy for such a long time, so all I could do anyway was describe what I observed, what I remember observing.

Did you write a proposal for this book, or did you write it in its entirety first? Did you sell it on proposal or the entire manuscript?

I wrote the introduction, the second chapter, and the proposal, supported by my wonderful agent, and we sold it on that basis.

Had you read much memoir before writing A Flat Place, and if so what about it appeals to you?

 Memoir is probably my favourite genre. Older memoirs, especially. Bad Blood by Lorna Sage – that mesmerised me. But also the memoirs of early twentieth-century writers. For Sylvia by Valentine Ackland – I remember crying over that on a plane, in my very early twenties, as we dipped through sunny clouds ready to land in Edinburgh. Ackland was Sylvia Townsend Warner’s lover; she was unfaithful and an alcoholic, and For Sylvia is an agonised reaching-out across that gulf between them.

Memoir feels like a pleasure, where novels and poetry feel more like work, because of my job as a literature lecturer. I always want to know everything about people. Not what they did or wrote so much as what they liked to eat, how life felt to them, what frightened them. I think I feel so alien so much of the time that I’m always seeking comparison-points with other people’s experiences of life – salt tastes salty to them too? Absurd, but there it is. I don’t know what’s ordinary about what I think or do, and what isn’t, and memoir helps me think that through.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

I’m not sure there were. Sort of the opposite perhaps – there were one or two things we had to cut, for legal reasons, because I didn’t have concrete proof and couldn’t back them up with other testimony. That was very painful, because it felt like being disbelieved. Of course it wasn’t! My editor was wholly onside and supportive and believed me! But we both knew that the law is the law, and what it allows or acknowledges is distinct from what one knows to be true. I remember having to manage those feelings: that I couldn’t prove what I was saying, and therefore I couldn’t say it. But the reception of the book has shown me that I am believed, I think. And the kindness of my editor and agent did a great deal to help me feel believed.

Was it a process to become ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’ to go to the places that you might have otherwise resisted?

 Again, I don’t think it was. One of the features of cPTSD that I talk about in the book is the tendency towards dissociation. In my case, it takes the form of derealisation: the feeling that I am real, but nothing around me is, and nothing that is happening is real. This is a very sensible response to have when the world around you has historically been dangerous and scary – though it’s a real obstacle to feeling safe and connected in a safer world. But my tendency to derealise let me do things and write things safe in the half-conviction that they weren’t actually real and none of this was happening. I think it has made me more able to take certain psychological risks.

I’m still not totally sure that anything I’ve done or written or published or said in the last three years is real. I amble along anyway.

Do you journal and if so, how did that help when it came to writing your memoir?

I don’t journal. I’m terrible at diary-keeping. I have one of those one-line-a-day books by my bedside, and even that I never fill out. It’s awful. But anything I find myself looking at twice – a sign, a shadow, whatever – I photograph, in my daily life and especially on walks. It takes me a very long time to look at things and to listen out for what is interesting to me about them; it takes time for those thoughts to swim up. So I scroll a lot through photographs, when I write.

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

Oh, absolutely. And sometimes actually it’s a kind of fake cohesion, but that’s okay – important, in fact. Sometimes it’s about saying: these memories don’t go together, they’re fundamentally incompatible, they contradict each other, they’re impossible, big parts are missing – and that’s normal; we’re going to go with that. We’re going to find a way to join the unjoinable, in a way which doesn’t conceal the impossibility, which makes the impossibility part of it. Our memories are always part false or hallucinatory or whatever. That’s the nature of memory. I think it’s very useful to give space to that, or at least I find it so; I find it a relief. So in A Flat Place, for instance, I talk about my memory of a man with a monkey’s head, pacing through the house. And I don’t try to explain it away, or collapse it into a more orderly story. I just let it be there, and I don’t apologise for it. The ethos of the book – the cohesion-giving force behind it – is to describe rather than explain, whether it’s the surface of a flat landscape or a memory which makes no sense.

When we write memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

You know when you’re playing one of those old video games – where you can’t save your progress at any old time, you have to reach a ‘save point’, and if you die after that, that point’s where you reappear? That’s what writing A Flat Place has felt like. I have given form to – made concrete, in your phrase – something which was formless and chaotic; where I kept having to go back to the beginning as I thought it through, again and again. Nothing in the book was fleeting or forgotten for me. I was possessed by it all, every day, helpless with it. But writing A Flat Place – putting it in full, concrete, beginning-to-end form – has made a save point for me. I might progress beyond it. I might reach a different way of thinking about it. I might realise that everything I’ve written is wrong. Then I have the right to put it in another form. But for now, I have that ‘save point’ locked in. I have a place to which I can return when my thinking about my life crumbles helplessly around me, and I can start from there.

In A Flat Place you write about complex post-traumatic stress. Did you feel drawn to write from inside the trauma, into a kind of embodied writing, as well as describing it? So that the reader feels as if they are under your skin? If so, please explain how this came about – whether it was conscious or not.

Is that how it feels, to read A Flat Place? That’s really nice. I don’t think I thought about how it would feel for the reader, except around things where I feared I might be misunderstood. I was committed to listening to those cries and whispers in my mind, and giving them form. With a flat landscape, and with cPTSD, there are no ready-made paths to follow for talking about how it feels. All I had, as a resource, was what things felt like to me, in my mind and body – all I could do was to describe those feelings. So I suppose I wrote that way because no other option was available.

How did it feel when your book was first published? Were you prepared for those feelings? How did your family take it?

Before the book was published, my main fear was that I would receive hate mail. I even wondered about whether my friends and family would be safe (and then of course I remembered that I am not important enough really to be targeted). I’d forgotten, I think, that people might actually like the book: that it might mean something to someone. And I’ve been stunned by the letters and emails and messages. One person said that it provided them with something to ‘feel continuous with’. What a beautiful phrase. Another person – someone, like me, with Pakistani heritage – said she wished she’d had the book as a teenager. That was extraordinary. I wasn’t ready for any of that.

My family and I don’t talk about the book. I will occasionally send my mother a nice review, and she will respond briefly. That’s fine – I understand!