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 and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. As well as featuring the interviews here on my blog site, I will be using them as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP in 2025).

My 17th interview is with Tom Lee, and about his latest book, The Bullet, which is a memoir about the impact of mental illness through his particular family, looking back at his parents’ periods of ill health in order to better understand his own bouts of extreme anxiety. I was lucky to be asked to read this at proof stage, and found it incredibly moving but also informative about the historic changes in the way mental illness has been treated, and the changing face of the asylum.

Tom Lee is the author of a memoir, The Bullet, as well as a novel, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr, and Greenfly, a collection of short stories.   His fiction, essays and journalism have appeared in Granta Magazine, The Paris Review, The Dublin Review, Esquire Magazine, and The Guardian, among others.  He has won the Society of Authors Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant and been shortlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest prize for a single short story in the world.  Tom lives in South London with his family and teaches at Goldsmiths.

When and how did you realise that you had to write The Bullet?

I’d always known that there was this stuff around my parents that was unspoken to a degree – not spoken about in the family – and that this was my original material, my core material. Even when I was writing fiction, I had a sense of it waiting for me to face it. Although I didn’t imagine I’d write a whole memoir about it.

In 2012, I got pneumonia, went into hospital, and was extremely ill with acute respiratory distress syndrome. And when I got out of hospital, I had a very strong impulse to write something that represented the experience as closely as I could. I’d not considered ‘life writing’ before; I looked down on it a bit as a fiction writer. But I’d taken quite a lot of notes in hospital as a record for myself, I guess, and I had an urge to render it as accurately as possible.

I wrote an essay and it was published in Dublin Review, and it seemed to make a bit of an impact on people. There’s something about writing real life experience that engages a reader in a different way. This response intrigued me. So I wrote a second essay for Dublin Review, about my anxiety, which had happened prior to being ill with pneumonia but was a more fundamental, more difficult, experience. Then I had two pieces, both of which I enjoyed writing. And then after my novel came out, I guess that was 2017, I was thinking about what to do next, and I realised there was a third piece, which would go into the family stuff, which I hadn’t done before, about my parents’ long, complicated mental and physical health. So then there were three pieces, and I saw an opportunity following publication of the novel to go back to Granta and say, what about this?

Did you find structuring of the real-life material different from when you were writing fiction?

Yes, it was different, because the process of writing fiction for me has always been utterly agonizing, and it hasn’t got any easier. Whereas with life writing, if I knew what my subject matter was I simply had to put the hours in, and I also enjoyed doing the research. The life writing felt like it emerged quite fully formed for me, quite developed. Of course a lot of that was because I knew all the storytelling techniques from fiction. There were certain books I’d been inspired by, too, like The Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, and her niece Leslie Jamison’s writing, and Olivia Laing. They’re all quite academic in their approach, and research based, which I like.

One of the main challenges in trying to get the book to work was making use of the different strands: the personal stuff, and the factual medical stuff, like the history of benzos and things like that, and the hospital stuff. The Severalls Hospital, where my parents had been patients, was the black hole at the centre of my memory. It was all symbolically located in this building that also, geographically, existed in this unknown space, even though it was very close to where I’d gone to school and grown up. So I knew the hospital was the heart of the book, and that there was a void in that heart. Exploring the history of the hospital was a way to unpick some of the personal stuff as well, and quite early on, I looked at how I was treated for anxiety, compared to the way my mum and dad had been treated, and this helped me see that our experiences as a family were part of a wider social and historical change: my parents were over-treated, compared to my experience of not being able to get any treatment, which seemed to align closely with what I felt was the bigger story.

I suppose that was partly why the book felt interesting and worth doing, because I could see a direct connection between the personal and the bigger social picture. But getting those elements to work together was hard. I did a lot of chopping and changing the structure to try to get it to work. At one point I had very long chapters of the personal and then a really long chapter of the historical / cultural and went back and forwards like that, but the movement between them just didn’t feel right. It was like, you’re deep in one thing and then you’re in another. And so I decided to make it fragmentary, more like memory; so I chopped it all up into bits. I remember having it on my office floor at Goldsmiths and literally moving things around and chopping things up. And I ended up with something that was much too fragmentary. And ultimately what I arrived at in the end, was somewhere in between, with short chapters that move between the three or four different strands.

And how did your parents feel about you writing about their history?

When I planned to write the third piece, I told my mum and dad. I can’t remember how explicit I was about the content, but they’d seen the other pieces that I’d written about myself, so knew it was probing and personal. I recorded conversations. I wrote notes. And then I pitched to Granta, and then started work on it. But I didn’t say to my mum and dad, this is what I’m doing now. And then at a certain point in the process, maybe 18 months into the writing, my mum got ill again. She basically had a fall, which then precipitated a relapse into her depression and quite a lot of paranoia. She was quite unwell, and life for them was incredibly difficult. And then Covid happened. And at some point I said to my dad: You know, I’ve been working on this thing, but there’s a few things that I don’t know. Can I talk to you both? And he said it was just too difficult. So at that point, I thought, maybe we need to let it sit for now. And my editor said your relationships with your family is much more important than a book, and I was so relieved.

But as time went on it was continually on my mind, and then my dad died in 2022, and in terms of the book I thought, I’ll see how my mum is, and see how things play out. And about six months later, I felt like I should go ahead and publish it. My mum read the beginning and said she found it a bit upsetting, which I think was mainly about reading about my dad. And my wife found it difficult to read because she didn’t want to read about me in hospital. So I told my mum, Ellie didn’t read it so you don’t need to either, which was a relief for her.  And my mum’s 84 now and more preoccupied with other things that are more immediate to her. I was fearful that because part of her illness has been high levels of paranoia and a really strong sense of shame about her illness, and the fact she was absent for short periods when I was growing up – because she was unwell and in hospital for periods of time – that she would find this aspect difficult. But she hasn’t mentioned the book to me or my brother and neither of us know where her copy is.

But I’ve really enjoyed receiving emails from people who’ve read The Bullet saying really thoughtful and nice things, and that my parents come across well in it. In a sense, I lost sight of that because I was so preoccupied with my worry that they wouldn’t want it out there.  There’s a bit of a generational thing around it as well, I think, around openness, and sharing dirty laundry in public.

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 to resist it because it kind of left a gap in the narrative?

The most difficult part which I felt needed to be in the book was the stuff around my mum’s suicide attempts and her time at Severells, which was I think the worst of her experiences. But I felt in order for the book to work, and the idea of Severells being a black hole, around which the book circulates, the hardest stuff needed to be there. I genuinely felt that the book wouldn’t make sense without it, really. Then it became a tussle between what was ethically right and what was right for the book. I had to wrestle with myself about whether I really should put it in. In many ways, I would like the book to have been much more collaborative. If my mother had been younger and fitter and if my dad hadn’t died I could have involved them more, because one of the things I still don’t know, or don’t understand, quite possibly never will, is quite what her illness was like for her. And in a sense, that’s one of the most interesting things to me. And in a sense, her voice isn’t really in the book too much, which is a shame.

You write very openly about your anxiety, and I wondered how that felt for you?

Weirdly, it was okay, although sometimes on rereading it, it felt slightly unsettling, you know, it was a bit triggering, if you like, and… It does make me a bit jumpy. I’m not sure it was very good for me. But I made sure I had other things to keep my head out of it. My wife has always said: It’s not healthy for you to revisit all this stuff.  Haven’t you done enough of this? But one of the particular characteristics of my anxiety – and I write about this in the book – is that I did talk to everyone about it.

When my mum was depressed, she didn’t speak about it. She was ashamed and it felt like a secret. Whereas when I was anxious, I talked to everyone about it. I didn’t really hide it. So I didn’t find writing about it particularly difficult.

Were there things that you did to support yourself during that time of revisiting and writing?

I quite enjoyed the writing of it, particularly the writerly part of shaping the material and feeling like I was getting it to work. So it wasn’t like every time I set to writing about it I had to engage with how crap I felt. I enjoyed the crafting aspect of it. And I also stayed in touch with family life, and I found my kids very grounding because they force me to be in the present. I always write at home, and so there is always a lot going on. I like to write in a regular structure, knowing I’ll be doing something different in the evening. And Goldsmiths provides… In fact, way too much distraction. There was one point when I was going to go to a friend’s for a period of time, outside London, to knock the draft into shape, and I was actually quite scared of doing that and spending a prolonged period on my own. I guess partly because of the sort of stuff that I was writing.

There was a lot that was not exactly concealed or exactly taboo, but a lot that had happened when my mum was depressed and in hospital when I was 10 or 11 that was glossed over because it was difficult. And I wanted to speak about those things that had felt a bit unspeakable. I don’t mean that burying and not speaking was necessarily harmful, but what is implicit in the book is the question: how did growing up as the son of a mother with mental illness play into my own anxiety?

How is memoir different from lived experience?

 In the process of turning something into a story you detach from the details of what actually happened. There’s a part of me that’s trying to tell a good story, that wants to make it cohere. And so I know that there are things that are maybe not strictly accurate or there are bits I’ve had to miss out, like my parents’ more recent history. In a sense, the story that I wrote aims to feel quite redemptive. That we have always looked out for each other and we have ended up okay. But then again, there is complicated part of the story, which is dealing with my mum’s illness, especially when she was manic, which is extremely difficult and which I feel anger about, which isn’t in the book. So the book is a version of events. Not the whole story. What you write really can only ever be in a sort of approximation. And at that particular time, in the sense, if I wrote my book again, five or ten years later, it would be a different book. There’s already a bunch of stuff that I feel I could write as an addendum to the book.

Has writing the bullet changed your life? Has it changed your relationship with yourself?

Writing a book can create a space of intimacy, a sense of people feeling like they’ve had a similar experience to you, or you’ve articulated something that they’ve felt. I had this with the essays, but the book has a wider reach. And that feels like a powerful thing. I mean, that’s got to be a good thing, I guess, to make people feel they can share something.

I think we do maybe forget that what we’ve done is a bit out of the ordinary in terms of being so open. And people recognise that and it’s a cue for them to be similarly open. After I wrote about my anxiety, a lot of people came out about their own anxiety, and it feels like a real privilege to be in that position as a writer, to help others speak out about their difficult experiences.