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 eleventh interview is with Dr Tulika Jha who is currently writing her first memoir on mothering. She is a psychiatrist and an activist combining health, creativity and social justice principles to disrupt and build care that is reciprocal and collective beyond expert and patient boundaries. After 25 years of experience in the NHS, she is taking time away to focus on organising and collaborating care in a way that is not at the expense of the caregivers, is led by care receivers and is aligned with larger socio-political landscapes and alternative epistemologies. This involves both written and spoken poetry and prose because she believes that creativity is a strong agent for change.

She has written and spoken for British Bilingual Poetry Collective 2022, Mad hearts annual conference by QUMUL 2021, Compassion for Health Care 2022, her poem, ‘MAD, BAD, SAD: 3 phases of Activism’ was published in the psychoanalytic book Burden of Heritage by Dr Aileen Alleyne (Karnac press 2022) and her poetry film ‘We are ready, are you ready now?’ was published in the Consilience journal Issue 6, Diversity Issue.

How did you land on your idea for your memoir?

My memoir is about mothering. The relationship between the primary care giver (usually the mother) and the baby is one of the most important templates that forms all other relationships in life. I wanted to explore this original relationship and from here on develop an understanding of many other relationships in my life

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

This subject was both urgent and persistent. Urgent because there were occasions when I felt overwhelmed with pain that I was unable to soothe for myself and needed some urgent understanding into why and how this skill could be cultivated.

Persistent, because what we don’t work through and understand, we repeatedly re-enact again and again and again. The writing of this memoir then became a journey of exploration and working through these persistent mental states in relationships.

What is it about memoir that appeals to you?

The memoir disarms me and the reader. There is little space for showing off purposefully yet your work shines due to its own authenticity. The memoir is a vehicle for my raw authentic self. Just like no one can critique or question hunger and thirst, no one can question my personal lived experience. This gives the form of the memoir superpowers.

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?

My voice came very naturally because most of my adult life I had been placed in a strait jacket about what to say, how to say it, how to greet my patients, how to approach them, How to take a history etc. Memoir writing was where my voice could run free because it was voicing my truth and no one had the right to control that.

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

This is a difficult one. Because my memoir is about mothering and relationships, it is about loved ones. Many if the subjects I am writing about have either not been broached or if they have, the result has been explosive and unresolved. This is something that I need to constantly re-evaluate. Currently, I am just writing as if I have no one gazing over my shoulders. This is the only way that I can get everything out on the page which is my only witness. In the future, I will consider whether to approach family members. It will not be easy because had the relationships been easy to navigate, I would not be working through these issues via writing a memoir, I would have worked through them with my loved ones!

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?

Yes there are so many aspects that I feel so terrified about writing. However I have perhaps not resisted it because I know these are the points of maximal pain that are motivating me to write the story. I have protected myself by discussing them in therapy. Writing down my dreams which is often a beautiful mothering process for me in that it metabolises some aspects of my story and makes apparent some latent aspects. I also speak to close friends and my partner. I sing, I paint, I garden and I go for walks.

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

Therapy therapy therapy

Did you have any rituals to protect yourself?

I have become very humbled by some shamanic practices like calling upon the animal archetypes, the elements, the stars, Sun and the moon. So I try to wake up and do my morning pages (the artist’s way) but prior to this I open ‘sacred space’ which is a shamanic ritual where you call upon all these archetypes to bear witness, protect, inspire and help you in your journey. I also close sacred space after an hour when I finish the session. Then I do something that moves my body and engages it in not just the attic (brain) of the house but the whole house.

Do you think personal narrative is a platform for exploring the unspeakable? Lifting the veil? Or even the unthinkable? If so, please expand:

Yes I do. I think personal narrative if done in a free association, stream of consciousness style, removes any defences to the subconscious (I won’t say unconscious because that’s what dreams are for). It connects the mind to the body through shoulder, arm, wrist, fingers on a pen to the page. I like to write by hand because an embodied experience connects me to deeper aspects of subconscious.

As said before, no one can challenge a personal narrative- the more personal it is, the less challengeable. This can be freeing.

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

Trauma Fragments memories. Writing memoir doesn’t necessarily offer cohesion to my memories as much as it offers agency to write my own memories. This may well feel like more cohesion and less fragmentation. Trauma happens to us all. It usually arises due to power imbalance. Taking up a pen and writing your own story is a very empowering experience in redressing the balance.

And did memories lead to memories that had been buried?

Yes, it did. It was like my mind and body had permission to ‘go there’ and having created a safe (sacred) space through my ritual, previous and ongoing therapy and other supporting activities and people, I was given the permission to open the gates that had been jam closed due to fear.

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?

I don’t agree with this. As someone with a leaning towards Buddhism, I believe in impermanence, that everything passes. I also don’t feel I would become the master of my story because mastery comes with letting go not concretising.

My way of looking at this would be to continue writing (even on the same topics like Annie Ernaux) as I change, evolve and grow in my position to the facts of the story. The truth is like a planetary motion in that neither the Earth nor the moon is stationary and hence their positions at any given time cannot be fixed. There’s no ONE concrete truth.