Lily: Shall we start by hearing about The Last Days, your memoir published recently by Ebury, and your motivation in writing it?

Ali: The Last Days is about growing up a Jehovah Witness in a closed rural community in the Scottish borders in the 1980s, and it follows my life as I come of age and get married within the religion. It also details the difficulty of being a woman within the religion, and the impossibility of leaving such a close community when you don’t have much knowledge of the world outside. It’s really an internal book dealing with my fears and the close existence I had, but at the same time its aim is to expose something very external.

For a long time, I wanted to write a hard-hitting exposé of the witnesses, a sort of Empire of Pain. I had plotted an excoriating historical piece. But I soon realised that I would be using this kind of book to hide behind. I thought long and hard about how to engage a reader, and what kinds of books get published. We all engage with personal stories in a way we don’t necessarily engage with political ones, a lens from which to view something bigger. So this was my intention for the book from early on.

Lily: What did it feel like for you to go into your past?

Ali: It was complete hell. I hated it. I wrote the first draft very fast. If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done it. It was an awful first draft, but it was a way of working out the shape and what was going on behind the story. I wanted to write about those things I was prepared to talk about in the future, so I needed a certain level of detachment. Then I went back and wrote the second draft. When I sent out a query letter about the book, I had lots of sleepless nights thinking, Oh God. This is a really bad plan. What have I done? Then once I started working with an agent there was more support in place, and then when I worked with Ebury it helped as well. During the writing of the first drafts I would be sick, I would have panic attacks. I would need to wash. I never showered as much as I did that summer. But subsequent drafts were less visceral. I used music as a way of going back into scenes; and also a particular song to bring me back into the present. Songs helped me enter experience at a granular level, what I was seeing, smelling and hearing. It was discombobulating as I was spending so much time in the past, and sometimes I’d wake up and not know which bedroom I was in, or what version of time I was going into. It was a very fracturing experience. I was communing with the dead, the past and with trauma, on my own in a room. It was an uncomfortable process that I didn’t enjoy.

Lily: So you didn’t find it cathartic?

Ali: No, I didn’t find writing memoir a cathartic process. But I think the past has a way of working away at you, particularly when it involves trauma. I had to somehow face it and realise that quite a lot of unusual things had happened to me. When I left the religion, I went through a period of needing to be in a constant state of movement – a need to move forward, because I felt that if I was in flux I was alright.  But writing makes you slow down.

What I realise now is that memoir is poison and the cure. It’s like you enter into a breech. I had this rupture and wasn’t fully in the next life. I was in this in-between space. And the memoir offered me a way of stepping into the next life. I didn’t want to feel ashamed anymore and I didn’t want to conceal things. I was fed up with being stuck.

Lily: Growing up you were told not to be worldly. But you have a good education. Did that come despite your upbringing or was your mum more lenient than other witnesses?

Ali: I’ve developed my interest in philosophy and literary theory since I left, but I feel as if I am constantly running to catch up. When I was younger I got clinically depressed, because I believed the end was coming. I became very ill when I was 15 with anorexia, so I did my GCSEs and then missed the following year of school.  One of mum’s colleagues at work said, what are you are going to do with your life? And I said what do you mean? The end is coming and I am ill, and hopefully I’ll die, was my feeling at the time. But I started my Highers and did them at home via distant learning. Reading was encouraged at home, books with a certain level of safe. No sex or swearing. Mum let us read the classics, so I read Dickens and the Brontes when I was very young. I remember reading the Beat poets when I did an intern in Amsterdam and it really opened my eyes. But when you’re in a cult, your cognitive ability is impaired so there was a lot I didn’t understand. When I left the religion, I was hungry for books, which is when I started to think about writing. I did an evening class in creative writing, and then I did an MA and everyone was talking about arcs – and I thought why are they talking about Noah!

Lily: Your memoir is written very much like a novel. Why did you choose to write it as a memoir and not as fiction?

Ali: It was really important to me that it wasn’t fiction because I wanted to talk about an organisation and the damage it had done, and I didn’t want it labelled as not true. But at the same time we engage with things through story, which is why I wanted to tell it in a very novelistic way. I was also sick of running away from the truth.

Lily: You write it chronologically and from the child’s point of view and then the voice changes as you grow up. You don’t have the reflective voice, but the reflection is embedded in character. Is that something that happened naturally?

Ali: Sometimes in memoir reflection can be quite laborious. I wanted the reader to reflect on it rather than being told what to reflect on. This can be quite tyrannical, and writing is tyranny anyway. My editor said, where is the reader in this scene? Are you pushing them away, or are they on your shoulder? This really helped me. I needed to keep the reader on my shoulder or right behind my eyes, and once I got that cinematic feeling it started to work.

Lily: You go to some difficult places in the memoir. How did you reconcile yourself with that. Was there a self-selecting process of where you were comfortable to go and what you were comfortable to reveal and what not?

Ali: I think there is a tendency in memoir to try to make yourself likeable, almost to absolve yourself as a writer of any personal responsibility for the crap that happens around you. I wanted to be quite hands up about how complicated we are as people and the ways we blow up our own lives. There is a space for writers who are doing that in quite a remorseless way. I really wanted to write into the complexities and into the intimacy of that, to be straight up about my own failings and difficulties. As soon as you become complicated as a narrator it’s much more honest. As a writer, I am really against sanitising anything. I really like the filth and the dirt and the difficulty.

Lily: What do you hope for your book now it’s ready to be launched into the world? What do you hope for its future?

Ali: I hope it opens people’s eyes about what seems like quite a benign and harmless little religion which is actually a global property empire, which I believe to be extorting its members for its own financial gain. I hope it helps people who have left feel seen. I also hope it reaches professionals, like doctors and school teachers who work with witnesses. If the psychiatrist I saw when I was a teenager understood more of the complexities of what they were dealing with it would have helped me. I hope it reaches people who are still in the religion and are having doubts and trying to find a way out. I also want people to be put off from engaging with the witnesses. We have this idea that people who join as vulnerable, stupid or silly, but high control groups are very sophisticated and clever in their recruitment, and coercion works in many ways.

Lily: What encouraging words can you say to your book to bid it farewell?

I don’t know. Off you go. My friend says it’s like lobbing a grenade over a parapet but it feels right now like I’ve got to follow it. I want to accompany it. I have such a strange and complicated relationship with the book. It feels quite symbiotic, like we’re little ghosts of each other. Maybe by the time the paperback is out, I might have a different relationship with it. It will be less oppressive because the book will be less heavy.

Lily: Yes, you’ll be able to carry five of them in your backpack.