Last week I finally did my Viva, an oral examination after submission of my doctorate, and it went well. Much like the doctorate felt like it went on infinitum, the Viva loomed large in my consciousness as this unknown frightening thing. Was I going to be challenged, or worse, humiliated? I imagined a lofty dark room with dusty surfaces and echoey floors, stern looking people sitting rod-backed behind a mammoth desk covered in books. No smiles.

Of course it wasn’t anything like this. It was online for a start, so I got to see my examiners up close, in the comfort of their offices, all their colourful books making patterns behind them. There was interesting discussion, there was laughter. I even muttered the word penis. There were smiles. (if you’ve read my memoir, Sins of My Father, it might not surprise you that I used the word penis in relation to my father, but still it surprised me that it popped out during my Viva! – pun intended). In fact, it was such a pleasurable experience that I left with a warm feeling, hoping I might meet up with my lovely examiners in person one day. But then again, they were the brilliant memoirist, Blake Morrison and academic Kaye Mitchell – thank you Julia Bell for organising – and thank you also, Julia, for being a silent but reassuring presence in the Teams room: my talisman, quietly listening in.

And I guess of course you might have judged that I passed.

I clear my throat here. I almost dropped out of school at 16. I got four GCSEs – no science, language or Maths – because I truanted so much. I was distraught at how far behind I had fallen and so going in was mortifying, and there were girls in my class who called me stupid. I was a dreamy child. But I was also rebellious and was hanging out with a bunch of petty criminals who liked to smoke weed and brag about their time inside. But throughout this difficult patch, I wrote consistently. I would skive off class and take myself to the library to lose myself again to one of my ongoing stories, made up of pretty girls in complicated families, a father driving a fancy vintage car, his young blonde in the passenger seat. I had discovered the power of stepping outside of myself into a world that was governed by me – of my own making.

The PhD was of course academic – I did make it to university having turned my life around in time for A Levels; and then years later I got a high distinction for my creative writing MA – in that I had to write a 30,000 word thesis of my practice, but it was weighted against my creative piece, which was my memoir Sins of My Father, published by W&N this past year. But my thesis I realised was also a way of charting the developments in my life the past seven years during which I had reinvented myself after going through a divorce and realising for the first time that I had to make enough money to live and support two children. In this time, I emerged as a writer of memoir but also a teacher, cutting my teeth teaching recovering addicts through Hackney Recovery Service. Here I discovered that writing and teaching memoir demanded a kind of readiness to be open, to get to the heart of the matter, but also to ask questions of those supposed truths of our experience.

What evolved was a study of the links between writing literary memoir and healing. More specifically, how by writing our life, we bring a new life into being, a ‘living presence’, one that breathes and grows, shifts and changes, and brings the transformative power of writing alive for all to see. I argue that to achieve this, the memoirist should nurture, an ‘oceanic’ state – to borrow a phrase from Physician Rita Charon when exploring ‘narrative medicine’ – in order to support a ‘transliminal’ bearing of their thoughts, their questions and uncertainties, what Phillip Lopate describes as displaying their ‘thinking on the page’. This, I believe, gives memoir an active engagement with self-appropriation and reconstitution through the process of reinvention, which benefits not only the writer but also the reader who bears witness. The therapeutic benefits emerge from a new and challenging relationship with yourself and the writing process, being open to the surprises that bubble up when deeply exploring experience on the page.

This ‘oceanic’ state helps you open yourself and be alert to the more nuanced messages that the mind and emotions tell us, which can so easily go unnoticed. It is like the state of the reverie. Once we listen to these parts of ourselves we come to know ourselves better which in turn makes us better writers, better communicators to our readers, and the transformation hopefully happens for them as well. From experience into words, then transmuted into art, which brings a transformation of self – letting the writing illuminate new understanding which in turn informs the writing. To sum up, our relationship with the text helps us develop our relationship with ourselves, which helps our communication with our reader.

Had I landed on something? Was I making sense? My examiners seemed to think so, as I was given a pass with minor corrections, so minor in fact they involved a few semi colons, attempting to merge together some pesky fragment sentences. And am I now a doctor? If I could have projected forwards, the girl in the ripped Levi’s and beetle crushers, her suede bomber jacket, walking with purpose out of the school gates when she should have been in class, her hand clutching a fag from her squashed B&H cigarette packet. She was heading for the skate park when she should have been in school, to hang out with the bad boys who drink Tenants in the middle of the day; sticking her finger up at those teachers who told her she was wasting her talent. I am not proud of that girl, but I am proud of her for keeping on writing, for turning to it in the bad times, for making friends with it from such an early age and for being loyal to that friendship, respectful of its power. I didn’t know then that writing would save my life in so many more ways than I can articulate here; but then again, maybe somewhere inside myself I did.