The Story of 'Nobody Nowhere'

The first of my nine published books was a number one international bestseller, but to me as the person behind the story, Nobody Nowhere still felt like the literary home movie that is so raw and personal, you hope nobody ever sees. It was once more personal than my underwear and I'd have almost died to keep it private and unseen except that I was getting close to choosing to die unless I dared to let someone know what was going on in 'my world'. The manuscript was the one place where my utterly patchwork sense of self, my jumbled jigsaw mind, my straightjacketed emotions, my mosaic rollercoater life came together as one tangible whole embodied in a collection of paper.

I wrote it at what I thought was the end of my life when I found myself edging closer and closer to the edge of the train platform with each morning train and asking myself inside... "what about today?..." because without the ability to dare let anyone be close to the real me, to hold out any hope that I could ever live comfortably with intimacy, closeness and being known, what was life worth in a world of appearances which seemed to want only a performing puppet, a facade.

But of course Willie (and you'll read about him and, yes, he's invisible) wouldn't let me do it, ... not without first telling someone, just one human being, what the hell was going on in here and just seeing, was it really true, was there really no hope and that meant trying to speak their language and daring to let them hear me speak mine.

God knows when Willie got that kind of hold on me, probably when I was nine when I realised that 'mind' existed and I discovered 'thought' and meaning (scared the heck outta me,... like, woah, what is this and whose is this and what do I do with it)... but in any case, it sure was a society which indoctrinates us all into believing mind is a greater authority than sensing (and I'd be something scraped into a bucket off the train tracks back then if mind had not had this heirachical one-upmanship, however alienated and non-self I found it)... but in any case I complied (one must comply with Willie... unless of course you are Carol... Carol never did and those two did not mutually respect each other (yeah, Carol was invisible too). Anyway, of course there was me, but what authority or clout does a ghost have, I wasn't even in control of the body. Sure, I was the 'self' but in society the self is so far down the ladder of recognition most of the time and so it was then.... In fact if anything Nobody Nowhere is the story of the self climbing that ladder, reclaiming mind as self, casting surface appearance aside, risking all and deciding that the only worth in life is if our real self can find that right to 'simply be'... but, yeah... what a road.

So Willie got his way and I don't know who it was who bought that orange plastic typewriter withthe wonky keys but in four weeks, I had allowed my fingers to vomit forth the words that would give some one person the whole damned thing on paper. There was no thought, barely any eating, barely peed either and my fingers flew like something possessed and a pile of 250 pages was in my hand as I knocked at a door that read 'child psychiatrist'. I slapped the papers on the desk and my words said 'tell me why I'm like I am'. I didn't tell him about the London Underground thing and the pact with Willie or that I was sure there was no hope anyway and we were delaying the invitable. I didn't tell him till later that my plan after he'd read it was to burn it so nobody could ever see or touch this life on paper or contaminate 'my world' by 'knowing me'. But when I did tell him, he told me the manuscript was too important to give back. My response was that I didn't want it now anyway, it had been seen and was therefore no longer mine, I would exile it.

And so I happened that I did find out why I was like I was, but also in time why I was so much more than any label and that however strange a fruit I was I was part of the diversity of society, however discarded and discardable I was I had the paradise of society's peripheries to hang out on, out with the other misfits, the eccentrics, the artists, the wackos, the Auties, the Nobodies who would hide their souls too long and finally join us in a place where Simply Being was not a dirty word in a world of appearances.

I remember so many wonderful stories in the decades that followed, among them another beautiful behavioural mutation staring at me across a conference theatre of a thousand people, his eyes filled with a realness, a foundness, but I could see he'd been a Nobody Nowhere himself. I had addressed this stranger, this face in the crowd who had said only, 'you saved my life'.

And it was in fact learning of that ocean of Nobody Nowheres which had ironically saved mine. Knowing they were out there had raised me above my own acute paranoid need for absolute detachment and privacy and allowed the book Nobody Nowhere to be published and go all around the world in every language. It is, I suppose, every person's 'coming out' story.

I remember a letter from a 10 year old who wrote to say it was his favorite book and that he carried it with him and it slept under his pillow and people who said the book had become the friend they wished they'd had. The book became a symbol for people from my youngest pre-teen and teen readers to those at the end of their lives and everyone in between. It was one of those books that didn't leave people once they'd finished it.

It became a symbol of daring closeness regardless of fear, of rising above loss, of humanity in the face of abusive inhumanity, of equality in a place of blatant inequality, of the beauty of individuality, the importance of getting 'found', of realness standing with such integrity in the places where superficiality and conformity were king and 'normality' a social bashing stick. Most importantly it became a symbol that none of us are truly alone even in the darkest, craziest and surreal of spaces, the magic of one's own world and never giving up on the idea that we all have a place in the diversity of society if only on its colorful peripheries.

When I was thirteen I wore a tee-shirt which read 'get yourself free'. It took me to nearly twice that age to start to do so but it is never too late, never.