The Trick to Time

"This is not normally the kind of book that I would read. But since I’ve written a popular book, it’s amazing how many other books get sent to you to read that you wouldn’t normally buy. The write-up on this book wouldn’t have directly appealed to me. So, there was a huge learning process in there which says to me don’t necessarily believe what’s written on the dust-jacket, because when you get into the story, it is really beautiful. The story is about dealing with death. I’ll only take it so far because I don’t want to spoil it for anybody. It talks about a woman who has clearly had difficulties in her life. As the book progresses, flashbacks show you how her life has developed. There’s the relationship she had with a man—she absolutely adored him—who left her, and her losing her child. In losing her child, she had to find her way of coping with the death. And she found that she was not alone in the world as a woman who had lost their child. People would come to her to talk about the loss of their child and how they coped with it. She had a relationship with a carpenter. After meeting with another woman who’d lost her child to talk about the child (particularly the weight of the child), she would then go to the carpenter and ask him for a piece of wood that would be carved into a beautiful work of art, that was exactly the same weight of the baby. And that piece of sculpted wood would be handed back in a shawl to the grieving mother, so she could hold something that was the same physical weight as the baby she had lost. I met Kit on a radio show and asked her where this had come from. In her professional life, she’d been involved with a lot of work associated with women and grief and the sociological counselling of women in grief. She says that she created it in her imagination—it doesn’t exist—but it’s so believable that I genuinely feel that women who read her book could understand why they would want something of that nature. It is that crossover, again, between what is a professional world—a creative world, because this is a novel and this is fiction—where it is sufficiently believable that there’s a bridge occurring between the two, that there’s a mechanism suddenly created that might help some of these women in that grieving process. So, I thought it was really beautiful. It’s a subject that we don’t normally discuss; when somebody loses a baby, as the chaplain at my university says, we tend to use soft words spoken at a safe distance. And when you’re in grief, that’s not what you need. You don’t want the placatory ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, because that doesn’t mean anything. You want to have that really difficult conversation with somebody that says, ‘This is how I really feel—how do I get out of it and how can I help myself?’ And to me, the totally out-of-left-field experience produced in The Trick to Time was really innovative. I wonder now if any woman has followed up on that, having read it. I think, as we discussed before, it’s so very personal. Some people need time to revisit the grief on different levels. Some people want to try and deal with it right away. There isn’t a right and there isn’t a wrong. There is a philosophy around grief which says that you don’t get over the loss of a person who mattered to you; what you do is accommodate around it. Your life grows around it and buries it in some sort of way, but it doesn’t go away. It’s still there. Every now and then, a little piece of it comes up to the surface. “There is a philosophy around grief which says that you don’t get over the loss of a person who mattered to you; what you do is accommodate around it.” It was the most awful thing to lose my father, but it was at a time where it was right for his age. It was a grieving process, and it was an immediate one. But, gosh! The number of times that man comes into my life! Even today, I open my mouth and hear my father fall out. My children open their mouths and I hear my father’s words come out. And although they make us laugh, there’s still also that little pang of loss. We don’t ever lose the grief, we just work around it. The more tools and mechanisms that we have, I think, the greater the opportunity we have to find our own personal way through it."