The confidence prescription

Whenever I’m trying to work up the courage to do something I get some lines from Macbeth floating around in my head: specifically the bit there the witches are urging Macbeth to be ‘bloody, bold and resolute’.  And look at how well that all turned out, eh…

As I’ve written before, I used to wish that confidence was something you could buy in pill form or have it injected.  This makes confidence sound like a drug and to me, it always did seem like something totally alien and unnatural, something which had to be imported in some way.
I think you know me well enough by now to know, dear reader, that when in doubt, I usually reach for a book. When it comes to parenting, as with all other areas of my life, I rely on my old friends the books to give me a helping hand. ‘How to be a happy Mum’ - literally, that’s what it’s called, to, erm Supernanny to Toddler Taming and when I felt that my children could do with a helping hand in the confidence department, (perhaps because I didn’t feel quite able to lead by example) I bought them The Confidence Code for girls.

What do other parents do when they don’t turn to books for everything? Take parenting classes? Enlist the kids in lots of extra curricular activities? Actually talk to the little monsters? (kidding).
The confidence code had been recommended by A Mighty Girl https://www.amightygirl.com/, who said that girls’ confidence could take a real dip between the age of 8 and 14. My children haven’t even reached the lower age limit yet but I was seeing things that caused me concern and so I turned to my old friends, books. You may well be thinking that I would be better off coming away from books and being more practical, but you see, The Confidence Code is a practical book - it has lots of scenarios and comic strips, illustrating the dilemmas facing the girls in modern life. It has quizzes to ascertain how the reader would act in certain situations. It encourages girls to question things in society and it challenges some of the more damaging and suppressing assumptions about femininity. It doesn’t just deal with being assertive, taking risks and becoming more comfortable with discomfort it also flag posts signs that some friendships might be a bit toxic.
Yes, it’s a book for children but I’m reading it too, because I want to see what messages it’s imparting to children. And do you know what, it’s great! As I was reading it I thought - I could do with following some of the suggestions in this book, I’m not particularly comfortable with taking risks, so I purchased the adult version for our Wellbeing collection at work.  It’s also diverse and inclusive - it tackles the different cultural and societal pressures that children might face and it addresses issues that LGBT teenagers might have to deal with. The Confidence Code is not about fitting in but fulfilling your potential, reaching high to try and attain your goals and being comfortable with who you are. How many of us, even as adults, are truly comfortable with who we are? Actually, you might be comfortable with who you are, but I’m not quite there yet.

There is another book I’m reading at the moment; it’s called Big Bones and it’s a novel for young adults.

I was nervous about reading this book because it’s about an overweight teenager who has no attention of trying to lose weight and the book that I’ve written, the book that I’m trying (unsuccessfully) to get an agent for, is about an overweight teenager who refuses to lose weight! I was worried that reading Big Bones would influence my writing or, worse, be so similar to my book, yet so much better, that it would destroy my confidence in my writing and make me smash my computer in tears of rage and despair. But Big Bones is a glorious book (which is nothing like mine) and it’s main character, Bluebelle, or BB for short, is a glorious character. Not only is she unapologetically fat, she is brimming with self-love and self-confidence. This is a very important book because there is a pervasive lie in our society, that if you are less than perfect, or, more accurately, if you don’t fit into the rigidly prescribed, societal parameters of what is deemed to be attractive, then nobody will fancy you and you’ll never have sex*. This lie is particularly insidious when you are young and starts to fade, for many, when you get older (although, as a woman, you’re not really supposed to get older either!) [*The great thing about Caitlin Moran’s book How to Build a girl is that at one point the character points out that she is fat but she has loads of sex, with lots of different people.] Bluebelle, in Big Bones, loves herself, revels in tight-fitting, brightly-coloured, clothing and she calls out all the fat-phobia around her. She is a truly magnificent, body-positive heroine.

I’ve always felt that fiction has its place in imparting messages and ideas, as well as non-fiction. I wish that this book had been around when I was a teenager, because what Big Bones does, for me (we all have our own interpretations), is demonstrate that confidence can be a choice.

Confidence is a choice.
Yes, easier said than done and some people have been so battered by life, so flattened by experience that it might feel like an impossible choice but if you are living high up on the pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then perhaps it is a choice that you can adopt.

A place at the Table

In the conversation about diversity and inclusion, two things have come to prominence this week.

1) Star Wars actor Kelly Marie Tran felt compelled to delete her Instagram account after suffering months of racist and sexist abuse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44379473
Chris McCrudden has this to say about the more ethnically diverse Star Wars reboot:


So, to sum up - Diversity and inclusion isn't just about being nice and try to make sure that everyone gets a turn at pass the parcel - it also makes fiscal sense!

2) Author Lionel Shriver criticised the stance of Penguin Random House for it’s goal to reflect the population of Britain by 2025 - in seeking to publish more authors and employ more staff who reflect the ethnic/socio-economic/differently abled make-up of Britain. Her words, in The Spectator, were these:
Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. 
Now what can we safely infer from Shriver’s own words - that she thinks that writers of colour are completely incapable of producing anything of excellence? Ditto anyone with a disability? Or someone who falls into the LGBQT+ catergory. Also - crap education? Not a particularly articulate way to dismiss someone who doesn’t have a university degree, Shriver! (Penguin Random House have got rid of the requirement that their employees need a degree, in a bid to encourage more working class people to their roles. They are also one of the few companies that offer paid internships, for the same reason.)

I attended a PRH insight day last year #WriteNowLive - qualifying for it because I fell into one of the categories that Shriver so vilified - BAME. All attendees had to submit a sample of their writing and, of the 1700+ who applied, 150 were chosen - so it wasn’t enough just to be BAME (or LGBQT, or have a disability), Shriver, they had to see some promise in your writing too! They then shortlisted a handful of folk to take part in their mentorships scheme (I didn’t make this cut), before finally deciding on the lucky few to make the final cut. I say lucky but what I actually mean is the most talented. Because it’s not like the talent, skill, imagination sheer bloody genius isn’t there, it’s because maybe, for a vast number of reasons, publishing has been barred to these people for decades.
I didn’t realise, until I participated in and Unconscious Bias course at work, that people with ‘foreign sounding’ were far less likely to get shortlisted for an interview than people with traditionally British names.

I’m casting my mind over the books I’ve read recently, that have been written by the ‘tick-bos’ people Shriver is so dismissive of and that I’ve loved:

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
A brilliant, insightful book.

Mr. Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo
Funny, warm, brilliant. I found myself missing the main character, Barry, after I’d finished it.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
A really important book in present day America and also a cracking read.

Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems 
By Lemn Sissay
I’m a little bit obsessed by Lemn Sissay and his poetry is amazing. If you follow him on Twitter he often posts little snippets - ebullient, hopeful little pieces that ‘stoke your soul’ in the way that all great art does.

And do you know what - I know it sounds petty and childish but I’ve loved all of those books far more than I loved anything by Lionel Shriver.

What about marginalised voices in TV. Did you watch A Very English Scandal recently? So good I watched it twice. Penned by Russell T Davies, it was an absolutely magnificent piece of television and Norman Cook’s courtroom speech about how he wasn’t going to be masturbated in a corner then ignored was one of the most rousing I’d ever heard (Not sure how close this was to what the real Cook said in court). Up until that point I’d found Cook an irritating little squirt but when he made that speech he was liked a Gay rights, anti-establishment crusader. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it - the establishment. The predominantly white, middle class, Oxbridge education literary establishment, feeling threatened by the new voices peeping through - they feel they are going to be swept aside. Those ‘other’ voices were always there, Shriver and others, there was Maya Angelou and James Baldwin and Christopher Isherwood and Patricia Highsmith and plenty more...There were always there but Penguin Random House are just trying to remove some of the hurdles to other emerging talent - is that really so bad?
In September 2017 I sat in that large hall in Bristol and the CEO of Penguin Random House talked about his favourite book by an underrepresented writer (something we’d all been encouraged to do). He held up a book by a gay writer (to my shame I can’t remember what is was) and said that when he read it, as a teenager who was gay, it made him feel accepted.
As a child of mixed race parentage, I didn’t see myself reflected an awful lot in the books I read, growing up, but I’m happy that my children will have far more of them to choose from!