Clare Bowditch

Interview by Madeleine Dore
&
Photography Anna Robinson

Clare Bowditch: creative powerhouse

Full transcript

Embedded in all of my routines, my whole life has been a restlessness.  I need to do very different things.  The anchors of my life are my partner and my family.”
– Clare Bowditch

Madeleine Dore: Around this time of year, many of us make lots of promises to ourselves.  They could be the habits that we’re going to form or the resolutions that we’re going to keep, the things that we’re going to finally start in the year ahead, or the things that we’re going to give up.  Sometimes these promises can make us feel uneasy or they can come with a real pressure, and with that pressure we might even internalise failure.  We might feel like we can never change, we can never stick to a new habit.

What’s wrong with us?  Why can’t we keep our resolutions?  When really it was the promise or the timeline that we put on that promise that is really at fault rather than our own ability to keep them.

I thought that my debut guest had a really refreshing approach to promises.  The musician, radio presenter, entrepreneur, and now author, Clare Bowditch, made a promise to herself more than 20 years ago.  And that promise was that she would write a book.  And that book would be about what helped her get through one of the most darkest times in her life.  A time before all the success, a time before she knew her trajectory, a time before she had hope. 

She made that promise with one very important caveat I think we can learn from, and that caveat was that she would allow herself to wait a really, really, really long time before writing that book.  And she kept it.

20 years later, she now has the book published by Allen & Unwin called Your Own Kind of Girl.  It’s a chart-topping, best-selling book and it’s a wonderful, rich, insightful, inspiring read, and I think that really is due to not rushing it.  All the life lessons, all the wonderful self-love and story changing and growth comes through in the pages, and that wouldn’t be possible if the book was rushed, if it had a different timeline that felt forced.

I’m really, really excited to share this debut conversation.  We did record the interview at a distance.  Clare was in Melbourne while I was in New York City, and it was also one of the very first interviews I conducted for this podcast.  I’ve admired Clare for a really long time, and she’s been on my wish list of interviewees for ages, and so I was both incredibly humbled and incredibly in awe to be speaking with her.  And at times, if the audio quality is a little bit quirky, I hope that you can also bear with us there.  I’m very much learning as we go with this podcast.

In our conversation, we talk about the book writing process, we speak about how routine and habits can sometimes help get us out of a dark time or a rut.  We also speak about how sometimes when we make really rigid routines for ourselves, we can actually, as a byproduct, be saying no to life, so we speak about those two sides.  We also speak about the stories that we tell ourselves and Clare’s amazing techniques for flipping those stories.  We also talk about the measures that we place on our bodies, our minds, our work, and our relationships, and how they can sometimes become incredibly harmful and incredibly toxic, and Clare is beautifully candid about that topic, both in her book and in our conversation.

We talk about doing many different things and when to let go of something and when to reach for something new.  We also talk about cultivating that hope that comes with a promise without the pressure of rushing it.  One of the most stifling parts of building a creative life is feeling the pressure to achieve everything right away, and Clare really taught me that it’s not about taking grand leaps or strides in the direction you want to head in, but actually aiming low.  And with patience, with trust, with one step in front of the other, it all begins to make sense.  So, I hope this podcast teaches you to start by reaching for something right in front of you, rather than a grand plan.  And, even if that means pressing pause on your creative dreams for a decade or two, I think that’s okay.  See what is in front of you to explore, be it in a new year, a new week, or a new day. 

Clare Bowditch: I realised quite early in my adult life, and also my creative life, that I’m not someone who has a regular routine. What I do is seasonal routines, and they tend to focus around, now, my family life but also around various projects.  So, today, you know, I’ve just come out of, really, a year and a half of writing a book and, for me, book writing meant waking up very, very early and what I do is I attach certain things to each chunk in my day, and they’re usually related to fluids.

So, I’m talking my perfect cup of tea and my coffee, which are back-to-back almost as soon as I wake up.  I don’t want your judgement about that, people, you know, this is the way I have to do it.  For example, my book writing routine           might have looked like waking up at 5am, writing for a couple of hours, waking up the kids then at, you know, seven… I’ve got one who’s a teenager in Year 11 now    and that meant, you know, waking up more like closer to six, and then I’m on mum duties until they’re all off to school, which is staggered between 7:30 and 8:30.  I’m in this fortunate position now where my children are all at high school, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to now write this book, because all of a sudden, you know, I have the kind of life that allows me to do it, just literally in terms of the nuts and bolts of raising children.

So, once they’re off, I then will have my shower, I walk my dog, and away I go doing some more writing until I peter out around lunch.  I have lunch usually with my partner, Marty Brown, who’s also my work compadre.  Our house is our coworking space.  We’ve worked on albums together, we just recorded the audiobook for Your Own Kind of Girl, which is my first book.  Just finished that last week.  And sometimes that involves going to our studio, which is offsite. 

And then, really, from three on an average day when I’m not travelling, from three I’m back on mum duties, you know?  I’m doing the shopping, I’m doing the washing, I’m doing the cooking the dinner.  My husband’s doing the same.  We’re picking up people, we’re dropping them off, and we’re in family time and I click back into work usually when the kids are doing their homework after dinner at seven. 

We always try and eat dinner together.  It doesn’t always work that way obviously, less and less as they’re teenagers, you know, have their own lives and often we just try and make a bit extra ‘cause someone will just show up, which is great.  And then, these days, I try and relax at night.  It’s a crazy thing, but this is new for me.  So, that’s, like, the routine.  But that is not, Madeleine, you know, you know this inside out.  This is not how the creative life really works because if you’d asked me this question four years ago when I was a broadcaster in radio, my routine was extremely different.

MD: And that’s what I think is so interesting about your career, is there’s been so many different modes to jump between.  So, I’m interested with the book-writing routine.

CB: Mm-hm.

MD: Getting up at 5am, was that something that you needed to work at, or have you always been quite an early bird?

CB: I am neither an early bird nor a late bird, and it just really depends on what time zone we’re in and which routine we’re in.  My routines are absolutely attached around… tend to be able to adjust to whatever project is on the go, but I have a similar flow of the day.  So, I am someone whose mind is bright in the mornings.  This could have to do with the excessive caffeine, as I said, but that’s the truth.  I’m on fire in the mornings.  And, once I get cracking, I can be very productive for a particular period of time.

But I think, embedded in all of my routines, my whole life has been a restlessness.  I need to do very different things.  [Quote 00:09:15] The anchors of my life are my partner and my family.  Other than the human beings that I interact with, my routine just really ebbs and flows around what it is.  And I’m not romanticising this, but what it is that my muse decides is going to happen on that particular day. 

So, I show up and my productivity really depends on some other mystical contract of things between things I don’t understand.  Have I slept well?  Have I been dreaming?  You know, am I stuck in overdrinking with my buddies?  You know, my school mum’s that week, or not.  I’ve never been able to really nail exactly what it is that creates a sort of creative flow for me, ‘cause sometimes in my darkest moments, that’s when I get most creative.

The idea for this book, Your Own Kind of Girl, was really written in my… it came to me in my darkest time, which was 21 years old.  One of the things that helped being such a fan of Extraordinary Routines all these years is because a lot of my recovery from what I now call my newest breakdown, and at the time my therapist, like Brene Brown’s therapist, kept trying to call a nervous breakthrough, which I hated.

A lot of my recovery came from a return to basic, simple routines.  Routines like getting up in the morning, getting my clothes on, getting out of the house.  You know, I had a year of my life where I really was agoraphobic, and this is… this is a new story.  I’ve been in the public eye for 15 years, I’ve never spoken about this time, but it’s so central to what my creative life is today.

MD: That’s what you express so beautifully in the book.  What I love about the book is how it really emphasises this idea of patience, and I think that’s incredibly refreshing because often when we hear about creative projects, there is this rush or this pressure to be… even, like, say a 30-Under-30 or 40-Under-40, all these kind of arbitrary measure of success.  But in your book, I love this line in particular, where you said that, “[You] needed the hope of the promise, but what [you] didn’t need was the pressure of rushing it.”  So, can you talk about how having this goal of the book, but not a rushed goal, was helpful during that time of the breakdown?

CB: We’ve got so much we could talk about.  I’m the youngest of five, we were all born 18 months apart.  In the book I say, you know, like, decades on the rosary.  I was brought up in an incredibly loving, robust, and, you know, Catholic kind of a home.  Liberal catholic because my mum was also from Amsterdam.

When I was three, my sister who’s slightly older than me, Rowena, my next oldest sister, became ill and I was six-months.  You know, they worked out that she was actually terminally ill with a very rare disease.  She moved into the children’s hospital and our routine here in Melbourne then became very much based around Rowena, and she was on a life support machine.  She couldn’t move, except for her head.  I never realised she was these things, she was just my sister who was still bossing me around from the hospital bed.

Our routine was really around her, you know, as it should’ve been, and in those days, you couldn’t stay overnight with your kids.  My parents kept it happy and light because the converse thing, and anyone would know this who’s been through that sort of trauma and grief, is that along with it is this life, this brilliant bright life, this joy, this laughter, this cheekiness that’s all existing at the same time. 

In order for us to stay sane and intact as a family through this experience, my parents bedded down on routines.  You know, the routines of meals, you know?  Fish and chips on Friday, roast on Sunday.  There were the routines and timings around going to church on Sunday.  There was waking up at a certain time in the morning and being back, you know, in time to pick up the kids.  And so, we had all of these very structured routines that kept us anchored to Rowena, you know, to being with her.  When she passed away two years later, from then until, really, my teens, for me, I had a restlessness and a chaos in me.  Again, lots of happiness and singing and joy, but internally I’m searching always to do something that meant something, and what was that? 

And I was really struggling trying to find my own routines, which looked like going on and off diets, you know, as a chubby kid who then got really thin, got all the praise at ten-years-old of being a thin success, a triumph, and then had to question for the rest of my life why am I treated differently now that I’m thin?  And then had that panic of fat and thin, fat and thin, you know, I call it my piano accordion body, which I’m so pleased with and grateful for now, but it was torture.  And I still didn’t know what I wanted to do at school and, again, I then took that restlessness on a big trip after a terrible breakup over to London. 

I’d written this list of things that I wanted to do with my life.  I wanted to do something that mattered, I felt guilty that I wanted to sing.  I thought it didn’t matter enough to be a singer.  And then, seeing Jeff Buckley play live, and realised actually, yes, singing can change lives.  So, there I was in London with my dreams, and I had this list of things I wanted to do with my life.  You know, I want to write a novel, make beautiful music, act in the theatre with inspiring humans, learn a language, run like the wind, and I remember this because I wrote a song around it.  And I played my very first open mics in Oxford, and I started to get my head around, wow, what if I could be someone who told stories from my life?

But I had nothing bedding me down, and that’s when I, you know, I never realised that this sort of fear that I had was panic, was anxiety, was, you know, unprocessed grief.  And it came to a head over there, in London.  I’d tell myself, secretly in my own head, looking for routine, looking for structure.  I’m not coming home from London until I am thin.  And at that stage I’d been working in the call centre and I was, you know, a big girl who struggled to find a suit that fit me and I said this to myself, and it became slowly in my head this secret voice and then a threat, and it started to terrify me.  And, really, this is what we might look at now with hindsight and say there was an eating disorder going on there, but we didn’t have language for people who were big with thoughts like that at the time.

So, through the panic of that and the lack of routine, which I kept trying to anchor back to and I just didn’t have when I was overseas on my own with very little money and, you know, I stopped being able to eat or sleep and I came home a thin little whippet of a girl who really couldn’t leave the house anymore. I was just broken. I couldn’t sleep or eat, but also I couldn’t read, I couldn’t have noises.  I didn’t know what was going on. 

And I was so lucky that, through that experience of really, you know, what I now know to be a full physical collapse, I found this great little book called Self-Help for Your Nerves, Dr Claire Weekes, and she was this Australian pioneer. I knew nothing about her at the time, except there’s this quirky little book and I thought, as if I’m going to get anything from this.  But I read it and it saved my goddamn life.e And it gave me, again, a little structure to work within that explained what are the symptoms of nervous illness and it gave me a framework within which I could start challenging the voice of fear.

Now, what’s this got to do with my creative life or routine?  I think it is this trick, this one set of tricks that I found at that time, and it’s on this subject that I’ve written my book about.  The ability to talk back to fear and, Madeleine, I’ve heard you speak about this many times, this voice of procrastination, self-doubt, and so on.  The one skill, the ability to talk back to that voice, has been the cornerstone of all the other creative projects that I’ve ever been able to accomplish or take on.  It’s the reason I’ve been able to live that life.

MD: Isn’t that amazing?  I love this idea of FAFL.  Can you talk to us about what FAFL is?

CB: Had a lot of habits and you may or may not, again, you know, depending on how you look at these things, you may say that these were OCD habits.  In fact, I had a psychologist at 16 tell me that I had OCD and, you know, she said it very kindly, it’s just another one of the quirks.  I was looking for acronyms all the time, I was always playing games in my head with letters and numbers, and it just helped me go to sleep at night.  And I really don’t think it’s terribly uncommon.  It’s very human.

So, one of the things that I read in Claire Weekes book was about this simple technique: face, accept, float, and let time pass.  It sounds very, very simple.  I recommend you read her book.  I explain it more in my book.  It’s a routine for accepting what’s going on.  So, the symptoms of panic for me, that was shaking inside, it was [inaudible 00:18:09] hard, it was sweating, it was palpitation, it was raising violent thoughts, it was terror, you know?  Just absolute terror.

So, you face it, I accepted what was going on was really a function of my, you know, my parasympathetic nervous system, a normal human reaction to fear that had just gone a little rogue.  Float meant, you know, it’s a little difficult to describe, but really it’s a pretty Zen concept.  I’m going to go out the door anyway, I’m going to accept these feelings, so it’s about cultivating the internal voice of kindness and grace.  And then letting time pass.  So, one of the most painful and panicking things that can happen in a creative career, but also in a panic attack, is that thought that this will never end.  I can never survive this.

I could not have imagined, really, in that space, that I would survive and that I would live the life that I’ve lived.  So, that’s FAFL.  That’s one of the techniques that really, really helped me.

And the other one that I came to, this one, you know, just invented after reading a book by Jack Kornfield called A Path with Heart.  I couldn’t seem to meditate correctly.  I couldn’t… I was too anxious, you know?  I couldn’t seem to name my emotions.  I had no fucking idea what I was feeling at 21.  It was just a cluster of, you know, of too much-ness.  My dreams were too much, I was too much.  I couldn’t even dream at that stage.  I couldn’t imagine that I could write a song again or anything.

So, for some reason, I started to call this overwhelm of emotions, I decided to name it, and I named it Frank.  And I don’t know why I named, you know, the voice of panic Frank, but I think it was just ‘cause it was an ‘F’.  It stood for fear.  And also, I didn’t know anyone called Frank.  I’d hear that voice going, you’re never going to recover, you’re going to, you know, and really horrible thoughts about what I was going to do to myself and how I didn’t deserve to live, and all the guilt of having lost a sibling and the guilt of feeling that my life was never going to begin and I wasn’t going to do any useful, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I’d just say, fuck off, Frank.  And then I’d get on with my day.  And I had to sometimes do that hundreds of times a day, and slowly, slowly, slowly I recovered, and it was in that recovery that I made this promise, back to your original question, which was I knew I wasn’t capable of anything much.

It took all of my guts to just apply to art school.  It still took me another year or two in art school before I really started talking to people.  Just, you know, sharing my work.  But slow and steady wins the race.  And I had this dream, one day, when I’m really, really fucking old, like 40 was what I told myself, I would tell this story because these words of Dr Claire Weekes and the advice I got from friends really saved me, and I knew I wanted to pass it on.

MD: Mm.  I love that so much, and I particularly love it that your older self, your 40-year-old self, was this anchor for you, rather than feeling like you weren’t good enough in the moment.  I feel like that’s such a rare thing, to sort of allow yourself to take time.

CB: Well, I think that’s key. We forget we have any choice in the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, and we do. 

MD: Absolutely, and this pressure to kind of reach success.  And what’s so fascinating, I think, about your career in particular is that you have reached success in so many different iterations, and then, at times, kind of have been able to recognise that you felt trapped by the idea of success that didn’t suit you.  So, I’d love to hear you sort of talk a little bit about how do you step away from things that no longer serve you?  That might be, you know, amazing touring career or an afternoon radio show.

CB: I write every day, and I sit down and often it is through this writing and this process of enquiry, which would be really boring for anyone to read, it’s not very exciting.  It’s mainly just me complaining.  But I’ll sit down and there it will be reviewed, the truth that usually that I’m bored.  You know, or that I’ve done what I set out to do, or that, if I keep going down this path, I’m going to have to give up all the other dreams that I have. 

So, in that classic, you know, it was Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar who gave me, a 17-year-old, this incredible metaphor about the fig tree.  You sitting in the crutch of the fig tree and the, you know, the heart of the fig tree, and each of your dreams represents a fig.  And, as you sit there in action, you watch each fig wither and die because you haven’t picked one.  So, at the age of 22, you know, I knew, still, I wanted to be a singer, as that was still my dream, and a storyteller.  But I picked any fig.

I started with ceramics, really.  You know, at the time I was really lucky to have moved into an urban community.  I lived with a wonderful, extraordinary waver and two farmers, who were in their 60s at the time.  We had nine houses, no back fences, and we ate dinner together on Sunday’s with the other houses, but the rest of the time we just did our thing.  And it was there that I just started, you know, I’d start with ceramics and then I’ll do a bit of writing, a bit of theatre.

And I started just following my instinct around it. So, the reason my career looks the way it does and, you know, that means having done many different things, is really because I’m always following this sense of where can I be most useful and where am I having the most fun.  So, it’s difficult to say thank you, this is extraordinary, I’m going to leave now, but the only thing I don’t do that with are my friendships, my family, and my marriage.  You know, everything else in life, I’m quite happy to say okay, thank you, you know?  And I’m going to leave before I get too boring.

MD: Yeah, I think it’s nice to know the difference between what’s a fig and what’s, like, the solid stump of the tree, and that would be your families and your friends, and –

CB: You just upscaled that metaphor, girl.

MD: Oh, thank you.  Extended the metaphor for us.

CB: I can tell you’re in New York at the moment. Bang, bang, bang, bang.  Love it.

MD: But I did want to chat a little bit about this… going back to this idea of, you know, you’ve fulfilled this promise to yourself and you wrote the book that you said you would write when you reach 40.

CB: It better be good, huh?

MD: It is good.  I went to my highlights in Kindle and there’s already, like, 15 percent of the book has been highlighted, so I was like, oh, I could just highlight the whole book, why don’t you?

CB: Oh, wow.  I’m deeply honoured.  Thank you, darling.

MD: So many resonant points.

CB: Mm.

MD: One of them I was so struck by is that list that you wrote.  I’m also a very avid list writer and sometimes it can be a real bum, but I also know that it’s a crutch.  But with your list, one that really stood out is the ‘My Amazing Life’ list, and it looks like everything happened.  How does that feel to kind of look back on that list now?

CB: Well, of course, I’m terrified that I’m about to die.  You know, any second now, ‘cause –

MD: Oh, touch wood.

CB: That’s… my mind is still dark with all the usual insecurities, so I write this list and then I’ve slowly worked my way through.  But the truth is, that list said I’m going to write a novel and act in the theatre.  I’ve written a memoir and I’ve acted on TV, but I haven’t really learned a language unless that’s the language of the heart, you know, of emotion.  And I have… I certainly haven’t learned to run like the wind.  I tried earlier this year, but I’ve got this little annoying back injury that prevents me from running terribly far.

But look, I think, really, this is significant for me, this book, ‘cause this was one of the big dreams, and maybe there’s a freedom that will come.  I’ve always been terrified of telling this story out loud still, because, you know, I’ve got children, I’m a mum in the schoolyard, I’m a person in public.  This is a really personal story.  It’s about shared stories, you know, my family stories around mental health and recovery, which is still highly stigmatised.

But for me, the thing that’s at the core and that will continue, I think, to push me forward and keep me creatively engaged is I love being useful and I love this ability to be able to draw people’s stories out of themselves, and I know that when we tell the truth we do a service.  So, that keeps me feeling pretty creative, even when I’m sitting there, you know, writing in my PJs at 3pm feeling pathetic and, god, what have I done with my life?  What sort of human does this?

I carry on, because I think, look, there’s someone at home one day who’s going to read this and find it useful, and they’re going to be inspired to live their own amazing life, their own creative life, and I’m glad that my life is an example of that.  Now I’m just going to bake bread for the next 20 years.

MD: That sounds nice.  I’ve always wanted to learn how to make sourdough.

CB: There’s a great recipe.

MD: Ooh.

CB: You can make your own starter over there in New York.  All you need is sultanas.

MD: Can I bring my starter back with me on the plane?

CB: You might not be able to, but you can create a new one in two weeks’ time.

MD: Yeah, it’s like having different lovers in different cities, having different starters.

CB: Live a good life.

MD: I was going to say that I’m really, really glad that you did, you know, write in your PJs at 3pm because the book does do that.  It does remind us how to kind of, you know, pave that out in life.  But I did want to go… return a little bit to your routine and, in particular, your book writing routine ‘cause obviously this was something that you always wanted to do, but was it… even though you had the patience, was it hard?  Was it a difficult process to write the book?

CB: There’s a grand irony that exists in any creative process, and it was absolutely alive here for me.  I was writing a story about the stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them, and I was writing it with the point of really showing that we do have the power.  We are the boss in our own creative lives, and we cannot control the circumstances, you know?  In my life, a lot of my life was spent arguing with, you know, what I couldn’t do to save my loved ones, and what I couldn’t do make my body small and, you know, what I couldn’t do to make him love me, or so on.

And my power came when I shifted that perspective into, I do have some power to tell a story, at least.  You know, to have some say over what I think.  When it came to writing the book, I stalled for years.  I was terrified for years.  I still didn’t think it was going to be good enough.  I thought it was, you know, with the story in my head, Frank, my inner critic, told me that it would ruin me, it would destroy my reputation, that my children will be ashamed of me, and all of these things, you know, I had to work through and change my story around in order to start writing the book.

So, we get to the point where I start writing the book.  I write my first draft, [inaudible 00:28:53].  I had this extraordinarily fortunate situation where there were a number of publishers who fight quite hard to get the rights to the book.  You know, finally settle on the right publisher,  I think it’s going to be a breeze from here ‘cause I’ve got a first draft and I’ve got a publisher who wants it, and I’ve got a queen of an editor. 

Holy fuck.  From that point onwards, it was just bedlam for about a year and a half, you know?  I can’t tell you the battle that I had, you know, genuinely, to apply the technique that I was writing about in the book, which was telling Frank to fuck off, getting up, writing the book, and then drafting the book, and just step-by-step going through the process.

My friends had warned me, you know, this is… it’s just a first draft, you know?  I’m like no, it’s a big draft, in my head I’m like, no, I’m just going to… this is going to be a breeze, I was born for it.  As if, you know, it was fucking hell.  I can tell you, my children were like my little coaches.  They would drop me love notes and say, you can do it, mum.  Like, I was really struggling at many, many points. 

But here’s the point I want to make.  I kept showing up.  And I know they say you shouldn’t think of your reader, I was absolutely centrally thinking of my readers.  I wrote this book for them.  It’s also there to be useful, and that’s what centred me back on.  So, I did finally settle into that waking up early, writing, and then writing until I couldn’t write anymore, and then giving up at about 1 o’clock, and that suited me just fine.

MD: Is some writing a bit of a different experience?  I know that you described it in the book as, like, scratching an itch.  So, is it a little bit more on the go than, say, book writing?

CB: Some writing you can hide behind in a very different way, and some writing is collaborative earlier.  So, one of the things if you do end up reading this book, there is a part of it that is really about a turning point, which is when I met my people.  So, I did all my work, you know, I was always writing drafts of songs, songs, songs, songs, songs, there were hundreds of them on tapes under my bed and I was never going to show anyone.

And then I got very clear about… I knew that the next step was I had to show someone else.  I had to draw it out of myself even though it was going to be horrible and awful and they were going to hate it and it was going to be embarrassing and blah, blah, blah.  I luckily met John, who’s one of my bestest friends, at the age of 22, who introduced me to his housemate, Marty Brown, who ended up being my drummer and my producer and my manager and the guy I married and the father of my children and the guy who set up the microphone to me today and is basically my frontal lobe, you know?

So, the process of songwriting always involves Marty quite early, you know?  I can say to him, I’ve got this idea, does this work, does this not work?  And he’s completely, beautifully harsh in a way that I know is not personal, and what a gift it is to have someone who I trust and love that much that we can threaten to destroy each other with our honest opinions every day and we never do. 

Writing a book for me was different.  It was a different level of vulnerability.  I had no idea whether I could write or not, and so it was a tender process, which is again why I was quite careful who I chose to work with on this book.

So, yeah, the processes were different.  Writing was more cerebral and more vulnerable in a way, but I’ve never been an either or-er.  Like, I’m going to do this forever or do that forever.  I think they can both sort of exist with each other.  Writing a book is certainly very satisfying.  To hold a little thing in your hand is [inaudible 00:32:46] at the time, but it doesn’t have the live element that music has, so, you know, and I might really regret what I said.  Like, I can change my lyrics on stage, but I can’t really change them in the book, can I?

MD: Well, I don’t think you need to.  But with that idea of juggling lots of things at the same time, how do you deal with distractions, interactions, life admin?  Where does that all fit?

CB: Coincidentally, my most used hashtag on Instagram is [inaudible 00:33:13], and it’s there that I often go and just go, [sighs], everything just… the wheels just fell off.  You know, there I’ll post the notes that I wrote to my kids and tried to put on the office door while I, you know, I’m trying to have a home office where the doors just keep opening and closing.  And what we’ve also got in there is the reality of, you know, this year we lost our darling John, to brain cancer after five years. 

A lot of my life behind the scenes is, really, just being… being with my people and, you know, there’s aspects to caring for family and friends, which are very satisfying and necessary for me, but I, you know, so some of them I share, a lot of them I don’t share, the reality of my creative life is, in short, a real mess from the outside, and yet I accept that and luckily, you know, my housemates, you know, my two twin sons, my 16-year-old daughter, my husband, Marty, and myself, we have a good sense of humour about it.  No one’s looking to me to be the perfect housewife, but I do bloody try.

So I find quite a bit of satisfaction in the aspects of homemaking, you know?  I really, really do.  So, in my mind, the short answer is they fit in quite well with each other.  I’m quite often just standing at my… my friend Peggy Frew, who’s a writer and who’s in my husband’s band, Art of Fighting, she told me that she’s often vacuuming with one hand and then just doing a… typing a little note with the… you almost creep up on your stories and type a little line and then you go off and do something else domestic and you type down another line.

They actually work quite well together to balance each other out, ‘cause one is very ethereal and one is very grounded.  So, I wouldn’t like to be on a pedestal, you know, writing in my pampered palace.  It just wouldn’t work for me.  I need the itch of constant domestic necessity to keep me hungry for what else is there?  What else have I got to say? 

MD: Yeah.  That’s lovely, I think that’s kind of the floating of the FAFL coming through.

CB: Right.

MD: Like, all we can really do is, like, float through our days.  We can’t… there’s very few people who are able… upkeep a very rigid routine.  It’s kind of more just having little pockets where we can.

CB: I did have a period in my life where I was very, very, very tamed, and I just found I was saying no to everything all the time.  No to a lot of the fun, no to the cakes that a friend delivered on the door, or no to the random drop-ins.  I needed to do that at a certain period in time when I was on radio because the demands on the jobs were so extreme in terms of preparation, and… but, beyond that, I like being alive too.  A little bit of the chaos.

MD: Mm.  Me too.

CB: It’s very, very important that we all find our own way of doing it.

MD: Yes, and especially if we take your core lessons of having patience and not succumbing to the pressure to rush because look what happens when you don’t rush.  You put out a beautiful book.  So, Clare, what’s making a small difference to your days at the moment?

CB: At the moment, my tea.  You know, I have a blend of tea that I was taught by my dear friend Rita.  Half Earl Grey, half English Breakfast loose-leaf, and then my friend came a few years back, told me to throw in a chunk of ginger, which I do.  I brew that and I put milk in it, and I have that a couple of times a day.  I have it in cafes all over the world if you just ask for half-half, they look at you a little weird, but it’s a beautiful cup of tea.

MD: I was personally really inspired and touched by Clare’s decision-making process and how she was very much inspired by the fig tree metaphor from The Bell Jar.  Especially for this time of year when we’re making a lot of promises to ourselves or we might be placing a lot of expectations on the year ahead and all the different things that we’re going to accomplish, I thought I’d share just a small extract and maybe inspire you to just reach for the fig that’s in front of you.

As Sylvia Plath writes, “From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another was a famous poet, another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America.  And beyond and above these figs were many more figs that I couldn’t quite make out.  I saw myself sitting in the crutch of this fig tree, starving to death just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing just one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

As Clare reminds us, all we can do is pick one fig and know when to move to the next branch.