I’m delighted to share the news that my memoir The Missing List will be published by Linen Press. Lynn Michell, founder and publisher at Linen Press, has announced our collaboration here.
I started writing this memoir almost fifteen years ago, in small patches, having no clear idea what it might become. I wrote the patches because I had to. Things built, slowly. I wrote more patches. Something began to happen. I shaped the something, rewrote it, unpicked it, reshaped it, unpicked it again. For years I did this, as writers do.
Often, this memoir project felt impossibly difficult – too difficult to think about, too difficult to write, and for a long time much much too difficult to imagine publishing. Often, I more or less gave up on it. I put it aside for long periods and wrote other things. But I came back and back to it because I couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning myself. In the end I found a way of completing the work, because I sensed that completing the work would complete me. And then I knew in my heart, once this memoir was all but done, that it should be published – it has things to say, readers to find. It has work to do.
I’m so glad to have arrived at this point. I’m thankful that I could begin to write this story, that the writing became something and that it can soon go into the world. I look forward to working with Lynn and everyone at Linen Press in the months leading up to publication, and beyond.
Clare Best 