Ewan Morrison
What can you tell our readers about your current novel Close Your Eyes?
Close Your Eyes concerns motherhood and our ideas of family and love and how these have dramatically changed since the 60s. It’s the story of Rowan. She was born in a hippie commune in the early seventies, hidden away from the modern world in the north of Scotland. When she was eleven, her mother, Jenna, one of the commune’s founders disappeared, and it was claimed that she died in a road accident. Jenna had been the muse of the commune, the folk singer, the dark beauty, and she’d raised Rowan single handed as father figures came and went. Over the years she’d ended up taking care of everyone else’s kids as the hippies left and abandoned them. Jenna’s disappearance or death threw Rowan into the care of the Social Services. She never found out what really happened to her mother and she never returned to the commune.
We find her twenty-five years later, a mother herself, but living in affluent Islington, with a rich husband, a new name (Emma), a hidden past and a baby, Sasa, who will not wean, or sleep. Stricken with Post-Natal depression, feeling unable to relate to other mothers or to her husband, and almost at her wits-end with sleep deprivation Emma feels that she will fail as a mother unless she discovers the truth about what happened to her own mother. When she finds a postcard from Jenna that is dated a week after her supposed death in 1983, Rowan decides to leave her own husband and child and head north. But the past isn’t a place, and the commune she discovers has many more secrets.
Your novel is set in Scotland, why did you choose this place to base it in?
I was born in a small town beyond the Highlands of Scotland and I’d always wanted to write about that very bleak but beautiful landscape. My parents too, were hippies and in a sense had moved that far north to try to escape from city life, and to create a kind of utopia. They didn’t live in a commune but all of the locals saw them as outsiders, as freaks. It was quite hard growing up there, as kids, my sister and I were singled out as different, the same way that the tinkers and foreigners were. We underwent a hell of lot of bullying for being hippie kids. It made me quite vengeful as a young adult, full of hatred against the locals, and ultimately blaming my parents for not doing enough. But I came, in time, to forgive. No-one was really to blame, it was a clash of cultures and we were caught up in the middle of it.
The landscape of Caithness fills the book. Its windswept, a bit like the landscape in the Brontes. The wind throws you about, wets your eye, ther’s no escape from it. In the book part of the challenge for the commune is to be able to be “self Sufficient” (You might recall The Good Life), and the further you go north the harder this becomes as the conditions for growing crops deteriorate.
In reality, there are actually two ‘alternative communities’ in the far north of Scotland– one at Durness and the other at Findhorn. Ithaca is a kind of hybrid of these places mixed with others that I visited and learned about. Hippy communes have turned into New Age retreats now, full of old people, Christians, Buddhists and people going through mid-life crises. The desire to escape from the modern world and go remote, is still strong in our culture. A small part in each of us wants to run away, escape from civilization, if only for a day.
You write about the relationship between a mother and child, why did you want to explore this relationship?
The character of Jenna really moved me, the fact that she’s the singer, she sings all the folk songs that were popular at the time – Joni Mitchel, Joan Baez and people adore her, but through time she becomes the dogs body, the slave of the commune – its tragic the way she gets used by the so called ‘idealists’.
My mother is, or rather was, a folk singer with an incredible voice. If things had gone differently for her she could have been as well known as Jean Redpath. Its tragic too that that never happened. Listening to her sing is always a painful experience because her voice is so clear and full of hope and power, but life has not been kind to her. In many ways really the book is a poetic letter to my own mother.
On another level, I wanted to take my own personal experience of having grown up with hippie parents and transcend it, push it beyond my own limits. I didn’t want to write it from my own perspective or to write about men. Male hippies and men within communes tend to be really irresponsible, they come and go, they shirk all commitments; the male children of communes too, from my experience, have ended up messed-up, with addictions, unable to settle into jobs or relationships, eventually involved in violence and crime, because growing up they had no boundaries – I would say also that Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is high among the children of hippies. The male kids of the communes are really a very sad story, but I didn’t want to tell it directly. I was more interested in writing about the invisible people in the commune – a mother who does all the things that the hippies can’t be bothered with – farming, harvesting, cooking, cleaning, looking after and rearing the children. And I wanted that woman, that suffering mother, who actually does more work even than a conventional old fashioned housewife, to be seen through the eyes of her daughter. Her daughter who witnesses her mother change over the years as she become disillusioned with the planned utopia of the commune. It’s really a story about the love between a daughter and mother who are caught up in a social experiment to change the very idea of family. In the commune for example, the hippies say “no-one is the mother of the kids, everyone is”, and “no-one owns anyone”, “everyone is free”. The words “mum” and “dad” are banned. This creates a terrible confusion for the communes kids when they need a parent to take care of them, or to take responsibility.
The book is called Close Your Eyes because all of the meditations start with those words, but also because I feel that the hippies did close their eyes to their children’s needs. They romanticized the idea of childhood, but were bad at taking care of their own flesh and blood kids. In some cases Hippies rejected their own children, seeing them as “selfish” and “capitalist”, seeing family togetherness as “bourgeois”. It’s amazing how many hippies including stars like Joni Mitchel abandoned their own children to go off and discover themselves.
How did you go about revealing the truth about Rowan's mother, without giving too much away too fast?
I told the story from Rowan’s perspective and she’s haunted by the possible stories of what might have happened to her mother, so we see these as little stories within the larger story of the book. In each of the sections, the words start “She ran that night…” in some of Rowan’s imaginings, her mother ran off and joined a band, became a success; in another she starts her life again and becomes a Christian and has a second family; in another her mother is killed by the government for her association with Peace Protestors. Rowan’s imagined stories of her mother are also infected with stories of comparable women, so there’s the tragic true stories of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill, and these lead Rowan to at times think her mother killed herself; then there’s the story of Anna Karenina in which Anna tries to come back to the child she abandoned. And this leads Rowan to think that her mother has been trying to contact her - been looking for her all these yeas, maybe even watching over her.
I kept Rowan guessing, not out of some desire to string out the narrative and create suspense for the reader, but because I wanted to explore the ways in which our imaginations are real, how they effect how we experience the world. Rowan is chasing a series of stories about what might have happened and eventually she discovers the truth, but on the way, she also throws into questions all of the possibilities of what it was to have been a mother and a woman at that time of immense change. Was her mother a muse, a victim, a feminist, a radical, a failure, a heroine?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2YhHlWaUtU
Rowan suffers from post natal depression, how much research did you have to put into this condition?
I have a theory about PND – that its not entirely women who suffer from it. One of the other things Rowan suffers from is an addiction to parenting manuals, I think this is connected to PND. Since her ‘parents’ didn’t have any plan for bringing her up, since they busked it and failed, Rowan is obsessed with the rules of how to be a better parent. I think as a culture we’re becoming increasingly like this. Look at the dozens of bestselling titles and the paranoia that now surrounds methods of childbirth and childrearing.
Being a father makes this worse, (I have two kids) because we are told that we don’t have that strong maternal bond, that intimate empathy that exists between mother and child, so us new fathers, us new men, tend to overcompensate by fastidiously studying parenting manuals and trying to act out the role of the perfect father. I‘m convinced that these books lead to and increase post natal depression for both women and men because they set unrealistic expectations for parents on what being a parent should be. They turn it into a set of goals, charts, routines, statistics, measurements. How much milk should be expressed? At what age should a child say their first word? If my child cries should I pick her up? How many hours sleep is optimum or damaging? Parents have become so afraid that they’rre doing something/everything wrong and they distrust their own intuitions. In this sense there was something right about what the hippies were doing with their lazy parenting. To much studying fo manuals removes spontaneity from parenting, turns it into a kind of crisis management course (in fact its worth noting that How to manuals for business success and parenting exploded onto the market at the same time and share the same goal orientated jargon). Or rather the optimum is somewhere in the middle between the tyranny of rulebooks and the incompetence of letting it all hang out and seeing what happens.
Parenting these days is turning into a competition between different families with different operating manuals and that, in itself, is depressing
Who do you most like to read and why?
At the moment I love the short stories of Lorrie Moore, the novels of Jane Austen and Dickens, the essays of David Foster Wallace and Malcolm Gladwell, and the philosophy of Slavoj Zizek. A bit of an odd mix.
Who would you compare yourself to as a writer?
I wouldn’t compare myself to any writer, first of all because it would seem arrogant, and secondly if I was to do it, even just for myself, secretly in my own head, it would get in the way of doing my own work. I’d start thinking how like Houllebecq or John Fowles, this or that piece of writing was.
The important thing as writer is to know which writers you love but to have your own project, your own set of questions that will sustain you for a decade or longer. To work through those questions from all angles. That’s how you find things out for yourself and create a body of work that for want of a better word ‘original’. My own project has been exploring alternatives to the family and questioning our ideas of love and commitment – this has taken me in subject matter through the sexual revolution to internet dating and long distance love, beyond to swinging, then back to the early 60s and communal living. It’s been a long and fascinating journey and it has produced six books. I’m just the guy that got caught up in the project – the project is bigger than me.
What is next for your fans?
Well, with a little bit of luck we should see Swung being turned into a feature film before the year is over. It’s been developed with Sigma films and has a well known European female lead actress attached.
That would be a very exciting thing and with a little more luck we could then see Close Your Eyes being developed for cinema or TV.
In the meantime I’m working solidly on essays. They seem to be what I find nourishing these days. I like research, learning and interviewing people. The world might be a terrible place but the people in are compelling.
Click here to buy Close Your Eyes by Ewan Morrison
Female First Lucy Walton