The Nastyversary

A year ago yesterday I received a book in the post. This book:

My contributor copy of 404 Ink‘s Nasty Women. The look on my face is somewhere between pride, joy and sheer bloody terror based on the growing realisation that this book was something much bigger than I’d anticipated.

I’d first heard about 404 Ink through my husband, Mark Bolsover, who had spotted them on Twitter and foretold their greatness/retweeted them a lot. As the deadline for submissions for the first issue of their lit mag approached, Mark kept nudging me to send something in. I kept putting it off because the only thing I had to send was a monologue and I doubted they’d want it. Then, half an hour before submissions closed, 404 tweeted a gif from one of my favourite songs.

I don’t think it was that actual gif, but it was close enough. It made me smile – 404 Ink has the best damn gif game out there – so I thought “fuck it, why not” and fired over the monologue. It was selected for the lit mag (which surprised me) along with a piece of Mark’s work (which didn’t surprise me at all), so for the first time we were published together.

We went along to the launch, which turned out to be one of the most useful events I’ve ever been to. It was our introduction to Interrobang, Chris McQueer, and most importantly of all to Heather McDaid and Laura Jones themselves, the powerhouse women behind 404 Ink.

At that point I knew they were doing an anthology called Nasty Women and I was aware that the call for pitches was due to close shortly. Again, I’d been ignoring it – not because I didn’t feel I had anything to say, but because the one thing I really wanted to write about was so damn personal that I didn’t really want to write the pitch. That changed when I actually met Heather and Laura in person and decided that I liked them and thought they seemed sound. Again, I thought “fuck it” and proposed a piece about my experiences with hormonal contraception and the toll it took on my body.  Again, they accepted something I’d felt sure they’d reject.

Writing the piece should have been a more nerve-wracking experience than it was, but given the speed with which the anthology was pulled together, there simply wasn’t time to get spooked. The piece was written, sent in and ready before I had much of a chance to think about it. Besides, it was an anthology by a new publishing company being funded via Kickstarter – not much chance that anyone beyond a fairly niche crowd would actually read it, right?

How very, very wrong I was.

The crowdfunding campaign spent its first couple of days bouncing along at a nice rate, which I attributed to a combination of Heather and Laura being savvy about it and to the large number of contributors who were sharing the link. Then Margaret Atwood backed it and tweeted about it and suddenly everything went absolutely bonkers. The project was 100% funded. Then 200%. Then 369% (iirc). There was extra money (always appreciated). There was publicity.

…there was a sudden certainty that people were actually going to read my essay.

And they did. I have no idea how many copies of Nasty Women have been sold over the past year. What I do know is that friends have sent me photos of it in bookshops in different parts of the UK, that it was the best-selling book at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, and that Audible turned it into an audiobook. I know that copies have been ordered by people all over the world.

Which means that there are now a lot of people out there who possess in-depth knowledge of the state of my uterus and more about my sexual history than my mum would have been happy with. I mentally apologise to my mum on a regular basis for my need to share my life with strangers – but I think she’d be happy about the results of my oversharing if she’d lived to see them. I don’t just mean things like Book Festival bestseller status, but the responses I’ve had from other women.

I had always assumed that the extent of my troubles with contraception was unusual before writing that essay. Nobody seemed to talk much about it, and the doctors I saw acted as if I was a statistical outlier. But after Nasty Women came out, several women left reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and their blogs saying that they’d had similar experiences. At the Glasgow launch I found myself having intense, hasty conversations at the signing table with women who wanted to tell me that they’d been through it too. It’s been the same at every Nasty Women event I’ve been involved in since. Older women talk to me about the early days of the Pill and the things they went through. Women my age and younger open up to me because they know that I know. I’ve had medical staff tell me that the essay gave them a new perspective on the patient’s experience. I get emails and Twitter messages from strangers telling me that because of my essay they’ve requested bone density scans, adjusted their calcium intake, rethought their contraception.  One even sent me pictures of the passages she’d highlighted and shown to her GP in order to get a gynaecology referral to discuss sterilisation.

Even though it feels strange to have given strangers such intimate information about me, it makes me incredibly happy to have those moments with readers. It’s often quite emotional, because they’re often talking about it for the first time or I’m the first person they’ve spoken to knowing for certain that there’s a shared experience between us. That’s a big thing to be trusted with. Which is why, for all it has felt exposing and raw, I know that writing that piece was the right thing to do and I’m glad I didn’t have time to talk myself out of it.

My essay isn’t the only one that provoked this kind of response, of course. Skim through the reviews on Goodreads or Amazon and you’ll see lots of readers name-checking the writers whose pieces really spoke to them. I’ve seen my fellow Nasties’ work recommended in threads on social media discussions about the issues they explored. I’ve heard them talk about the readers who have engaged with them, who’ve reached out to share their own stories in return.

In addition to bringing us into contact with the readers, the Nasty Women anthology brought us into contact with each other. I didn’t realise, this time last year, how much of a bond I would feel with my fellow contributors. Ren Aldridge described it as feeling like she’d joined a coven, and I’d agree with that. We haven’t all met in real life, but that doesn’t matter – even the Nasties that I’ve never met are special to me, and it makes me happy when good things happen to them.

Most of all, I feel incredibly happy when good things happen to 404 Ink. Laura and Heather have gone from strength to strength, won one award after another, and continued to be genuinely lovely human beings who do their work with principles and respect for their writers (and they have the best office dog ever). I’m very glad to have them in my life, on my CV and on my bookshelves.

The moral of this story: Writers, find publishers who tweet gifs from your favourite songs and send things to them.