For years now, I’ve read and loved the writings of Penelope Lively, a Cairo-born British author.
In addition to her Booker-prize-winning Moon Tiger, my other favourite of hers is Making it Up—a 2026 novel based on pivotal moments in the author’s own life. However, instead of writing down or fictionalizing those moments, Lively asks: “What if?” As in: “What might have happened or unfolded if, back when, I had chosen or followed a different or alternate path?”
The result? A book of made-up counter-stories.
Recently, as I prepared for a podcast interview in which I knew I’d be asked for my writer’s origin story, I posed Lively’s “what-if” question to myself.
That long-ago winter evening in the late 1970s, when I sat ‘doing homework’ in my girlhood room in Ireland, what if I hadn’t abandoned that convent-school textbook to instead start scribbling my thoughts in a notebook?
Sans writing, who would I have become? Who would I be now, in middle age? Would I have discovered or found a different, non-writing path to an inner or existential life? Or would my life have centred around day jobs, paying the mortgage, shopping for groceries and choosing my next Netflix series?
Unlike Penelope Lively, I flunked my own “what if” game. I couldn’t conjure or imagine a non-writing life. Or maybe I just didn’t want to.
What I did do was sit down to write a sort of meta-analysis. In my present-day house and journal, I wrote about why I sit down to write. Then I grouped those “whys” into six named categories.
Pleasure
As a kid growing up in rural Ireland, I loved to play with words and languages. Song lyrics, poetry snippets, lists and conjugations of regular and irregular verbs in English, our native Irish and classroom French.
I recited words inside my head. Tried them on for size. Chewed on them like soft candy. Why? Because words were (and are) my emotional “blankie.”
Thankfully, on and beyond the journal pages, this ‘words-for-comfort’ factor has endured.
Feeling better
After secondary school, I left that rural home to start college in Dublin. There, I was a year-plus younger than the other first-year students. I also had what we’d now tag as ‘imposter syndrome.’ So I did what I already knew: Some nights, I sat in my dormitory room writing.
After college, I worked in a lonely, watchful town, where again I turned to my pen and notebook. Ditto for when I landed in a small, snowy city in upstate New York. Back then, I’d never have guessed that international researchers would publish more than 300 clinical studies on the evidence-based health benefits (emotional and physiological) of writing down our thoughts and feelings. I just knew that writing made me feel more like me, while also making things more manageable.
Claiming my stories
Haven’t we all encountered that person who says, “This is how you should feel” about something that happened to you? Or we’ve encountered those who try to top our stories with one of their own (“my grief or illness is worse than yours”).
As writers, it’s our job and our privilege to protect and lay claim to our own stories. It’s also our job to mine and preserve our own deeply-held truths—all by writing them down.
Being heard
Writing lets me take some control over past events or lingering memories—over which, otherwise, I often have little or no control. It lets me tell and validate my lived experiences as an immigrant in the United States. I write to be heard in our loud, hyper-digitized world, where it’s easy to be silenced and where I’ve often silenced myself.
“Speaking” for the voiceless
Sometimes, my journal entries morph into a public-facing essay or story about immigration, displacement or racial and social class disparities. Even in those early, scattered drafts, I know that my ability to write for and about social justice is a privilege that’s derived from my race, literacy and current social class. It’s a privilege that many others don’t have. So writing, I hope, lets me use my privileges for some public good.
Comfort and spirituality
I don’t belong to any formal church or religious practice, so writing is my spiritual home. Also, in times of crisis, pain and loss, writing is my first release or Band-Aid. Even when it’s just a few sentences, the words on the page bring some measure of relief, clarification and comfort.
Writing helps us know ourselves better
The researchers mentioned above assure us that writing doesn’t work for all of us, or for all life situations. But at a minimum, it helps us to know ourselves better—to ask ourselves the hard questions or address or readdress our repeating life themes.
In her 2015 memoir, Penelope Lively also does some meta-analysis. In remembering and telling her life story, she analyzes memory itself, describing it as “the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around.” Lively later adds: “This is how we know who we are and where we have been.” For my money, this author’s observations also describe the act of expressive writing.
Or, as the Greek philosopher Socrates put it: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
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image: Aaron Burden
