|
T H E W E N D Y P E R R I A M I N T E R V I E W |
| 10 | The book examines the pressures of contemporary society, and the balance between trivialisation and the darker side of life. You’ve referred in the past to Blake’s ‘joy and woe’. Can you tell us a little more about what this means for you and for Second Skin? | "I’ve always been aware of the darker side of
life. As I’ve said, I was extremely depressed from my late teens and also had several
spells in hospital, where I met many people whose lives were reduced to sickness, fear or
worry. So I realised at an early age how precarious life is. You can lose everything -
your health can go; your mind can go; your relationships can break up; your faith can
disappear. And when I lost my own faith I felt very much adrift in the world. Without a
God, life seems both meaningless and frightening. Here we all are, rushing around
frenetically, not knowing where we come from or where we’re going. And yet we’re
surrounded by a cocoon of jollity and ‘fun’. Most women’s magazines, and
many TV and radio programmes, adopt a tone of cheery chit-chat, and advertisers assure us
that all that matters is a new car or glowing complexion or a fortnight in the Seychelles.
I wish instead that we could engage full-on with the difficulties and complexities of
being human; the fact we’re all facing death, and that no one is secure. Only a tiny
gap separates the smug City broker from the tramp lying under his cardboard in the rain.
Any one of us could go mad, or commit a crime, or lose everything, or land up in the
gutter. It’s a matter of luck, or chance. "Many people hide behind a façade of being ‘fine’, yet if you scratch the surface, you’ll often find oddity, or fear, or even terrible tragedy. "I remember last year I went to Mass on Christmas Day, and the priest preached on the subject of depression - which I thought took a lot of courage. He said Christmas was assumed to be a happy, joyous time, which made it all the harder for people who were on their own, or ill, or recently bereaved. I was feeling pretty low myself, so his sermon really touched me. I wish there could be more acknowledgement of that bleaker side of life." |
 |
 |
 |