Lifelines - Patrick McGuinness

Having had the good fortune to be brought up in two languages - English and French - I spent a great deal of my childhood thinking it was not good fortune at all: arriving in England aged 9 with a French accent but an Irish name, and being asked where I was 'from', caused me huge anxiety and dépaysement, much of it quite raw. I spoke to my mother in French, my father in English, and so going to English boarding school seemed like an imposed choice (not mine - children don't choose much, which is why parents make such a show of letting them choose things like sweets or toys or cakes - the agency they do not have), and someone else's life I'd been fitted with. Much like my grandmother from Bouillon made me my school suits - clothes I fitted but which were not mine - I felt I was being given a life that belonged to someone else. In Bouillon, my mother's town, I felt both at home and always on the cusp of losing it all. It gave me a relationship to my languages that for a long time was quite painful, but which later in life became the seam from which I started to write: poetry first, because poetry is a language, as Valéry says, within a language (to which I'd add a language between a language), then fiction, then memoir. In my memoir-writing, I speak often frankly about these questions, and how they shaped me for good or ill. I now live in Wales, where I speak a third language, Welsh, the language of my partner and our children. My identity as a writer was in fact liberated by moving between Welsh and English as I once moved between French and English. So I think of myself as a Welsh writer from Belgium writing in English. In this talk I'll try to untangle this.