‘I loved books as a child. Never did I imagine that I would become a writer’

Running my finger across the red hardback book cover, I would stop to trace the slightly indented title, The Pink Ballet Slippers. The words were written in silver, hinting at the wonder within once I turned the pages. Pages that became marked with my chocolate fingerprints thanks to the biscuits I would sneak from the fridge. While the rest of the house slept, my bedside lamp burnt bright as I escaped into the world of a little girl yearning for a pair of pink, satin ballet slippers, pirouetting in my mind across the wooden floors of a dance studio.

As a young girl, Jessica Rowe escaped in her favourite book, The Pink Ballet Slippers.

Books have always played a central part in my life thanks to the passion for words that both Mum and Dad shared with me and my sisters. Each Christmas, we’d get a book that was perfectly suited to our sensibilities. Mum rarely spent money on anything but books. A treat for me was visiting the local bookstore and listening to Mum and the curly-haired store manager dissect and debate the latest literary offerings.

Mum transformed one wall of our living room into a library, cramming her latest book, once it had been read, onto a spare spot on the shelf.

When it was time for bed, Dad would tell me to, “go gently into the good night”. It wasn’t until many years later, while studying the Welsh writer and poet Dylan Thomas in high school, that I realised my father had altered the words of his favourite poem to make it a fitting lullaby for his young daughters.

Mum transformed one wall of our living room into a library, cramming her latest book, once it had been read, onto a spare spot on the shelf. She was always suggesting something we might like to read. Then, as we got older, we would choose for ourselves, although I do remember her hiding the trashy novel Lace from us, which only made us more determined to find it among the more highbrow literature.

Books and their world of words were a joy for me. Authors were people I put on a pedestal, marvelling at their creativity and imagination. Through their pages I would time-travel, fall in love, weep and laugh.

Mum was a writer, having written her first novel when I was just five years old. She also wrote a weekly newspaper column. By the time I was a teenager, she’d written six books.

Never did I imagine that I would become a writer. Though I was a journalist, I saw myself as sharing facts and information, never as a “serious” author. My writing style was economical and functional.

So it was an enormous stretch for me when Mum’s publishers approached us about writing a book together on our family’s experience of living with mental illness. I couldn’t possibly do this! I didn’t know how to write more than a minute-long story for a television news bulletin. How could I write a chapter, let alone a whole book?

“Darling, you just have to start,” said Mum. “Begin with a word, then a sentence, and keep going.”

So that’s what I did. We decided to write separately, having first come up with themes we’d cover in each chapter.

When it came time to share our work, I noticed the damp fingerprints I’d left on my manuscript, a sign of how nervous I was at sharing my words.

When it came time to share our work, I noticed the damp fingerprints I’d left on my manuscript, a sign of how nervous I was at sharing my words with my brilliant author mother.

Then the hard work really began. The notes back to me from the publisher, Annette, were different versions of “give me more here”. Thankfully, her editing was matched with a gentleness and nurturing that gave me the safety to open up on the page. Now the challenge was to unlearn my journalism writing style and use words to “show” rather than “tell” the reader what was happening.

It’s a lesson I’m still learning. One that was given a huge boost, years later, with a memoir-writing course that helped me write in a much freer way. So much so that I wrote chapters on sex, which didn’t end up making the published version of my memoir – thankfully. I can only imagine what my teenagers would have made of that!

Recently I found my ballet book, stacked against the picture books I’ve kept from when my girls were small. The pages have yellowed but I can still make out those faint chocolate fingerprints on some of the pages. There is no way the little girl who was then dreaming of becoming a ballerina could have imagined she’d become a published author.

Now I have six of my own books on the shelf. Each one is different: our family story, a collection of interviews, a memoir, essays, a joke book and a cookbook. What next? I just have to start, one word at a time.

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