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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Psychologists Write: Suzanne Conboy-Hill

25/9/2018

7 Comments

 
It’s almost a year since the Harvey Weinstein business blew, sparking the #metoo movement in which more and more women spoke out about unwanted sexual attention and rape. So timely to welcome Suzanne Conboy-Hill to this series, along with her novella, Fat Mo. Like When I Hit You, it’s a painful read in places, but an important one. While the reader can find relief in the elegance of the language, there’s little consolation for Mo in a community that colludes with the systematic abuse of women, young and old, until she finds the strength within herself to say no. But let Suzanne tell you more about it …
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Fat Mo, a novella.

Sometimes when I look back, I wonder how on earth I got here – thirty years in a career I had never heard of via one I had never shown an interest in, and both the result of politics interfering in my chosen career as an artist. The fall-out from the political shenanigans dropped me into the series of low paid jobs that ultimately led to my encounter with ‘Merv’, and my escape from him set me on this most unexpected path.
 
I retired in 2012 after many years working with adults with intellectual (learning) disabilities, most of them as Consultant and, not at all coincidentally, back in Brighton where I began my art career in 1967. A kind of closure but not a complete one. That came later after hearing over and over again tales and reports of abuse and exploitation our clients had and were still experiencing, the rough deals they got from the courts where judgments could conclude that rape had not taken place because the victim was incapable of consenting. This was little better than the historical evidence from the old institutions where babies were born into the place and never left. But there was also a lot of fun; running groups in which no one knew how to role play but everyone knew how to be a character from EastEnders, helping a man with communication problems propose to his girlfriend without using the F word. Marvellous human times.
 
I have always written. In the early days it was mostly science fiction and still is from time to time. But there were grittier more contemporary stories to tell too, derived in part from the vast pool of trauma my clients allowed me to hear, and in part from my own direct experience.  By the time #MeToo happened and the floodgates opened, I had written Fat Mo and felt right that this clutch of three related stories should join the flood in counter-balance to any impression that people who are groomed can only be groomed for lucrative jobs, that they know what they are getting into, and that abusers are hyper-powerful extraordinary people with money. In this story, Merv is only extraordinary because of where he is, and both Mo and Pauline are everyone’s kind of ordinary, even today.
 
I have talked about Fat Mo in my
blog and in the book’s Preface and Afterword, addressing the fictionalisation of a personal experience. Fat Mo is not entirely true but I have tried to make it truthful by drawing not just on my own situation but on the experiences of the vulnerable people who shared their own accounts with me over the years. I have also drawn on accounts from, for example, the Rotherham and the Rochdale children who so very recently were disregarded and further victimised by people who should have been looking out for them, and again I hope that my training and experience as a psychologist has seeped into the bones of it and informed its structures and actions. If it describes how grooming works, good. If it shows how ignoring works, good. If it sheds a bit of light on this sordid business for equally ordinary people who have never been there, then good. These things have been shameful and private for too long and for too many, and none of us is to blame.

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Jamie Hacker Hughes, past president of the BPS, has written the Foreword, perfectly making the link between fiction and the psychological canon. I hope you decide to buy it. It is
available from Lulu.com with all proceeds going to Respond.org, a UK charity which supports people with learning disabilities who have experienced sexual abuse.


Editor/contributor, Let Me Tell You a Story – an anthology of poetry and short stories each with its own voice track accessible via QR code. 2014. Available from Lulu and Amazon.

Author, Not Being First Fish – and other diary dramas. 2
nd edition, illustrated, 2018. Pen name P Spencer Beck. Available from Lulu and Amazon.


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
7 Comments
Norah Colvin link
26/9/2018 08:21:55 am

I really enjoyed this interview with Suzanne, Anne. I think her book sounds like interesting reading. So much abuse is hidden and so many who have suffered are too embarrassed to talk about it. It must be even more difficult for those who suffer learning disabilities. It is difficult enough for them to have their humanity recognised at times, let alone any affront to it. This bit really got me " rape had not taken place because the victim was incapable of consenting". That's got to be absolutely ridiculous. I can't even attempt to attach any form of logic to it.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
30/9/2018 01:23:45 pm

Hi Anne,
I thought I'd commented on this post the other day. Maybe my comment got eaten by spam. Never mind. I enjoyed the post and the book sounds interesting. I was particularly flabbergasted by this statement: "that rape had not taken place because the victim was incapable of consenting". Surely if a victim can't consent, it must be rape, nonconsensual. How dehumanising.

Reply
Annecdotist
8/10/2018 06:50:07 pm

Yes indeed, that line got me too – it’s the exact opposite of how it ought to be, and I think how we measure concerned nowadays. And profound apologies that you had to tell me this twice, as both your comments went to spam. Please be reassured that I appreciate your contributions, even if the bot behind the website doesn’t!

Reply
Suzanne link
13/10/2018 05:00:48 pm

Norah, I popped in to say thank you for taking the trouble to comment - twice! I saw your post in my twitter feed and I'm grateful for your perseverance. That bot though, I've got it in for that bot!

Reply
Annecdotist
13/10/2018 06:03:41 pm

Sorry, will speak contact the 'management'. Thought the bot was only targeting Norah

Reply
Norah Colvin link
22/10/2018 12:48:23 pm

Only me! Why me? Poor me! :)

Annecdotist
23/10/2018 08:07:12 am

Sorry, the bots consider that classified information! I know it sometimes happens that they simply don’t like the look of someone’s email address :-( But I’m so glad they’ve let you through now.




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