Jungian psychotherapist Jane Haynes today writes for Female First, letting her readers in on 10 things she'd like everybody to know about her! Check out what she had to reveal below...
Jane Haynes writes for Female First
1. The only place I can write is when I am alone on my seven foot bed. When I say ‘alone’ I mean without human company but ideally with my Hungarian Vizsla, an exotic looking beast, the divine Dido lying next to me. Although I work full time in private practice in Marylebone as a psychotherapist my littlest granddaughter, Bell doesn’t think I ever get off my bed.
2. Bell and Dido are my substitutes for Botox and anti-depressants.
3. I do spend a small fortune employing a colourist, who I have known for fifteen years, to work her magic transforming my hair into a golden version of dappled grey. I am almost white and this summer – when I let the lowlights grow out for an experiment - I realized for sure I did not want to go ‘natural’.
4. finished my first book eleven years ago. Nobody would publish it. Everyone replied that it was beautifully written but what shelf would it go on? I am not keen on the phrase ‘beautifully written’. I self-published which was a great learning experience but it has left me very fussy about choosing my covers. Then, it got short listed for the Penn Ackerley Memoir Prize and I sold Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? to the publishers, Constable.
5. I spend so much time in my consulting room (not on my bed as Bell believes) and listening to stories of people’s lives and believe me, life for sure is stranger than any fiction. As a consequence I could never create any fictional character who would be as interesting as the people who consult me. And I prefer structure to plot. I like to astonish my readers.
6. Alcohol does not agree with me and I wish it did because everything seems to be so much more fun when I watch people getting drunk, or at least to begin with. And, I am terrified of having to talk to so many people at once at my book launch, cold sober.
7. The first book I read was when I was six. It was called, The Wide, Wide World by Elizabeth Wetherell. I could not wait to escape from boarding school and my family and get out into the world. I ran away from school and home when I was sixteen without any academic qualifications although I ended up as an academic for a period of my life.
8. For years I thought the writer Marcel Proust was a yawning bore but he has ended up being a consolation to me. I have re-read In Search of Lost Time twice and have just started for the third time but sadly in translation as I am a hopeless linguist and I also cannot sing a note in tune.
9. I have learnt more from novelists and poets than I have from Freud, Jung or any other theorist. Most clinical theories are at some level unconscious confessions. Freud got it altogether wrong when he thought that every woman wanted to have a penis and he helped to turn men into misogynists by propagating another whopper that women grew fangs in their vaginas: vagina dentata.
10. It is impossible for me to stay asleep, or in bed, for more than six hours, (unless I am writing). I live in dread of insomnia. I listen to iBooks every night and nothing gives me more pleasure than to realize I don’t’ remember a single thing about the plot because I fell asleep. I would like to die in my sleep if it didn’t make the people I left behind too sad. That might be why I find it so hard to allow myself to fall asleep.
If I Chance To Talk A Little Wild: A Memoir Of Self and other by Jane Haynes is out now.