‘Was I ever loved?’: The question that stopped Dianne in her tracks, and the answer

The year I turned 40, I started writing from a hospital bed. Propped up against the pillows, I returned to writing – something I’d always loved but hadn’t done since I was a teenager – because I’d nearly lost the chance to do so.

I’d been sick for close to a year without a diagnosis. It had been a gradual decline, a slow ebbing away of the life in me. In the latter stages of the unknown illness, I had no physical or mental energy, and was struggling to get through a day and care for our three children. I was constantly nauseous, and couldn’t sleep or handle stress of any kind. I barely left the house, relying on my husband for nearly everything. By the time it struck me that I might be dying, there was, truthfully, some appeal to the idea; to slipping away and no longer feeling like I was too weak to exist.

With only days to spare, my life was saved by an emergency doctor. I had Addison’s disease – a rare autoimmune condition – and this doctor had seen it once before. After being sick for so long, I was injected with the cortisol my body needed so desperately, and the sensation that engulfed me afterwards will never leave me.

Almost dying taught me that life is precious. It left me unspeakably grateful to be able to once again mother my children, to love them and raise them, and to love in general. It informs my writing, making me far more aware of beauty and truth, of the frailties and joys of being human, of what matters.

My first novel, The Wakes, holds the essence of what I had been through – the juxtaposition of life and death. And my new novel, Margaret, Are You Leaving? is about love in its many forms. But how devastating this story would be, caught me unawares.

A girlfriend had asked if I’d like to write her story. She had begun searching for her birth mother, having unearthed fragments about a baby left on the steps of a church in Fitzroy and a new-immigrant mother who disappeared off the face of the earth. I agreed on the spot, thrilled at the prospect of writing a story that had the makings of being wonderful. Thrilled enough that I didn’t stop to consider, properly, the profound responsibility that lies in telling someone else’s story.

With all my naivety on board, I sat down to interview my friend. To write her story, I first needed to understand her, and it occurred to me that apart from being an otherwise open person, I knew almost nothing of her upbringing, of what may have formed her. We talked at my kitchen table, and when she left hours later, I sat there stunned by the overwhelming sadness in what I’d been told, by the stark absence of love in her story, by the sheer enormity of what she’d stored deep within herself and was now entrusting to me. (In time, and with my friend’s blessing, I would turn partly to fiction, with its creative freedoms, to adequately capture the deep truths I was handed then, and later.)

We went on to have several more interviews, each one raw and intimate, and as my knowledge of her life grew, the story I’d first imagined – one of mothers and daughters, and the mystery of a lost family – became much more. It became one of deeply held human needs. I realised my friend was really searching for some evidence, however small, that she was loved as a young child (surely the most crucial and foundational love of all). That she needed, ultimately, to have the answer to the heartbreaking question: Was I ever loved?

A mother’s absence is a loss I know too well. My mother, whom I adored, died of breast cancer during my final year of high school, and her death was a trauma I struggled with for a very long time. Eventually, though, I saw that I was blessed to have known that kind of love, to hold the beautiful truth of that love inside me. As my friend continued her search, I hung onto a hope that she would find some part of that for herself, or something akin to it.

As it happened, that hope of mine transformed into a conviction. One evening, I watched an interview with actor Jack Thompson. Talking about his early childhood, he said something along the lines of if you haven’t been loved as a child, you won’t have the capacity to love. If that were true, I knew my friend must have been loved, truly loved: maybe by her mother, or if not by her, then someone else, as I had no doubt about her capacity to love.

The search and the novel are now done, and along the way, our friendship has turned into something special. We embarked on a strange and often challenging journey together, but not for a moment did I want to be anywhere else. It was full of humanity and love, and joy, too. All the beautiful human stuff that matters.

Margaret, Are You Leaving? (Hachette) by Dianne Yarwood is out now.

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