Amy Key

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m in my mid-40s. I live on my own in a small flat in London where I work from home. My day job is in communications in the health and care sector. In my 20s I started to write poetry and then as I approached 40, I started to write essays too. Last year I published my first non-fiction book, a memoir about making a life without romantic love called Arrangements in Blue. I’m interested in writing about intimate relationships – the ones we have with others but also the ones we have with the places we live in and of course, with ourselves.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
I always wanted writing to be part of my life – it doesn’t especially have a relationship to the idea of parenting or not. Having said that, the ambivalence and difficulty of having or not having kids has shown up in my poetry several times and was a question I knew I wanted to explore in my memoir. I hope that, were I to have become a parent, I would have kept writing in the same way so many of my beloved authors have.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
When I think about writing essays, I remind myself that the word ‘essay’ comes from a French word meaning to attempt, to try. Every essay is an attempt to explore something – an idea, a feeling, a suspicion, a question. The act of writing is what helps me think something through; to arrive at an insight I’m searching for. In terms of inspiration, so many things can provide the spur to write. It could be a bit of dialogue in a novel I’m reading, a song, a conversation with a friend, an object, a journey. The trick is pay attention to the things that paw at your mind, that
make you want to look more closely.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
I don’t especially have a defined process. In a way I’m slightly suspicious of writerly routines. What I tend to do is try to always capture thoughts, ideas, lines and images as they arise – writing them down, putting them in my notes app, emailing them to myself, voice-noting them. Then I gather them all together and ask myself – can I do anything with these? Sometimes I can, sometimes I return to the later. When I am writing in a more focused way it is from my bed, where I feel most comfortable. It’s a space of intimacy that allows me to be vulnerable.
 

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Writing is core to my way of thinking and understanding the world and myself. I’m not sure if I could fathom this life without it. It’s brought me into conversations and friendships I might otherwise not have been able to experience.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
I know I’m not alone in sometimes minimising my experiences and my feelings. So seeing my book published was validating. It challenged my negative self-talk that people wouldn’t be interested in what I had to say, or that the way I said it couldn’t have literary merit. But I don’t think being published improves one’s self-esteem and I think decoupling self-esteem from ‘being in print’ is one of the healthiest things you can do. That’s not to say it’s easy!

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
The reader response to my book has been incredible, and in many ways, it has sustained me through the at times very exposing experience of writing a memoir. When you write memoir, you will not only experience critical commentary on your writing and ideas, but criticism will also be directed at you. Your actions, your experiences, your audacity for asking someone to be interested in what you have to say about your life. It can be hard to detach from that as it feels so personal, but I know when I read, I bring my own experiences to that reading and when I have a strong reaction to a piece of writing, sometimes I come to understand its less to do with the writing itself and more to do with how I feel about the subject at hand.

I don’t know if my view of myself as someone without kids has changed since the book was published, but the messages I’ve had from readers (parents and non-parents alike!) have helped me to understand just how shared my experience is and that has been very comforting.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
It can be very boring to see how people without kids are represented in literature and especially boring when authors depict friendships between women where one parents and one doesn’t as adversarial, with the non-parent as childish, reckless and unthinking and the parent as high-minded and secure. One book I loved which really wrote against this was Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey. It allowed both characters to be complex and own their individual feelings.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
I wrote a piece for a magazine last year and they changed my sub-heading to include the word ‘childfree’. I know for some people ‘childfree’ and ‘childless’ can be helpful, clarifying labels, indicating presence or absence of pain. But for many people, these binaries aren’t at all accurate. People without kids may live alongside all kinds of feelings about it. Speaking for myself, at times I feel grief, at other times it’s liberty. I know how I feel about it will always be shifting, will never solidify into a ‘free’ or ‘less’ category.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
I hope to keep writing essays and poetry, but at the moment I’m trying, for the first time since I was a young person, to write fiction. It’s something I told myself I could not do. But I said that about non-fiction too and proved myself wrong. So, I have to try.