Eva Aldea

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I am a writer, editor and lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature. Last year I published my first novel, Singapore, which was inspired by my experiences of being an expat wife. My current work in progress, Stockholm, is part-memoir, part-historical fiction based on the stories of my Eastern European migrant family. I am due to publish a collection of personal essays on mental health with Broken Sleep Books in 2025, and I run a website Dx: Diagnosis and Writing that invites other writers to reflect on how diagnoses (psychological or physical) have related to their craft. I am also working on a text and image project on the body, ageing and selfies, that came out my posts on Instagram.

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2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B? 
Part of choosing not to have children was because I felt would struggle to both be a parent and keep my academic and creative work going. Of course, lots of people can manage both, but I always knew I couldn’t. Recent  diagnoses of chronic fatigue syndrome/ME and ADHD have explained why – my energy reserves and ability to focus are limited. I don’t regret that decision, which was always an ongoing discussion with my partner while we were still of an age to have kids.

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3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
I write what interests me and grabs me, which is often personal stuff – that’s why I have so many strands going! I guess my own experiences of the world are my primary inspiration, and the sense that I want to share those, in the hope that others will find something they recognise. I am also inspired by the way other writers, especially women writers, have tried to convey their experience of the world, for example Virginia Woolf or Annie Ernaux. The way the latter’s work straddles fiction and memoir has been a revelation to me of the possibilities of writing.

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4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
I have learned that my way of writing begins with a lot of exploration and experimentation. During this time, I don’t have things planned out, but write what comes, and then at some point, things start to come together. In the early stages of a project, I give myself the goal of writing a minimum of 500 a day, first thing in the morning, then I take the dog out and if I feel like it I write more, or spend the afternoon reading or doing other things. I have to be careful not to over-do it, but in reality I end up having periods of intense writing followed by days of complete rest when my energy stores run out.

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5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
As I tend to write about my own experiences – even if in fictionalised form – and writing is a way to work through and understand my own emotions by putting them into a narrative. It is also a place where I can explore some unpleasant and dark thoughts and turn them into something productive rather than destructive. This was very much the case with my novel Singapore, but also some of the essays on mental health that I am working on, and some recent writing that looks into intergenerational trauma.

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6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
It was only when I published my first novel that I felt like I could call myself a writer – I should have done so much earlier, as I have written in various forms for a long time, and just saying “I’m a writer” with confidence has really changed the way I am in the world. I used to be an academic, teaching English Literature, but I was bored with the research side. I wanted to write a novel, but I thought it had to look like the things I taught at university. It took many years and some life-changes to shake me out of that way of thinking. Once I realised I don’t have to imagine the perfect plot, but could write what I know and that my own story is valid, I found myself unable to stop writing on all sorts of topic and experimenting with writing.

In terms of my NoMo status, I guess publishing made me feel like I had achieved something, and that not having kids had been the right choice. I don’t think that is necessarily a good way of thinking about either writing or parenthood, but society often makes us feel that way. I don’t think having kids would have been right for me even if I didn’t write.

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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?
My novel is not mainstream, it is a little weird and dark, but a I have had some great feedback, which is always wonderful. We like to think that being creative should be enough in itself, but having some kind of external validation is also important. Readers enjoy my writing, but women in particular respond to the off-beat main character that is full of self-doubt and anger. Her choice of not having kids and the way that the expat community responds to it in ways that seem really alien to her mirror my own experience, and it feels like the novel validates that narrative: she is the odd one out not having kids, but that it is actually the women who suggest having kids because it is something to do and the live-in-help is cheap that are the odd ones!

Interestingly, the fact that I published a novel in middle age (I was 46) resonated with a lot of women who felt inspired that it was possible to achieve new and exciting things in mid-life. Some women have confided in me that they felt that they had spent a lot of energy and time as parents, and now found themselves at a loss at where they were in life. Some even admitted regretting having children. I feel that the anti-heroine of my book as well as my own child-free life are important alternative narratives in a world where most women’s stories, fictional or real-life, run along fairly predictable paths.

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8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?

Following on from my previous point about the stories available to women being very predictable, I think there is a real lack of nuance between wanting and not wanting kids, a silence around the ambivalence that comes with both being a parent and child-less. My choice to be childfree was not taken lightly at one moment but re-visited many times. Sometimes I do feel some sadness at not having a family and wonder what it would be like. Ultimately, I am comfortable with my decision, but nothing is ever black and white. I think we need more stories about the feelings that we’re not supposed to have, which is one of reasons I wrote Singapore.

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9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
I am not sure any particular writer’s status as a parent or not parent should matter to the industry per se. However, I think there is a market – after all that is what the publishing world is mainly concerned about – for stories that are more complex around parenthood, and stories that include men and their emotions around the decisions to be a parent. I think the latter is really important, as I have seen the way men have struggled with the experience of being a parent, or infertility and their partner’s miscarriage and so on. Part of that struggle is because they have almost no models for how to feel! Ultimately that is what writing and reading is about, to share the variety of human experience.

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10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
I need to finish a big edit of my next book Stockholm – it’s nearly there, but as is often the case, other things get in the way. I am really excited about my projects around mental health and diagnoses, and I want to run some writing workshops where writers and non-writers alike, can explore diagnoses and how they have affected them. I am also hoping to do more photography, experimenting with self-portraiture and how I feel about my body at a time when it is changing in ways that we are told should be resisted or hidden away. No doubt a large part of that exploration will also involve writing.