Marisa Wray

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I was the first in my family to have any scientific bent whatsoever, and although I loved English, French, Latin and History, I realised that I could do those as a hobby. You can’t study medicine as a hobby, and I was quite keen to be the first doctor in my family. Medicine has proved a very challenging road, and it took me many years and several twists and turns in my career to find my niche. I went into psychiatry due to my fascination with the workings of the human mind, and possibly as an attempt at ‘physician heal thyself’. I became an old age psychiatrist mainly because I love hearing people’s stories. I am eternally curious and have insatiable intellectual curiosity. When my research career ground to a halt, I threw myself into medical education. One of my favourite things is to use the story of Vincent Van Gogh’s illness to teach medical students how to write up a psychiatric history. He and I share a birthday after all.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
I have always loved writing, from GCSE ‘empathetic essays’, which were my particular forte, to insisting on writing an essay on Primo Levi’s ‘If this is a Man’ for my eccentric A&E placement supervisor as a medical student. I went part time in 2012 after struggles with my mental health and embarked on researching my first novel. This has yet to see the light of day as I became sidetracked in my medical undergraduate work and had no time to dedicate to it. Maybe a retirement project? I started my bigholeblog in 2017, initially to share with the world my thoughts on being childless. I did not feel able to be public about my feelings around my childlessness when I was in the first throes of my grief. IVF failed in 2012 and adoption in 2015. It was not until 2017 that I began to be able to write about being a stepmum, and 2019 until the raw edges of my grief were soothed enough to write about failed IVF and adoption. My blog writing has been very sporadic. My most prolific time was when I was processing my breast cancer during Covid lockdown in 2020. The blog became a book after I realised that I just couldn’t hold it in and my story poured out of me.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
Personal experience and passions – I love history and topics related to women and psychiatry.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
Sometimes I can’t write. When I do it comes easily and I don’t notice the time passing. When I review my writing later, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Did I really write that?’.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Flow. A sense of achievement. Deep satisfaction. A creative outlet. Sometimes I even get praise!

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
It hasn’t. I know myself.

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?
It’s been almost universally positive from strangers. My family have had mixed reactions. My sisters have been awed by it, my mother has not been able to bring herself to read it. My aunt couldn’t cope as the rawness of it made her cringe.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
To be honest, I don’t read things I don’t like, so I probably haven’t seen really awful portrayals of childless people.
 

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
Be open minded. There are a million and one reasons why someone has not had or can’t have children. Each of our stories is unique.
 

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?

I still want to write my novel but it’s on the back burner. I don’t have the spoons at the moment. I did just spot the call for entries for the 2025 old age psychiatry faculty essay prize. Maybe I will enter?