Stella Duffy

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m a psychotherapist, writer and theatremaker with 17 published novels, over seventy short stories, and 15 plays. In the past five years I have completed a doctorate in existential psychotherapy, my PhD research is in the embodied experience of postmenopause. I also teach workshops in yoga for writing – writing is an embodied practice. I live with chronic pain and health impacts from cancer in my mid 30s (which made me infertile) and again in my early 50s. I was raised working class in London and Aotearoa/New Zealand and have lived back in London since 1986. I have been out for around 45 years and have been with my wife for 34 years – although we weren’t allowed to marry for the first 24 years of our relationship. While my childlessness matters to me, it is no more all of me than my sexuality or my class of origin – that is, it matters a great deal and also very little.

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2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B? 
Plan A was to play Lady Macbeth at Stratford in the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company), so parenting definitely wasn’t Plan A either. I have always written, always performed, always – as had many women of my age and generation – assumed I would be a mother. However, as a gay woman of my time, before the lesbian baby boom of the later 90s and 00s, there was also a sense that being true to my sexuality might mean missing out on being a parent.

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3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
I wait until something is burning in me to write it before I write, otherwise it’s like carving stone with a toothbrush. I also work as a creative mentor and I find far too many people want to ‘be a writer’ and yet have no idea of what they want to write. Knowing what you are moved to write is half the battle. The other half is getting on with it and not taking it too seriously.

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4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
Getting on with it and not taking it too seriously! I don’t have a special place to write, I don’t use fancy notebooks, I have written whole novels between other jobs in theatre or other arts, I really don’t believe that writing needs us to move to Tuscany and swan around in a glorious villa. My father was a labourer from the age of 14 until a few years before he died in his mid-60s. I know how enormously fortunate I am to have made my living from any number of forms of creative work – including psychotherapy which feels like the most creative of all – so I do work hard at my writing. I do not, however, believe that writing is hard work. And I wish people would stop talking about talent – until we educate everyone equally, until we give everyone equal access to create as well as to consume, we have no idea who is talented and who is not. Equality of creative access matters enormously to me.

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5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Some satisfaction, sometimes. Mostly it’s just fairly frustrating because what ends up on the page is never as good as the glorious possibilities in my mind – this is true of all my fiction and drama work, and now I find it’s also true of my academic writing. And yet, I keep on. I don’t mind anymore, I know that I am unlikely ever to write anything as perfect as the possibilities that entice me – I work to enjoy the process regardless. I also very much believe, not least as a psychotherapist, that process is the point. Product is nice, but what then? Being in process is all.

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6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
My first novel was published in 1994, before my wife and I had started trying to have children, so the two things aren’t connected for me. What I note looking back is that my novels have always had every type of person in them – including people who are childfree or childless, long before I considered myself childless not by choice.

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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?
I’ve shared many stories, fiction and personal truth. Having had cancer twice, been menopausal since chemo in my 30s, been CNBC for a very long time, been out for a very long time, I do not feel that my childlessness is my defining characteristic – regardless of what the rest of our culture believes – instead I believe it is a vital part of me. I think I’m fortunate to be gay in this respect, being gay means we are always outsiders. I believe the childlessness community could learn a great deal from queer peoples’ understanding of families of choice, engaging fully with our lives despite being deemed lesser than, and perhaps even finding pride in our difference. Queerness is not easy in a heteronormative world, neither is childlessness in a pronatal world, but when we can address our own internalised pronatalism (work I have had to do periodically) then we can embrace who and how we are, rather than solely focus on who and what we’re not.

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

It’s lacking! There’s also that very annoying, head on side, pity element which I find infuriating.

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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?
We exist. We’re a growing part of the population. Write us more and welcome us more often into the stories you share – just as writing only white characters, or only able-bodied characters, or only heterosexual characters, or only middle class characters means leaving out great swathes of interesting possibilities of humanity, so too does leaving out childless/childfree characters. We’re all here, in the world, let’s write all of us!

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10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
Oof, I’ve only just delivered my PhD thesis! That said, I have felt a desire to turn back to the novel I put aside to write my thesis, so I’ll see what happens ... for now I am very much enjoying being a therapist and having weekends and some time off every week for the first time ever. I might even learn to enjoy working a little less hard ... maybe.