On 5 September we will have the pleasure of publishing Joshua in the Sky, a startling and moving first entry into memoir for Somerset-Maugham winner Rodge Glass.
Today, we opened for pre-orders and shared this cover reveal video, so to tie in with these announcements we chatted with Rodge about all things Joshua. Stick the kettle on and read below to get a taste of this special book.
TAPROOT: Tell us a little bit about Joshua in the Sky and how the book came to be.
RG: My nephew Joshua was born, and died, on the same day in March 2017. In the years afterwards I began to write about him, as a way to try to get closer to him – he only lived for three hours after birth, we never met – but also as a way to try and make sense of the grief. For me, that was very much bound up with the fact that he and I, and other members of my immediate family, share the same rare blood condition, HHT. After Joshua died, I became utterly convinced that I was to blame for his death, and that had I done a few key things in my life differently – gotten myself diagnosed with HHT earlier (I had obvious symptoms), been more proactive in researching the condition, and then shared some of that information with my family – I could have somehow prevented the events that followed. I felt utterly worthless and was guilt-ridden and paralyzed with it all. I’m a trier. I mean well. I always do my best. But what if my best was to blame for this tragedy? I honestly thought I might not survive it.
Though Joshua’s parents didn’t blame me, they know me well, so they appreciated that I make sense of the world around me through reading and writing. In 2019-2020, they supported me in starting to write about what happened. This was, at first, very slow, and incremental. It was important to me that my family were comfortable with what I was doing. It was as much about me as about Joshua, and my own life in HHT, but increasingly I came to wonder how I might use the few skills I have to make for Joshua a kind of memorial. I shared the first couple of essays with Joshua’s parents, and they encouraged me to keep going. Even in the intensity of their own grief, they were able to recognise that this was an essential way towards survival for me, and I needed to work through it. That’s a measure of what wonderful people they are. In the early stages of writing, what I was doing, which was a mode of survival – that wasn’t about publishing at all. I write because I have to, and it helps me make sense of things in a chaotic, overwhelming world, but Joshua’s death had also shaken my belief in the value of the very things I’ve dedicated my life to: reading and writing. I thought, what if I’ve spent all these years on something that had only served to distract me from my real life and its consequences? What if I’ve been too busy to notice anything about myself because I’ve had my head stuck in a book since I was a child?
‘Here I was, with one skill – writing – that could ensure, if done right, that Joshua would not be forgotten, in our family, beyond our family too.’
That’s when I got the idea of exploring what a biography of Joshua might look like. How it could be done with compassion and sensitivity, using the stories I have surrounded myself with to cope through the stages of grief. At first, I published one short extract in a little journal. Then an extract was picked up by New Writing Scotland. Another, in Gutter, last year. I kept including my family and checking they were happy for me to keep going. I kept portraiting myself, my children, the wider family, and stretched the book out over about a ten-year period. My life in HHT increasingly seemed the central event of my adulthood, so I tried to cover that period. My childhood too.
As I carried on, I grew more confident, playful with the project, and I really wanted the book to have light as well as shade – to refuse to present Joshua’s life purely as a tragedy, some kind of sad face emoji. I wanted to present his life and death not by hiding from its difficulty, but rather framing it as something with genuine, real, positive consequences for us all. In the end, that’s become the most important thing. I felt very well supported through the whole process, so by the time my agent started sending the book out, I felt happy and confident, though I didn’t assume then that it would be published. Happily, Taproot wanted to publish the book, and in a way that protected Joshua’s parents’ anonymity but also worked with them to make something we can all be comfortable with. In a way, it feels like it’s already out there, as one of the chapters won the Anne Brown Essay Prize in 2023 and is available online.
TAPROOT: You’re an experienced biographer having written award-winning work on Alasdair Gray and Michel Faber. This book has been described as a ‘new approach to biography and memoir’. Can you expand upon that?
RG: I’ve spent a large part of my writing life looking up close at others, often at people who have had a lot of attention already, at least superficial attention. My work is all about getting up close to my subjects, developing genuine trust and intimacy over a long period of time. Putting in the time and lot of research, too. For example, Michel Faber and I built up an extensive correspondence, often with long late-night emails, over several years, and only then after I’d already written both creative and critical writing in response to his own in the years before that. That trust has to be real. I don’t pretend to be objective. I’m interrogative and independent and I can be critical, but if there’s any value to what I do it comes from being guided in my writing by considering how I might write convincing, close-up, compassionate portraits. I’m currently doing that for my next book, which is a series of portraits of a band.
‘The magic trick is presenting a short life in a close-up, vivid, respectful way that rejects the idea that short lives have little impact, go unnoticed, and should purely be seen in tragic terms.’
To different extents, I’ve made myself part of these stories I’ve written over the years, sometimes making myself the butt of the jokes, a la James Boswell, sometimes portraiting my own life as well as the lives of others. It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to writing a diary. I think I’m good at interleaving looking inward at myself and outward at others in a way that lets readers in and doesn’t make it all about me. This time, I wanted to carry a lot of that experience I’d gained from writing, say, about Alasdair Gray or Michel Faber or other artistic people I’ve concentrated on over the years – and attempt a kind of magic trick.
The magic trick is presenting a short life in a close-up, vivid, respectful way that rejects the idea that short lives have little impact, go unnoticed, and should purely be seen in tragic terms. I try and show Joshua’s life and legacy with more nuance than that. The portraits in the book are those of my two daughters, of Joshua’s parents, of my own family, as well as portraits of all the storytellers who have shaped my life. But, though on the surface this may seem very different to my other nonfiction writing, for me it’s incredibly similar. It’s all about looking inward at myself as well as outward at my subjects. It’s all about developing trust and trying to make meaningful emotional connections, in a compassionate way. Joshua in the Sky makes me much more vulnerable than I have ever been in my books. It’s very raw in places, silly in others. It is rooted in the fact that I have often been chronically ill, and hiding that I’m ill. There’s an absurd chapter with me in the back of an ambulance, having the latest asthma attack, convincing myself I’m fine. Those who’ve read my biography of Alasdair Gray may wonder what happened to that overly cheerful young man who spent his twenties following Scotland’s great polymath through his old age. But he’s there. For me it’s all the same thing. Memoir and biography. The imaginative writing of real lives. Looking for the way to tell those lives in a way that’s expansive, rather than reductive. Don’t we all deserve to be seen, to be loved, to be paid attention to? That’s what’s hiding under my approach.
‘Alasdair Gray used to say, if there’s a thing you want to exist, and it doesn’t exist yet, then make it. So I did.’
Taproot: The book’s sub-title is A Blood Memoir, and it is the first published in the UK to deal with the blood condition HHT. Tell us a little bit more about this, and why it’s important to the book.
RG: I love a title with a question hiding inside it. So, everyone knows that a memoir is: but what’s a blood memoir? I feel like readers will probably be able to guess to an extent, or intuit the sort of territory, without reading a word of the book. It suggests the exploration of blood ties, of family, of our connections with each other. But at its heart this is a book about our family’s journey through HHT, which is a rare condition that affects every race, gender, culture and community around the globe, though 90% of people who have it don’t even know they have it. I was one of those people, for a long time. It’s genetic, so every time a child is born in a family where one parent has HHT, the child has a 50% chance of inheriting it, unless something like PGD (Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis) is used to identify it before birth. (Joshua’s siblings were born via this process, and they’re HHT-free.) The main symptom of the condition that’s obvious externally is nose bleeds. These can be small, big, you can lose a lot of blood in a single serious nosebleed. The first chapter of Joshua in the Sky sees me having the worst one of my life, as my family sleep around me. For many years, I thought, ‘oh well, it’s just nosebleeds – how bad can it be?’ In my thirties, when these got much worse, I didn’t realise quite how ill it was all making me. Until suddenly, horribly, it all felt undeniable.
My mum has always had very severe nosebleeds, but growing up I saw her able to live a very full life despite the toll these took on her. In previous generations, so little was known or understood. The attitude was that you just kind of dealt with it and carried on. I started to get more nosebleeds as I got older, which is quite common, though I mistakenly thought for a long time that as I didn’t have blood spots on my tongue that I couldn’t have HHT. There’s a very wide scale of experience with HHT. Joshua’s dad has never had a symptom in his life, but has HHT, and could pass it on. It can affect the liver, the lungs, the brain. Joshua died because he had something called PAVMs on his lungs (abnormal lung vessels), which meant we learned that once he was born, he’d be unlikely to be able to breathe on his own. When connected to his mum, he could grow and thrive. Isn’t that something? But out in the world, it was harder.
I wish I’d had a book when I was younger with someone – anyone’s – story of HHT. I was never aware of any book about it at all until I read a medical book after Joshua died called Living With HHT by Sara Palmer. That’s featured in Joshua in the Sky, though it’s more about practical ways of coping than exploring what people’s experiences of the condition are. As there’s never been anything like this published before, I’m hoping it can raise awareness about the condition. Also, I do believe that by telling personal stories, we might have more impact than by simply explaining things in cold hard medical detail. Alasdair Gray used to say, if there’s a thing you want to exist, and it doesn’t exist yet, then make it. So I did.
‘In a book about the value of stories, and what shape life stories can take, it seemed important to make the stories that have charged my own life central to the book.’
TAPROOT: Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a written work, and throughout you engage with and respond to books you have read at significant points in your life. Why did you choose to write Joshua in the Sky this way?
RG: I chose to do it this way because I’ve always made sense of my life by filtering that experience through books, music, art, film, and that seemed the only way to do this that could possibly work for me. My life is about looking closely at imaginary things, so that’s what I did, as a way to make myself look at real things too.
This is the hidden part of the book that means most to me. One way to think of Joshua in the Sky is that it moves through the five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, then finally Acceptance. Over the chapters, I start to edge more and more towards this idea of writing a biography of Joshua’s life, and the final chapter is my attempt at doing that. Present tense. Joshua, named, while everyone else is made anonymous, inverting the way a child who dies so young might be disappeared, invisible. So that’s the structure. But I needed a focus for each chapter, something to respond to that helped me move forward my thinking about my own life, my mistakes, and what Joshua’s life and death might mean. One chapter responds to a poem by Caroline Bird, ‘Rookie’, about someone who means well but goes around doing damage, accidentally. One uses Kathleen Jamie’s essays in the natural world, all about the Art of Noticing, as way to force myself to notice who I have become. In that same chapter, I’m responding to the suicide of the writer and publisher Brian Hamill. One chapter responds to a speech Joshua’s dad gives at the Jewish Bris ceremony when Joshua’s little brother is born, while there are loads of other responses hidden in the book, musical and visual art as well as literary, from Nina Simone to Talib Kweli. I respond to the Òran Mór auditorium, Alasdair Gray’s biggest and best mural, as well as a host of his other works, as a way to think of what all those years with Alasdair as a young man taught me about whose life gets to be remembered, and how. I respond to my very favourite short story, Grace Paley’s ‘Wants’ – which is about a women who is accused by her ex of not wanting anything from life. I respond to Hassan Blasim’s masterful short story ‘The Market of Stories’, translated from the Arabic, and George Saunders, in his own responses to the great Russian writers, for example Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’.
Even as I type, I can feel myself welling up about that story. It’s so ordinary but so spellbinding. Marya is a teacher who is taking a journey she has taken many times before, in 19th Century Russia. At the start of the story, she looks at the landscape around her and is convinced there is nothing new she could ever see in her surroundings. Her life is stuck, and she can’t imagine how it might ever improve. Come the end of the story, she is charged, changed, alive once more, thinking she sees her dead mother in a passing train. Saunders argues that we might learn about the world around us in new ways by developing curiosity for the turning of one ordinary character’s mind, observing the quiet ways others experience the world. Marya is changed. We too can be changed. Or at least, we can give her our time and care, and recognise that we don’t know it all.
Which is my way of saying: in a book about the value of stories, and what shape life stories can take, it seemed important to make the stories that have charged my own life central to the book.
TAPROOT: Lastly, what is one thing you hope people will take from the book?
I hope readers might feel, as I do, that we are in charge of the way we tell our own life stories. And that all life is precious. At the end of my book, Joshua’s little sister cries out in joy that ‘Joshua’s in the sky!’ She’s not learned to think of her big brother’s death as tragic yet. It’s not. Or at least, it’s not only tragic. She exists as the person she is, literally and directly, because of Joshua’s life and what we all learned from it. Now isn’t that some kind of magic trick?
Joshua in the Sky publishes 5 September in hardback. Pre-order now.
Visit https://curehht.org for more information on HHT.