Jane Hudson Blog Posts
The Question at the Heart of In the Name of the Mother
Every novel — if it works — has a question at its heart. A question the story is trying to answer, or at least to hold honestly. A key question at the heart of In the Name of the Mother is this: What do we owe the truth? And to what degree do we owe people the truth?...
The Hardest Part of Writing a Novel (It’s Not What You Think)
Before I wrote book one, I had certain assumptions about what would be hard. The plot — making all the pieces fit, lacing the intrigue without giving away too much too soon. The dialogue — making it sound real. The sheer length of it – sustaining a story across...
The Second Chapter Nobody Tells You About
There is a version of the second chapter that gets talked about a lot. It involves a career change, a relocation, a dramatic reinvention. The woman who left finance to become a ceramicist. The man who retired early to sail around the world. That is a real version of...
A City of Secrets: Cape Town as Character
There is a tradition in literary fiction of the city that is so present it functions as a character in its own right. Joyce's Dublin. Dickens's London. Coetzee's Cape Town.I make no grand claims for In the Name of the Mother alongside that company. But I will say...
What Grief Does to a Family — and Why We Don’t Talk About
Grief is one of the most written-about human experiences and, at the same time, one of the most poorly understood. We have become better, in recent years, at talking about individual grief. We are still very poor at talking about what grief does to a family as a unit....
Identity: Who Are You When the Story Changes?
One of the most destabilising experiences a person can have is discovering that the story they were told about themselves — their family, their origins, their identity — was not entirely true. I have worked with people who discovered this in all kinds of ways. A DNA...
The Family Behind the Diagnosis: What Nobody Tells You
When a person receives a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, their family is changed at the same moment — and usually without any support of their own. As with many health issues, the focal point is the patient. I have watched this happen scores of times. A diagnosis...
The Stigma of Mental Illness: What I Saw in 27 Years of Practice
When I began practising as a psychologist in the 1990s, the stigma around mental illness was severe and largely unchallenged. Patients came to me in secret. They parked down the road from my office. They paid cash so there would be no record on their medical aid. They...
Writing Bipolar Disorder in Fiction: Why I Did It, and How
The decision to put bipolar disorder at the centre of a novel is not one I took lightly. Mental illness in fiction has a complicated history — used too often as a shorthand for danger, or for dramatic instability, or as a plot mechanism rather than a human reality. I...
Permission: The Thing Women Struggle to Give Themselves
In 27 years of clinical practice, the theme I have encountered most consistently in women — across all ages, all backgrounds, all presenting problems — is the struggle with permission. Permission to want what they want. Permission to take up space. Permission to be...
Why I Started Writing a Novel at 74
People ask me this question with various degrees of tact. The more direct version is: what on earth made you think you could write a novel at your age?The honest answer is that I did not. I thought I had a story, but didn’t really believe I could write it. They are...
Resilience Is Not What You Think It Is
The word resilience has been adopted by wellness culture and turned into something almost unrecognisable from the clinical reality it describes. In the popular version, resilience is a kind of cheerful bounce-back. The person who loses everything and is stronger for...
Family Secrets and the Generations That Carry Them
In 27 years as a psychologist, one pattern appeared with remarkable consistency: the secrets that families keep do not stay quiet. They find another generation to speak through. How secrets travel I am not talking about dramatic revelations — affairs uncovered,...
What Bipolar Disorder Really Looks Like From the Inside
I have been a practising psychologist for 27 years. In that time, I have worked with hundreds of individuals living with bipolar disorder — and sometimes with the partners, parents, children and siblings who love them. What I have learned in those sessions is this:...