Love, Death & Trousers: Fifty Stories from a Nearby Life

LOVE, DEATH & TROUSERS: An Excerpt

It’s quite possible that these non-fiction stories, taken word for word from a collection of 148 anonymous diaries found in a skip in 2001, have nothing at all to do with the diarist’s life.  

That’s not some sparkling post-modern observation: it’s a genuine risk.   

All the sentences, events, perceptions, shocks, humour and fineness of writing belong to the diarist, but the stories are mine.   The themes have been spotted across diary sections containing tens of thousands of words, and edited down into narratives of at most four or five hundred.   Nothing about these stories is made up, except their existence.

The discovery of these diaries and the four years I spent hunting down their author are the subject of my book, A Life Discarded.         

Laura Francis could be an excellent diarist, but frequently wasn’t.  Why should she be?  She wasn’t writing for an audience.  She had no duty to entertain.   Her writing is repetitive, self-obsessed, confused and 2mm high.  A typical 200-page notebook from the 1990s contained over 100,000 words and covered just six weeks of her life in which nothing happened.   Yet the diaries are full of good stories.   Her writing also has the one quality that professional writers, fiction or non-fiction, find the most difficult to capture: vitality.   Even when the diaries are agonisingly tedious, you want to go on reading them because they are true.  No novelist has clattered into this woman’s life to impose a narrative ‘arc’ on her images of incarceration and waste.   There’s none of the story-teller’s fraudulent scene ‘setting’, character ‘development’, point of conflict, concluding resolution.  You are peering in on a real woman who thinks she is alone – a woman in the final stages of tedium.  She is writing about being an ordinary human: the arbitrariness, the impotence, the fog.  Vitality – aliveness – comes to her just because she has picked up her pen.   Her drama is that she is not fiction.