Camilla Gibb on climbing out of grief

At 42-years-old, Camilla Gibb found herself pregnant and alone. Her marriage had ended suddenly, collapsing all hope she'd had for her burgeoning family and leaving "a lot of broken pieces about." Gibb's memoir, This is Happy, is about how she, accompanied by a disparate group of individuals, climbed her way out of grief. 

ON WHERE HOPE COMES FROM

"When I started writing This is Happy, I felt unhappy. I felt the family I had come from was a broken family. I felt I had invested so much hope in my marriage and what I thought was the creation of a new family. I wanted to understand how it is you come about, you come to be here, at 42, pregnant, on my own, facing the prospect of being a single mother? What were my fantasies of what marriage was, of what a family would look like? Were the fantasies informed by the broken-ness of the past?"

ON ADVICE FROM IAN BROWN

"The process of writing the book was really interesting because when it started, I wasn't feeling very hopeful. I had some advice from Ian Brown who said, 'Just start, just write it all down.' So I started documenting what was happening after the birth of my child. What was happening was something I couldn't have seen if I had just been in the experience. People started arriving. My brother turned up. We'd been estranged for 14 years. He's dealing with his own demons, he turned up because he wanted to help me. This giant wave of forgiveness just passed over the last 14 years. I met a new friend, it was a disaster, I couldn't be a good friend. I was crying all the time, I was exhausted, and she accepted me as I was. A live-in caregiver arrived and she and I slowly got to know each other and trust each other and love each other."

ON REALIZING SHE WAS WRITING A STORY

"I thought nothing was happening because all I felt was grief. But when I began to see it on the page, I thought, 'Oh no, there's a story underway here. Look at these connections between these unusual and disparate individuals and we're all coming together around this person I call the Egg, the baby at the heart of the story, who's not a character per se, but she's the centre of the entire book.' I decided to write about it because really for me narrative is how I begin to pick apart things and it's how I began to make sense of my own situation and my own history. It is really the only way you're going to have any command over it."