Every author who’s waiting for their book to come out will experience pangs of anxiety in the middle of the night! What have I missed out? Should I have said that differently? Or better? Who haven’t I thanked? And many more agonies… FACE IT may have been long in gestation but that hasn’t saved me from insomnia!
But there has to come a point when writers sign off their work. In my case, that day was forced by a deadline which, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I thrive on. I handed the manuscript over to the editor and waited. In trepidation! Would she hack it, dismembering hours of painstaking scripting and thought? But she didn’t. She was very challenging at times but never destructive.
As with my first book (Changing Faces: The Challenge of Facial Disfigurement, Penguin, 1990), the writing of this second one required a very different sort of discipline to running an organisation be it a dairy farm (as I was then), a charity or a business. All of those enterprises require a mix of short-term priority-setting, relationship- and team-building and longer-term strategic decision-making. Writing a book is solitary and often frustrating. You have to find a good time every day, shutting off the other pressures and distractions, picking up your pen and crafting. Procrastination is one enemy, closely allied to completing other seemingly vital tasks.
The origins of this book go back to the mid-1990s, the early years of the charity, Changing Faces, when I was frequently asked to tell my story with all its twists and turns, ups and downs… or to lay out in much more detail the rationale and content of our pioneering package of psycho-social help. And then after we launched the campaign for ‘face equality’ in 2008, I was asked ‘why, what and how?’. But much as I wanted to write down the answers, so often, my attempts at starting, drafting chapters and synopses came to nothing. They seemed good for a while but soon gathered dust as other priorities gripped me — and when I went back to look at my last efforts, I winced. Start again.
Then, in the summer of 2018 as Face Equality International was being hatched, I began to write in earnest, every day and in early 2019, finally committed to getting FACE IT out there. And I’m pleased with the result!
It’s an honest memoir of my battle after severe facial burns; it’s a practical self-help guide for anyone with a facial difference and a manual for health professionals trying to help them. And, finally, it’s a manifesto for face equality, rooting out the stigmas of face-ism that oppress us all… and urging new face values in our 21st century world.
It was completed before the Covid-19 pandemic swamped the planet. But it seems all the more timely for all that.
James Partridge 