This week on A Thread of One’s Own, Theo Clarke is joined by acclaimed author Tanya Shadrick to discuss her extraordinary memoir The Cure for Sleep: A Late-Waking Life, and the journey to becoming a writer later in life. The Cure for Sleep: A Late-Waking Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is Tanya’s memoir of what it took—and cost—to break free from old social constraints and make that larger story for herself, even as she remained a wife and mother in a small town. It was a Waterstones and Evening Standard Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
Together they explore what it means to find your creative voice after years of putting others first, the power of memoir to make sense of our lives, and how writing can become an act of self-discovery.
Topics discussed on the show include: writing memoir; becoming a writer later in life; balancing creativity with family life; finding time to write; the importance of place in storytelling; memory and truth in memoir; writing as self-discovery; overcoming self-doubt; and the journey to publication.
BIOGRAPHY
Tanya Shadrick embarked as a writer after forty with The Wild Patience Scrolls. A mile of writing composed pen on paper beside England’s oldest outdoor pool during her young children’s school hours, it was an intensely local project that led to BBC Radio 4 features and an international residency at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature in Switzerland. Following that large-scale performance piece, Tanya became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was welcomed as a writer-in-residence at other extraordinary locations, including the National Trust’s Grade II-listed cliffside artists’ cabin at Bucks Mill, North Devon, and Virginia Woolf’s garden on the Sussex Downs.
Theo Clarke is a bestselling author, interviewer and former Member of Parliament. She is the creator and host of ‘A Thread of One’s Own’, a podcast and Substack celebrating books, writing and the creative process. Her memoir ‘Breaking the Taboo’ was shortlisted for the Westminster Book Awards.
Resources:
📖 The Cure for Sleep: A Late-Waking Life by Tanya Shadrick
🌐 Tanya Shadrick: https://tanyashadrick.com/
Website: http://www.theo-clarke.org.uk/podcast
Instagram: @theoclarkemp
A Thread of One’s Own production team:
Host and Producer: Theo Clarke
Editor: Adam Woodward
Designer: Emily Ryder
Social media: Eleanor Flavin
