TUBSTACK 2: Grief Grifting
trying and failing to participate in the trauma industrial complex
note: I’ll put up an unreleased tubs tune (not from the upcoming album) just for paid subscribers next week
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It’s been ten years since my mother, the folk singer and novelist Charlotte Greig, died. Milestones like this make me feel like I’ve been doorstopped by a journalist. Like I’m required to provide a statement. I find myself wanting to deflate any poignancy. This fanatical urge- kill all cliche- seems characteristic of my ‘grief style’. I take pleasure in derailing well-wishers’ attempts to talk to me about it. It’s glib but I think it expresses something of the experience. Because the truth is: I rarely feel straightforward sadness, longing, betrayal, guilt or any other classics. There’s darkness there. But it operates in subterranean ways. Her birthday, and I’m OCD spiralling about the possibility of being tortured to death via immurement. The anniversary of her death, and a childhood rash flares up. A recurring dream she’s somewhere in West London but GMaps keeps taking me to Croydon.
And sometimes I’ll experience a classic after all: a childlike longing; a sentimental flashback; a painful running of the counterfactual. But these feelings evaporate when I look at them head-on. So, when confronted by a platitude, I pounce. Because correcting what this grief isn’t is one of the few times I feel grounded.
In my twenties, I cultivated this style, had fun with it. I’d deploy it a party, ensnare some ketted-up mutual friend. This felt like an attractive element of my personality. If I was dating someone, I’d fantasise about the moment I divulge my tragic backstory. Her reaction to my surprising, cliche-killing tone. Not only had I survived: I’d survived in an interesting way.
It also felt like a shortcut to instant depth. The gothic nature of it being a suicide helped. I could keep it at arm’s length. There was a tabloid unreality to it, impossible to square with the undramatic life we shared. After all, I’d learnt the method by Googling her name and finding an article about it on Walesonline, below a report about Alex Jones from the One Show being spotted at a Llanethli pie shop. I could bend the narrative to suit my purpose. Depending on the situation, I could treat it flippantly, comically or could mythologise her. The latter was easy to do: she’d left behind several albums worth of mysterious minimalist folk music, and plenty of ethereal black and white press shots.
Later, I began writing about her. Egged on by fiction’s plausible deniability, I started luxuriating in my unsentimentality. At first, I was simply addicted to writing cliche-exterminating sentences. But I eventually wanted to market the style. It was 2016 and the Trauma Industrial Complex was revving into gear. People were being paid to write lifestyle articles and indie songs about their sexual assaults. Sites like Bustle were sending their writers ‘identity’ surveys with lists of tick-boxes (I’ve been to rehab, I’ve had an abortion, I’ve lost a child etc). I wanted to be exploited too. I wanted to both participate in the culture and subvert it. I thought I could offer something more genuine than the solemn gravitas of the survivor memoir. I began writing an Ottessa Moshfegh rip-off novel about two model twins who shared my backstory but fully inhabited the glibness I’d flirted with at those parties.
After a few years of being precious about it, I sent a draft to the only published novelist I knew: my dad. He liked it enough to help edit it, and recruited my step mother (another novelist) to help. We began working on it as a team. I found this embarrassing, partly because there was some horrible sex stuff in there. But everyone approached it professionally. And there was something funny about one of them Google-suggesting not sure if needed under a ramble about my mother’s suicide or an anal prolapse scene. We didn’t speak of the parallels. And any discomfort I felt was ultimately trumped by excitement. My bands weren’t doing much, and I’d become fixated on the idea of becoming a fiction writer- an occupation I thought might be more dignified than being a musician. My dad and stepmum helped me write a cover letter. I made sure to mention the suicide of my mother. Then I used my stepmum’s literary connections to get it read by some agents. Much like I had with my dates, I fantasised about them being taken aback by my unsentimental style.
No one took it on. One big agent nearly did but passed once she reached the second half. I told myself it was too weird. That I didn’t write about trauma sympathetically. That literary publishing had become centred around post-Sally Rooney style fiction about women. But my real suspicion was that the book wasn’t much of a page-turner. I’d been scrupulous about withholding any pain or longing, saved it all for the final two sentences which I hoped would be a glimpse into a subterranean world of grief. But that required getting to the end. After exhausting my connections, I started shopping it through the usual channels and received template rejections and out-of-office emails.
There’s a special kind of humiliation in failing to hawk your big tragedy. I’d been so protective, so ready to demolish the obvious narratives and, in doing so, had imbued my true narrative with a kind of sacred power. As if the mere fact of writing about my mum in such a way was destined to be interesting. If it’d been a purely cynical attempt to exploit my trauma, that might have been a lesson learnt. But there was a lot of my honest experience and feeling in there, however masked by the style. If there was a lesson to learn, it was that grief can be as much artistic hindrance as trump card. Amber A’ Lee Frost writes: “The survivor memoir is a fraught subject. It can be highly resistant to critique by virtue of its pathos”. This inevitably includes self-critique.
I was at a low ebb after that. I’d not only failed at writing, but failed to leverage my tragedy. This coincided with my relationship falling apart, and I ended up having a breakdown. I lost a few stone, barely slept for months and became addicted to Xanax for a bit. I stopped thinking much about the novel or anything much. At some point during my recovery, The Tubs released an album which started doing pretty well. I’d written it at the same time as the novel, and used my unsentimental style as a kind of lyrical persona. It seemed to be paying off, after all. This obviously aided my recovery, and it wasn’t long before I had the urge to capitalise on the attention by writing a song about my mum’s death. The Guardian had, after all, compared my lyrics to Morrissey’s. Maybe my novel was like the time Morrissey tried to write one.
Hawking trauma is more prerequisite than golden ticket for musicians today. The TikTok necessity for songs to have emotional hook captions has resulted in young artists trying to crowbar terms like ‘complex ptsd’ into their choruses. Maybe you’ve seen the ‘film your loved one’s reaction to your song’ trend. I just watched one: showing my girlfriend my song about losing faith in God after being SA’d- this was scary. Two women cry side-by-side in an SUV, the camera zooming pruriently whenever said girlfriend heaves a fresh sob. One of my favourites- I wrote this with an actual therapist ❤️🩹 - sees musician and therapist (?) trade pop-punk bars like: “the more I speak my mind- the more I get left behind”. There’s something very compelling about how literal these songs are. It’s partly down to the emotional hook model- you have to signpost your specific pathology in case someone scrolls by. But it also feels like the logical conclusion of the cultural trend towards mental health openness. In life, as in art, a certain amount of repression, concealment or metaphor is required for expressions of grief to land. It’s classic show not tell stuff. Sort of like how nudist colonies are the least erotic places on earth.
Most older musicians aren’t doing the TikTok version but they’re still encouraged to plug trauma where possible. It’s expressed more opaquely, but millennial musicians are forever writing a little Instagram paragraph about something traumatic their new single explores. Musicians have run with this, even more so than writers, because it’s easier to explore trauma in a song than in extended prose. Even the tritest survivor memoir requires the writer to at least live inside their tragedy for hours. Musicians can pop in for a few minutes. And, what’s more, they can get away with doing it badly. If you’re musically talented enough, a song can still elevate a cliched attempt to explore your trauma into something affecting.
I knew all of this. But I still wanted to get involved. I, again, believed I could both subvert and partake in the culture. But when I tried it felt embarrassing. Probably because my songs rhyme, and there’s something ridiculous about grieving in rhyme. So, with some relief, I abandoned the idea. But then I found myself in bed one afternoon, writing a song about the suicide. It’s called ‘Strange’. It retains something of the unsentimental style, but it’s more plainspoken. The lyrics just depict a few scenes in which people said funny, clumsy, banal things to me in the months afterwards. I mention the Walesonline article. I wasn’t sure if the song was musically good, but something about it felt riskier than anything I’d written in the novel. Not cathartic. There was just a radioactivity to it which felt significant, but also made me embarrassed and a little ashamed. I showed it to my girlfriend and some friends. They would often cry and this would make me more ashamed. I’m not usually prone to shame. I’m very easy on myself. I hadn’t felt ashamed of being an edgelord about the suicide. Or stressing it in a press release. But something about getting what I wanted- a genuine emotional response- seemed to take the excitement out of it. I felt no desire to hawk the song.
But then some time passed and I did. I made it the last track on the album, and contributed terms like ‘palpable sense of risk’ to the press release. Listening to the mix one evening , I thought of one of my mum’s press shots. It’s a grainy black and white photo of her breastfeeding me in a graveyard. She’d used it as a cover of a 7” single. I decided to use it as our album cover. I had my marketing hat on of course. Be honest: if your folk musician mother had killed herself and you had a black and white press shot of her breastfeeding you in a graveyard, wouldn’t you use it as an album cover? But there was also something right about it. She had mined her life, her relationships, me, in her books and songs. She, too, had that “sliver of ice in the heart of the writer” as Graham Greene puts it. And in this case she’d used me- the unknowing infant caught in the intimacy of feeding- to hawk her own music. (I was like the Nirvana baby!) And now I was making her the unwilling participant. There’s something about this that makes me feel closer to her. The two of us in that graveyard- hawking each other forever.
