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By Lindsay Johnstone

The greatest fear of anybody who has lost a child is that they will be forgotten

Put simply, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir is a memorial for a baby who lived for only three hours outside of the womb. It asks – and triumphantly answers – the question of whose life is any more deserving of our attention. Who is any more deserving of a book written in their name?   

However, this biography-memoir is far from simple. Its terrain is both corporeal and cerebral – rooted in the body and located in the darkest recesses of the psyche. It asks whether the lifelong stories we’ve told to make sense of ourselves in the world have ever served us and questions whether the coping mechanisms we adopt to get through our days in an increasingly senseless world detach us from it or connect us to it. This book takes its place in a body of work that, ultimately, concerns itself with locating and exploring our common humanity.  

Glasgow Review of Books (GRB): One of the things that struck me in both Joshua in the Sky and A Secretary’s Biography is that your sense of identification with your subject is rooted in the body, be it by condition or by blood.  I’m interested in the ways that you identify with the subjects of your biographies on a cellular level.  

Rodge Glass (RG): Thanks – I think I did identify with Alasdair precisely that way, because of his asthma and his eczema, two conditions we both have. So much of the way he moved about the world and the coping strategies he had to be able to make his life work were rooted in the body. In his ways of coping. If he’d been born today he’d have been treated very differently – we now live in a society that more often recognises neurodiversity, and looks to accommodate, to include. Not so much in Riddrie, Glasgow, in the 1930s or 40s!

As a child, Alasdair had to find ways to adapt, and those stayed with him for a lifetime. So yes, there was the body, always. And I was interested in him on a cellular level as I was physically close to him for a long period of time. There are different kinds of closeness that aren’t about the body but that have reminded me of the body ever since. Alasdair and I rarely ever touched. Once, I rested my hand on his arm, when he was in pain.   

Something else on the cellular: I’m interested in how we treat other people and, for all of the other things that I discuss [in the book] in relation to the community that I came from, what Alasdair taught me (more than any other one individual) was how to treat others. A lot of what I carried into writing about Joshua in the body and the mind came from what I learned from my years spent with Alasdair, so for me they are intimately connected.

I couldn’t have written Joshua without the Gray biography coming first. There was in an interesting contrast for me, between writing about somebody who’s had a lot of attention, like Alasdair, and someone who would otherwise not be seen. The book about Michel [Faber] could only have come after the book I wrote about Alasdair too, and there are consistencies in writing about Joshua that are rooted in both those other books.

For example, Michel’s obsession with compassion, generosity, connection (or the impossibility of connection) and our innate human desire for it anyway. All of these things are deeply intertwined and influenced me when I came to write about Joshua. Which is partly why this new book has chapters that respond both to Faber and to Gray. I feel we carry all our pasts into our futures. That’s a gift. 

GRB: There are so many other stories that could be told. Yours is not the story of a parent but it feels parental in terms of your feeling of responsibility. The tear in the family affects every single person. I’m thinking about moments in the book where screens or books can act as armour. Something that can get in between you and the emotional reality. And yet, interestingly, with Alasdair you were subject to his very human-ness. There was an unavoidable intimacy. 

RG: That’s so interesting you’ve spotted that, about screens or books as armour. I’ve not thought of it in those terms, but suddenly I can see it! And yes, it’s a kind of intimacy at work. I would say the way our family’s changed has given me much greater, sharper, more intense appreciation for the positives in all our lives. Part of the reason I wrote about my own daughters was to be able to do so in a joyous way, mixing it in with these other stories, real and imagined, Joshua’s story becoming part of their lives to – because I choose to present them together. As a NICE THING. Especially in a book full of pain, I wanted to record that joyousness.  

There are aspects of our lives that are moving in parallel, and I certainly felt like that about Joshua’s parents. That said, I’m not hiding from the darkness of any of this. All of that is real. But I don’t feel responsible for Joshua’s death anymore, like I did when I started writing Joshua in the Sky. The writing of the book was a cure for that delusion.  I was never made to feel by Joshua’s parents or my friends that I was responsible for anything; but you have to work through it yourself. I did that partly through finding art to help make sense of my life.

The line I use by David Kinloch about poetry being a conductor of being is an important one – for me, all the things I respond to in the book are conductors of being. The other important line is where I say that in my life, reading and writing have been these twin ways of hiding from and facing the world at the same time. I thought of that when you mentioned the screens. You don’t have to choose either or. You can be divided and connected at once. Hide and face the world at once. 

I say early on in the book that my own relationship with storytelling had fallen apart. I thought I’d told myself this very convenient lie in order to avoid living properly and then bit by bit I realised, no – that relationship with literature was of real value. But there’s a more nuanced relationship you might have with it in that sometimes, the screen or the book or the story or your imagination or your guilt or your hope or any of these things could act as a barrier, or they could also act as a door. And you’re also sometimes moving between those two things. Always moving through the door and back. Jumping the barrier and falling over it.

I was very conscious of having not been physically in the room during Joshua’s life and not wanting to trample on anyone else’s grief. Take advantage of anybody. Assume anything. I didn’t want to tread on anyone else’s grief and I’m proud of that. But to do that, I had to collaborate with Joshua’s parents and very slowly, carefully, build respect and trust. Try to understand what this thing was and build it piece by piece, which again came from the experiences of writing about Alasdair. Writing about Michel, writing about my children too. I hope that when the final biographical chapter of Joshua in the Sky comes, readers feel like they’ve earned that final chapter, that you can somehow experience that intimacy without being present. 

GRB: To go back to the start of the book, I felt like I was ‘in’ an HHT (Hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia – the blood disorder Glass shares with Joshua) episode. Like we are stumbling around in the dark with you. It’s visceral. The prose style feels reflective of an HHT attack. It’s staccato. Disjointed. Sparse. You’re rubbing at an itch that can’t be scratched behind the eyeballs, like maybe rubbing at the images, or rubbing the visions into being. The version of ‘you’ at the start of the book, too… There’s a very strong sense of self-flagellation.   

RG: Thanks for saying that. I’m glad it feels like an HHT wave – that was my intention. To bring readers into what that’s like, so they could then be carried through the rest of the experience. I think it’s worth saying something more about that self-flagellation though. I know it’s unflinching. Even when writing it, I was a bit like, ‘Oh, Rodge! Don’t!’

But good writing has to hurt, I think. You can’t keep at a cosy emotional distance. You can’t describe pain as if it’s a gentle, manageable thing way off in the distance, that you don’t have to touch. If things are desperate, you’ve got to be prepared to look that desperation straight in the eye, even if you know that you’re going a little bit insane and readers will see that. Because that, too, is part of the process of working through the truth. The truth matters. I’m a different person now.   

 It’s not like I don’t have anything in common with the person who wrote the book, it’s just that writing the book changed me. Surviving that period changed me, because it meant interrogating why I felt so convinced, why I felt I didn’t deserve to live; why I felt responsible for Joshua’s life; thinking about all the other knock-on effects of that on the people around me and trying to face it directly whether that be through writing, reflection, storytelling.

All of those experiences and thoughts have helped remake a quite cheerful, positive person who is going to turn up at these launch events with a big smile and a bright shirt and actually feeling quite good! Trying to get that balance between telling the truth of my past and fairly representing my present is going to be challenging, but I do look back at some of those bits in the book and go, “That was the worst of the worst.” The value of facing those events, and surviving them, is a present to your future self.

GRB: I wonder what you hope this book will achieve?  

RG: I wanted to make a memorial to Joshua, and I have done that. That can’t be taken away. It’ll also be the first personal story ever published in this country or in Europe about HHT. There is literally that one book [Living with HHT by Dr Sara Palmer] the scientific book published in the US, that’s all.

It’s not about our experiences of living with the condition, and every condition deserves that sort of book because it helps you survive it, understand it, relate to other people who have been through it. The reason why people make Facebook groups or whatever with other people from around the world who have the same condition as them is because they want to connect with other humans who have a similar experience and this is the first book that exists on that, so I know that I’m raising awareness. 

Also, I’m not financially profiting from it myself, and so if anyone was to say well, you’re profiting from somebody else’s pain, I know I’m not. The advance has gone to Joshua’s charities. When I won the Anne Brown Prize, the prize money went to Joshua’s charities and any time I do an appearance, all my fee and any profit the book makes is going towards them, too.

Finally, it’s got me going again writing creatively in a way I haven’t done for a while, that’s the real selfish benefit I have from the book. I published six books in eight years, and then after my first daughter was born, I didn’t publish a full book for a decade. Although I did smaller things, occasional stories, chapters, I didn’t feel the same confidence in myself as a writer. By writing the book about Michel, at the same time as developing Joshua in the Sky, I now feel like I exist as a creative writer in a way I haven’t done for a long time. So it’s achieved that, for me. Already. This book has gifted me more than any writer could reasonably expect.

GRB: You say HHT cuts across gender and ethnicity and that it is indiscriminate and could affect anyone anywhere across the globe. This is striking, because we can look at these genetic conditions in terms of those metrics or percentages, but in fact none of that matters. It’s universal.  

RG: It’s universal, yes. What interests me is that universality, and how most people with HHT, like me, don’t even know they have it. There’s a 27-year lag between people ‘having’ it and generally finding out they have it, so my story is incredibly common for people with HHT. I’m glad that that’s on the first page.

Another thing that’s at the beginning of the book is the epigraph from Michel Faber, from an interview with him. That’s about universality of a different kind. The quote from Faber says that literature reminds us of our specialness and our commonality, and I believe in all of our specialness and all of our commonality. I am absolutely clear-eyed about what I think about humanity in a way I just wasn’t sure in my 20s.

And once you have some kind of clarity there, then you can map that onto a book that reads like it’s a coherent thing, that is making an argument of a kind, which is about generosity and compassion and what we have in common and how we should treat each other. Every writerly choice I make is led by that.

I’ll often joke, with a twinkle in my eye, about how all people are my people. (I do know they’re not really all mine. It’s silly, it’s self-deprecating.) So first of all, all men are my people, right? So I’m having all of them. Almost half the planet. Billions of people with my experience, or something in common with it, at least.

Then there’s the English, for all their problems – they’re are also my people. Every one of them! I want to give them all a hug. I’m also having the Scots because I’ve lived here for the best part of 25 years and my children are Scottish. Because I’m invested in this place and its culture, it’s given me a wonderful living, and a life, and I contribute to life here, so that’s mine. All of Scotland! Every glorious Munro and every dreich day! Every wean and every wee granny! 

Obviously the Jews are mine, too. They’re my people – as I’ve tried to explore in the book, that’s incredibly complicated for me. But they’re mine and I’m theirs. Jews of every skin colour and language and culture worldwide, every view I do or don’t agree with. And you can expand it and expand it, and of course it’s a joke, intended to be ridiculous, but also it’s a way of expanding our sense of asking, what is our individual identity? Who might we connect with, and how?

Basically, the more we expand the definitions of being connected to others, the easier it is to be generous towards other people and the more that you choose to see yourself in a narrow way, the easier it is to switch off to the humanity of people who are slightly different to you. I want to connect. That’s me and I can’t change it.

GRB: A big part of the book is about your relationship to the Jewish community . . .

RG: And my conflicted relationship with that, which was often rooted in feeling like our sympathy was for ourselves as Jews but without looking outwards and considering how that impacts our ability to take responsibility for other people. I was forced to face my own prejudices, the discomfort and my allergy to my own community as part of Joshua’s life and death.

My assumptions proved to be wrong in so many ways. Just because I had a set idea about what an Orthodox rabbi was like, or what the Jewish community could or couldn’t provide, didn’t mean that was the truth for everybody, and I saw with my own eyes how much support, solace, generosity, insight, wisdom was in Joshua’s rabbi, and how much that helped the family. That forced me to admit that I don’t know it all and I always want that shown to me. What I don’t know. 

It was much easier to run away from it. Move to Scotland at 18 where there were as few Jews as possible. As far away from the community I came from. I had lived in Israel-Palestine as a young man and became horrified by what I learned, what I saw. I felt like I didn’t want anything to do with Judaism if it meant having to reckon with the impossible, eternal question of that state. I had been brought up thinking of Jewish history as about Jewish slavery, about prejudice against Jews, discrimination against Jews.

Once I came to believe there was somewhere in the world where Jews could fairly be described as oppressors – when I saw just how conflated the questions of Judaism (an ancient worldwide faith), Israel (a state in the Middle East) and Zionism (a belief system) often are in the eyes of others, well I just couldn’t cope with it, and I ran. That’s the beginning of a much longer conversation! Which I’m happy to have. But anyway, when I came to Glasgow as a teenager, falling in love with contemporary Scottish literature – that was partly a way of diving into something new to get away from something else. You know, finding something that was not my own, which I could claim.  

GRB: The depiction of yourself in this book around the time of working on the biography of Alasdair in the mid-2000s was harsh. You depict yourself as someone who thought he had the answers about writing biography; about life. Yet there is a keen sense that in this book, you’re saying we don’t grow up until the order of things is subverted. We don’t become adults until we’ve experienced a senseless loss, perhaps. We can only run away from the truth of who we are for so long, and then we have to go back. We don’t have a choice. We have to decide to tell the story we have to tell rather than the one we want to tell.   

RG: In terms of accepting that I am Jewish – and will always be Jewish – yes, that is fundamental. There are possibly three or four different readings of this book, foregrounding different elements, and in some cases I think this may be missed. Judaism isn’t an obvious racial identity but lots of people feel they can see it or recognise it. Some people who are Jewish feel like they can see it in others. All of those things are being carried with you and should we step into a timewarp and go back and find the SS is knocking on people’s doors again, they’re not going to say, ‘How often do you go to synagogue, or do you believe in God? They believe it’s “in” you and it cannot be gotten out.   

Why do those things matter? Because if you have spent, like I did, 25 years running from being Jewish and then realising that, actually, wherever you show up people see it or think they see it or they know then you have to come to some kind of acceptance with it. You’re only ever a hop, skip and a jump from your Jewishness being a public part of yourself if you make imagined things. And I’ve come to realise I couldn’t hide from it anymore. I have to accept it.

I have been present while people literally say Jews all control the world. (My hosts didn’t know I was Jewish, of course.) I have been spotted as Jewish immediately by people I don’t know and then immediately had it assumed I wish to see innocent Palestinian babes murdered and displaced. (I don’t.) So, Jewishness is seen sometimes, hidden sometimes. You need to accept both those realities. But going through the process of seeing my family’s continued faith and still being part of that community that I left, and what that gave them in terms of grounding and solace; things that could be positive forced me to question a lot of the things I’d grown used to thinking about being Jewish.

Those moments in the book with Joshua’s rabbi and his kids bashing the drums while I watch on Zoom may be comical and silly but also a moment of meaningful connection for them, every time that Joshua’s name is mentioned, that matters. You can see what solace that provides to people. You can’t run from it. 

GRB: We haven’t touched on the art of biography, and yet I know that’s something you want to talk about when you talk about this book.  

RG: I think that a lot of us start out thinking we want to be one kind of writer before realising we might be capable of other things. By a combination of luck and opportunism and some graft, I ended up being Alasdair Gray’s biographer and even if my book was rubbish (I don’t think it is! Ha! But even if it had been…) nobody else did one and he never agreed to collaborate with anyone else! So there was something unique in that, that became transformative in my own life.

In fact, it’s only all these years later that May Hooper, one of Alasdair’s close friends who sat for him multiple times as a model and who was used on the front cover of some of his books, is finally publishing a memoir about their friendship. But for the best part of two decades, nobody did it which made me unusually associated with him. I felt like of all the things I had made, that was the thing I’d made most successfully and that changed me as a writer.

Even the novel I wrote afterwards, Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs, was essentially a fictional biography that was rooted in real events (sexuality in Premiership football), so I feel I’ve increasingly become someone who writes about real lives and so thinks about what is the fair way to represent a life. 

In a way, I feel I’ve been coming to this thing since I met Alasdair. I would not have been able to publish a book about Michel Faber had I not published a book on Alasdair Gray. Having spent all those years writing about public figures and only now coming to write about my own family, I think I’ve learnt something about the art of biography. The choices we make. What to foreground and what to background and how that distorts or enhances the picture. How can you do something that is honest and accept that you’re missing out most of any life? What is the ethical way to move through that? For me, this book is a case study in how to do that in the most sensitive of situations.   

GRB: We see you grapple with that on the page. That is such a big part of the story and we see the ethical dilemma running all the way through it. The point you make about Alasdair’s relationship to your book, and the fact he had his own feelings about what you’d written that mean – in hindsight – you can now look back on that and think about things in a different way is interesting.  

RG: I would like to write another biography of Alasdair Gray in a completely different way. I mention, in Joshua in the Sky, the writer Mina Loy, who’d written seven different autobiographies. I’ve consistently written about Alasdair in many different ways since my initial biography, but part of me would like to go back to that later in life myself and try and challenge myself to do it, because that life is inexhaustible. Poor Things got two or three pages in my first biography! Ha! That’s absurd!

GRB: So, what next?  

RG: Since the completion of Joshua in the Sky, those ethical considerations have influenced two stories I’ve done for children, one of which was the Hanukkah story that was on BBC Sounds last year. This book has also influenced how, ethically, I choose to walk through that territory.

My children aren’t Jewish, but they are taught about their heritage in school, they are curious and ask questions and they know that a large part of my family is Jewish. The story I wrote was set in my own flat using the real names. I gave then a draft of it and we talked about it before I revised it. I gave them opportunities to show their discomfort, I told them what it would be like, they heard me read the story and then when it was broadcast, they got a lot of pleasure out of it. I was so lovely.  

When the first story went well and the BBC came back to ask me to do another one, I’d then written about my daughters several times, including in Joshua in the Sky, and so I was used to it. I’ve done this new one called The Magic of Stories¹ and it’s about how my elder daughter gets freedom from being able to escape into her imagination through storytelling.

When I said to her I’d been asked to do another one and asked “Should I?” she said “Yes, are you going to put us in it this time?” She wanted me to. She had ideas, and a title, and an idea for a focus. So I wrote it up, checked it with her, and she even edited little bits she thought weren’t in her voice, or weren’t quite right. How many writers get that kind of pleasure? I feel very lucky.

GRB: Rodge, thank you so much for speaking with us and sharing these insights.   

Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir by Rodge Glass is available now from Taproot Press and good booksellers.

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About our interviewer

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1. New recordings of Rodge’s audio stories, including ‘The Magic of Stories’ will be available shortly, via BBC Sounds ↩︎