This week, I was interviewed by the British Library, for a forthcoming feature as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations. The interviewer, Lucy, asked me a question that I hadn’t been asked before, and it got me thinking. She asked me if it was a conscious stylistic decision to have structured In Her Nature around a series of questions.
Until she asked, I hadn’t really articulated why there are so many questions in the book. When I was writing it, I knew that I wanted to lay bare my research processes; processes that had remained invisible, behind-the-scenes, in my earlier books. In In Her Nature, I wanted to show how the questions that writers ask, the ideas that strike us, and the lines of enquiry that we pursue, are all intimately related to things that are going on in our own lives. It seemed to me that the stories that emerge from research are not impartial truths, but reflections of what happens when the past is seen through the lens of one person in the present.
Lucy’s question also made me reflect on what it means to me, personally, to ask questions.
(This is where I’m writing this newsletter. I had a window of a few hours when I needed to be near the Moors, so I brought my laptop and set up office beside a rather idyllic brook.)
For most of my life – until roughly my mid-thirties – I have been dreadful at asking questions. There were a lot of secrets in my family when I was growing up, and, as an anxious, perfectionist and self-loathing child, I used to berate myself for not knowing answers to adults’ questions. I grew up with a sense that I was somehow uniquely ignorant of things that literally everyone knew, combined with a belief that asking questions would not remedy that ignorance, but rather reveal my shortcomings to the world. I hated not-knowing.
So, instead of asking questions, I tried to fake knowledge. When I entered conversations in which people were talking on subjects about which I knew nothing, I didn’t ask simple questions that would have oriented me: ‘what are you guys talking about?’; ‘how does that work?’; ‘what does that mean?’; ‘what are the implications of that?’ and so on. Instead, I nodded and smiled and hoped that my interlocutors would drop enough information into conversation that, hastily and silently, I’d be able to cobble together sufficient understanding to pretend I’d been keeping up with the chat all along.
Another example of my past aversion to asking questions: I have a dreadful memory for names and faces. I need to have met someone around 10 times before I’d be able to recognise them in the street. But, on occasions when I bumped into people who seemed to know me – even though I had no recollection of them – I was so reluctant to admit to my poor memory that instead of simply asking their names, I nodded, smiled and pretended recognition, hoping their identities would dawn on me as they talked. (My dreadful memory for faces has led to some embarrassing situations. At a friend’s wedding a few years ago, I was introduced to someone’s boyfriend and talked to him for around half-an-hour. Later in the day, at the dinner, I was seated next to him, but I didn’t recognise him as the man I’d been talking to earlier, and so shook his hand, saying ‘hello, I’m Rachel. We haven’t met.’ He clearly thought I was extremely drunk.)
My worries about asking questions meant that, for much of my early adult life, I was a dreadful conversationalist. I spent too much time panicking that I’d be unmasked as an ignorant idiot, or as someone so rude as to suggest that my interlocutors weren’t making themselves entirely clear (or weren’t sufficiently important for me to have remembered their names), for me to actually concentrate on the topic of discussion. I was too intent on performing conversation to gain anything from it or to contribute much to it.
Much of this character trait came from the specific ways in which I developed, personally, as a child – but I think there was also something broader at play. I go on about it a lot, but Iris Marion Young’s essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ had such a major impact on me because it articulates something I’ve always felt: the experience that many girls and women have, of our bodies being ‘both subject and object for itself at the same time’. Young describes how (as I summarise in In Her Nature) ‘men generally possess enough knowledge of their physical capabilities so that, when they go to catch a ball, their minds and bodies work together – they think through their bodies – to bring that desire to fruition almost instantaneously’. But when girls and women run to catch a ball, we are often conscious of how we must look to others as we run to catch a ball – and it slows us down and trips us up. Similarly, I took part in conversations whilst being conscious of how I must look as I took part in conversations – and it made me as dreadful at conversation as I am at catching a ball.
It was only in my mid-thirties that I learned how to ask questions (although I didn’t become any better at cricket, sadly). It took what Iris Marion Young identified. In order to be better at asking questions, I had to rid myself of self-consciousness, and inhabit my body more fully, as a subject. Because asking questions, I realised, is about recognising and articulating your own desires. And, for me, that came from long-distance running, which I started around that time.
Ultra-running is entirely dependent on the ability to identify what your body desires at various points in a run. You can flog your body through short-ish distances without adequate training, rest, nutrition or hydration, but there’s no way that anyone can run fifty or a hundred-odd miles without respecting their own physical needs. I write about the learning process through which I got to know my own body, and its desires, on p. 29 of In Her Nature:
Once I had learned to recognise and prioritise my body, it was a relatively simple next step to learn how to ask the questions that were necessary to look after it. Sometimes these questions were very simple: ‘do you have any coke?’ at checkpoints, or ‘am I on the right path?’ during a race. Sometimes they were a bit more complicated, revealing my ignorance and/or asking something of another person, both of which made me vulnerable to criticism and rejection: such as, ‘can I run with you on this night section?’
As I got better at asking questions in the context of running, I got better at asking questions in conversation. Asking questions shows that I am not omniscient and not entirely self-sufficient, but now I try to put these worries – which are to do with judging myself as an object – aside, and to pursue questions that help me to flourish, as a subject. Asking questions is the only way to materialise the physical and social pleasures of ultra-running, or the genuine desires for knowledge, self-improvement and communion with other people which come from conversation.
In Her Nature charts how running helped me to live more as a subject and less as an object. Because learning to ask questions was a crucial part of that change, I wanted the book’s structure to reflect that – so I think that’s why there are so many questions in the book. I was really delighted when Janice Turner, reviewing it in the Times, described it as ‘a book of limitless curiosity’, because the book came out of my desire to be a more curious person. And, when I was writing it, the way in which asking questions led to more and more questions showed me the value of curiosity, not just in terms of personal development, but in research methodology.
The book started with a very simple question. I kept encountering the claim that women’s outdoor sports, such as mountaineering, only began in the 1970s; and the question I first asked was ‘is that true?’. Cursory research showed that the answer was ‘no’, and so that question led to more questions: ‘if it’s untrue, then which women were active in mountaineering prior to the ‘70s?’; ‘how early did women start participating?’; ‘were they outliers, or was mountaineering generally popular among women?’. These led to perhaps the most important question: ‘if so many women were participating in mountaineering right from the very beginning of the sport, then why on earth have they all been forgotten?’ And thus began my investigation of how (and why) men drive women out of sport.
The value – and the difficulty – of becoming comfortable with asking questions has been brought home to me since my husband died. I think that people who die by suicide often have things, thoughts and emotions that they’ve been keeping private and secret from other people; not least is the fact that they’ve been harbouring the desire to end their own lives. I’ve found it very hard to come face-to-face with the difficult truth that we never entirely know other people; even those with whom we live intimately for decades. It has made the world appear unstable and unknowable; a reminder of a childhood spent feeling as if I was the only person kept in ignorance of a secret that everyone else was in on.
I’ve asked lots of questions in the 17 months since Pete died, and some of them I’ll never be able to answer. Among other things, the experience has changed my attitude to questions. In the Before Times, I valued being able to adhere to certain overarching truths. Axioms such as ‘there is no god’, ‘the world is not flat’, ‘I exist’ (and so on) were fixed beliefs around which I shaped my life. Today, there is very little of which I’m completely sure. So instead of shaping my life around the pursuit of grand answers, I’ve had to learn to live instead according to questions and questioning and in a constant state of not-knowing.
In writing this today, it strikes me that perhaps this state of pursuing questions rather than answers is closely related to what it means to write feminist history (as well as to Buddhism!). As I discovered in researching In Her Nature, ‘received wisdom’ is often based on a version of the past in which men’s lives are more visible than women’s. The stories that are recorded, disseminated, and repeated enough to become mainstream are often nurtured by male-dominated institutions. Mainstream histories of sport favour male athletes because the clubs, societies, facilities and competitions in which achievements were recorded and disseminated most widely were often male-only. In order to research and write feminist history – and, perhaps more generally, simply to live as feminists in the world – we have to begin by interrogating received wisdom and asking the first question – ‘is that true?’ or ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ – and then seeing where that leads us. It’s pretty terrifying, but perhaps it’s the most truthful way to live.
Other recent things from me:
I wrote about why so many suffragettes were into mountaineering for The Great Outdoors magazine.
I spoke at the Hay festival on women and nature. You can listen to the recording here.
Beautifully put; this really resonated with me, notably the value of letting go of performative behaviours and how embracing physical activity in my late 30s has led to me being much better in tune with myself and my desires - what I actually enjoy vs what I think I should be enjoying!