Writing Takes Courage

I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Writing about misery is a tricky business. Fiction or memoirs, if you are not careful your reader becomes too depressed to turn the page. The blurb on Ruth Fitzmaurice's 'I Found My Tribe' made me wonder whether I could possibly bear to start reading. It outlines how her gorgeous young husband, Simon, father to their FIVE young children, has reached the 'locked in' stage of Motor Neuron Disease, demanding round-the-clock care and leaving her to manage everything, including grief at losing him, with no solution in sight. Out of her desperation she discovers a love of swimming in arctic seas as a form of escape.

I need not have worried. 'I Found My Tribe' is harrowing. Ruth and Simon set out as the eponymous love-stricken, attractive, successful couple. He makes films and she writes. They produce three children in the early happy years of marriage and seem to romp through life with the sort of effortlessly glamorous ease that most of us envy. When Simon's foot goes 'floppy' they think it will pass. And when it turns out to be MND they throw every ounce of their energy and optimism at how they will defy it. But the disease will not be defied. It does it's thing, bit by bit, narrowing their once free and vibrant existence into one that most of us would find hard to imagine, let alone cope with.

So far so grim. It is a tale of The Worst happening, out of the blue, and I would be lying if I did not say that part of the compulsion to keep reading stems from a sense of one's own, comparable, good fortune. Just like when a newspaper story describes some atrocity and you think, well, I may have problems, but at least they are not those. More importantly however, Ruth Fitzmaurice writes about her life with irresistible fluency and appeal. She chops backwards and forwards between the earlier 'good' times and the current problems in a way that sweeps you along. Her sentences are short, unsentimental, as well as powerfully evocative. They ring with truth. There is no self-pity, not even when she is describing the most indescribable things, like admitting defeat, finally, on no longer sharing her husband's bed, because of the barrier (and noise) of the machines keeping him alive. She manages sometimes to be funny, as well as sad. She loves her husband still. They even produce two more children (twins) when he is in the thick of his illness and all five offspring adore their paralysed father. They are a family being torn apart in one way yet remaining deeply connected in another.

The focus of the book in terms of Ruth Fitzmaurice's private story, how she keeps her head above water (literally) in such gruelling circumstances, is her discovery of a love of wild swimming. In all seasons and all weathers she plunges into the sea, off the coast near her house in Co. Wicklow, along with a group of other stalwart women, all of whom have been or are in the midst of terrible ordeals themselves. They do not plan to become a group in this way, it just happens, organically. 'The Tragic Wives Swimming Club', they jokingly call themselves, but what they achieve through mutual support and enormous physical courage is not to be laughed at, only admired. I am not remotely 'aquatic' myself. Just reading the passages about the swimming filled me with a sort of repulsion - I could think of few things I would hate more than diving into the waves of a freezing sea. But Fitzmaurice made me understand completely how this madness helps her and her friends; how it takes their bodies to limits of survival, leaving them stronger, more empowered to manage the daily travails awaiting them.

My main impression of 'I Found My Tribe' was of the great fighting spirit of its author. She sees the awfulness of her situation and is not afraid to describe it. There may be bravery in throwing oneself into the Irish sea, day after day, but it was the bravery of the book itself - the act of writing it, of fearlessly staring at her demons - that moved me most.




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