Five minutes with author Carly-Jay Metcalfe
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Carly-Jay Metcalfe was born with cystic fibrosis, survived a double-lung transplant at the age of twenty-one and faced a rare cancer at the age of thirty.
What she has endured should have killed her, but her humour, courage and optimism became her best survival skills.
We took five minutes with Carly-Jay to celebrate the publication of sexy, sassy, funny and thought-provoking memoir Breath. Out now from UQP in all good bookstores.
Have you always written? And have you always written about your illness?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write. I wrote my first very short piece of memoir on foolscap in HB pencil, titled ‘My Treatment’, and it’s about a run in with a particularly nasty doctor, the story of which is in my book.
From a very young age, I always wrote down the day’s events in a diary, and from there I would move to a journal for more introspective writing, so there are towers of both that still haunt my parents’ house.
It’s both fascinating and horrifying reading my sometimes-histrionic diary entries from high school, but I’m so grateful that I kept a daily log of life. I was recently reading some entries from 1994, and these strange little books serve as a reminder to what I was going through with my life and illness. I never expected to be alive, and it’s immensely humbling to see what I’ve survived, and how this shaped the human being I would go on to become.
It seems like you’re an amazingly ‘glass half full’ kind of gal, but did you have to work to balance out the heavy content with the humour?
I was always a really happy kid, and optimism was a by-product of this, as was my pragmatism. For some reason, I’ve always been able to make a joke out of my own suffering. I wager that if I can make a joke out of my own cancer diagnosis, I can laugh about anything. Humour has played a big role in my survival.
When I was writing Breath, it became increasingly difficult to see the glass as half full, because every time I sat down to write, I was re-traumatising myself. But then I’d remember a story that would make me laugh hysterically, and this seemed to restore the balance.
I had heard about authors speak about their experience of writing their stories down as being cathartic, but this was so far removed from my experience. Writing this book nearly ruined me, but I managed to claw my way back. I felt that by the time I was working with my editor, I’d come back to myself.
There’s a sense of constant grieving for others in the book and a poignancy as you lose people — was writing a way of grappling with this and your survival?
My life has been underscored by illness and death, so it felt like I was in a perpetual cycle of grief when I was seeing my CF friends die, especially during my childhood and adolescence.
Writing was one of my ways through the pain of that. It’s always been a salve of sorts. Watching your friends die of the same illness that you have is not something you ever get used to, and I wouldn’t want to because I think that would diminish my humanity.
So much of my writing is wrapped up in my experience and the one question I cannot answer: why did I survive?
There are multiple discussions and threads around death in the book. Did you intentionally want to spark a conversation around this for your readers?
That was absolutely intentional. Our resistance to talking about death has caused great psychosocial harm.
As with anything, the more we pick apart an idea, the more we understand it, so I’m hoping it cracks open some honest conversations around death, why people are terrified of it, and how we can promote ‘death literacy’. It’s a space I’m really passionate about.
The bra — please tell us about the incredible bra made for you for your launch!
The Breath bra! One of my oldest and dearest friends, Megan, asked me months ago what bra size I was, and because Megan is the queen of glitter, I just assumed she was going to fling a bra covered in glitter in my direction during my book launch.
How wrong I was. The ‘Breath bra’, as we now call it, pays homage to the cover of my book, and features technicolour flames affixed to a bedazzled hot pink bra. It’s magnificent. It’s glorious. It’s the bra I never knew I needed in my life.
Were you inspired by any other memoirs prior to/while writing your book?
Not while I was writing. I always knew my memoir was going to be a tricky book to write, and there were a few reasons why I found it so difficult to read for pleasure when I was working on early drafts.
Firstly, I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to read other people’s stories. Secondly, I was hyper-fixated on finishing Breath, and thirdly (and perhaps most strangely), I felt like I was cheating on my book if I was reading anything else! I had to reacquaint myself with reading for pleasure.
What’s on your TBR?
Oh, my goodness, what isn’t on my TBR pile? My house is overrun and overwrought by books – my heavy wooden desk is nearly two metres long (and resides in my dining room) and it has several teetering skyscrapers of books from end to end.
My most urgent TBR books are The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy, I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, and Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key.
Feature image: Sharon Danzig
