The power of unravelling

Sometimes you have to come apart in midlife to have the chance to put yourself back together again, says novelist Preethi Nair

Preethi, now

I’m away this week, chairing a host of brilliant authors (including

Elif Shafak

, David Nicholls, Matt Haig,

Jennie Godfrey

and many more) at Cheltenham Literature Festival, so I’m delighted to bring you a guest post by author and academic Preethi Nair. Preethi is a visiting professor at various business schools, teaching creativity and storytelling for personal transformation and speaks on resilience. Her latest novel, Unravelling is out now.

“At fifty, I turned down a fourth book deal with a major publisher for my novel, Unravelling. It seemed like a great idea at the time. I wanted to go back to my roots of self-publishing with a cover that I could be proud of and retain the tone of Bhanu, the 59-year-old woman who it was about. It felt empowering to have some control over that decision and I remember jumping up and down excited after the phone call with my agent to tell her to say ‘no’ to the publishers. This was what the fifties would be about for me - liberating. Shortly after I turned that deal down, I got ill, had two operations in quick succession and then caught Covid badly. Forget bounce back, the elasticity had well and truly gone and there was no foreseeable way of getting it back. The fifties can also be about unexpected curve balls, feeling loss and retreating from further loss. I spent over a year recovering, letting go of the person I had been and ironically, unravelling.

I want to tell you a bit about the person I was. I never thought about bouncing back in my twenties as it was just a given. At twenty-eight, I was made redundant from my job as a management consultant, and rather than tell my parents, I found myself putting on a suit every day and pretending to go to work. It’s a long story but for eight months, I waved them goodbye, put on a suit and headed to the library instead. I finished my novel, Gypsy Masala, and got rejected by every publisher so I decided to self-publish.  I took all my savings, set up a publishing company and a PR company called The Creative House and created an alter-ego named Pru to hype the novel. 

In my mind, this audacious alter-ego was blonde, bold, and fearless and after two years of a roller coaster of a journey, I signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins. Pru was short-listed as Publicist of the Year! On the surface, everything seemed to be going perfectly. I had a successful career as an author, set up my own management consultancy and bought my first flat, but it was a sort of forced manifestation based on misguided thinking that I could control outcomes.

This all changed in my thirties when my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer and died at 59.