Early in this sharply angled essay-cum-memoir, Cristín Leach quotes Seamus Heaney: writers are people who can’t help but “estimate their own identity through how well they can write”. Leach, who has been an art critic (most visibly for the Sunday Times) for almost 20 years, knows in mundane as well as profound ways how life and writing may get painfully ravelled.
An odd consequence of being a prolific journalist or reviewer: you can often match the timescale of your published existence with events in “real” life, whether ghastly or glad. As time-stamped computer files and printed fragments accumulate, they rhyme with the history of birth and death, failure and success. Also betrayal, shock, the ruin of a marriage.
The controlled-panic response cannot last: Leach soon went to bed, and stayed there for three days
Leach recalls that in 2014, when a text arrived to say her husband was cheating, she had been writing a review of a book about Irish art and architecture. And she carried on: “My body was so full of adrenaline that, instead of screaming or fighting, I went still, and I went to work, with words.”
Many writers, perhaps especially those who live by their deadlines, will have similar stories. But the controlled-panic response cannot last: Leach soon went to bed, and stayed there for three days. In some ways, Negative Space is a conventional memoir about what happened next: marriage counselling and a slow realisation that all the talk was merely putting off an assured end; months of sunglasses at the school gates and seeing in friends’ eyes their anxiety at her plunging weight; constant fretting about what she (and her husband) had not noticed about the marriage.
But this is also the memoir of a writer who is trying to figure what kind of writer she has been and wants to be now – which is also (Heaney again) a way of asking what kind of person. “Words are solid and slippery things. When my marriage broke, I came to distrust them for a time.” When she comes back to writing, she and it will have to have changed.
Childhood start
Leach remembers that at the start of her journalistic career she learned not to say “I”, and toned down subjective or descriptive passages to fit the constraints of word count, audience, editorial style. (She had actually begun as a writer in childhood, turning out book reviews for the RTÉ Guide: an anxious and laborious debut freelance gig.)
Negative Space – the title invokes drawing lessons from her mother – is partly about allowing her writing to become more personal: or better, more physical. Criticism and autobiography start to merge, and Leach finds correlatives for her predicament, or instruction on how to get beyond it, in a wide array of art and literature.
When she learns of her husband's infidelity, she starts wringing her hands and notices for the first time that this is not only something that happens in books
It’s an established and sometimes awkward genre, the memoir or personal essay with forays into describing or analysing beloved artworks. But here it feels immediate and wholly convincing. A sculpture by Dorothy Cross based on the negative space inside a kiss, the “accusatory stare” of Saoirse Wall in a video self-portrait, the voice and presence of Doireann Ní Ghríofa as she reads her poetry aloud – all of this serves not as aesthetic or intellectual displacement of pain, but to ratify and enrich Leach’s understanding of it.
She is uncommonly good at writing about being embodied. When she learns of her husband’s infidelity, she starts wringing her hands and notices for the first time that this is not only something that happens in books. As if to shout down cliches about finding one’s voice: “After my marriage breaks, I go to the top of a mountain and scream. The wind whips the sound away, disappearing it out of my mouth before it has even hit the air. I scream in the empty house. I scream at the empty house. I yell in the bath.”
Testing her voice
For a writer whose subjects are primarily visual, she pays a lot of attention to sound, detailing the tinnitus (“an internal bell, an inner alarm”) that means she is never quite unaware of her own insides. While training as a perinatal yoga instructor, she learns to channel and appreciate the sounds she had made giving birth to her children.
A distrust of language, a longing to be done with it, comes with the vocation of writing
At times, the way Leach pitches such bodily being, and its artistic incarnation, against the abstractions of critical intelligence (including her own) can seem slightly too schematic. But I think in those pages she is testing various aspects of her voice rather than coming down definitively on the side of feeling over reason, urgency above craft. A distrust of language, a longing to be done with it, comes with the vocation of writing, and is felt in peculiar ways by those of us who write about art. Negative Space is the record of a writer remaking life and language, knowing they will always be strangely matched.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, a book mostly about photographs, will be published in 2023
