Back in 2018, Catherine Simpson’s heart-wrenching and bleakly funny memoir about her sister, Tricia, was on the cusp of its launch. Though the book chronicled the most deeply personal of tragedies (Tricia took her own life in 2013), it also set in stone Simpson’s success as a writer, having netted a major book deal and endorsements from celebrated authors. And then, eight months before publication, Simpson was diagnosed with breast cancer. Once again, she found herself caught in the most extraordinary of circumstances; and once again, she turned to writing to document it. The result is her new memoir, One Body. 

If When I Had A Little Sister reads like a bullet from the heart, One Body feels like the work of a lifetime. Writing it led Simpson to dive back through the events of her entire life, through childhood illness (a ‘nuisance’ on the Simpsons’ Lancashire dairy farm), puberty, first tampons, abortion, childbirth, obsessive calorie counting and, of course, cancer. It packs the wallop of a wrecking ball but reads as easily as a page-turner; in each chapter, crystal-hard and startlingly clear truths about the realities of living in a woman’s body come pouring forth. It reads, in fact, as if it was brewing long before the trigger came that led to Simpson writing it. 

‘It has been brewing, but I didn't realize it was,’ Simpson says, over Zoom. She’s dressed for the summery weather, with a streak of natural silver in her brown hair (which she only recently stopped dyeing) giving her a Michelle Visage-ish kind of wise glamour. ‘There is a sort of resentment, when you start looking back and realizing that you thought ridiculous things and lived by them and judged yourself by somebody's standards. Who is it that we're trying to get ten out of ten from?’

Before the cancer diagnosis, Simpson says she hadn’t managed to formulate her thoughts on these subjects properly. But they were always there, going around ‘like in a washing machine. It’s only when you suddenly see your body turn against you that you step back and think, this is not right. When I realized that the fear of getting fat was only a short step behind the fear of dying of cancer, that’s quite a penny-dropping moment. I just thought, “whoa, something has gone really wrong here”.’ 

The book, Simpson says, burst from her ‘like champagne from a bottle, and it felt such a relief actually. And then I started shaking the bottle because I thought, “oh, well, this is great”.’ This juxtaposition, of brutal epiphanies overlaid with comic imagery, gives a flavour of what it feels like to read One Body. One moment you find yourself knee-deep in contemplation (and often rage) about the trauma and judgement enacted on women’s bodies; the next you’re blindsided by a life-affirming humour or laughing out loud. At one point, in the midst of a chapter pondering mortality, Simpson pauses to remember a friend’s 16^th birthday party, where ‘the table decorations were tubs of cigarettes’.

‘I think I've got a real sense of the absurd,’ she says. ‘It's the juxtaposition of things that often highlight just how bad things are, and just how funny things are.’ She cites another moment in the book, when a nurse is halfway through delivering her cancer diagnosis, and her husband Cello begins to feel faint. ‘I'm actually both laughing and crying at the same time, because it’s a terrifying experience, but also bloody funny that my husband is on the hospital bed. That scene kind of encapsulates the absurdity of life.’

Simpson’s candour has certainly been resonating with readers. Women have got in touch with her to share their own experiences that chime with the book. Two early readers told her that they’d both had abortions too. It’s a pattern with Simpson’s writing that it’s followed by an outpouring of solidarity. Recently a story broadcast on Radio 4, about taking her 95-year-old father to a care home, made one listener contact her to say they’d had to stop the car, her story mirrored so closely their own experience. 

In documenting the private pain, joy, anger and absurdity of life, is she tapping into something desperate to be said by a whole generation? ‘I think people used to think that to write a memoir you have to be a celebrity. But I think memoir is having a big moment now, and I hope it's long lasting. I just think we're getting more and more interested in the lives of our fellow human beings, and just how we deal with life.’

Catherine Simpson appears alongside Lucia Osborne-Crowley at Aye Write, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Saturday 14 May.