You think you’ve locked us in?
If you can only see all of this as a prison, then you’re a poor, sick man, a stranger. Every time you turn your back to me, I let a flower grow behind it, an entire field of shining yellow sunflowers. I can create bundles of cabbage-sized hydrangea flowers if I want to.
And I do. Every moment you leave us on our own here, I bring the world into our four solid walls. I create secrets and a private life. I take trips with our daughter, while our son sleeps sweetly and soundly after a cup of milk and honey, dreaming of flying. I take Hannah to our garden, to the hydrangeas. I introduce her to her grandparents and let ladybirds crawl over the back of her hand. You think we’re stuck here, locked in. Whereas we’re in Paris or by the sea or in all those places you think you’re locking us away from if you just shut the door and board up the windows.
Power. Stranger.
I can bring the toy cat to life. I can flood the room with sunlight. I can fetch the stars from the sky. And one day I know my children won’t just see all of this through my eyes and my stories. One day they will step through these doors and out into the world.
That is hope and it’s in my power to ensure it never dies.
You haven’t got us, not really.
It’s your prison, not ours.
Acknowledgements
My untold thanks go to my agent, Caterina Kirsten, without whom this book simply wouldn’t exist. Dear Caterina, I’ll never forget how you’ve fought me and fought for me. May our journey together last for many, many more years and just as many more books.
I’d also like to offer my heartfelt thanks to Georg Simader, Vanessa Gutenkunst, Lisa Volpp and Felix Rudloff, for your support, the unforgettable experience of reading to an audience for the first time, and for schnapps at the right moment.
Once upon a time there was a little author and she cried torrents of tears when her agent called; tears of joy, happiness and disbelief . . . this is also down to you, Claudia Baumhöver and Bianca Dombrowa. Here I’d like to tell you again, as well as all the fantastically dedicated and enthusiastic staff at dtv, just how much I appreciate your efforts and your work, and how grateful I am for this very special time in my life.
Finally my family. I hope I tell you often enough what would fill a ridiculous number of pages – I hope you know every day. You are the point of, and reason for, everything in my life.
CV
I was born in the GDR, the child of very young and poor parents who were not especially loyal to the regime; their Stasi files were as thick as Tolstoy’s War and Peace. My cot was a washing basket with a frame made of curtain rods and a home-made canopy. We didn’t have a fridge, so we used to hang our sausages out of the window. Isn’t that how a good story begins, with a sausage hanging from a washing line out of the window of a prefabricated apartment in Halle-Neustadt?
The story gets even better, for my parents, being terrific idealists, fled with me via Hungary to the Golden West. They worked hard, carved out careers for themselves and bought me a regular bed. They taught me to believe that everything was possible; they encouraged me to be more open-minded and instilled in me what I consider my greatest strength: I have no fear of failure. I like to test myself and see how far I get. If there are any limits to what I can do then I’m the one who sets them.
This is my pet topic and I’ve been regularly writing about it since 2016 at www.mymonk.com. In my articles I talk about my time in television. How I, a girl from rural Swabia with glasses and a big bum, ended up in this business in the first place. The reason? Because nobody believed I could make it. But it was what I wanted. I wanted to be in a profession where I could meet people, listen to stories and retell them, and I wanted to make a success of my career.
I talk about how, uneducated and without any training, I became managing editor of a Munich television production company at the age of twenty-four. I talk about the programmes I made and the hundreds of people I worked with over many years. The battered wives, the Somalian war refugees who brought me to tears in the middle of an interview, the neglected children and the gay Austrian farmers.
I talk about how fantastic a time this was for me, but also how I became ever harder on myself and no longer recognised who I had become. Letting go of stories wasn’t always easy. I talk about how I sometimes felt so impotent and inadequate. How I slowly lost myself.
And I talk about Karl, my young son, who changed everything. For whom I wanted to get better and reinvent the world. Television was no longer to be a sixteen-hours-per-day job, but merely an activity to keep the wolf from the door. I started working with other stories that didn’t hurt anyone. The job isn’t as exciting as it used to be, but it’s probably healthier.
Now I work at my old kitchen table rather than in an office. My workplace is no longer in the city, but somewhere where it’s not unusual to see a racoon on the terrace in the evenings, gorging on wine grapes. I do yoga, chop wood and grow vegetables in the greenhouse.
And of course I talk about writing. About the first book that came about when, six weeks after Karl was born, I needed to process my separation from his father. And the second book that had to be written because after the first one I couldn’t imagine not writing.
I also talk about all those other manuscripts that were rejected, I talk about the doubts and tears and the resolution I made on New Year’s Eve 2006: I’m giving up; I’m never going to get anywhere. I strictly kept to my resolution until the second week in January. And finally I talk about the conscious decision I took to just keep going. Maybe on occasion you just have to convince life how seriously you mean something.
So I wrote my articles, most of which ended with: ‘If I can achieve all of this, so can you.’ But that’s not actually true. You also have to be slightly naïve in this world, which at times can be very cruel. And I am naïve, really naïve, in fact, something I consider to be most advantageous. If you can believe, you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. If you can believe, you don’t ask yourself why you keep going. You just do – and then you’re taken completely by surprise when your agent calls and says, ‘They want your manuscript.’ How wonderful and exciting life is – a very grateful Romy.
Romy Hausmann
Dear Child: The twisty thriller that starts where others end Page 31
