Marcia Hutchinson: 'Writing my autofiction debut has been like therapy - painful and cathartic'
Bradford-born former lawyer Marcia Hutchinson has made her literary debut as a solo writer. She speaks to Laura Reid about inspiration for the book.
Ideas would come at Marcia Hutchinson thick and fast, quicker than she could write them down. “I would then not remember them three hours later,” the Bradford-born author says. “I can't write slowly. It either comes quickly or not at all.”
A diagnosis of ADHD two years ago was a lightbulb moment for Marcia. “It was like, ‘Oh, so this is why the ideas are coming fast...” “I've written loads,” she continues, “and I've struggled for years with distractibility. I'd write a bit of story one and then I'd just drop it and write story two, drop that, write story three and I thought, will I ever finish anything? And I think once I was diagnosed as ADHD, I understood that this is just how you work.”
Marcia has now found a way of writing that clicks for her. She’s spent many an hour walking and talking at her local park in Moss Side, Manchester, dictating chapters into her trusty mobile phone. “Then, when I get back, I tidy up what I’ve written.”
It’s how the 62-year-old has come to fulfil an ambition which she almost gave up on – making her literary debut as a solo writer. Earlier this week saw the publication of The Mercy Step, a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age novel, which is a powerful reckoning with Marcia’s childhood in 1960s and 70s Bradford, where she grew up as a daughter of Windrush parents, who had moved to the UK from the Caribbean in the late 1950s.
“My parents had both grown up in Jamaica so they had an identity as Jamaicans,” Marcia reflects. “You felt like you were in limbo because at home you were Jamaican but outside you weren't. You were a kid from Yorkshire and you wanted bangers and mash and your parents were feeding you curry goat and you were a bit embarrassed about your culture. There was a sense of not belonging and added to that in Bradford the West Indian community was the almost forgotten minority.”
Marcia was raised in Manningham as one of five children, though she had four more older siblings over in Jamaica. “There was never enough money to go around. We didn't starve, but it was very much there's never quite enough food,” she remembers. “And you find in a situation like that, the children are not aware of the bigger picture so they kind of turn on each other and are forever stealing each other's food and toys and clothes.”
Those experiences had a profound impact. Marcia grew up with a strong sense of what was fair and what wasn’t, a drive within her to “make the world a better place”. It was how she landed on a career in law, after becoming the first pupil from her comprehensive school to study at the University of Oxford. She started in London as a solicitor before moving back up north to a law firm in Leeds – but nothing could shake the feeling: “I hated being a lawyer”.
Later, after having her children, Marcia set up educational publishing company Primary Colours which she ran for nearly 15 years until 2014. The firm started off by publishing children’s books but gradually moved into learning resources, and education through theatre. The work saw Marcia awarded an MBE in 2011 for services to Cultural Diversity.
“At the time in publishing, you could find more books with animals and cartoons as the main character rather than black characters,” she says. “It started off as representation for my children, but what I realised once we were in schools was that positive images helped everybody, not just the black children…I think what I specialised in was a creative approach to diversity. So it wasn't confrontational. It was finding fun ways to bring creativity and to bring cultural diversity to schools.”
Moving to Manchester in 2012, Marcia then became a community activist and was eventually elected as a Labour Councillor in 2021. “But I realised pretty soon that my ability to affect change in the political sphere was relatively limited,” she says, and so she turned her focus to writing.
It had always been there in the background, even in childhood when writing and reading was “an escape” for Marcia. To this date, creativity of all kinds feeds her soul but her love for writing is one that has spanned the decades. At university, she would write together with a group of friends, mainly short stories. That craft continued alongside her various careers and when the Covid lockdown began, she re-started writing sessions, albeit virtually, with a university friend once again.
“It was almost like we pressed pause and then pressed play again 25 years later. And just about every single day during the pandemic, we'd meet online, her at her house, me at mine, set a timer for an hour and we’d both write and then read each other what we'd written.”
The Mercy Step began life as a series of short stories, each inspired by childhood. The first ones were written over twenty years ago, but gradually, over time they grew into a novel, with help from writing groups and mentors. The book, Marcia says, is about “the resilience of the human spirit” – and writing it has been like therapy, “both painful and cathartic”.
“I think when you have a childhood that is a bit dysfunctional you kind of look at yourself and think well how did I survive? How did I get through it all and live to tell the tale almost?,” Marcia muses. “I really wanted to examine what made me the person I am today.”
More autofiction books are already in the pipeline for Marcia, who spends her evenings teaching fitness classes, but by all accounts is, at last, a full-time writer. “It's an ambition which I almost gave up on,” she says. “Now I think I can look myself in the mirror and say I am a writer.”
- The Mercy Step, published by Cassava Republic Press, is out now. Marcia will be at Manningham Library, Bradford on July 26 and Union Mash Up, Hull on July 31.