Why I wrote Who Wants to Live Forever

Onism, the passage of time, and break-ups

Cover of Who Wants to Live Forever, designed by Mel Four

I’m Hanna Thomas Uose, a writer and a strategist for the progressive movement. Here I share what I’ve been thinking about (mainly how to make a new world and how we are with each other while we do it). Every quarter, I also send a list of things I’ve enjoyed. Take what you like and leave the rest.

---

Hello internet friends,

It’s happening! I wrote a book, sold it and now there is a book cover and Who Wants to Live Forever will be in shops in just four months’ time (you can pre-order here thankyousomuch)! Some of you have patiently followed this process through many years of writing and some of you might only have a woolly sense of who I am – an irregular newsletter-sender amidst a sea of others! Either way, over the coming months I want to share with you some of the process of writing it – why I did, how I did it and what the path to publication has looked like – and I hope you find it useful or interesting. 

For today – why? Why write a whole book? When I was younger, before I started campaigning and working in the nonprofit sector, I wanted to be an actor. I went to drama school and everything! I have always felt the need to crawl into the skin of other people, to understand how others experience their lives and to run from the feeling that I now know to be ‘onism’ – 

onism

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

But writing novels as a way to do that? Though I was a big reader, writing fiction seemed deeply unlikely – that was a magical ability which precious few possessed. At the time, I didn’t understand the construction of a novel to be as mechanical as it is mystical – a process of fitting pieces together, whether jankily or seamlessly.

As an adult and a campaigner working for a large petition site, I churned out multiple emails every day, and many more subject lines. 

If not now, when?

We urgently need to speak out now

Join our call to government leaders around the world

BEE ALERT

And even though I had an early 2010s blog that documented the very modish concerns of doing good works, playing the ukulele and DIY sewing projects – even though I did write, a lot, and I was good at it – I didn’t consider writing to be my medium. I even wrote a journal entry in 2013 – a random word doc on my laptop because I was not in a regular practice of journaling – and at the end I wrote this: I want to write more. I feel I need to write, and have been thinking about it a lot, but never sitting down to do it. There is so much to say, so much to get into, so much deeper to dig. Family, childhood, race, dreams. All of this. In time I will.

But it was five years until I thought about writing again. When I did, in 2018 and at the age of thirty-four, it was because I was in a different job, a big one, at an international climate NGO. I was working 10-12 hours a day, in Zoom meetings during at least 6-8 of those hours, which might be scheduled at any time between 7am and midnight because it was an international team. I believed in our mission and I loved the people I worked with, but I felt the substance of my life being chipped away. Time for friends, for love, for being with myself and my inner life. I was brought low. Each morning when I woke, the world felt irretrievably grey.

The memeable words of US Congresswoman Maxine Waters – Reclaiming my time! Reclaiming my time! – (spoken in 2017) must have been ringing round my head as I began to write.

I felt I was writing to save my own life, that I had found one secret way to survive. Short stories, at first. Poems, too. Being good was not really the point, I was mostly trying to keep myself company. I had come through two relationships (and two awful break-ups) in quick succession – one significant and one just very ill-advised. I was preoccupied with what it meant to ‘grow up’, to leave someone behind or to be left, with how to take responsibility for a life built on my own terms rather than pleading for someone (anyone) to hand me one ready-made.

An idea implanted itself in my head in the midst of all this – a strange, speculative mirror to my concerns – at the end of 2017. A story of a world where people had the choice to live much longer, if they could afford it. What might happen in such a world? How might relationships be tested? What would it mean to live a ‘good’ life? What would become of traditional milestones if multiple paths were possible? And what forms of resistance would emerge? 

It was out of the question that I would tackle such an idea, so instead I just quizzed everyone I knew: Don’t you think this would make a great book? Don’t you think someone should write it? I would hijack whole conversations to game out the rules of this imaginary society, not understanding that this was the brain of a writer in action (slash, almost definitely neurodivergent, right?) and that I should take myself away to work it out alone. Eventually, I did, and the characters of Yuki, Sam, Frank, Maya and Paige were born and told me everything that I needed to know. 

I consider the idea to be something between a gift from the universe and the logical endpoint of a mind that has been preoccupied with the passage of time and what it means to be human for as long as I can remember. But an idea alone doesn’t make a book. It was paired with a drive to understand what had just happened in the last decade of my life (and not only from my own perspective). After years of campaigning, of persuading, of using the black and white language of top-line messaging, I wanted to sink into nuance. After a *time* feeling like the casualty of my own romantic choices, I was ready to pull those choices apart and build a new set of beliefs from the wreckage. To do that, I had to pick my life up and look at it from all sides – an imperfect diamond. The idea for Who Wants to Live Forever – and the metaphor of a life-extending drug – gave me the excuse to write down what I found.

The book is not an autobiography, but it’s fair to say that my whole life is in there. On the other side of writing it, I am astonished that it worked. In the sense that I downloaded my thoughts and made an object of them. That I was forced to look at those thoughts as dispassionately as I could. That the writing of this book has brought me a new life – new people and new rhythms, new problems and new lessons. I am so grateful for all of it. 

Next time, I will tell you more of the nuts and bolts of how I did it.

Thank you for reading! And pre-orders save lives, or something! 

Love and solidarity, 

Hanna