Benji Waterhouse: 'Reading is like fertiliser, it helps you grow and spark ideas and memories of your own'
BY Emily Powter-Robinson
16th May 2024
NHS Psychiatrist Benji Waterhouse studied on several of our online courses, including our six-week online Writing a Memoir course in 2020 and our London-based Writing an Original TV Drama Serial course in 2022. His debut book You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here (a medical memoir) is out today with Jonathan Cape – already, it has received a 5 star review from The Telegraph and has recently been selected as The Times book of the week!
We spoke to Benji about drawing on the real life stories of his patients, his top tips for memoir writers, and the inside scoop on the TV adaptation of the book.
You’ve studied on several of our online courses, including our six-week online Writing a Memoir course in 2020. Most recently, you studied on our London-based Writing an Original TV Drama Serial course in 2022. How did your time studying with us impact your writing journey?
It’s not hyperbole to say that the online memoir course changed my life. I signed up during lockdown when the only other option was to go for a run. Writing helps me to organise my thoughts and during COVID front-line workers had lots of those to process.
Doctors are always encouraged to keep a reflective diary and I ended up writing a reflection that got slightly out of hand and ended up becoming an 80,000-word book.
It really helped having a structured, weekly online course tutored by the excellent Cathy Rentzenbrink, with writing tasks and homework deadlines plus supportive course mates to keep me going.
At the end of the course CBC’s Jennifer Kerslake kindly offered to send my work to an agent and she found me one within the hour. Then we sent out a book proposal and received several early pre-empts and a big 8-way auction followed.
It was a very surreal time and I know I was very lucky. The process isn’t usually that straight-forward and I’m probably due several years of rejections now.
You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here is an enlightening and darkly comic window into the world of psychiatry. What is the most challenging aspect of writing about your patients?
Despite being non-fiction when writing about real-life patients I can’t write exactly-what-happened and need to anonymise stories to protect patient confidentiality (see recent furore around ‘Baby Reindeer’ on Netflix). So some of the patient parts are a strange non-fiction/fiction hybrid.
The process of anonymisation forced me to write ‘characters’ who were really amalgams of the hundreds of patients I’ve helped – or at least tried to help - over my decade working as a psychiatrist. They now feel like real people to me; living, breathing and sometimes trying to destroy themselves just like everyone else. Readers seem to find them quite realistic too and my grandmother often asks me how ‘Tariq’ is doing now.
The book is also personally revealing from the other side of the doctor’s desk. How did you find writing about yourself and your family?
I could be more candid when writing about myself and all the personal strands are true. Or at least my version of things (from speaking to different family members and corroborating real and misremembered memories you quickly release there isn’t really an objective truth).
The hardest thing was writing about my loving but slightly dysfunctional family. My parents – especially my mum- deal with any difficulties in that traditional, British, stiff-upper-lip way of just never, ever talking about it.
She initially struggled with my more modern approach of openly exploring taboo subjects and wouldn’t sign the disclaimer form until I’d removed certain things and softened others. Maybe be mindful before you start writing that you’ll need this sign-off!
I could have just gone ahead and written a more dramatic, shocking version, but then I wouldn’t have a family to go home to at Christmas. And the book isn’t as important to me as my family. Besides, my mum says I can write the gritty, real-life version when she’s dead.
She’s actually been on a journey and has now realised the world doesn’t end if you talk about these things and she proudly invited her friends to my first book event.
Despite the heavy subject matter, You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here has many comedic moments. Do you have any advice for writers looking to bring humour to the page in an authentic way?
I think authentic comedy usually comes from a real place or at least speaks to some underlying truth. I was once so tired when trying to section someone that one the section papers I really did mix up the box for the patient’s name and the psychiatrist’s and technically section myself.
I never sit in front of a blank page thinking ‘what would be funny?’ I just live my life and occasionally I’ll observe something humorous. Like when a patient tries to overdose on 99 paracetamols because they says that ‘bought 100 but dropped 1 on the floor and I didn’t want to get an upset tummy’. So I’ll jot that down in my notes folder on my phone. After the patient has left my clinic room, I should add.
Navigating the line between good humour and bad taste is notoriously difficult. I never punch down and my patients are never the butt of the joke. The target is usually the dark absurdity of the human mind. Or the NHS’s failings. Or psychiatry’s ignorance. Or my own impotence to really help my patients. That sort of thing. A 5-star review from The Telegraph hopefully means others agree too “Humorous and humane... finds the funny without turning patients into punchlines”.
Film and television rights have already been sold for You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here which is very exciting news! Are you able to tell us much about the screenplay yet?
After the book auction my agent at the time said the book was ‘hot’ so we should sell the TV rights. I told her I’d never written a screenplay before and she said ‘we’ll worry about that later!’
So we got the deal and then I did CBC’s Writing an Original TV Drama Serial course in 2022 run by Jamie Nuttgens.
Just as I was lucky to be able to pick my dream publishers following an auction (Jonathan Cape / Vintage) I was also fortunate to pick a TV production company (House productions / BBC Studios-owned). They seemed – and are – really pastoral and nurturing which is just what I need as someone who still doesn’t really know what they’re doing.
House’s in-house script editors Cal and Molly are helping me to write the pilot now which takes time because TV is a totally different art form.
The main challenge for me when adapting it to television is loosening up and abandoning some of the artistic choices I made with the book. The TV form is meant to be new piece of work to stand and simply ‘inspired by’ the book. But it still takes some getting used to moving away from non-fiction to what is essentially going to be a fictional world on screen.
Could you share your top four tips for writers who want to write a memoir?
- Break the memoir down into the most formative or significant mini-stories from your life. These are the building blocks for your longer-form story. Maybe even tell them aloud on stage to work out the beats, the humour, and what’s interesting or not. An audience is a brutal but invaluable editor. I host a storytelling night called The Moth in London and having to tell short-stories there made the task of writing a 300-page book slightly less daunting.
- Write first thing in the morning, ideally early before it feels like the rest of the world is up. It feels like you’re almost getting ‘free time’. Write solidly for 2 hours stopping maybe for a cup of tea or coffee in the middle. Just don’t, whatever you do, put on your phone on or check BBC sport / social media.
- Join a memoir writing course. The CBC one was excellent - CBC you can pass me my brown envelope later - but there are others. A cheaper option is to read books on the craft. Stephen King’s On Writing is a writing bible where he imparts nuggets such as ‘apply your ass to chair… and write’. The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr is also really helpful on things like ‘truth’ and writing about complicated families.
- Reading is like fertiliser, it helps you grow and spark ideas and memories of your own. And what a joy to be able to read amazing memoirs in the name of ‘work’! I loved Tara Westover’s, Educated, as there were lots of recognisable themes for me. My editor at Vintage, Bea Hemming, kindly sent me lots of books too - my pick of those were Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs and And when did you last see your father? by Blake Morrison.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’m writing chapters for a possible second book, working title Maddening.
It’s very early stages but its covering themes or disorders which I didn’t manage to squeeze into book one like anorexia nervosa, autism, and the time I’ve spent researching psychedelics (in a clinical trial, not just at home).
It's also about how different – or not – my job is now that I’m a Consultant Psychiatrist and so technically the boss. I need to stop saying ‘technically the boss’.
Deadlines force me to write so I’m doing in a book-in-progress show at the Edinburgh Fringe throughout August where I’ll road-test the chapters. Listening to an audience’s reaction gives me instant feedback. If they laugh at a certain point then hopefully that bit is funny so I’ll probably keep it in. And if the audience find something interesting… ok, it is harder to gauge interest which can sound like bored. So I also look out for any chin strokes.
You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here is out now!
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