Ian Rankin wishes he’d been there more for his kids? OK, but others wish they’d been there less |
‘I do feel I’ve wasted my life, really, living in a world of fictional characters,” said Ian Rankin – multi-award-winning author (more than 35m copies of his Rebus novels sold), knighthood for services to literature and charity, a man who achieves more in one year than I have in 51 – on a recent podcast. If you’ve wasted your life, Sir Ian, what about the rest of us?
There was levity in Rankin’s delivery, but real feeling, too – an ambivalence about what his creative drive had cost him. “There’s big moments, big beats in my life that I just don’t have any memory of: holidays taken, first days at school for my kids and that sort of stuff, because in my head I was somewhere else,” he continued.
You don’t often hear these feelings expressed so baldly, but they’re surely not rare: lots of men wish they’d had, or could have, more time with their families. In a survey of 5,000 fathers from the Working Families charity last year, 74% expressed a desire to parent equally, but 60% said they felt “consistently judged for prioritising family”; low take-up rates for paternity........