Dani Garavelli

I AM on my way to Melanie Reid's quirky farmhouse in the wilds of Stirlingshire when a text flashes on to my phone."When you arrive, just let yourself in via the sunroom – I'm down a ramp and it takes a while to get up," it says. The message is, I am about to discover, pure Reid: outwardly bright and breezy, but with a more than a hint of vulnerability. A forensic chronicler of her life, she never shrinks from confronting the impact of her disability, even when doing so causes her pain.

Reid, a former assistant editor of The Herald, broke her neck and fractured her back when she fell off her horse in 2010 at the age of 52. The accident left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the neck down, although she has partial use of her arms.

Now she has written a memoir: The World I Fell Out Of, which provides a powerful overview of what it means to have the life you once knew snatched away. The distance of almost a decade has allowed her to reflect on her experience with renewed perspective.

"I really thought I was going to get better," she says."I went a further distance in terms of recuperation than other people and that was hard because it fooled me into thinking that if I kept going and kept trying, I would beat it. But what other people tried to tell me turned out to be the absolute truth: you can't come back from a neck and spine injury.”

Reid is talking to me in her office – the heart of the home she shares with her husband, David, a photographer. It is full of memorabilia. On one wall, a painting of a horse is juxtaposed with her press awards and a picture of the rescue helicopter that took her to hospital, signed by those on board. Dangling from a coat hanger is a T-Shirt with the word “feministe”.

To her right there is a poem, called My Mum Is Fun, written by her son Douglas when he was eight. It contains the line " And she is SUCH a fussy speller"; just to prove the point, she has corrected his single error in red pen.

So many souvenirs; it's as if her old life shattered with her bones and threw glittering shards of her past and future in all directions.

Above her desk, there is the famous Banksy picture of the rat, with the words: "I'm out of bed and dressed – what more do you want?" daubed in red paint. "That's very much my motto, these days," she says, wryly.

The World I Fell Out Of is a dark book. It contains descriptions of Reid's time on morphine and the consequences of double incontinence that leave you queasy and expressions of loss so savage they sear the soul. But it is also flecked with the kind of west of Scotland humour that kept her fellow patients in Glasgow spinal unit sane. "You had to laugh or you would have been on a plane to the clinic in Switzerland," Reid says.

Most profoundly, the book explores how our identities are intertwined with our physical form, our mobility and our desirability: something most of us – in our able-bodied complacency – don't spend much time thinking about.

To properly understand the impact Reid's paralysis had on her sense of self you have to know that, before her accident, she was 6ft tall and very active. Working in a male-dominated environment, her height gave her authority and a presence she might not otherwise have had.

"When that is taken away from you, and you are suddenly 4ft 3ins, you feel disempowered in an incredibly real way which possibly I might not have felt if I had only been 5ft," she says.

"As well as the physical loss, there was a kind of psychological belittling, a shrinking of status and voice and power. When you are in a wheelchair, you can't get cross or argue, or hold your own in an argument especially if the other person is standing because you are like a child talking up.”

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I didn't know her before the accident. Despite our shared occupation, our paths never crossed. But, by reputation, she was fierce and funny. Today she looks tired after a restless night; because of this she needs a small push to get her up the ramp. And yes, of course, she is smaller, more frail, but, with her piercing intelligence, she can still be fierce and funny.

Still, she insists, the move to a wheelchair, changed her relationship with her husband. “I couldn't get cross and have the last word and turn on my heel and walk out of the room. I think I have become, not plaintive – I try very hard not to be plaintive – but more submissive. I used to be a can-do person; like most working mothers, I had a superwoman complex. But now I have to accept I cannot organise everything. I have to let Dave get on with things even if he doesn't do them the way I would."

Perhaps the greatest taboo Reid confronts revolves around sexual currency. Although she tells me her appearance was never very important to her – "the only time I ever thought: 'Look at me! Look at me!' was on a horse" – it was one of the first casualties she registered after the accident.

As the winchman from the rescue helicopter – the man she dubbed 'dishy Daz' – whispered words of encouragement, she says she, "knew with absolute certainty that never again would a man lean over me wanting to make love to me".

Throughout her book, she makes it clear David has been a steadfast support. When she urged him to leave, he insisted she was stuck with him. At the same time, however, she describes him as "irresponsible, irresistible, incorrigible and flirtatious". How devastating, then, to read these lines: "[Dave] loved me but he simply didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t fancy me any more. He was blunt about that."

She doesn't shy away from the toll it took. "There you have it – the core of loss. The stone heart of longing, envy and emotional shut-down which is a woman’s self-defence against disability," she writes.

"Because you aren’t fanciable and you won’t be, can’t be and never will be. Because the great game of sex, in all its hurts and joys and sleaziness and beauty, is no longer one you can play."

Did she think twice about sharing something so sad and intimate? "If you can write about pee and poo, why not about sex," Reid says. "I thought it was important because in these times of Love Island and Instagram, there is a pressure on all women to look like sex goddesses. I thought I would strike one small blow back for reality and say, 'you know we don't all have beautiful bodies and it's not the end of the world if you are not a sex machine'."

And what about David? How did he feel about her openness? "I didn't show it to him before I sent it away," she says. "But, you know, he's very forthright, very realistic. And it's fine. We still have sexy cuddles. There is still a spark. We laugh a lot. And we adore each other. That's more important."

Having spent her life sharing people's stories, the desire to share her own was instinctive: "I felt like I was reporting from the front line." But a steady income as a newspaper columnist also allowed her to retain her independence. It paid for a cleaner and a private carer and other small luxuries.

With so much of her identity under threat, her columns provided a lifeline. "My body was f***ed, but I had a voice and my brain was still OK – that's where I was lucky," she says.

At its best, writing can be a form of refuge. When Reid was working on Gregor Fisher's biography, The Boy From Nowhere, she immersed herself so completely in his life, she lost track of her own. But it can also be a solipsistic and introspective pursuit.

Penning the memoir meant constantly rubbing at her own wounds. "In that sense writing is both my salvation and my yoke because I cannot escape from it."

In print, Reid is able to mask some of her pain. Her public persona is steely, but in real life she is a discomfiting blend of resilience and fragility; defiance and (unjustified) guilt. There are many points in our conversation where tears are running down her face. But when I ask her if she wants to stop, she plays it down."Oh, I cry easily and a lot," she says.

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One of the things I like most about Reid is her refusal to give pat answers; though conspicuously intelligent, she doesn't try too hard to resolve the contradictions inherent in her own life.

She is, for example, repelled by the notion of suffering as redemption, and yet she refers repeatedly to the wisdom she has gained from her own. As a child she read the morality tales What Katy Did and Pollyanna. What unites the heroines of these books is that they become temporarily paralysed, regaining the use of their legs only after they have learned the virtues of patience and humility.

"I spent my whole life rebelling against that message," she says. "When I had a baby there was no way I was going to stay at home and be a good housewife. And there's the irony. The biggest thing they could do to these little girls to teach these humility was to paralyse them – and that's what happened to me.”

Despite her dislike of this morality, she felt there was something she could take from it. "It's a long game so I do have to be positive and I do have to be patient. There were qualities in those tales I was forced to accept through gritted teeth."

Is it possible, I ask her, that she subconsciously absorbed the happy endings of those books; that a tiny part of her believed – having acquired all the requisite virtues – she had earned the right to walk again?

"I don't know," she says hesitantly. "I certainly lived for a long time with a sense of injustice."

Whatever the reason, Reid convinced herself that she would defy the odds and recover. After finding she could wiggle one of her toes, she drove herself to the brink of madness trying to prove the doctors wrong. When she realised her condition had plateaued, and that she would, in fact, always be in a wheelchair, she hit a trough.

Only after she came home to Stirlingshire, did she begin to accept her limitations (although, as we shall see, such things are relative). Returning to the countryside was both good and bad for her morale. She says it would have been a spiritual death to leave the house and might have killed her marriage. At the same time, gazing at hills she could no longer climb was a kind of torture.

Today, she can drive an adapted vehicle, which has given her more freedom, and she has learned to enjoy the small pleasures of nature: the scuttling of a beetle across the floor; the stalking of sparrowhawk round the shrubs. "In this way, you learn to rediscover joy," she writes.

Over the years, Reid has also gained an understanding of the politics of disability. The columns she wrote while she was determined to recover were sincere, and the admiration they provoked was justified. But there are those who believe the raising up of individuals for their determination to overcome their limitations promotes the idea that others aren't trying hard enough.

"I had opportunities to strive and to see improvement up to a point, and because of that, I probably sang that hymn," she says. "But I have now been humbled and realise there are people who try just as hard as I did, but are never able to twitch a finger. There are things I wrote that I would take back because I think perhaps I gave the wrong image to people: that if you did strive hard enough, you would get places. I learned the hard way there was a limit beyond which I could never go."

In these days of identity politics, Reid treads a middle ground between older disabled people "who carved out lives in a world that made absolutely no concessions to them" and the new generation who are proud of their bodies the way they are.

"I do understand this [attitude] – the fact that people say, 'my wheelchair is me, I want to stay here,' and that the world has to take cognisance of that. They are far bolder than I am, than I could ever be, and I really admire them for that. But I can't go there. Theirs is the new world, let them take it. I have seen what my naked body looks like with all the tubes coming out of it and I don't feel proud of it."

One abiding contradiction is that, while Reid believes the built environment should be altered to make life easier for disabled people – with CEOs of companies forced to spend a week in a wheelchair to understand their disabled workers' needs – she has done little to make life easier for herself.

Last year, she and David put in a new kitchen, but it's designed to fit in with the style of the farmhouse rather than her wheelchair.

"Yes, I guess I could have gone for it and had a sink and cookers that come up and down, but I like my Aga though it does mean my right shoulder will probably wear out more quickly than it would because I am working above shoulder height which is exhausting. Maybe it comes back to my desire not to compromise too much for the sake of my family and to my identity as a disabled person." She pauses. "It's a good question and one I haven't really thought through. Why didn't I do more? I think it's because there is still a bit of me deep down that doesn't feel disabled."

Reid's memoir gives the impression that she has come through her years of struggle and reached a point of near-acceptance. She writes of finding happiness with Dave "sitting in companionable silence together, or watching the news, or perhaps meandering down the track with Pip [their dog], laughing fondly at her".

Meeting her in person, though, it doesn't seem that simple; she still has a way to go before she achieves equanimity.

She is honest about this too. When it comes to learning about her injury, she says, she is just about approaching adolescence. "When something as profound and life-changing as this happens and you lose your mobility, it's like being reborn. You have to explore and learn about an entirely new world.”

The World I Fell Out Of is published by HarperCollins.