2022

The book began nearly thirty years before it was published, and not as a book. In the mid-1990s, before the reissue of Just Another Diamond Day and before anything that followed from it, Bunyan started writing the story down on a word processor for her three children, who had grown up inside an unusual life without being told much about how it had come about. "I really should start writing this story for my kids because they really had no idea," she told Glide Magazine. She made drawings to go with it. She sent a synopsis out: "I sent that out to various publishers, and I got nothing back." The manuscript was put away. Music came back into her life instead — the reissue in 2000, Lookaftering in 2005, touring, collaborations, Heartleap in 2014 — and the writing stayed where it was for two decades. It came back out at the start of the first Covid lockdown, when a friend asked her what she was doing with herself and then put her in touch with a publisher. What she wrote then was not what she had written in the 1990s. "What I have put in the book now is not what I would have written back then," she said.

Her reason for finishing it was partly corrective. The story of the horse and wagon had been told back to her for twenty years in a form she did not recognise: the hippie idyll, the barefoot girl on the road, embellishments that had hardened into fact through repetition. She wanted the mud in. She also did not want to take the dream away from people who had found something in it. Talking to Jude Rogers in the Guardian before publication, she said she wanted people to know the trip "wasn't just a lovely trip through the daffodils and daisies", and then corrected herself — "I also didn't want to spoil the dream." In the same interview she was short with the vocabulary that had attached itself to her singing since the 1960s. Of "fragile", "vulnerable" and "twee": "I hate those words." She said she was nervous about the book coming out.

The writing itself, once she was in it, was not the hard part. Speaking to Dave Freak for Folk Radio in August 2022, she said the memories had stayed: "It was easy to remember – I have really clear memories of it," and "I found that it came really easily in the end." What was difficult was deciding how much to say about other people, and particularly about Robert Lewis, who is present throughout the journey and yet lightly drawn. She told the Guardian she could have said much more but wanted the book to be her own story; she and Lewis have three grown children. On showing the book to the people in it, she said simply: "Everyone was okay with it."

Wayward: Just Another Life to Live was published by White Rabbit on 31 March 2022, with the ebook and an audiobook she reads herself appearing the same day. Two days later, on 2 April, she played the Barbican Hall in London — a retrospective concert with an ensemble led by Fiona Brice, marking the book's publication, and a signing afterwards. In April she appeared at the British Library in conversation for an evening shared with the essay collection This Woman's Work, edited by Kim Gordon and Sinéad Gleeson, whose blurb is on the back of Wayward. Books from Scotland ran an extract that month, taken from the Denmark Street pages — the auditions, and the first meeting with Andrew Loog Oldham. On 29 April she recorded a podcast for John Sandoe Books in Chelsea with Magnus Rena, and discovered in the course of it that she had a connection to the shop. She talked about the book through the summer on radio and in print, including a long interview with Dave Freak published by Folk Radio in August and an episode of the Rock's Backpages podcast in which she discussed the book, Nick Drake and Joe Boyd. On Sunday 4 September she read from Wayward at Moseley Folk and Arts Festival in Birmingham and talked about her life on stage with Jude Rogers.

2023

White Rabbit published the paperback on 6 July 2023, at £12.99, with the same 240 pages. American listings give 3 October 2023 for the paperback in the United States; there is no separate American edition, and the UK ISBNs are the ones sold there. The book went on picking up reviews well after its first year — American Blues Scene in April 2023, Americana UK in May — and Bunyan gave interviews to American outlets through the spring, including Glide Magazine in April, where she gave the fullest account of how the book was started and abandoned and started again.

Gordon Burns Prize Longlist, 2022