Q. Eat My Heart Out has already generated a lot of discussion on social
media ahead of its release - have you been surprised by the reaction so far?
A. I have been surprised – I had no idea how people would respond to the
book. For four years, my editor and publisher Hannah Westland was almost the
only person who I showed my fiction to. I always hoped that people would engage
with the ideas in it, and that it would generate debate about feminism.
Q. There's a lot of anger in Ann-Marie's narrative (some of it very
focussed - some of it less so!) - is that indicative of your mind-set whilst
you were writing?
A. No – I wrote the book in a very controlled way. I was also writing a
lot of art reviews and working on my PhD at the time, so I only had a limited
number of hours each day to spend on writing fiction. The restriction helped a
lot – it made me focus. For me, writing the character of Ann-Marie was like
getting in role – perhaps in a similar way to how an actor might get in role for
a play. I always felt that writing in the first person was like performing
(although you are alone and typing on your lap-top, rather than on a stage with
an audience). Particularly because there is a lot of emphasis on voices in the
novel – both her voice and the conversations around her. And she is very
theatrical!
Q. Ann-Marie and Stephanie both make references to Amy Winehouse
throughout the novel, although it seems like she means different things to each
of them - what do you think makes her so important to Ann-Marie's generation?
A. I saw Amy Winehouse play at The Junction in Cambridge when I was 20.
She was a year older than me and her first album, Frank, really expressed what
it meant to be a young woman growing up in London at that time. I always loved
her rawness, her energy, the poetry of her lyrics, and I thought it was a
terrible tragedy that she died. For me, she belongs to the tradition of female
artists, like Janis Joplin, who stepped outside of what Stephanie Haight would
call The Symbolic, who didn’t conform to conventional ideas of female beauty,
who expressed something very true about the female experience with pathos and
rage, and who were punished as a result. How and why they were punished is
complex. While Ann-Marie identifies with Amy Winehouse, Stephanie views her as
a kind of martyr.
Q. Eat My Heart Out opens with a parody of a conventional rom-com
set-up; in your acknowledgments you talk about the creative freedom Serpent's
Tail gave you, but do you think elsewhere in the publishing industry writers
are being encouraged to follow traditional, 'safe' subjects at the moment?
A. I feel very lucky to be part of Serpent’s Tail, which has given me
complete creative freedom. This is very rare. I think there is great pressure
elsewhere in the industry on both writers and publishers to produce books that
cater to a pre-established market. In regards to writing by women, this is a
charged and political issue. Chick-lit, women’s magazines, rom-coms are all responsible
for creating a vision of what it means to be a woman that in turn affects
women’s own sense of themselves. I don’t believe that women are simply
brainwashed by these mass-produced narratives, but representation is powerful;
it influences the status quo. If the dominant narratives about women’s lives
insist that finding a man is paramount, then that will shape expectations. If
other, more questioning narratives are allowed space, then our sense of what’s
possible will widen. Of course this is dangerous (in a good way).
Q. The novel makes much of the generation gap between Stephanie's
generation of feminists, growing up in the 60s, and the modern equivalent - do
you think there's a way to bridge this gap, or have developments like the internet
changed life too much?
A. The freedoms of my generation (I am 29) are due to the struggles of
generations of women that came before – from equal pay to abortion and
contraception rights. I am greatly influenced by so many feminist books, from
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Jessica Benjamin’s Bonds of Love. However, I think every generation needs to build a feminist consciousness of
its own – varied and contradictory as it may be. I’m so glad that a new
feminist wave is emerging at the moment. There is a hunger for feminism now
among young women, which feels urgent. I think the gap is “bridged” by
continuing to engage with feminist ideas, but insisting on creating them
afresh.
Q. Which modern writers do you most enjoy reading at the moment?
Q. Which modern writers do you most enjoy reading at the moment?
A. I really liked Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, which is about the wives
of modernist writers. And I just read a brilliant biography of Dorothy Parker
by Margaret Meade called What Fresh Hell Is This? I also just read One Flew
Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for first time, as research for my next novel. And I’m
looking forward to reading Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life. I think this is a really exciting time for writing by women. Joanna Walsh’s
#readwomen2014 is a fantastic project – promoting female writers and
challenging the dominance of men in the literary world.
Q. What's your writing routine - do you go out, stay in, listen to music, stay in silence...?
A. I only ever write at home, at my desk. I write best after I’ve just
done exercise, which always clears my mind and gives me new ideas. I listen to
a lot of music between writing, but never during. I used to work best at night;
I wrote the first draft of Eat My Heart Out at night. I found that I could
think better when everyone else was asleep. But these days I keep regular
daylight hours. And I watch a lot of films for inspiration when I’m
writing.
Q. What are you working on next?
A. I’ve just finished writing the second chapter of
my second novel, which is about a romance writer who gets locked in a mental
asylum for pushing against the bounds of the genre. I’ve become very interested
in the idea of genre since the book has come out. And I’m planning a
non-fiction non-academic book based on my PhD research on romantic love,
sadomasochistic power relations, and feminism.
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