Cringing Through The Mirth - An Interview With Emma-Jane Unsworth

Emma Jane Unsworth's second novel Animals (reviewed here) has been described as 'Withnail with girls' by Caitlin Moran, and saw Unsworth described as 'one of the new literary bad girls' in The Guardian. The novel focusses on Laura, torn between responsibility and sobriety, in the form of her fiancee Jim, and the temptations of The Night, as represented by her tearaway flatmate Tyler. Animals is filled with comic dialogue and hilarious set pieces, as the women binge their way through Manchester's pubs and clubs. Here, Emma Jane Unsworth talks about booze, campervans and leaving Manchester.

At the start of Animals, your main character Laura is caught between conflicting desires - she wants to spend her free time writing, but is tempted by drunken nights out with her flatmate Tyler, she likes the idea of a settled future with her fiancee Jim, but is scared of losing her independence - what initially drew you to the character?

I wanted to write about a woman in her early thirties who was feeling pressure from several angles – including herself – to do or be a certain thing. I’ve always been a healthily morbid person but it’s that sense of running out of time that I only started to really feel in my thirties. I think it’s about about expectation, and fulfillment. Where do these come from? How are they split between social conditioning, the individuals we make deals with at various points in our life, and our own desires (if these even exist)? I wanted Laura to try and investigate why she wanted the things she wanted, and what she was afraid might happen otherwise; what would she be left with. 

It seems as though you had a lot of fun writing Tyler and Laura's debauched nights out, and their drunken bon mots - did you particularly enjoy creating those sections of the novel?

My favourite thing to write is dialogue – especially arch, highly stylised exchanges between two people. I think that’s probably my favourite thing to read as well. The debauched sections were fun to write sometimes but the girls are so full-on that I was often cringing through the mirth. In fact, Cringing Through the Mirth might have to be my autobiography title. Either that or Never Quite Mortified Enough.

Much of Animals takes place in locations which will be very familiar to anyone who lives in Manchester - did you feel like you wanted readers to be able to tour the city with Laura? 

Yes, I did want it to be a scamper around the city. There are so many weird and wonderful places you can end up on a night out in Manchester, and I did want to document those to a certain extent. I didn’t realise it while I was writing Animals – maybe I subconsciously knew – but the time has come for me to leave Manchester for a while after living here my whole life. So this book is sort of a little sign-off to the city, too. A fond goodbye smacker on the lips.

There's a tendancy to celebrate literary drinkers, like Scott Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker, thinking that their imagination was somehow sparked by intoxication, but Laura talks about her own heavy drinking as a way of blotting out the pressure she feels to write. Do you think there's a misunderstanding about the relationship between creativity and alcohol?

I do think it’s a fairly dangerous Romantic myth to say intoxicants make you a better or somehow more interesting writer, akin to the one linking genius with madness. Speaking for myself, and every writer I’ve asked, you can’t write well drunk. You might think you’re writing well while you’re drunk, but then you’re going to read it back sober and want to gnaw your own hands off. I’m in kind of revolted awe when I read Hunter S Thompson’s daily diet – have you seen that? Getting up at 3pm, then it’s all coke and acid and Chival and cheeseburgers until the punchline, at midnight: ‘Hunter ready to write’. It can’t be true. But if anyone was going to make that work, it’d be him. And I suppose it’s about what alcohol does for you personally – for me, it’s far more about shutting down parts of my brain rather than sparking them up. I drink to calm down not giddy up. I’m giddy enough. I smoke when I’m writing but that’s about it. As soon as I have a glass of wine it’s game over, so I have to be strict about when I start. It’s such a nice idea though, isn’t it? To sit with a glass of something, leisurely tapping out fine prose. Such a nice idea. 

Laura also seems to feel she is being judged by everyone she spends time with, being pressured to perform one role or another - do you think this sense of constant scrutiny is a particular modern issue?

No, I think it’s the human condition. The arena of fear changes shape – in Animals, for example, disgracing yourself on the internet is a thing – but public disgrace and judgment has been around as long as there’s been a public. What I do think is relatively new (and I say ‘relatively’ tentatively because there will always be historical exceptions) is women being able to publicly judge their own lives on their own merits, or at least see how they can’t do that and get angry about it.

Where did the idea for Laura's novel-in-progress Bacon (the story of a priest who falls in love with a talking pig) come from?

Haha – oh dear. That’s me taking the piss out of myself, I’m afraid. And my first novel. And magic realism. Which I love.

What's your writing routine like? Do you have any favourite places, or music to write to?

I try and do it every day because it helps me stay involved in the story, and there’s a lot to be said for sitting yourself down and just forcing yourself to write whether you feel like it or not. I don’t think I’ve ever suffered from proper writer’s block, or rather I have something like it every time I sit down, but I don’t want to do anything else (and can’t do much else) so I’m just being a dick if I don’t get on with it. Redrafting is my saviour. I redrafted the first two books many times. The main thing is getting to the end of something so you can see some sort of shape. I need deadlines desperately, even if I set them myself. I write at home mostly, but I also like writing in cafes, libraries, hotels, and on trains. I take myself away for two weeks every October on my own in a campervan – it’s like a desk on wheels; I can’t recommend it highly enough. Rent one of the transit-van ones, not one of those daft trendy VW ones you can’t stand up in. And campsites are crazily strange places, especially out of season. Campsite bars are even stranger.

Which modern authors do you enjoy reading?

Recently I really enjoyed Clay by Melissa Harrison. It’s about the unexpected wildlife you find in urban areas. It’s a very lyrical book with a deep, muscular violence running through it. I’m a naturalist who loves cities so was really moved by how much the characters glean from their discoveries. 

What are you working on next?

Funnily enough, a novel set in a campervan. It’s another dark comedy – this time about teenage obsession, completely ruining your life in 48 hours on MDMA, and stalking someone who wronged you 20 years ago. No really, it’s a comedy.