What Am I, A Deer?: A Guest Post by Polly Barton

After a chance encounter with a stranger, a young woman falls down a rabbit hole of obsession, fantasy and exhilarating self-exploration. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Polly Barton on writing What Am I, A Deer?.

With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton’s formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. 

 

My novel What Am I, A Deer? is a tale of violent crushes and karaoke, set at a Frankfurt games company. It’s a crystallization of thoughts that I’ve been having for a long time about obsession, romance, and intoxication, and the opportunities these offer for reinvention and hiding from yourself.

I think the moment I knew that I had to write this book was when I was with someone who made the throwaway comment that ‘translation is karaoke’. Up until that point I’d been vaguely aware for a long time that everything I really liked doing revolved around the feeling of stepping outside of myself, but at that point I knew I wanted to really examine what that sensation was, where it came from, and where it was ultimately heading towards. Also, what the alternative looked like in contemporary society, where everything seems calculated to drive us into a state of distraction and keep us there.

If this sounds gloomy and despairing, I think I should also say that this book is really also a love letter to karaoke. I wanted not only to explore my karaoke fixation, but also to infuse the book with the electricity that comes of being in a karaoke box, the thrill of singing, and the opportunities for feverish connection that provides. A lot of that hinged on landing on the right style: one that felt intoxicated and obsessive, and yet which drew the reader in rather than alienating them, embroiling them in its strange rhythms. Looking back I think that my experiences translating were something to draw on in this regard, my experience working on various authors in the past helping me to shape and channel a voice that felt like it had the necessary thrust and mania.

One of the things that fascinates me about karaoke is the way it foregrounds the lyrics of the songs being played, making not just the singer but also the spectators aware of them as visual as well as sonic entities, and I strove for a way to bring this phenomenon inside the world of the book. My eventual solution to this was to do away with a conventional chapter structure, and instead break up the sections with lyrics rendered in all-caps, which serve to interrupt the text and add new resonances.

I’ve previously published two books of nonfiction, but What Am I, A Deer? is my first work of fiction. I spent my twenties writing bad novels in my spare time, which I’m now very glad never saw the light of publishing day. Returning to fiction was therefore quite a terrifying task for me: I felt certain sure that if I was going to write fiction, I needed to ensure it still had the pulse, the chaos and the urgency of real life. What Am I, A Deer? is probably quite far removed from a standard novel, but it’s my attempt to bring my version of real inside the novel box, and hand it the microphone.