Poured Over Double Shot: Claudia Dey and Sheena Patel

Jenna Seery

Claudia Dey’s novel Daughter is a stark and beautiful portrait of the complicated dynamic between a young artist and her father. Dey joins us to talk about creating the distinct voice of the novel, complicated family relationships, writing a novel that’s true and more.

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel is a visceral look at one young woman’s descent into the world of social media obsession with a sharp look at today’s internet culture and what it means to exist online. Patel joins us to talk about the absurdity of internet fame, unlikable female characters, combining memes with literature and more.

Listen in as these authors speak separately with guest host, Jenna Seery.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.        

Featured Books (Episode):
Daughter by Claudia Dey
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettle
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot
Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over and today I am joined with Claudia Dey, the author of Heartbreaker, her new book, Daughter, and frankly one of my favorite voices in fiction hands down. So, Claudia, thank you so much for being with us today.

Claudia Dey
Well, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

JS
So this book is Daughter, your newest work. You are a novelist, you are a playwright, you do a million creative ventures. This book feels so special and so unique. It is atmospheric and it is encompassing, and these characters will drive you around the bend and back. And yet you find yourself caring for all of them at the same time. It’s an experience. But I would love to start with you just giving a little description of the book for our listeners.

CD
Wow. I love that. I think if we’re going to describe it in compressed terms, I think the novel is really a father daughter novel, or it certainly begins that way. And the father is Paul Dean. He’s famous for one great novel. He’s kind of the all-powerful patriarch, very charismatic magnetic man. And the daughter is Mona Dean, and she’s an aspiring actor and writer in her own right. And they’ve always had this uneasy anti magnetic relationship. Until one evening, Paul gets in touch tells her he needs to see her. It’s urgent. They meet Paul confesses that he’s in love with someone else. He’s having an affair. He’s cheating on her stepmother. And Mona really becomes his confidant. And that’s really the setup for the book, I really wanted to look at, like the shadow side of the father daughter relationship, like looking at the father daughter relationship as a bad romance.

JS
And I think that the best place to start, like unpacking this book for myself with Mona herself. Because so much of this book is through her eyes. And whether or not we can always believe what she sees or perceives. That’s what we get first and foremost. And her voice is so distinct and so strong. And from the first page I was with her no matter where she ended up going, even though she went some places that I didn’t expect, and wouldn’t have hoped for. But you’re there with her. How do you find a voice like that? Does it come to you? Does the story come first? It seems so big.

I’m always drawn to imperfect dimensional women. So Mona falls very clearly in that category. You know, I can say to that now, when I think about her, now that the book is done, and it’s in the world, the audiobook, the part of Mona is being read by the film actor, Hannah Gross. And the Hannah has this kind of inscrutability, about her this sort of loneliness and strangeness and darkness and humor, and hypersensitivity to her surroundings. And so I really think of Mona just to give you like, as we speak, an image of her. Yeah, I think for me, I’m a really sonic writer. And so the novel really began with that opening line. And once I had the opening line, I knew that I had her voice. And I knew that in her voice, I wanted to essentially break out of control states in the most controlled way. So I wanted the pros to feel very precise, very alive, very direct, very unadorned, I wanted it to get directly into the readers bloodstream with no opportunity for detachment. And so that’s really what I was trying to do with Mona. And it was really that first line when I had it, and then, in combination, it was really the image of her meeting her father in the back of her father’s favorite restaurant. I was like, why does this look so much like an affair? You know, why is it so addictive and so dangerous? So that’s where the novel really started.

And like you said, just the same as you felt it from that first line, I think readers will feel it from that first line as well. It gets off to such a great start. It’s such a strong opening, where you just feel like you’re in that world, even though a lot of this setting, at least to me felt very out of time and place I struggled not in a bad way to place myself always within this world with Mona, but I think that that enhanced the way I read because just as much as she feels untethered in the most controlled way through your writing, I was a little untethered as I was going through.

Oh, I love that. I love that. Yes, certainly, this is a book where I didn’t spend time on description, I felt that description created resistance, and I wanted it to be a novel of interiors and novel relationships. And so I didn’t want to spend my time describing a room or a sky or a hairstyle or a pair of boots, I felt very kind of post romance in a way writing this book, I wanted it to be as granular as it could be, but also only what was needed. I wanted it to be like clarification through reduction.

And you saying that you always are looking for these specific female characters. I mean, I think there’s like a big trend, a big push right now for sort of these like feral girl books, these feral women books that allow a freedom that has been sort of not afforded to female characters in the past, like a rawness a, unlikeability, because so often we’re confronted with this idea for female characters, I think that they must be likable, whatever that means. This steps outside and you do care for Mona, even when she is not, quote likable. I always cared for her.

Yeah, I love that. I think for me, I’m always interested in writing women who blur the moral codes or the societal contract. That’s when people get really interesting for me, is when they start to behave like quote, unquote, badly, especially for women. It’s to pressurize that we behave in a way that’s pleasing, that’s polite, that’s acceptable. It’s so easy for us to be coined difficult. And so I always like to go like directly to the meat of that kind of behavior.

And between all the female characters in this book, I think you get every shade of that, like every facet of where can a woman fall in that gray area? I think the character that I was drawn to the most in this book, and for better or worse is Cherry, she is my favorite piece of this. She’s the stepmother, who Paul’s having an affair. I was so drawn to her in this book.

Yeah, I mean, she is kind of the villain in the book, you know, as much as I’m, like, not interested in drawing heroes and villains. And one thing that I did, I went into the novel with a set of clear intentions, but I was open to disruption. And I found myself as I wrote, like, transiting between points of view. And so suddenly, I was inside the very, like prickly mind of Cherry and I was so interested in how we like the ultimate truth is what we perceive as right. We think of ourselves as good people, we think of our story as true, you know, as absolute. It was actually such a delight to write her to write her like conviction of her own rightness, but also her hurt, you know, and she’s such an injured person and she injures so much you know, she creates so much chaos there’s this kind of constant emotional chess happening within the family. It’s very complex, a lot of mash, donating, and manipulation and she’s really the kind of the silent you know, Stone Cold queen of that.

I think her being a Styrofoam heiress, like was such a perfect like, I underlined it like six times because it just feels so perfect that that’s the thing is this Styrofoam, because it just sort of felt very much like her personality in several parts, right? The perspective is also really interesting, because obviously, we have sort of a first person look through Mona’s eyes, but we get these other scenes that she can’t possibly know about, and these other glimpses into other characters life. And we get that balance between the interiority of Mona and sort of understanding this big chessboard through pieces that we would have missed had it all been through her perspective. Was it difficult to balance writing those two in those two veins or from those two perspectives?

It was kind of a relief, actually. Like I think what I was after with the book is really creating closeness, closeness with the reader. That’s, that’s what I’m interested in. And closeness with the reader for this book is achieved through closeness with Mona. And oddly enough, I felt like as I transited through the points of view, that just got us closer to the center of the book to Mona, you know, it was playful for me. It was it was like strange and playful to get into these other voices, these other points of view. And, you know, just on a kind of mechanism front, it created a lot of velocity it makes you want to, you know, I’m always interested in the page being turned right, you want to plant one thing, at least on each page. So it gets turned. And the points of view shifting, created that kind of like speed, you know, and momentum in the book. So my editors we, like internally, we call them cameos, my friend called it like the ghostly writing. For me, it was just it was actually such a pleasure to move behind other characters eyes.

It created so much tension and allowed that propulsive feeling of wanting to know more because it allowed a view into this world that wasn’t just for Mona because I felt so much when I was reading. And I just wanted to know, like, what was the truth? There’s so many moments where you’re not sure what’s really happening or if the way that something is being perceived as what, what the truth is. And not to say that those, those other sections are the truth either. We may never know because it’s whose truth but it added so many layers in that aspect. Do you consider Mona an unreliable narrator? Do you think that we’re supposed to be right there with her? Or are we supposed to have like a degree of skepticism as we go along with her?

I mean, greedily. I want both, like they’re all unreliable narrators, right. Because they’re only you know, they’re only kind of presenting their own like subjective view of the world. She’s so the anchor, like she’s so the spine of the book. And, like carries us through, even though she’s in these like very graphic cycles of self-inquiry and self-loathing and self-love and self-protection. She carries us through with such like, assuredness and confidence.

And this view that she has, I mean, it comes back so much to the family. And it is this complicated web of family and all these voices layered on top of each other. And I think most of us who have families know that truth within groups of people like that is always different from one person to the next. Like if you ask between Mona and her sister, older sister Juliet and her younger sister, what is the truth of anyone’s situation? You’re going to get such radically different answers if you ask them all about the exact same event.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think that that’s what I was really interested in portraying, I didn’t want to write a solipsistic book that centered on a single person and her point of view, I actually wanted to I love being able to see the central character from the you know, the external view. And so we do get to hear from Paul’s point of view, from Wes’ point of view, from Cherry’s, from Ani’s, you know, and of course from Eva’s.

It’s the best way I think, to understand a character is through the descriptions from others. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the family aspect of this book is so I mean, you write about families a lot. I think it’s it seems really prevalent in sort of what you bring in your fiction Heartbreaker, you have a mother a really strong mother daughter sort of feeling. And here we have the father daughter, but it almost feels I think you mentioned that it almost kind of feels like Succession in a way.

Yeah, it has it definitely has like a strong Succession kind of aspect in the sense that, like, there’s an empire at stake. It’s not media, it’s art. It’s writing, Paul Dean is famous novelist, Mona Dean, aspiring writer, this kind of famous family organized around kind of all-powerful patriarchal kind of King Lear figure, and then the embittered cold stepmother and the kind of viciously competitive siblings, and these broken expressions of love, as well. Like, there’s a lot of tenderness in this book, as there was strangely like very misshapen tenderness in Succession. And yes, the love can be extremely self serving and sometimes form of manipulation. The other point that I would make about Succession is that, you know, in the end, I think even though our families like organize ourselves around these men, it’s the women who orbit these men who are just so much more interesting and possessed by a far deeper talent. And so, you know I look at like Natasha, Mona’s mother, I look at Cherry. You know, I always picture Tilda Swinton when I think about Cherry, and then I think about Shiv’s line, he couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head. And all of the women, the wives and mistresses sitting together in that pew at Logan Roy’s funeral. Anyway, all of that feeling that that like embattled family feeling is definitely in daughter. And again, like everyone feeling the rightness of their own perspective and how that narrative is the thing that carries you through that makes life bearable.

Everything sort of radiates off of Paul, in a way even though Mona is the character that we find ourselves I think connecting the most to it also made me think of like, as in Heartbreaker, there’s like this cult aspect is like is Paul this charismatic cult leader of this family?

Yeah, that’s a great way of looking at him. And I think that’s very true. And, you know, when I was like, drafting Paul, I was really thinking about these, like, the literary men of the canon who had kind of, you know, like, by proxy of their novels, and poetry seduced me through my 20s. Right. So it was like, the Leonard Cohens and the Norman Mailers and the Philip Roths and, of course, Ernest Hemingway. But of course, Paul has only published one book, and he hasn’t published in 15 years. So in him, we get a much more tormented man who, in a way has all the power, but no power at all. And there’s a lot of I would say, to, you know, comedy to Paul, like, I do picture Bill Murray a lot. As, as I wrote, Paul, I really pictured him like his kind of that Tragic Clown persona. But I really wanted to get into the center of that, man. He was so much fun to write.

I can imagine. I mean, he was so much fun to read, because every time he would come on the page, it would be like, which Paul is this going to be? In relation to who he’s speaking to, who he might be in love with what his challenge of the day may be? And then watching these women orbit and sort, of course correct to adapt to whatever version of him was there that day?

That’s super interesting. Yeah, that’s super interesting. I mean, him going in with just, you know, an intention for every scene and outcome that he wants for every scene, like kind of weaponizing his like helplessness with his daughters, and, yeah, just always at a loss and in a way, you know, giving Mona his attention, which she confuses to be love, and maybe it is love, but he really does treat her quite badly. Even though she is his muse, you know, so these women in the scenes with him, he’s really kind of mining for their insights. And that’s especially true of Mona, like it’s a very parasitic dynamic between the two of them, even though again, there’s like, a lot of tenderness and like, kind of strange comedy between the two of them. You know, and when Mona goes through her darkest days, it’s Paul, who she feels closest to, right. So just the, you know, the strangeness of how life works, and who we’re drawn to, depending on where we are in time.

And I think especially even though she feels this connection to Paul, even though it’s her mother, who’s there, every day, mother who’s supporting her,

This is the thing about, you know, mothers and daughters, and fathers and daughters, too, you know, I think that we tend to, in art, save our scrutiny for mothers and that fathers are actually like, under examined and often figureheads, or, you know, authority figures are final states in terms of, you know, marriage choices, and I wanted to build between them like such a fraught, competitive, hugely human relationship, like a bad romance, you know, like that shadow side of, of a conventional relationship.

It does have so many moments that feel like a tragic romance more than a family novel. And I had to stop and be like, Oh, this is what happens when these feelings get perverted and shifted and moved over to this place. And I think it happens so much. We see it in the art world itself because these big creative people are translating their ideas whether Paul is writing his daughters into the people that he hopes they are or that he needs them to be, or whether Mona is translating through her acting sort of projecting out what she needs from these other people. The art in this is so connected to how these people live their lives.

Yeah, that’s a beautiful point. And I think that that’s really the book itself. It’s like I wanted to strike that very live nerve of the Father, daughter, nurse. And I really wanted to look at a young woman who is coming into her own power as an artist, like making art as making selfhood.

I think art acts in this novel is a connector as a wedge, as a healer, as the trauma itself. And for people who are creative in any way, I think all people are creative in some way. But that reading it in and having it connect through these people, sort of opened up a lot in the world in the space between these characters in and in themselves.

Right. Yeah, I think that that’s very, very true, you know, and there is trauma in the novel, there are two kind of major traumatic events that I depict in the novel. And I was really interested in where that makes art and makes life you know, just in the way of like a hot the hot voice of an intimate in your ear, I wanted to get as close as I could, to life to how life feels. And look at Mona especially as like a cumulative aggregate person, I didn’t want to write her at all in the abstract like vacuum packed as kind of a plot piece, I wanted to look at her like in in you know, kind of like an Elena Ferrante or Annie Ernaux, like I wanted to look at all of her complexity. And again, like closer to how life feels I wanted to write it in language that was closer to spoken language, you know, so that there was, again, that kind of like directness, and with these hot emotions, the counter effect of a colder prose.

And I think for readers who love language, and who look for that, in a book, this is going to just like blow them away. I think like, I can read a book about anything, or anyone as long as that language is there. And the sentence structure that you create, and the way that Mona sounds and the way that these people interact, and you can just feel it, it was so much more enlightening. And it really brings you in so much more than just a book with a lot of plot. And not to say that there’s anything wrong with books with a lot of plot. I think we all look for that excitement sometimes. But when you want to feel, I think it’s a book with language that does that.

I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to write a really visceral book, you know, and you know, talked about when you’re reading something, it should feel like watching an X rated film, like you should have that kind of state of anxiety and stupefaction and suspension of moral judgment and that feeling of like, I can’t look away. And that was definitely what I was after with Daughter.

As you were writing, was this a book that took a lot of rewriting did it come to you sort of in like a hot panic moment, because it feels sometimes, you know, like that exuding of words all at once, which I mean, a good writer can create that. But I just wonder how much goes into really making these sentences perfect.

I love the hot panic moment. Come from a hot panic moment. I wrote it during the pandemic. And what I found was that I was like circling a few different novels, but none of them, they all felt like false efforts. I knew they weren’t right. And I felt impatient with, with fiction as I was perceiving it in terms of like, conventional structures. And I didn’t know making a line more beautiful and described like it all just felt beside the point, I had this new fear and new impatience, I needed a new way to work. And once I had that first line, like once I knew the kind of cadence and how the book would sound, I ended up writing that first draft and like kind of a single setting of two months. And then the first draft is intact in the book. So exactly what you’ve identified, that’s real. And then I spent a couple of years like sitting with it, examining it, turning it over under the light and then building it out. By keeping that tone and that momentum intact. We’re actually I mean, this is a kind of good metaphor for this moment. Just in terms of aliveness and precise expression. I’m working with a perfumier, who’s building a perfume based on the novel, and she’s calling it Mona. I’ll send you a bottle. So cool. I feel like it just kind of sums up everything in terms of like distilling something, while keeping it just completely alive.

This book feels so crystallized and so like a moment in time, even though there is quite a bit of time that passes in this book, but it feels so contained. And as much as I kind of you wonder, like after the book ends, what’s happening to these people? Like, are they okay? But for some reason for me, like, I usually like to think about what kind of happens to the characters after the book. But in this instance, I just want to know them within these confines, because it feels so perfect and right.

Wow. I love that.

Because I think also sitting with these characters, they sort of work when the light is shining on them. And afterwards, they go back to the ether in this art. Mm hmm.

I love that. I love that, like the book was written in a moment the characters exist in a moment. Yeah, I love that.

Because I think that kind of feels like what Paul has sort of done through his novel also entitled, daughter, he has created a daughter, and it’s kind of like there’s this back and forth between who is the daughter in this book? And is it? Is it any of them? Is it none of them? Is it this amalgamation he has created of the one that he would like? It really is. That’s sort of the rumination that I leave with on that.

I love that.

So you wrote an article for the Paris Review, which I love the title, it’s Mother’s as Makers of Death. And then if I as I was reading that, I mean, I think that really feels connected to this novel in so many ways. Like, I read the article after I had read the book, and immediately it evokes sort of that same feeling as I had had when I read the novel.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. Sometimes I think of the novel as the sequel to that essay, I found something in that essay, it was one of those moments as a writer where you strike something, but I didn’t fully comprehend what it was until like, two and a half years later, when I started working on daughter, you know, I wanted to go into the darker emotions. I mean, the essays really about the presence of death in motherhood, and daughters, certainly about that as well. I think too, in terms of tone, Rachel Cusk talks about synthetic novels versus true novels, synthetic novels being kind of overly invented, overly plotted and true ones, ones that you lend your life and your state of being to. And daughter is definitely a true book as that essay was a true essay. So yeah, I think you’ve hit on something like I do think that they’re in conversation.

As someone who I’m not a parent, I have parents, of course, but you know, I don’t connect to that aspect of it. And yet, I can feel that tone, that darkness that sort of seeping in to the edges of this novel, that really allows for an understanding of these people that on paper, like, I think you could very easily say like, oh, how could I ever understand like, that’s not someone who I ever think I would know, in real life or like that I would ever connect with like someone like cherry for me. But in these moments and through the this lens, it allows for connection, and I think that’s what, that’s the best thing about fiction. Is that a way to connect?

Yeah, thank you. That’s definitely what my intention was. And always is, you know, I think of myself as a really private person, like, quite an introvert. But as a writer, I feel like a very public writer, like I’m really interested in, in binding people together and in creating conversation, you know, and I think, like, I came up in theater, and you know, in Daughter there is like a black box theater feeling to the book, I didn’t do an epigraph or a dedication or acknowledgments, that curtain rises, the novel plays out and then the curtain falls. And it’s really this like limited number of characters in a relationship. They’re all in relationships with each other and limited number of settings. And what I love so much about live theater is just that electricity, you know, and that electricity of like connecting like having a shared experience in the dark. So that’s what I’m always trying to do with fiction too.

And shared experience in the dark is like absolutely a great way to describe this book. I think for me, because even with the jacket, I think the jacket works so perfectly with that feeling as well. It’s so good.

It’s so beautiful, isn’t it? It’s like, oh heartstoppingly beautiful. I actually have a finished copy right here. I can show you.

Yeah, like that’s amazing.

it’s just like, you can’t believe the beauty of this. And you can like check your lipstick.

Multipurpose.

Right? Anyway, I that was such a gift that’s Joon Park genius, FSG.

It feels so classic at the same time of like evoking exact like, you can bring so whatever you want to that whatever you feel reading the book that’ll match it. Perfect. And I know you mentioned Annie Ernaux, and I can actually feel a lot of Annie Ernaux, in this book. But do you have other big like literary influences or your favorite thing to read?

I mean, I have tons like I can show you my bookshelf situation. This whole top shelf is like filled with all of my favorite writers like Elena Ferrante, for sure it was a huge influence, especially on this novel. And Tove Ditlevsen and like Vigdis Hjorth is a huge influence as well. Leila Slimani was as well just in terms of like creating something that sets you on fire and is the shadow side to a traditional relationship as much as it was like a horror show to read. I love Catherine Lacey, Miriam Toews, Laura Vandenberg Samantha Hunt is a huge influence. Just women writers who have like, humor and depth and yeah, just like are willing to like enter the spirit and strangeness you know, where there’s, it takes so much craft and so much invention to pull off that kind of like dimensionality Katie Kitamura for sure. Sheila Heti, of course. And yeah, it’s so many so many women writers that know, Hurston, that have really, that and Cusk to like that I feel in conversation with like fiction just gives us company and solace in a way that nothing else can. You know, it allows you to re sequence and reorder your own life and thinking. And so when I say influence, I mean it on like the deepest, deepest level. But those were the writers are really held close for Daughter.

I think that any good book, will I honestly, I think any book that you read, and that you put time into understanding and being open to is an influence. Like, I feel like every time I read something, whether I can even tell that I’ve connected that deeply with it. It’s in there, and this this book and your previous book, I’ve absolutely changed the way I read fiction because the words, the choice, the character, it all comes together in these ways that I can’t wait to get my hands on over and over again. I’m a big reader. So I go back to these, you know, I go back to things a lot, because I have to just keep understanding them. Amazing. I love that. Thank you. And I have to ask because it’s the Barnes Noble podcast. But what’s next for you? Do you have anything I know that it was that this book was a labor of love and took some time to come out? So I can be I can be patient if I have to be but I’d love to know what’s on the on the docket for you.

Yeah, I’m now I’m kind of back in that mode of just reading and taking notes and thinking I tend to think long and write fast. You know, as I did with Daughter, it’s like, I’ll circle and they’ll feel like I’ll feel kind of miscast and a play like false efforts. And then all of a sudden they’ll strike something. And then I’ll write it very quickly. So I’m back in that like searching phase, but it’s you know, it’s good. It’s kind of I don’t know that I could sustain the intensity that I had with daughter and transfer it into a new project right away. It’s like I need just like a palate cleanser.

Yeah. And this novel deserves its chance to breathe, because it is that good. Yeah,

thank you so much.

And there’s a great playlist that you have that goes along with this book that I had been listening to, there’s going to be a perfume which is like incredible, like what a better thing to pair with a book. It just makes like a lot of sense to capture that moment in another moment. Amazing. So I can’t wait for all those other things. And I can’t wait for whatever you write next because I will be there every step of the way. But Claudia Dey thank you so much for writing Daughter and for being here with us today. It’s out now so I hope everyone goes to get their copy.

Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to speak with you.

Jenna Seery

I’m Jenna Seery bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over and today I am so excited to be here with Sheena Patel, author of I’m a Fan. I’m obsessed with this book. If I could Instagram stalk it, I would, maybe I already did, we don’t know. But this book has been all over in the UK, it won the British Book Award for the Discover category. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize, long listed for the women’s fiction prize. I mean, it’s done a lot. And I can’t wait to see where else it goes. Because I am truly in love with this book. Sheena, thank you so much for being with us.

Sheena Patel

Thank you for having me. I’m very, very honored that you’ve asked me.

So I think this book, I often say I read books in a single setting, because it’s one of my favorite things to do. But I feel like I read this book in a single breath. Like once I started it, I could not stop. It was such a wild ride. It’s brutal. It’s hilarious. It is so many things. I would love to start with you just describing the book for our listeners, because it is a lot.

In the simplest way possible. It’s a story of a woman who is stalking another woman who is the other lover of her lover. That’s all everyone’s very messy, and no one is a good person. So it just tracks this person’s sort of spiral into a catastrophe basically, and then into splice with that is sort of her thoughts on the world. And the ways in which systems can corrupt.

I did not know where it was going to go when I started, I think you can’t like it’s so it’s every, like as a millennial woman, it’s like so many of my fears, and also like worst and best qualities of myself, like put out on a page to read and to like deal with, which is the best way to deal I think with our inner selves is through fiction. I was wondering how you found this voice for our unnamed narrator because she carries us through this whole like you said catastrophe. And we are with her right next to her inside of her this whole time.

Well, I didn’t know that I was writing a book when I was writing a book. In the UK it was originally published by a very small publisher, called Rough Trade books, who was sort of a sister arm to Rough Trade. But it’s one person essentially and then has been picked up by Grantham with paperback, it was more with Rough Trade books, I started to work with them really creating this thing. And I wasn’t too, I wasn’t sure what it was, it could have been a picture book, because I was collating loads of pictures from the internet, I was just sort of amassing things and then narrowing it down. And then once I figured out I was writing, it was sort of expanding the writing bits. And then it was very intuitive, which sounds like a cop out. But I wrote everything very straight like this happened, this happened, this happened. And then in the sentences, I started to really dig down. And I was thinking, how could I make this very weird or very strange or very surreal? I think that that’s as far as I asked the question, and then this and then I thought, what would be the worst thing that you could say? And then started to really move into that into this person that was very angry, funny, but angry, and really had nothing to lose. And I just thought, what would it be like to have nothing to lose in any given situation? And so it sort of spiraled or from that, really, but I don’t think I was, I knew it was very bitter. But I don’t know if I knew quite how acidic it was until I’d finished and I’d given it away like to be printed. And I thought, oh my god, I’m in trouble. I was like, I could get fully canceled for this book. But it’s sort of risk did I it did in a metaphorical sense, felt like a sort of death that I was playing with, that I could never write again, I’d you know, you’d write this book, and everybody would be up in arms about it. You know, the few people I thought would read it, but it was something I found, and then something that sort of possessed me. And then someone I missed after I finished writing it really.

I think that that risk is so worth it. Because for most people, and I think again, especially for a lot of women, this is a very repressed side of things. This this sort of inclination of obsession and competition and comparison is so vital and so ingrained in the way that we sort of interact and exist, especially with social media and in relationships. And this yes, it’s sort of a powder keg of all those things, and maybe the most heightened version of all those things, but it’s so recognizable for so many intricacies of existing.

Thank you for saying that. And also wild that actually, that that’s true as well, you know, because when I wrote it, I was thinking, There’s no way in hell anyone can identify with this. This is this felt it felt to me very extreme. And, you know, there’s gnarly, ugly bit of all of us. And I did want to put shame in the book. It’s it is an exploration of shame. So it’s all your shameful bits that make up this person. But I was like, Oh, my shameful bits that make up this person now, because I was thinking, what if I was really stripped bare, and if you stripped bare, like the patriarchy, it’s like all women sort of out against each other, really, that that, to me felt more real than this sisterhood thing, which I know is also true, because I have very, very close female friends. But there is this sort of way that you’re pitted against each other in a way where it’s like, I’ve got a boyfriend, so I’ll be fine. Or I’ve got a partner, I’ll be fine. And, and the way that money and class and those kinds of things, intercede into your relationship. So I was thinking, what would it be like to explore that, and also, like female rage, and also, you know, more potently, non white, you know, brown or black female rage, which is often suppressed and treated as something that you have to distance yourself from. So to step into that space of rage and really embody rage. And also be this sort of be the thing that society fears you to be, and really be that thing, I found it was very liberating to write from that place and not deny it.

I can only imagine, because even for me reading, it felt in the brain to be like, Oh, that’s a thought that I have had. And I thought never have that thought again. But then you realize that, like, it’s natural, we’re only going to think these things, especially in the like, sort of prism of weird social media end of the world Doom scrolling society that we’re interacting with now, and especially have been for the last few years. We can’t help but experience these tendencies, because it’s the world we live in now.

But well, I’d say is that this book is actually about power. And about, you know, not just not just her as a victim, but her need for power and her search for power, as well as experiencing other people’s power and, and sort of hating it, but wanting it at the same time, which is definitely something we all experience where you hate someone for something that you want, and how social media becomes this newer way of accessing information is an old story to be you know, the lover of someone’s lover or like to be the lover or someone and then be jealous of that other lover. Like that’s the kind of to be jealous of anyone an ex or you know, whatever. It’s the most ordinary thing. But social media adds this like terrifying edge to the need for knowledge. And the way that you know, being a detective, you can hurt yourself by your quest for knowledge. And then you only have yourself to blame. Really, yeah, it was just interesting to mix these things together.

The way that you describe social media as this sort of like the making people the most accessible that we have ever been to each other, I mean, our narrator will look up an estate sale and be able to just go in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to do that before. We can’t track people’s every moves. And yet we are so isolated because of it as well. Because we are trapped in these worlds that we create for ourselves in these imagined relationships we create. And it’s something so specific that I think not a lot of fiction, not a lot of books get right, because it’s such a delicate balance. And because it’s so sort of ever changing. But this is such of the moment, I was like, this is exactly how social media feels.

That’s really great. I didn’t want to be cringy. And I really wanted to capture now, like that was a very specific thing for me was like even the rent prices are updated in it because I was asking someone like one of the publishers like should I update the rent prices because this is wrong. Now it’s not you can’t get a two bed in London for 1200. That’s the like, absolute joke, but it just captured that moment of like when you know, it’s just I was just prepared for it to date because I thought a lot of the stories that Black and Brown people have access to or tell are ones of nostalgia and Britain is in the grip of nostalgia. I mean, it’s a very nostalgic country. And I didn’t want to tell a story of a country that you know, I don’t know, that I would have to imagine I would call to unify in my head like I know, London and I know Britain and I know, this is what I know. And I thought I really just wanted to take a photograph of what our behavior was because as I was asking a couple of friends at the time when I was writing, it’s not that I told them I was writing, writing. Do you end up going in rabbit holes? And I mean, this is pre pandemic, I asked them, it was like, kind of just before the pandemic was just at the beginning. And they were like, Yeah, we do sort of do these influencers. And you’re just thinking, God, this is like, widespread, or this, this thing where you’re looking people up, and then when you meet them, you pretend that you haven’t looked them up. I mean, it’s, it’s so prevalent in all of our relationships, and how that adjusts how you value people based on how many followers they have. And I just, you know, the book deals you get and who pays attention to you? And who rubbish is your opinion? And who doesn’t, it’s just very weird that numerically, we’re like, numerically valued through social media. And like, we’ve always been like that it’s always happened, because it’s like, how much you’ve earned or what house you live in. But it seems so weird that like, within our age group that this happens is that somebody with 300 followers, you’d be like, Oh, well, I don’t care about them, you know, what would it be to write the story of someone who does have 300 followers and write the story from that person’s point of view? So I feel like a lot of books about the internet always write them from you know, with aspiration in mind, we’re always looking towards the person that’s the influencer, or has the thing has the house has the boyfriend has the marriage? And I was like, what would it be like to write a story with from someone’s point of view that has none of those things? Which is most of us and write a story of like sort of revenge,

Especially in like this world of micro influencers that I think we live in of like people that how often do I see someone on Instagram and I’m like, they have 80,000 followers and like, who are they? Like, how did this happen? I think something and I know that this is in the book, I felt this, again, is sort of like mediocrity of whiteness that pervades so much of social media in this like micro influencer sphere of like, are you just thin and white? You have these followers; I don’t know how.

I remember when Instagram first started like I can, I can also remember going out and I can remember going out and like I don’t go out now, but I don’t. But I can remember going out and meeting with friends and those friends being like that person’s Instagram famous. And this democratization of celebrity was just really interesting, and how that kind of that how that tilted the media at the time, because they weren’t before it was the media that would decide whether or not you were a celebrity. And then suddenly Instagram came in, like took that power away from them. But then we started to use that power against each other. Yeah, it was just interesting to write a story like this and sort of capture now, like our behavior right now.

And I think like in 10 years, looking back, this book will be like completely different feeling because we will have some new, we will be a part of social media, it’ll be like implanted in all of our brains. And it’ll be like that Black Mirror episode where everyone can see everyone’s ratings at all times.

But actually followers are that, yeah, followers are that, our ratings, it’s and it also it skews so much then because you know, models don’t get jobs if they don’t have a following. It does happen in publishing where people with very small followings on no social media presence at all won’t get picked up. Because there’s this sort of the expectation that you’ve got this business behind you that you’re this, you become a brand and then you know, you’re your own small neocolonial. You know, like the financial system in a weird way. It’s like, you have to, but you become your own small brand. And like this is part of my brand, or I mean, I joke is like my dad was in the queue when the Queen died. And I joke to someone I said it was so off brand for me. But actually, it’s like, it’s that sort of thing. It’s like attributing other people’s behavior, your own behavior to a certain type of narrative sense of who you are just the way that companies do it. So I just think it’s really bizarre. It’s bizarre behavior, and we all do it.

And it creates this sort of duality. I think all people have like these, we exist in a little faker sense. We have these performative sort of friends that we put on and we recognize them and other people, we see them and we know, and some part of our brain that these profiles are not representative of actual people, and yet, we are so attuned to just believe what we see and that’s where those jealousies come in, even though we know you know, that person has like a normal life and does all normal things and you know, whatever. Seeing it in that lens, like we can’t separate the performative from the real.

Yeah, I know. I mean part of that I’m that, I’m very into Jungian psychology, like I really love the theory. And I’m not in Jungian therapy. But there’s also this podcast called this Jungian life, which like I’m totally obsessed with. And there’s this idea of Persona and shadow. And I was thinking about those things when I was writing this book, because the internet is like the perfect like social, Instagram and whatever is the perfect, the perfect foil for persona. And then all of the shame and the jealousy and that is in the shadow, because that’s what lives in, you know, it’s what you think it’s what you edit out of yourself. And so nobody else sees that you are also this jealous, gnarly person. Because everybody’s busy being shiny and being like living my life. And this is, so then everybody ends up feeling bad about themselves. Because no one’s being genuine, you know, there’s no connection through vulnerability, which is really the only way to connect with anyone is to be like, oh, gosh, I feel like that, do you feel like that, and then you become friends. Because like, that’s how it works. But you don’t become friends with someone being like, my life is amazing. Your life is not that great. Like, that’s how you make friends. And it feels like social media just propagates that sort of behavior. But that’s just that’s the kinds of things I was thinking. And like the original colors were on the cover were lilac, and red, which I got from Nina who’s the publisher, from her garden, she put up a flower in the garden. And I was thinking that color of poison is quite interesting to have a book that is poisonous that has this poisonous voice, but in in a way metabolizing that poison would hopefully free us because you’re admitting something you reject. And that can only the only freedom comes through that. So I was thinking maybe in its small way. It’s like a piece of poison apple that everybody has to eat, and maybe something good will happen.

I think I became friends with this book, because I felt so much of myself in it when I was reading which is like, now for people who are going to read the book, they’re going to be like you saw your… are you okay? And I’m gonna say I’m working on it. I’m working on it. But I think the unreliability too, in the narration where, you know, it’s told in these, these little vignettes, these little, you know, short moments in time with their own little captions, their own headings, which I think is great, because they’re hilarious. And what else can we do other than laugh while the world ends? But as was going through, you know, there’s, these are so heightened a moment like moments that you wonder, like, Is this really happening? Or is this what she perceives is happening, or she wants to happen, there’s such a blurred line between what could really be there, and some things that you read me think that can’t possibly be the way that interaction went?

That’s great. I’m really glad you’ve said that. Because that was the point I really wanted to blur that line between what’s happening, what she thinks is happening, and has it happened. So I was thinking, in my mind, I was thinking this person lives so fully in their imagination. And I think when you’re like a lonely and maybe slightly weird girl, when you’re a teenager, you do live in your head a lot, you have a very, very vivid fantasy life. And that’s often where your life is, is in your head of how you want things to be. And I wanted this person to be that and, and actually, I wanted to really map that in the kind of girl universe of fantasy life of on what that is where you know, a room becomes a club, or how your chair becomes your friends, you know, like you if the position of where your friends would be and the how your cupboard is like a DJ booth or whatever, you know, like, it’s like this, this sort of very small domestic world changes in her mind into the world. She doesn’t need to be in the world because the world is in her bedroom kind of thing. And so I was thinking, I was like, this, like, very, there’s this. I forgot the name of the show, but I remember watching it like a long time ago, but there was a show called Sunset Beach. And it had to end really abruptly. I’m not even sure why. But it has an end really abruptly and the way they ended it was it was a dream, the whole thing was a dream. And I was thinking that this could be the same thing. Because that the whole book could be a dream is just locked in her head like lying on her bed thinking she’s done all of these things, but nothing’s happened and she’s just sort of in a dream state. Not really living her life.

I was kind of wondering if I if there was going to be a point where we realized that she didn’t know any of these people and she you know was existing completely by herself and I don’t want to know it whether or not that’s like I want to exist right there in the in between with her and question just the same. Yeah, because that’s what brought me along there. I mean, that the short chapters and sort of the tension that that creates as you’re going through, like I couldn’t stop as I was reading because I just needed to know where she was going to end up next and how she was going to live through each and every like obstacle that would come up in her path. And I think like, so often, we get caught up in what’s likable, especially for a woman, especially for non white people, like people of color. There’s so much pressure and exceptionalism and what is good and right and likeable. And I hate the word likable, especially when it comes to any woman in a book. But that kept coming up of like, so many people wouldn’t like this book because they can’t relate or they can’t connect. And I don’t believe that, but that feeling of who, how do we connect with characters who are making bad choices?

That’s really, really great thought, because? Well, one it was I did do this. I mean, now there’s like this trope, I didn’t really realize that there was a trope about this, like sad girl thing or unlikable women. I didn’t think about that really about fitting into genre if there is one. But I was thinking that was that this and likability thing is not afforded to Black and Brown people and how you have to be likable in ways that you fit in, and how you have to kind of shape shift and mold yourself to be unthreatening. And so her being violent and full of dread, and a threatening person was very purposeful, because I wanted to play with that. And like how, how much can she do, and how much will a reader stay with her, I just really wanted to push the boundaries of that. And also the idea of like likeability or not liking a book, because you can’t relate, I find that so mind bending, mind bending as an idea. Like, I don’t come to art with this idea that I need to see myself reflected in it. I come to arts, hoping to understand what it’s like to live another life, or what it would be like to make another choice. I think that’s the thing I found about reading, like, I’m an avid reader. And when I was a kid, just read book upon book, I didn’t care I didn’t, I didn’t care what I was reading, I just read anything I could get my hands on and would take a lesson from it in some way. Even if it you know, from like, Berlin in the 50s. I don’t know, that’s not my life. But I would think God, that’s an amazing thing to do is to be brave, or whatever, you know, or this is what it is to be a coward. And I wouldn’t ever look at a book and think I need it to be a mirror. Like I see that as a door, you need to walk through that door and understand what has been presented to you and then and then meet it as it is not as you want it to be. Because that’s meeting art as a consumer is like, this is what I want. It’s not what I like. So I’m not going to like it. It’s like a weird to me very weird way to engage with ideas.

And for me, I think some people that maybe aren’t avid readers think of reading as like a solitary experience. And while it is in like a true sense for me. There’s nothing that is more community based than reading and being a part of, especially fiction, because one I’m constantly talking to my friends and family and everyone and saying you need to read this, what are you reading, but I also feel that connection with authors with characters with people that I’ll never meet, or will never have any connection with other than I read their words. And now I understand a part of them a little bit more. Yeah, I think so often now, with the way everything in media is so siloed into these genres and tropes and like experiences and people are like, I’m a this kind of reader. I’m a that kind of reader. And it’s like, that’s so limiting. There’s so much you can have a favorite but you’ve got to try it…

As a teenager was a much more open reader. I would read like anything from like, obscure Japanese literature to like chick-lit or whatever it’s called now like romance and would have no I wouldn’t really I would read all of it. It was just interesting to me to read all of it, crime, whatever. It was all just reading and whether it was a good book or not, I just that’s all I cared about was if it stuck with me a bit more snobby now, but like I kind of jealous as my teenage self that would just read anything. Also, you know, she didn’t work and I do so I have to be a bit more choosy. You’d never know what you’re like. I think that’s what I come to it as is that how could I possibly know why like, you know, it would, I would, it would be a poor life to self-determine what I like before I encounter it, I think.

I think for me, too. It goes back to like who gets to tell what story and then who gets to engage with it, I think where there’s so much more openness now. And we’re finally making some progress and getting stories told that have not been told before and opening some doors and now there’s just like I’m even through things like tiktok and you know, exposure online, a new generation of readers coming. I’m just so hopeful that we can just continue to expand and continue to grow.

Yeah, with what I mean, the best thing is when you like a book and then you tell someone that you like it, you know that you’re like this. I mean, that’s the best way to encounter anything really is like someone you really like, like something so you like it? You know, all you know, all down is just, that’s interesting to me, but I hope yeah, I hope people don’t give up on meeting something that they don’t necessarily agree with, and then therefore decided that they don’t like that would be sad to me, but I definitely I what I wanted to do with this was to make something quite scary. And to scare the reader that was that was my intention was for it not to feel safe. And for no one to feel comforted while they read it. I just want to I wanted it to be a threatening experience. Because I experienced that once reading a Kathy Acker novel and I was like, This is most magic thing you can do to someone is to terrify the living data itself. With a book, which is to me like the safest place you can be. But to make this very, this place of like, fulfillment actually quite scary was hilarious. I feel I try it.

Definitely brutal is a word to describe how I felt when I was reading this, especially with the really short chapters, I guess, I’m not sure what you call them in your, but like, the when it would be like just a blip of a sentence. And I’d be like, No, I, there’s what else happened there, because there’s more and I need it. I’m never gonna get it.

I was interested in like, the white space on the page. I’m really, really fascinated by negative space. And I was interested in like, how those chapters would breathe. So just having a sentence and then then that sentence will pulsing through the whitespace of the page. And the white page being as weighty as what was written, I think those were the things I was thinking about what writing was, it wasn’t just what I wrote, it was what I’d left out and the space around it. I was asked because papers really expensive at the moment. I mean, I’m not sure if it still is, but it was going through the roof when this was being published last year. I mean, it was like a shortage of paper. So they were kind of pushing me to have all the chapters underneath each other so they could save the paper. And I was like, No, I think it has to be on each page. And each section has to have its own title. Because I needed that whitespace to exist.

1:02:41

If I have one favorite thing in, in books, its form, I think I love something that plays with typography, with spacing with, with how chapters flow together, it makes the reading experience so incredible. So this book I was in from when I saw the setup altogether. And I know you write poetry as well. And some of the short chapters really almost read as prose poems.

Well, I was I used the structure is poetry, I use the structure of poetry. I mean, I’m not a poet, I haven’t written a poem in a really long time. And I’m an awful poet. But I liked that structure of poetry. Because I thought because the root of stanza is in Italian is room. And I thought, wouldn’t it be really interesting if each of these moments were like a room you could walk into, and, you know, it didn’t really matter what order you walked into them in, you could put the order together yourself. I mean, actually, the order of the book could have happened in any whatever order, this was just the one we settled on. But it’s out of order, because of actually and it also borrows the structure from scripts and TV, because I work in television, I don’t write it. But it’s that idea of like, a load of scenes together make a sort of like a sum of its parts, you know, it’s this broken up narrative where you’ll go from one character, then you’ll go to another situation, come back to the first character, go to a third character, go to a fourth, come back to the first and it’s all jumping around, and you’re having to piece it together. And I thought were more much more used to doing that when it’s television. But less used to do that when it’s books and I was thinking, how can I import that into books?

Now, the time in this novel is really interesting, because you never quite know where you are in time in relation to each other. There’s some mentions of this, you know, this happened before this, or this happened before that, but really relationally it’s tricky to figure out exactly where you are, which is kind of I mean, not to keep going back to social media, but it’s almost algorithmic in that way that they don’t show you anything in order. So you’re just getting things in the way that someone else thinks is important.

Yeah, exactly. That’s totally that’s a really good point, which no one’s ever made before. So that’s an amazing thing to like, notice, but yes, it’s that idea of like, I posted on this and then it’s like, someone’s grieving their grandmother. And then it’s like, someone’s having a baby and you’re like, ah, and you just have to like, cobble this information together— happy, sad, depressed, jealous and you’re like all of these different emotions very quickly. And also, it’s the way that we consume media because you’ll read a book, then unfortunately, you do put it down scrolling on your phone, and then you’ll watch television. And like, you’re always constantly grabbing pieces of information, and then having to put the story of the world together in your head from this, these bits of information. So is that to also just within the titles, though, like nick them from memes, because I thought it’d be really funny to put them in a book. And also, it’s hilarious. And also, because she does such dark things, I thought to offset that. And to make me laugh, I just put something opposite to it, that in the same way that memes do that on the internet, which is that you’ll see something and you’re like, that really saw me and because you know, you do that thing, that particular thing. Like there’s one I saw the other day, it was just tiktoks of this boy saying when the situationship is so bad that you have to reconnect with nature. And it’s like, so funny. And I wish I’d put that in the book. But it’s stuff like that, which is hilarious and true. And also, it’s poking fun at yourself for being such a simp.

And I love the idea that like, yes, the internet like is a great chronicler, and holds all things in like a creepy way. But I love the idea of like putting memes in literature and being like, this is we’re putting this for posterity, like we’re, we’re putting the Grinch is an Edgelord in a book, so that we can come back to that later.

Yeah, and also this idea of like literature have like this, like holy space, which I obviously, I fully subscribe to as an idea. But also even that idea. I mean, it’s part of my nature to poke fun at anything that tries to hold itself too seriously. I mean, I do it to myself, about myself. So I thought it’d be really funny to poke fun at this very sort of earnestly, jealous, stalkery character and like, poke fun at her. And also poke fun at the idea of even writing a book because, like, Who puts memes in a book, I mean, who does that but it’s actually hilarious to also put all of these you know, to, you’ve said, it’s like prose, poetry, but to put sort of which I was aiming for, I was always aiming for poetry in the sentences, but to put poetry next to memes and to put it near or these different, like mass and high brow and, you know, what is seen as like mass culture, whatever, and mix it all together and see what would happen because I didn’t know what would happen. So I didn’t want to exclude anything, I wanted to kind of mix it all up.

And that’s life for us. I mean, if you are existing, and using the internet regularly and reading, I mean, it all happens side by side, you can’t be like, and now I’m going to only look at literature, and I will be doing that only. And then at 4pm I will be…

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking that was like your body, I was thinking about bodies, I know this is a book about the internet, but I was also thinking about like the value of bodies and like your actual body moves through so many different spaces anyway, you know, you’ll you will be you know, you’ll disassociate on the internet, and then you’re in a gallery, and then you’re in the supermarket. And then you’re, you know, whatever your, your body moves through high and low, or what is whatever lowers but like, high and low culture all the time anyway. And then your body also changes its value, and its meaning dependent on what environment it’s in as well. So it’s an interesting thing to kind of capture, which is what I was trying to do was map that change.

And even though it’s every person’s is so different than my experience, in some ways or another readers experience will be very different. There are those moments that, those beats that connect in, you’re like, oh, it’s like when you see that meme that really hits you and you’re like, so ashamed, but also, like, send it to four friends that I know have that same feeling like I have sent the chapter titles from this book to like nine people because I’m like, oh no…

But it’s again, see being seen and then sharing that and being like, like, Well, yeah, it’s exactly that. It’s, it’s a really, and it’s also sending memes. Specifically, I know a friend that loves Karl Marx and raccoon memes. So I just sent her those memes if I find a good one, I’m like, I know that you like Karl Marx memes, but I don’t even know how I know that she likes that, but I will send them to her. And it’s those sorts of things where you’re just sharing stuff. Very specifically tailored things. But you know, memes are so interesting and how they’re so mass but so specific, I think there as an art form extremely good.

And getting to combine it with this, you know, highbrow form of like, of literature of, you know, award winning literature. And that’s just perfect because I think there are so many people who had never imagined that that those two things can so perfectly matched and work so well. But they do and this narrator I swear like she her voice has been in my head for days now. And I like I think you mentioned earlier that you kind of miss her and when I was first reading the book, I was like, I don’t know like I got to get through this because I just gotta see how it’s going to end. But then towards the end, I was like, really just hope she’s okay. I just really want her to be okay.

I think when because it was very quick the writing process from like starting to write and then it goes into publish, it was like a year and three months, which is quite quick from what I’ve since learned. But once I gave it in and I couldn’t, you know, tinker with it, and I couldn’t change it couldn’t work on it anymore. I was just like, wandering around in London being like, Oh, and also just like, really missed her. Like, there’s something so liberating about going in and being like, situation. It was, so it was, like, as heavy as it is, I mean, it was gut wrenching, but also very fun to write. And I, for months afterwards, I missed working on it, because it was such a fun thing. I’m just so afraid it will never happen again in that exact way, which it won’t. But it was such a confluence of like, ideas and, and not really caring about any of the rules. It was like such a fun making process. And she was so fun to hang out with. But yeah, I do feel very protective over her. So when people say when people are quite harsh about her. I’m a bit like me, but I am very protective over her. I really do. Yeah, I am. I do hope she’s okay. So I was thinking I was like the last bit. I was like, maybe it could have just been in her head. But you know, maybe it did happen. But I also tried to give it a Sopranos ending because I was watching that in lock down. And I was like, I want to cut to black.

Yeah, I agree. Because yes, there are nasty, like brutal, visceral bits, but at the same time, all those pieces that were like, Oh, I felt that it’s like, well, if I feel those things, like, I have to hope that she’s okay, because otherwise…

But I think I got so much out of reading; I was so lonely as a teenager. And that books became like my friends in a weird way like I was, I was like, Oh, somebody’s felt lonely before, you know, it was really mind blowing to me to experience that. And so if I’ve done that, through this book, and I’ve given back in a way, I find that very moving, that I’ve given that feeling back of like, oh, that’s me, you know, there’s a home for those bits where you’re like, Do other people feel like this? Or is it just me, you know, and I think that I have been able to do that is the best thing. The best thing about this book is that, you know, you in America, New York, you know, I mean, and I’m here in London, and you’re like, Oh, I know that, you know, that’s the same and you know, and you’re white, and I’m brown, and we’re still there’s still a place to meet there. And that’s the thing that I find most magic about this book is that my identity hasn’t stopped it from being a you know, like a thing where it’s like, oh, well, it’s only been, you know, I can’t access that I can’t access that book or whatever. It’s like, this is something other. And it’s, I’m so happy that I’ve made something that opens that up.

Absolutely. I think that there are so many people that are going to connect with so many different parts of this book. That’s the thing, this, this character because she is able to be all the parts of herself. And we’re able to see all the parts even that normally would be hidden away under many other things that so many readers will access those connections in different ways. And not everyone, I don’t think anyone will probably feel this is exactly me. But everyone will be able to come to it from somewhere, which is really all you can ever hope in a fiction book is to be able to connect in that way. And to see things in a different way. There are so many pieces that are so different from my life. And I can say oh, but it makes a little more sense now because I can frame it.

I know there’s like this, I’ve seen it, which is wild to even talk about this in respect to this book. But on Instagram, having seen people not connecting with it, it’s just to make space for that as well. They don’t like once I saw a message from a woman who threw was in the bath and threw the book from the bath across the room. And I was like out but also wow it made her so angry that she tossed it. I was like wow, that’s amazing. Which is I definitely made it for it to be it’s I think you I think people who love it, like love it or when people who hate it, hate it, which I think is kind of amazing. This is definitely polarizing, but I think that’s good. I think if you’ve made something that everyone likes, then it must mean you know, I don’t know what it means. But I’m glad I’ve made something that is so divisive. Because the age as well.

I mean, that’s the thing is now everyone has all these platforms for opinions. And I think at the end of the day, it’s great because we need to be able to share about these books that we love and that how have affected us. I know we’ve touched a little bit on some of your like literary influences, but I’d love to hear. I’d love to hear more about your favorite books, something you’ve read recently, whatever, whatever feels right.

Oh my god, I’ve got so many things to say. Okay, so recently I read Still Born. It’s a Fitzcarraldo, it’s unbelievable. It’s magic. It kind of worked its magic. It was like a, I was on a bit of a book hangover afterwards. And it was only when I was cycling. I was like, oh my god, it means this, and it just hit me afterwards. And it was incredible. It was I don’t know if you guys get it over there. But there’s this author, she’s dead. So it’s sort of bringing her work back. Celia Dale, she’s got this book called Sheep’s Clothing. And that’s coming out in the UK in September. And that’s incredible, as well as about like London and women in the mid for, like, mid 20th century just after the war. And it’s amazing. It’s like a scammer thing. But it’s really great. Like the books that inflict those very foundational texts are like who I am as a human being, but like that the ones that are informed this book are all of the things I’ve ever read in my life, but also definitely, I Love Dick, Motherhood by Sheila Heti. Also, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, I read that and I think that’s what sort of moves the voice into a more an unapologetic space, rather than make her a victim. I was like, okay, I need to be a threat I need to like embody this threat. And My Life With Picasso as well. Also really wanting to kind of embody some of that spirit too. There’s so many books that I love, and Hanif Kureishi as well, because Intimacy is this very awful book that probably wouldn’t stand up now. But it I found it so shocking that he was unlikable. And it is so radical to do that in the 90s, I think to make the story of this very selfish man. And I think that that definitely affected me when I was younger when I read it and has stayed with me. And his writing is just like, I don’t know, it’s like sex. It’s just amazing. Like, it’s so visceral and physical and muscular. It’s just really great prose. And I sort of tried to aim for that.

I think this would fit very well in I think I’m a Fan fits in so well with those books. I mean, like, those influences come together. And I think this book will be that for other people. I think this book will allow especially a lot of young women to sort of understand their power and their like to exist in their space of just a little bit more. Well, that’s nice to know. But I also have to know, is there anything on the horizon? Have you started working on anything new?

No, and I feel terrible about it. I feel terrible about it. Because I would love to be like, Yeah, I’m working on my third book coming out next month. No, I’m not, but I’m desperate to so I’m waiting desperately for an idea to hit me.

We can be patient. I’ll just reread this six or eight more times.

It’s that thing where it’s like, it’s like that second album, isn’t it? It’s like you have a great first album and then you have like a bit of a ropey second album. So I feel like I have a bit of a ropey second album waiting for me out in the future, bear with me for the second album,

We will all be waiting because it’s going to be I think something really incredible. Because I’m a Fan is truly one of a kind as a novel. I loved it so much. I can’t wait for readers to get their hands on it. It’s out now. And Sheena Patel, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you Jenna, you’ve been such a lovely host, thank you.

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