Intro to my Arts Council England-funded novel, about turning 30 in Hackney
Structure, tone, autofiction elements, and an exploration of growing up as an adult
In my new novel, I am writing about a time in my own life when I went through a great deal of turmoil and change. I truly had a present, lively, joyful early and mid twenties… you know the kind of thing. Living in London, NYC, LA. Making music videos on Hackney rooftops. Making art with friends. Attending San Diego’s Comic-con as the three leads in a science fiction movie about parallel worlds. Sleeping on the beach at Cannes because there’s no time after staying out all night to go home before a morning meeting. Falling in love and sprawling happily with that love through Miami, Maine, Paris, Vietnam, Frankfurt, the East Coast US, the West Coast. Book tours in the States, Canada, Spain, Sweden. Wrapping my arms around various muscular torsos while scrambling up a cliff to avoid the tide in Santa Monica, at Venice Beach skatepark after giving myself a concussion trying to drop in, quadbiking across the Egyptian desert at dawn to watch the sunrise from a mountain. Just the kind of adventures you want to have as a young human.
And then, in my late twenties, I hit a different kind of desert. I’d had a break up. I’d built a life and left it. I didn’t know it, but I’d “got the fear” as they say in skateboarding, so I wasn’t taking as many risks. My boundaries were up. I pootled along, doing my thing. The landscape of my life seemed emptier and more plateaued than I thought it would be. Okay, there was fun but also—what? This can’t be it, I thought. Can it?
How shall we live? It feels like one question but within it there are three: Who am I? What is the reality around me? How will I be constructed from the coming-together of my Self and my Reality?
Life is about making choices but it’s really not about asking, “so what do I want?” We don’t have that kind of control… and if we did, wouldn’t it be exhausting? Reality is not within our control. Our selves are tweakable but we also have to deal with what we’ve got. We are capable only of being who we are, working the job we are made for, getting on with the people we get on with, snogging the people it’s obvious that we would snog, climbing as high as our vertigo can stand.
I wrote, in my last essay, that I think life is about understanding ourselves deeply. It’s about authenticity. It’s a journey deeper into ourselves. When we know ourselves, then we can exercise our limited amount of power over our lives and selves in a deliberate way. But not until then.
This isn’t a lonely or self-involved journey. We learn about ourselves from what we love in others, what we dislike in them reveals what we dislike about ourselves, we surround ourselves with people we admire and want to be like, we mirror them, we learn to regulate from them. We grow together ~ biologically, we’re actually incapable of growing without the presence of others, whether friends, family, loved ones. Everything that there is to learn that aids growth comes from regularly practising human interaction and self-regulating based on the information we glean from those interactions.
In my early 20s, like many people, I was lucky. Nothing had gone terribly wrong, yet. I had the confidence of someone who has no experience ~ that is to say I was wildly confident, for very little reason. I didn’t understand that life is a crapshoot. I thought I was in control. I believed in ideas like being the captain of your own ship, when realistically life is more like being on a vast ship, part of which is burning because some selfish, greedy bastard set it on fire, where most of us have a third or second class ticket and can’t get out the smoky lower levels, over time becoming more and more at risk of death from pollution-induced COPD.
In my late 20s, I also didn’t understand that even though life is a crapshoot, I could be deliberate in it in a very specific way. Not with goals but more with how I approached and saw the world. Our perspective can change everything, including what happens to us. The 29– and 30- year old me in this novel does not understand that. That me lets life come to her, wash over her with no objection, no thought to say, “that’s not for me”, because she doesn’t know who she is yet. She begins the novel in a doctors’ office, where something is physically off.
The book is structured in three parts. I really enjoy parts. I guess they are like acts in a screenplay. It’s very satisfying to me to split up my story into 30k sections and find it works. That feels like a book to me. I want to slide in real things from life and I’ve been gathering them - lists, emails, conversations. I really love real life dialogue and would love to write a book that was entirely that at some point. I’m also exploring autofiction ~ reading as much memoir and autofiction as I can get my hands on to try to understand more about how to write fiction based on the truth (more on why I’m so interested in “truth” in a later essay). I always start books at the beginning, but very quickly I know the ending. That’s how I know it’s a book ~ it’s going somewhere, and it’s going to take telling the story to get there. It’s contained and yet there’s a lot to say. That’s really the right cocktail. I’ve started writing it and, because the set up is always the easiest part (lots to say that I have to let the reader know about), it’s going well. The first third of this book is going to keen very closely to reality, and it’s going to be set in the late summer of the year I was 29 and then turned 30. It’s going to be about growing up as an adult.
I read an article in The Guardian recently about sad girl fiction. This novel, I guess, is sad girl fiction, except she’s not sad or passive. She’s a bit lost, which is different. Maybe she’s not even lost. She’s searching, which is different again. Sad girl fiction is said to be watching women come apart “over relatively low stakes things” (Pip Finkemeyer). The article mentions careers stalling and being unsatisfying, relationship breakdowns, the state of the world… but what are these occurrences if not the stuff of life? The longing for meaningful work, love, and safety, and the frustration of not getting it. We all need meaning, comfort, family (chosen or otherwise), security, the ability to obtain resources ~ even those of us living through war, famine, danger. No ~ especially those of us living under those circumstances.
So, yes, my book is about some of these “low stakes things”. But moreover, it’s about one pervasive cultural narrative that we regard as the only way to happiness. Uni ~ job ~ good career ~ partner ~ house ~ marriage ~ baby ~ more success. Even those of us who identify as progressive and thoughtful can cling subconsciously to this narrative, and yet one look up shows us not everybody gets to be the golden couple; a thought to our extended family and we each know someone who couldn’t have, or struggled to have, children. Know anyone in an unsatisfying or poorly paid job? How many people do you know that own property? (I’m looking at you, Gen Z.)
I can not live in a world where there is only one way to be happy ~ and luckily I don’t. So this book is about not getting what you believed you would get, not getting what you want, not becoming who you thought you’d be, but being happy.