Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep25: Bookshelfie: Monica Ali

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Bestselling writer Monica Ali, finishes off this season with an in-depth chat about the books that she loves, the responsibility she takes on as a writer and how she overcame a shattered self confidence. Monica Ali shot to fame with her literary phenomenon Brick Lane 20 years ago. She has since written four other books, Alentejo Blue, In the Kitchen, Untold Story and Love Marriage. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been nominated for a long list of accolades including the Booker Prize and the George Orwell Prize. She is also the Chair of Judges for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Monica is Patron of Hopscotch Women’s Centre, a charity that was originally set up by Save the Children to support ethnic minority families who had come to join their partners in the UK.  Monica’s book choices are: ** Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lingren ** Emma by Jane Austen ** Middlemarch by George Eliot ** The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge ** The Group by Mary McCarthy Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season six of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of season six? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

The novelist's job is to imagine. And for me, that's a moral act as well, because empathy, the ability to put oneself in somebody else's shoes is the beginning of morality. So there have been studies done as well that reading fiction can make people more empathetic. So if you relinquish that responsibility, you know, it's not like a, you know, that's my right to write about something else.

I know, that's my responsibility as a writer, is to put myself into other people's shoes. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 6. of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction, to share the five books by women that have shaped them. Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about the books you'll be adding to your 2023 reading list. Today I'm joined by best-selling writer

Monica Ali, who's shot to fame with her literary phenomenon brick lane 20 years ago. She's since written four other books, Antalejo Blue, in the Kitchen, Untold Stor's and love marriage most recently. She's a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been nominated for a long list of accolades, including the Booker Prize and the George Orwell Prize. She's also the chair of judges for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Monica is a patron of hopscotch Women's Centre, a charity that was originally set up by Save the Children to support ethnic minority families who had come to join their partners in the UK. And we are delighted to welcome it to the podcast. Hello. Hi. Monica, I have just been chatting to you about the massive boxes of books that have arrived at your house, ready, poison waiting for you to read them as Chair of Judges for the Women's Prize of Fiction.

How do you feel delving into that? A mixture of things. So it was great excitement. It's like Christmas, isn't it? It's like a present. It's like a present. Boxes of books. And that's my favourite present to give or to receive. And also, to give. be honest, a little bit daunted because you have to read them all. But once I've got stuck in, as I now have, I'm just enjoying the process so much because there are, especially I think by the time you get to my age, I'm 56, you sort of think you know your taste and you know which writers are going to interest you and maybe you get a little bit stuck in those channels.

So the joy for me is really opening myself out and seeing just what a broad range of fiction is being written at the moment and discovering writers who I might not have my own accord have picked out in a bookshop and finding myself surprised and delighted by them. Are there any genres that have opened your eyes that you just wouldn't have gravitated towards otherwise? It's not so much the case that I've avoided entire genres. Maybe that's not true. I mean, for instance, fantasy or books with an element of fantasy. I think that's what I'm discovering more,

that there are elements of every single kind of genre that can be blended into create a very unique work. So I might pick up a book and it's got ghosts in it or fantasy elements. I'm not sure that it's going to be for me and then it's just I get sucked in first. Yeah. It's so utterly transporting and you just didn't expect it and so often I wouldn't allow

myself the chance to be transported like that. It's such a joy. It is. It is. As someone who writes for a living does your relationship with reading change depending on where you're at with a writing project? Do you read much for research or inspiration

or do you stop reading when you're writing? I don't stop reading when I'm writing I do a lot of reading for research, part of the process that I really enjoy because it puts off that evil day when it's just you and the blank page. I'm still researching, it's fine, I'm going to eat this out a little longer. So I always do a lot of that. And then when I'm actually writing, because there comes a time when you have to put the research away and not rely on it because you've got to make an imaginative leap and not let the research show too much on the page, when I've put the research. work aside and I'm actually writing, I do still feel the need to read and I still read fiction. I don't have that sort of anxiety of influence, but I've noticed that I tend to go back to books

that I've read before. So I might revisit an old favourite, a classic, for instance. So maybe that does betray a little bit of anxiety around not being influenced by something new. Maybe that's a little bit of safety and going back to something that I know quite well already. You know what's going to happen. Which books do you sort of gravitate towards when you are reading for pleasure, when that is just pure enjoyment. It's just for you, Monica. Well, you know, one of the reasons that I read is because I'm curious about the world.

I want to find things out. So I tend to gravitate towards those books, but what are those books? That can come in a number of forms, right? So it might be to do with a period of time in history. So it might be historical fiction or it might be about a culture that I don't know much about and I'm curious to find out about. So it can cover a broad range of literature really. And where do you steal those moments that are just for yourself?

when do you do your reading? Like most people, I read in bed. Yeah. When I've gone to bed, it can feel like a very guilty pleasure, can't it? If you spend an afternoon reading. Because we don't allow ourselves that. I always say there's no guilty in pleasure. If you like something, then it's good.

Yeah, well, I've got a puppy now. So it's much harder for me to focus on writing. But what I can do while I'm playing. With her, one hand is turn pages with another hand and fit in some reading. So I get two pleasures sometimes at the same time. What? Tell me about your puppy. Oh, she's a six-month-old border terrier called Noodle. I love, I love the name of noodle.

And presumably quite a lot of work if six-month-olds and a terrier. Yes, my goodness. She never stops. I mean, I'd forgotten what it's like to have a puppy. It's like having a toddler with sharp teeth. Well, let's get into some of the books that she might be tugging at your arm while you're engrossed in. Your first book, Shelby Book, today is Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lingren. With her mismatched stockings, carrot-colored hair and freckly face, not to mention superhuman strength and resilience, Pippi Longstocking is a cultural icon.

Pippi lives in a house with a horse, a monkey, a suitcase full of gold, and no grown-ups to tell her what to do. She is an iconic character, but tell us why you chose this book. I think I was about six, or it could have been seven, when this was a book that we got out of the library. I grew up in Bolton, and every weekend my mom would take me to the library in town, and we'd go to the children's section and get out as many books as we were allowed. And one of, we got out the first Pippi Longstocking book, which I think is just called Pippi Longstocking, and I read it.

And I was so taken by this girl who lives without any adult supervision and doesn't conform to any of the norms of society that I couldn't wait to get back the next week and get, there were another two books that I knew I'd spotted. And I've just loved her ever since. And I read, I read them, I think I read them to my daughter. And then she read them again herself. But yeah, she's such a super heroine. Did you read her? I seem to remember her as a character who was present in my childhood. But I can't remember reading the book or reading any of the three books.

I must have done, I must have been read them or been made aware of her. I think there have been movies and cartoons. and so on, so that might have seeped into, you might have seen those. I don't think I've seen those, but I remember the books quite clearly, actually, because I had that second time around with my daughter. And I think she's a heroine who sort of lurs through the ages.

I mean, it was in the 1940s when they were originally. But quite forward thinking. Really forward thinking. So Pippi is brave and very strong, as you say. She could lift up her house with one arm. you're on this sort of superhuman strength she's rebellious she's defiant

she's really witty and cheeky but there's a lot of those traits which were sort of often attributed to boys but she's a girl and you know I think that's why she appealed to me so much

that and the fact that when the police came around to try and take her to a children's home she gets she gets the two policemen one in each hand and just carries them out. And I just remember being so thrilled by that that she could overcome, you know, this sort of unnecessary as I saw at adult supervision.

And she protects other children from being bullied. But she's not a goodie two shoes either. She tells tall tales. She gets self into all sorts of mischief. You know, so I enjoyed all of that. And I think also I read the Famous Five as well, which I also really enjoyed, but there's a tomboy in that, hasn't there, called George?

I related much less to that because I didn't like the idea of you had to sort of act like a boy to have those adventures, whereas I don't think I didn't read Pippi as a tomboy as such. She was just a girl with all those traits. She was just Pippi Longstarring. You can be who you are. I think there was a great power in realising.

that as a child. Do you remember when you read it thinking, okay, I identify with this character? Absolutely. I mean, I wanted to be her, I think. Yes. I mean, the superhuman strength element is also really... It's attractive. Really attractive. She goes to a circus, I think, in one of the books. She definitely goes to a circus and she beats the circus strong man. You know, that's I remember being bowled over by that. What were you like as a child, when you were reading this book around the age of eight, were you good at school? Were you rebellious?

I was not like pippy longstocking at all. You know, I thought I was, and I was very quick at school and, you know, did well in my school work. I was constantly being told that I was lippy or answering back or I'd get in trouble, but I couldn't I didn't feel that I

I mean I don't say stupid things all the time right I mean I'm sure I did to my children and I thought it was legitimate to point out those stupidities I am with you on this and I used to get in so much trouble but I maintain

I still stand by it question everything because they don't always know what they're talking about no we often don't when I know that now you were born in in Daka, East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and then grew up in Bolton, like you mentioned. So what was early life like for you? What are your earliest memories?

You know, I was talking about this with my mum the other day because she was asking me if I remembered anything about Daka, when I was three. And I said, I think that my first memories, apart from a few sort of fragmentary memories, from when we actually came over to the UK. But even then, it's hard to know if those memories from the first months in the UK

are inherited memories or whether you've actually recalled them. So I don't really know what my own first memories are. But I think there were, yes, that sort of traumatic time of fleeing from a war. Yeah. I mentioned in the introduction that you were paying, patron of Hopscotch Women's Centre, which is a charity set up to support ethnic minority families

who had to come to join their partners in the UK. Is this important to you because of your own family's experience of moving to the UK? Yes. So Hopscotch serves the local community around Camden and that includes quite a lot of Bangladeshi families, also Somalis, Eastern European women and children as well. And I mean, they do a fantastic. job. They work with victims of domestic violence, Afghan refugee women, people with complex needs, helping people to get back into employment, or just with simple things like, you know, how to get the bus or how to use money in a cafe and things like that. It's because some of the women who've come at an early age and have been very cloistered and then they've been,

that husband dies or their husband sometimes leaves them and then they don't have even those basic skills. So they do such fantastic work and I'm really, you know, pleased to be able to support that work. Monica, it's time to talk about your second book today, which is Emma by Jane Austen. Emma Woodhouse is one of Austin's most captivating and vivid characters, beautiful, clever, rich and irrepressively witty. Emma organises the lives of the inhabitants of her Sleepy Little Village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work.

When did you read it? I just started senior school. Maybe I was 11 or 12 and I fell in love with Emma straight away, which is sort of ironic because Jane Austen famously wrote a monologue. of her many letters to her relatives that I'm going to take a heroine that no one will much like. But I loved Emma and you're right that she is flawless as her creation, but she has many flaws. As a person, which makes her only the more lovable. So yes, so when the story opens, it has a very famous long opening sentence, Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and

rich and it ends something like had had very little to trouble or vex her in her nearly 21 years and you know from that that trouble is ahead yeah here comes the vexation exactly you know that she's you know a little bit spoiled she definitely is and emma had a governess called miss taylor who has just got married to Mr. Weston and Emma gives herself the credit for that matchmaking because she's the one who introduced them and she decides that matchmaking is a skill that she would like to put it into practice more often

and hone that skill. And she gets warned against this by Mr Knightley who is the eventual love interest. But she goes ahead and she makes so many terrible blunders but she's just sort of adorable, isn't she? When you were 12, 13, reading this, how did it influence you? How did it impact you as a piece of work?

It's the first book that I reread. Okay. And that means a lot, that, you know, you feel compelled to do that. Yes. You want more. So I would say that in a way it's the book that taught me how to read.

because in re-reading you see so much more. So Austin has this very clever way. I mean, she's often credited with creating the free indirect style. So, you know, colloquially, that's a close third person reading. And in doing that, you learn to see through the character's eyes and also simultaneously see beyond what the character could see. So that is, you know, a definition of dramatic irony. And I didn't know those terms.

And at the time I was nowhere near knowing them. But I started, I just started to understand by rereading how the writer was letting us see that sort of double perspective and how she was filtering everything through. the consciousness of her protagonist and some other characters. You know, we flip between perspectives. So it's the book that really taught me how to read.

And it taught me the pleasures of rereading because, you know, you read to find out what's going to happen next. When you read it again, you know what's going to happen next. But there's a different pleasure in that you see all the signs. So, for instance, the piano, the secret gift of the piano to Jane Fairfax. the first time you read it, you know, you're not in on the secret. But of course it's come from Frank Churchill and she's secretly engaged to Frank Churchill. And the second time you read it, the pleasure is in discovering all those clues that you think you've actually missed all along.

And there are so many things that you pick out on a second, third, fourth reading. I mean, the last time I read it, I was thinking about when Harriet, who is, as protégé. She's only 17 years old. And Emma encourages her to think that she might be able to marry Mr. Elton, who's this sort of odious, oliginous, clergyman. And of course, that all goes horribly wrong. And he's such a social snob. He's never going to look twice at Harriet, who's a, you know, girl of modest means. And there's a scene where, Harriet has this ceremonial burning of the contents of this little box that she's collected of little tokens from Mr Elton except. They're not tokens from him at all.

They're like a bit of bandage that was used when he cut his finger. Even the bandage that was actually used, it was a bit of the excess that was cut off. And then there's a pencil without any lead that he has used at one point. And in the first few readings, I think I thought, oh, well, she's really genuinely heartbroken about Mr. Elton going off and marrying somebody else. But actually, that's not at all, you know, that's not really the case. It was a totally hollow thing, you know, that there wasn't a relationship. And the whole thing was as hollow as that empty pencil, right? The pencil without any lead.

So, you know, you can go back to her again and again, Jay. in Austin. You see that nothing is incidental. You see the cleverness of the patterning. And it's, yeah, so I'm still reading her and finding new things. It's so interesting that you bring up the joys of rereading and the revelations in rereading. Having said that when you're writing, you tend to return to books that you've read before and realizing that perhaps there's something in what you get from that experience that is enriching during writing that's obviously just enriching overall.

That's clever of you. It sort of just came up without, you know, maybe you don't, maybe we're not actively thinking, okay, I need to reread this book for this reason, but it's giving you something. And as a writer, I mean, to have read this book at the age of 11, 12, 13, I mean, did you know you wanted to be a writer then?

Was it even a prospect on your horizon? No, no. I mean, absolutely not. I mean, I was always a voracious reader, but the idea that I could be a writer never ever occurred to me until much later. And I think that the seeds of that were planted actually by, am I allowed to mention a book by a man? You may. It does sometimes happen on this podcast and it's okay. When I read the Buddha of Suburba in my 20s, that was actually the first. time I thought, oh, is it, it's possible to have a background not that similar from my own. I mean, you know, Henneath was writing about a Pakistani father and a white mother. And that was, I mean, not that I acted on it straight away, but that was the first little inkling that I had that it was possible to be me and or somebody like me and to write.

And to write Brick Lane for that to have the impact in the same. success that it did. What was that experience like for you as a new writer? You know, looking back on it, I think I was a bit sort of rabbit in the headlights. My children were still very young. I wrote Brick Lane when my son was two when I started it, two and a half. I was, you know, I had a baby in arms. My daughter was just a baby. And so there was still very little when Brick Lane came out. And I was sort of in a whirlwind and simultaneously very concerned to be a present, fully focused mother. So I didn't enjoy it as much as I should have done.

It's often the case there isn't it? You can't take stock until way after it. You're like, oh, that happened. Yes, yeah. But of course, you know, it was a wonderful thing that it did so well and it was loved by so many people. and it's now an A-level set text, which is bringing it to a new generation of readers. And, you know, I talk to groups of six-formers about it

who are finding new ways to relate to it and read it. So, you know, it's, yeah, it's a marvellous thing. Bailey's is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bailey's is the perfect adult treat, whether shaken in a cocktail, over ice cream or paired with your favourite book. Check out Baileys.com for our favourite Bailey's recipes.

Have you just been diagnosed with breast cancer? Do you have a million questions in your head but you don't know who to turn to? I'm Dr Lizzie Reardon, the breast surgeon with breast cancer. And my new podcast, so now I've got breast cancer, is the only one you need. Every show, with the help of my expert guests, I'm answering your questions and no topic is off limits. So listen now to Season 1 of So Now I've Got Breast Cancer. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Time to talk about your third book, Shabby book, which is Middlemarch by George Elliott.

Taking place in the years leading up to the first reform bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life. art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships, considered an exemplar of Victorian realism, while also being a novel of deeply considered characters, confined in this plot of social tension in a setting that is this microcosm of a time of larger societal change. Can you tell us a bit about this book and why you chose it? Yeah, so I read it when I was in my later teens, 15, 16, something like that. And the first time I read it, I really identified, I think, with Dorothy. I mean, it's such a huge novel, and there are lots of storylines.

And Dorothy is sort of the central character. And I stuck very much with her, and I was always impatient to get back to her. and she again is a very young heroine like Hemmer we've just been talking about I think she's 2021 and she marries this sort of cold-hearted monstrous clergyman

Casubon who it's sort of horrified I had this horrified fascination like why are you doing this you know she's going to come into her own fortune so unlike lots of heroines of novels of that era, it wasn't sort of a choice between marry this man or become a governess or face

poverty. She had her own fortune. So I was always, you know, wrestling with this puzzle. Like, why is she doing this? But it's because she thinks of him as a good man. And she comes to realize that she's made a terrible blunder. She's made a terrible mistake. And the reason that she becomes a real heroine is because although she suffers sort of, you know, humiliation and pain and so on, she continues to want to do good in the world and she continues to want to find the best in people. I think that's what draws everyone to her. But that first time I read it, I wasn't sophisticated enough to realise that Casabon is impotent, you know, I didn't get that in that first reading. So I was always sort of full of horror of this desiccated old man, pouring away

poor young Dorothea. The theme of relationships and marriage is prevalent throughout this novel. And it's a subject that you address in your most recent level, love marriage, which I absolutely loved, read earlier this year. Did Elliot's portrayal of disastrous marriages? Did it peak your interest at all? It sounds like you were very curious about how, why, why? as something that would then lead you to write about it.

Well, perhaps. I mean, I think the thing with Austin as well, and actually lots of women writers, that you can get to things about society through a domestic lens. So whether you're reading Middle March or whether you're reading Jane Austen, it doesn't stop the canvas.

I mean, Jane Austen famously said, oh, I'd, you know, paint my, little, I'm going to have to paraphrase, but I paint with a brush on a piece of ivory sort of thing, we'll find small portraits, but, you know, actually she knew that she was doing something much bigger than that, because through those very intimate portraits, you get a lot about society, and you definitely have that in Middle March. I mean, it is a broad canvas, so, you know, there's stuff about the death of George the 4th, there's the stuff about the great reform bill of 1830, whatever it was. outbreaks of cholera, the impending railway that's going to be built.

So you got a lot about the stuff of society at the time. A lot of the references I didn't understand on that first reading, and I'd get lost in it, frankly, but it was good training. Because I was so invested in Dorothy, I also Lydgate, it didn't matter to me. I knew that I didn't understand the half of it. but I knew that it was worth pursuing and I think that was a big part of my literary education

so I had then a period of reading a lot of the Russian greats like Tolstoy and stuff and when you get to the Battle of Borodino as a 16 year old girl you're not that interested or I wasn't that interested but I think that training with reading Middlemarch and being willing to grapple with the hard stuff also willing to admit that you don't get it

but it doesn't matter. There's still a lot to be. So you're learning, and you're also learning not to be so, Erica, is to think that you should get it all. Central to Middle March is the idea that the novel's heroine, Dorothea, cannot hope to achieve heroic stature

as she lives in the wrong time amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state. To what extent do you think it's the writer's responsibility to question and challenge the state as a question. Is it ever your intention when you set out to write a novel? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I always start my novels with characters.

I don't start with, I want to change the world. Because, you know, that's a sort of vainglorious hope, isn't it? So I start with the characters, but naturally the things that are of interest to me. come out through those characters. And often those characters perhaps do end up challenging things about the status quo or giving an alternative perspective. So the answer to your question is sort of not intentionally. I get that.

I feel like that's often the case in all pursuits, whether writing or other creative pursuits or otherwise. As soon as you come up against anything, you're like, well, that's not okay. Because we should question things as human beings. And that is very likely to filter into our work as well. Into the work. Exactly. Exactly that.

Filter into the work is a good way of putting it. You've always been a brilliant advocate of freedom of speech and for some time an active member as well of Penn, the human rights charity who supports writers at risk of persecution. And you've also talked about how society is currently a marketplace for outrage, which I feel every time I open any social media. Do you feel that there are any topics? I don't open social media.

No, that's the best way to do it. Yes. I'm learning also to do that too. It's just people shouting over each other and not listening, and it's not good for your mental health. Are there any topics or characters that you feel are off limits? I think once you start thinking like that, you know, we're really. all doomed. I mean, the novelist's job is to imagine. And for me, that that's a moral act as well,

because empathy, the ability to put oneself in somebody else's shoes is the beginning of morality. So there have been studies done as well that reading fiction can make people more empathetic. So if you relinquish that responsibility, you know, it's not like a, you know, that's my right to write about something else. That's my responsibility as a writer is to put myself into other people's shoes. Your fourth book, Shelby book, Monica, is The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge. Frida and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian-run wine bottling factory. A work outing offers promise for Frida and Terror for Brenda. Passions run high on a chilly day of freedom,

and life after the outing never returns to normal. Inspired by author Beryl Bainbridge's own experiences of working at a London wine factory in the 1970s, the Bottle Factory Outing examines issues of friendship and consent in this offbeat, haunting yet hilarious novel. Why is this book important to you? So as I said, I went through this period in my teens of reading a lot of the classics. And, you know, a lot of them were men from Tolstoy to Balzac to Dickens to whoever else. And then I think I was about 18.

I was about to go off to college. And I picked up this book from the library. And it was like a breath of fresh. I mean, it's such a sort of wickedly funny book. And if I told you the plot, which I won't, it sounds like a farce. You know, and it is a farce in some ways. But it's such an acute observation of English moors, isn't it? So Brenda, who is, I think she's 32, divorced.

She's been brought up in a sort of middle-class house. She's been privately educated. That's something that's reiterated quite a few times. And when Mr. Rossi, the assistant manager of the bottle factory, is, I mean, just groping her in the cellars, I mean, it's awful black humour. She's got all these layers of clothes because it's so cold in the factory. and she's got newspaper stuffed beneath her clothes

and he's tried to get his hands on her flesh and some newspaper are falling out all over the place. But it's been explained to us that Brenda has been brought up to think that it's polite to say no when you mean yes and yes when you mean no. Do you want another piece of cake? If you want it, it's polite to say no so as not to look greedy.

And if you don't want it, so as not to look rude. You say, yeah. So she's sort of stifled by this, you know, weird English sense of manners. So it is a comedy of manners in that way. And it's very, very funny. Sexual politics and gender dynamics, they create high tension in this book. Brenda and really they have quite different takes on men.

They have different. I guess manners, like you've just said, and the men they work within the factory. So Frida has romantic designs on a manager. Brenda tries to keep her head down. Do you think Beryl was actually quite ahead of a time with this book? Yes, yes, absolutely. Also, another reason might really appeal to me, I think.

I mean, it is just brilliant prose. The style is sort of deceptively simple. I mean, they're simple declarative short sentences often. But, you know, don't let that fool you into thinking that this is not a very enormously sophisticated piece of literature. But another reason that it appealed to me is this portrait of an immigrant community that I'd never come across. I'd never thought about it before, which is the Italian immigrants set in London. And the owner of the factory, Panagotti or something like that, he has imported, basically, a number of poor peasants from it. to work in the bottle factory

and they clubbed together to buy houses, they call for their relatives to come over, you know, cousins and wives and children. The children are now starting to grow up. Some of them are going off to university.

Freeder is very keen to get the factory unionised, I mean in quite comical ways because of the terrible working conditions. The workers themselves are not interested because to them, although the conditions are terrible, it's better than what they had at home. So I started to see parallels with Asian communities, you know, the things about kinship, about clubbing together to buy houses, about the children bettering themselves, all of those things.

So it was really fascinating to me that there was this whole other group, the Italians from an earlier era, who had gone through something similar, you know, things about food and language and all of that. So I think that was another reason it really appealed to me. The simple sentences, which are not so simple, because that's just a way of writing. You know, the prose is rich. Do you think that if this book had been written by a man, it would have been viewed as simple in any way, shape, or form?

I do think that Bainbridge, although she, you know, was fated, she's shortlisted for the book five times, I think. I still think she was an underrated author. In spite of consistent accolades. Yes, yes. I think, you know, I don't doubt that. I think you're absolutely correct. I think she's a whole level of sophistication ahead of many of those contemporaries.

and I don't think that she had the claim that, or even the readership, although she has many loyal readers, yeah, I think she's underrated. On the subject of reception of the work, after you published Untold Story in 2011, a novel which imagines a Princess Diana-like characters post-fame life after faking her own death,

you said some of the reactions to the book made you experience an obliterate. of self. Can you tell us what you meant by this? Well, I think I just had a massive failure of confidence. I mean, I stopped writing for some time. I mean, it was 10 years between my last book and love marriage coming out in 2022. Not that I stopped writing for the whole of that time, but I did for a period just stop writing. But I found that when I wasn't writing at all, I got depressed. So I started writing again.

It seems that writing isn't optional for me. I mean, it's something that I have to do. What made you start writing again? How did you find the motivation to do it? Well, I actually tried to write for TV, which has never come to fruition, but that's okay. I started reading lots of screenplays and drama scripts. I think basically because I was watching a lot of TV,

which is something that depressed people sometimes do. I'm watching, you know, some really fantastic dramas. So I got curious and interested about how that worked and I'd like to learn new things. So I started doing that, and I worked with a number of production companies and had scripts commissioned and so on. So that just allowed me to rediscover the joys of writing

that eventually led me. back to, you know, what is my real work, which is writing a novel. And then I was playing around with these two different stories, one about this woman Harriet, who is a sort of liberal intelligence here, Primrose Hill inhabitant, and another one about Yasmin, who's a junior doctor, who's engaged to another doctor. And there were, Yasmin has an Indian heritage. and they were two worlds that, you know, entirely separate, two different stories I was kind of playing with.

And then I just had this moment of thinking, what if I put them together? And then I knew that I had my material and then the story and just sort of, you know, it was the thing that I then had to write with those two worlds coming together. When you stopped writing for your own, I mean, outside of coming back to it as a job, as work,

how did you find the motivation in yourself, inspire yourself, to feel whole while doing it? I think it was just the realisation that I have to write to, I don't know why I have to write, but I do have to write. I mean, that's my way of making sense of the world of processing things. It's a necessary creative outlet and I had to let go of that idea of it. It's something that's too difficult and that I can't deal with it. I mean, I have to deal with all of the different aspects of it because it's a necessary part of who I am. Yeah.

It's time to talk now about your fifth book-shelphi book, which is The Group by Mary McCarthy, a novel that follows the lives of eight graduates known simply to their classmates as the group. An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings after graduation and a wedding, the women begin their adult lives. It's only when one of them dies that they all come back together again to more than. loss of a friend, a confidant, and most importantly, a member of the group. Why did you pick this one? I picked this because it's a classic, modern classic, that I hadn't read until I finished

writing Love Marriage. And I picked it up at random in a bookshop and I knew all about it. Well, I thought I knew all about it because it's, you know, such as its fame. But I sort of picked it up with the intention of like filling a hole in my, literary landscape or education rather than expecting it to really grip me. Because what I knew about it was that it had been published in the early 60s. It had spent a couple of years on the bestseller list. It had been a huge success and that it had lots of sex in it.

And it was considered shocking at the time. It was banned in several countries. But I thought, well, you know, if the main thing is about sex and contraception and motherhood, and it's written in the 60s and set in the 20s and 30s, how gripping is it going to be? You know, we've moved on. I was so utterly wrong. I was so utterly wrong about that.

I mean, the most famous scene is when Dottie, sort of the members of the group, gets deflowered, because they talk about defloration, by this sort of luscious, misogynist, which is a bit of a tongue twister to say, called Dick. And it says, forthrighten is brutal and as funny as, you know, if it had been written today. I mean, she writes with such precision about the emotions that are involved and the embarrassment of the characters.

But crucially, McCarthy herself is not. at all embarrassed. You know, she goes for it full throttle. It's a remarkable book, which are you talking about, you know, if it had been written by a man or if it had been from a male perspective, how might it be differently perceived? Because again, it's that thing of coming through things from the female lens, which led some critics like Norman Mailer, most famously,

to dismiss it as a trivial lady writer's book, which, you know, it is sort of astonishing. His complaint was that the characters are going to have to paraphrase, don't have the means or the desire to affect change. So his complaint was that it looked at small, trivial things, but actually it doesn't do that at all. I mean, things like motherhood are not trivial. That's not a small thing.

Right, for a start. But also she does deal with big themes, like the sort of loss of faith and progress, you know, following a period when, you know, things seemingly were just getting better and better. And then there's the crash of the early 30s and there's another war and so on. So those are big themes which are running through the character.

lives. And then in terms of the capital piece or politics, you know, she does deal with things like FDR's New Deal, the Spanish Civil War. But we get that through the perspective of the characters. And because of that, you've got a sort of skewering of male pomposity about the big issues of the day. So one of the characters has a married lover and he's a supporter of the Spanish communists on the side and the Spanish Civil War and he's a supporter of Stalin as well and his lover, Polly, I think.

She hardly sort of dares, you know, the politics are for the men but of course she sees through you know, she thinks that the lover should have listened more carefully about the Moscow show trials. And she doesn't know whether she's being silly or not, but we know who's the dupe, you know, in that, and who's got the more discerning eye. So the way that McCarthy approaches those big issues is not through the men who are participating more actively and pontificating it through the female gaze, but that doesn't make it any less acute. In fact, it makes it more acute.

But sex and motherhood are political and also inextricably linked to loss of faith in progress. I mean, I'm losing faith in progress when it comes to sex in politics. And we look at what's happening around the world. These are big themes. They are big issues. They're huge themes and their themes that are things that are. haven't gone away. So I think when you read the group, you just do become a little bit more alive and alert to all the Kantan hypocrisy in the ways that women then and now are oppressed and not listened to. You once proclaimed in an interview that male white writers have a freedom to write what they want, but for women writers, the opposite is true. Do you still think

that? Do you think that continues to be the case? I think that's been challenged in some ways, just in very recent years. You know, the issue that you referred to earlier about, you know, do you have the right to write about anything you choose? There's been some pushback to writers who have chosen to write about cultures that are other than their own. But I still think that the balance for writers of colour is starting to change. there is a little bit more awareness that sort of saying that writers of colour are only of

interest if they're writing about, to put it in the most crude terms, guns and gangs if you're a black writer or arranged marriages if you're coming from a Muslim Asian background. But I think we're starting to see that just being eaten away at. I think those things, they're always difficult because they're not explicit. So it's harder to challenge when it's not explicit. But I think that challenge is being gradually made. I do have to ask Monica. I read that you had to conquer your own fears of writing sex scenes

for your fifth novel for love marriage. But you said actually when we introduced the group that this was something you read after having finished writing love marriage. So unfortunately there weren't any tips. could have picked up from it. How did you find that? Oh God. You know, I'd written about an affair before. So Nazanin and Brick Lane has an affair, but it was quite in keeping with her character as a devout woman to close the door at the point where she gets into bed. I didn't actually need to go there. But with Yasmin in love marriage, sex is a part of how she explores her identity

and who she is in the world and how she wants to be in the world and how constrained she has been by society's expectations, about getting in touch with her own desires, which she is also sometimes guilty of suppressing. So I couldn't sort of just bottle out of it and I knew I had to do it. But I was dreading it. But actually when it came down to doing it, I actually quite enjoyed it. It was fun to do.

And I think because it's integral to the character building, it was fine. And then the period sex scene was actually really fun. I was, you know what? I was like, oh, yeah, this is on the page. You know what? As it should be. How it should be?

How it should be. What a selection you brought to us today So we've had the group by Mary McCarthy We've had the bottle factory outing by Beryl Bainbridge Middle March by George Elliott Emma by Jane Austen and Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren But Monica, if you had to choose just one of those books

As a favourite Which would it be and why? I think I would have to It's really difficult But I would take Emma Because as I said earlier Emma is the book that really taught me how to read. So I treasure it for that reason, amongst many other reasons.

Well, I wish you the very best of luck. In all the reading you're about to do is you take up your role as chair of judges of the Women's Prize for Fiction, 24. And it's been such an absolute pleasure to get to chat to you. So thank you so much. Thank you, Vicki. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

I'm Vick Hope, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.