Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S7 Ep13: Bookshelfie: Miranda July

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Miranda July is a multi-award-winning director, writer, filmmaker and artist and in this episode she opens up about ageing, reaching her creative limit and reading with every meal.   Miranda has written, directed and starred in three feature films as well as over a dozen short films. Her first major film production, Me and You and Everyone We Know, won six awards including the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2016, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences in acknowledgement as a writer. In addition to her work in films, Miranda is a talented writer whose work often explores slices of ordinary life and  has been described as ‘wry, smart’ and ‘painfully alive’.  Her collection of short vignettes, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.  Her new book, All Fours, has just been published and follows the journey of a perimenopausal woman who upends her life, following an extramarital affair.  Miranda’s book choices are: ** One! Hundred! Demons! By Lynda Barry ** Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson ** The IHOP Papers, by Ali Liebegott ** Daughter by Claudia Dey ** Trans Sex by Lucie Fielding  Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season seven 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 seven? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

Each thing I make, I'm really like hit in the face with how not perfect it is, you know? Like just by existing, it's utterly failed, right? Because the perfect thing is in your head and it's this feeling you conjured and it kept you going through all these years. But then the second it exists, now here's a finite, real thing. It's like a sort of death or mourning happens of the thing that kept you going, which wasn't It was not finite. There was always more room. 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 am your host for Season 7 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 2024 reading this. Today I am joined by American writer, filmmaker and artist Miranda July. Miranda July is a multi-award winning director who has written, directed and starred in three feature films as well as over a dozen short films. Her first major film production, me and you and everyone we know, won six awards, including the Camerador at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2016, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences in acknowledgement as a writer. In addition to her work in films, Miranda is a talented writer whose work often explores slices of ordinary life and has been described as wry, smart and painfully alive. Her collection of short vignettes, no one belongs here more than you, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Awards. Her new book, All Fours, has just been published and follows the journey of the perimenopausal woman who are pared her life following an extramarital affair. Welcome to the podcast Miranda. Yeah, so glad to be here. Hi. Well, it's so lovely to be able to speak to you. It's evening here and I think morning over there. And I'd love to know where in your day reading usually fits in. Do you get the time? Do you make the time?

Oh, yeah. I mean, in my ideal day, I read with every meal, which I know you're not, you're supposed to like, focus on the food or whatever. But if I'm alone, I will read with every meal and then I will read before bed. And that's all heaven to me. Like maybe that sounds like a very sad life to someone, but I actually changed my life to be able to make that happen more often. Why is that important to you? Why is weaving it in at those times such a pleasure? I mean, if I'm writing, then the lunch break, when I'm reading the break from my own work to someone else's, I think is it just, you just remind yourself like, oh, right, this works. Like this thing I'm doing that seems to be one directional at the moment. It actually functions. It's a call and response. And I might feel very alone now. But look,

over lunch, I can be moved to tears, you know, and then and kind of revitalized. And I love to have that built into the day. Do you read different things when you're writing or when you're working opposed to that pure pleasure? Do you use books for research or other art forms? Yeah. I mean, I don't have a rule about it. And I'm not one of those people who, you know, spends years researching before they even touch the fiction. You know, there's, I, I worry about getting distracted by researching. So I often just do it later, you know, like I don't, I write something about something knowing nothing, you know, just kind of, yeah, and I'll pull it in later or not.

Sometimes I'll just go with my version of that reality. With this book, I'm talking about a subject, you know, know, basically women in the middle of their life, what that means hormonally, emotionally, logically in terms of their families and their work, in terms of their desires. And as much as I was excited the whole way through to create this fiction, I also thought, no, I can't just make it up. I can't, like, I can make it up for one person because I'm one person. but this is something that's so different for everyone. Like I actually do need to interview older women who have been through this time,

interview gynecologists, read all the books that there are, you know, most of which tend to be more medical, you know, more in the guide world than in the fiction world, but certainly the fiction books that exist. I read, you know, Darcy Steinkie's flash count diary, if I'm not portraying the name, is one that's more recent. Yeah, and then just like talking to friends and stuff. So this was a book where research was important and then figuring out how to weave in, you know, all these voices that are not in agreement, you know,

necessarily and not having the same experience, have them kind of come together to form a picture of a time. This is, of course, all fours, your new book which has just been published and which we're going to talk a little bit more about in just a moment. But let's move on to your first book, Shelby book, the first book that you've picked for us today. And it's 100 Demons by Linda Barry, inspired by a 16th century Zen monks painting of 100 demons chasing each other across a long scroll. Linda Barry confronts various demons from her life in 17 full-colour vignettes. In Barry's hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you and stay with you. Your worst boyfriend, kickball games on a warm summer night,

watching your baby brother damp the smell of various houses in the neighbourhood you grew up in, or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you're officially a teenager. Barry froze the idea of truth out the window by asking the reader to decide if fiction can have truth and if autobiography can have a fiction, a hybrid that Barry coins, and I'm going to just try and get this right, auto biofictionalography. Tell us why this book made your list. Well, I love Linda Berry. I grew up on her, you know, before she was a McCartner. Award-winning book writer. She just, I knew her in high school as the comic artist in the free paper in my, in the

Bay Area where I grew up in California. And they were these little comic strips about her youth for the most part, her life with her sister and her grandmother and her mother. And, oh, I just, I lived for them. and it was a kind of very raw storytelling that, like, you could just easily believe it was all true, but it was better than true. You know, it was like my first taste of like, oh, when something comes alive, it's not because it's like a field recording, you know, it's, it's, it's come through your, all your experience

and your art, you know, it's art. 100 demons, and she has many, many books. This one, I found. right after my first movie came out. So I was I was 30 when me and you and everyone we know came out, which though I'd been making work in all the mediums that I work in for for 10 years, you know, more since high school, I, this was a big shift for me. Like more people saw that movie than had before. And it felt a little, you know, so exciting, such a gift to my life still and also a little bit like a creative car crash, you know, like something I needed to

rehabilitate myself after creatively. This idea of the 100 demons, which isn't, you know, as you said, her idea, it's this ancient painting exercise from a Zen monk in the 16th century was, you know, you just paint the demons as they come. And she says they weren't the demons. she expected and and then there's these like demon voices crying out around her this is pointless what the hell are you doing where's this going to get you time waste or you know sort of as you're writing about the demons of your past there's also all the demons around your head saying you know like this isn't good um and it it allowed me to to think of that process that process of rehabilitation as a creative process and allowed me to understand, oh, every single person I admire

who's made more than one thing that's come out in the world has gone through this, has recovered from that one thing meeting its audience and the new experience of that. And it's basically introducing a level of self-consciousness, you know, which can be there, whatever, on an Instagram post, you know what I mean? Like you don't have to go very far or do very much to become cripplingly self-conscious. And so this book really like showed me an example of someone working with that as the material, you know, instead of being stopped by it, taking it on creatively. I love the way you say it's better than true.

I actually found a quote from me that was the truth is no book can hold all of life, but we have to try. What truths are you trying to tell in your art? And do those truths change as we move through life? Each thing I make, I'm really like hit in the face with how not perfect it is, you know, like just by existing, it's utterly failed, right? Because the perfect thing is in your head and it's this feeling you conjured and it kept you going through all these years.

but then the second it exists now here's a finite real thing it's like a sort of death or mourning happens of the thing that kept you going which was not finite there was always more room and for more feelings and more perfection and more you know messy imperfection you know and just the right balance and and i guess after a while you begin to realize like oh it's not any one of these things, it's a life, you know? Like, it's a practice of doing this. And, and it's not about perfection or even a certain kind of consistency that one tries to, you know, I mean, one's standards are like sacred. Even that, you know, you have to be kind of at the mercy of real life and children and pandemics and your own health and energy love. You know, so like,

that's part of what makes work good. Like when we connect to something and it feels alive, it's because someone couldn't meet their standards often because real life came in and yet somehow they got it down. Yeah, you create this thing and you bring it into the world, but by the time it entered the world, the world has changed, your world has changed necessarily because the thing has been made.

And you mentioned, you know, having children that your child now enjoys is Linda Barry's work? Do you read together? Well, I don't have to anymore. They're 12, but you know, it's so sweet is they'll call me, you know, they'll be reading for the 10 millionth time, one of these Linda Barry books, and they'll call me in to have me look at one part that they love. And it, the whole thing just brings me to tears, you know, like, like realizing like,

oh, I read this long before you were born. and you're getting it in just the way that it got me and us talking about like, why is that? I'm remembering this one thing, like they were pointing at the sound of playing kickball at night in the neighborhood with the neighborhood kids, which frankly is not something they've ever done or probably will ever do. I don't know where all the neighbor kids are, but we're not playing kickball at night. But that somehow got transferred from her childhood to mine to the, there's, you know, the feeling of it just is such magic. Yeah. And I guess those sliffery,

blurry borders between time and place and memory and it is that autobiophictionalography that she's coined. Yeah. We move on now to your second bookshelfy book, which is Acts of Infidelity by Lena Anderson. When Esther Nilsson meets the actor Olaf Sten, she falls madly in love. Olaf makes no secret of being married, but he and Esther nevertheless start to meet regularly and begin to conduct a strange dance of courtship. Olaf insists he doesn't plan to leave his wife, but he doesn't object to this new situation either. It's far too much fun. Esther, on the other hand, is convinced that things might change, but as their relationship continues, over repeated summers of distance and winters of heated meetings,

in bars, she is forced to realize the truth. Esther Nilsson has become a mistress. Why did this book, Acts of Invidality, affect you so much, Miranda? Well, so there is an act of infidelity in all fours, and I read this when I was writing that. And her level of obsession, like the whole book is about that. My whole book is about a lot of different things. But you can wonder, when you're really getting into the obsessive detail, you can wonder, like, is this, does anyone want to read this? Like, it's, like, how much is too much obsessiveness? And at what point does it kind of work against itself? And this book, it goes so far in the minutia of all the kind of mental, like, bar. And,

You do with yourself just to get through the minutes, you know, when you're waiting for someone who's really not, not worthy. Like, on some level, you know they're not worthy and they're not going to give you what you want and that only makes it, you know, like all, all that. But without, she also, she's not a super knowing narrator. Like, you know, you could write about all that. And then you could also add like, hmm, I wonder why I'm like this. Like, why would I be addicted to longing? What in my childhood? You know, no, this, this narrator has a pretty narrow focus. And it fascinated me that that works. Like, that's fine. It's still really brilliant. You don't, like, fiction works that way and also the specificity of a character of their particular brain, which,

which, you know, I think is like, and I say this, you know, in a kindred sense, like there's some neurodivergent kind of singularity to that brain. This is not, I don't know the author at all, so I'm not speaking to that, but I'm just saying like the relentlessness of the focus was liberating to me because it was like, right, you can go past the point that. you've seen before in fiction and see where that takes you. And it took me in a different place, but this book, yeah, helped me get there. I heard you mentioned that you were interested in the minutia of the narrator's romantic fixation, that this serious woman, talking of Lena Anderson, a serious woman, a serious woman, a photographer felt that it was worthwhile to write a book about these things. That's, I was almost going to say, like, please look at the office. And so, author photo on the back, because that is a serious woman.

Yeah. That's a serious, brilliant prize-winning, you know, Sweden's highest literary honor woman. And I guess that's truly what was liberating is that she would take a topic that could be so easily dismissed, so easily dismissed, ridiculed, you know. and just treat it like philosophy, you know, like, like the Greeks or something that, you know, like something that we don't have to debate its merit for a book and for a book that's not, you know, your like typical romance novel and isn't going to end that way or be like that at any point. And yet has the propulsion, like I should.

note, like, you are propelled in the way that you are propelled in, like, a rom-com or a romance novel, because it is a human structure. Like, you are, like, it can be done in all these different ways, but there is something, like, built into our bodies, you know, this kind of narcotic allegiance to a hole, to, like, a black hole that, yeah, I hadn't seen, described in this way. You've commented in the past on sort of the gendered criticism of your work as tweeter, or as whimsical and, you know,

what is considered a worthwhile subject in fiction. And you said you needed room and confidence to write your latest novel, to write all fours. Why do you feel reluctant or nervous when writing? When writing in general or with this book? This book actually. Yeah, this book was. different because, I mean, picture me, I started writing when I was 45. I started writing this

book, but all the way in my early 40s leading up to that, I was starting to notice this kind of narrowing of the story. Like it seemed like there'd been imagery and mythology and interest in the my women's story, you know, a women's story. So, you know, it had been almost overwhelming, the involvement in my reproductive system and, you know, and what I do with it and my body. And then suddenly I was sort of having to like search the internet for just like basic facts about what happens next for this body for this reproductive system. And it wasn't even like clear cut what the answer was or what I was supposed to do. And the vibe of it, like even more than the lack of information or stories, the vibe was kind of like, what's coming is so humiliating

that we're actually not talking about it out of respect for you. And so it's a mutual favor that we'll do each other is just not talk about that you're getting older. And you can kind of still present as if you're young and we'll kind of go along with it and that's kind of called aging gracefully, you know. And meanwhile, there was this very intense almost like whisper network among me and my friends that was like the opposite of this. We were talking about not just our bodies, but our desires and our marriages and our, like we were questioning everything. It was like a time of radical questioning and I couldn't find the book about it. And yet I was nervous because I was like, well, if there's not the book, then maybe if you write the book, something very bad happens to

you. You know, like I'm not sure what the bad thing is, but I can kind of sense it in everything around me that it might be better to not tie myself to my age and to the word perimenopause and to, you know, but finally it was just like the conversation was too interesting. And I thought, well, this is the conversation that could kind of see me through the rest of my life, since I am only going to get older, you know, and I'm going to need some kind of, something more than just nothing. Your protagonist is deliberately left nameless, but, you know, you've just described something that you experienced and I'm sure many readers would read you into her.

how difficult is it for you to include or exclude yourself from your narratives? I do that to the sort of conflating. I mean, as I just did with Lena Anderson, I was like, look at her author photo. That's a serious woman. I always'm flipping to the author photo and being like, that's who I'm reading about. And then. You do, yeah. Yeah, one does.

And unfortunately, you know, one does it more with women. You know, that is part of the. part of sexism is, you know, the failure to understand that women can create a world that's different from theirs. And then I think I made a life that actually increases that even more by acting in movies that I wrote and directed. So I thought, well, you know, either I can kind of rail against this, which sounds exhausting, since I know I need to write about a woman my age with roughly my life. I can either be like, but she has red hair and she's an architect and you know, like really build that up and kind of keep saying it's not me, it's not me all the way

through. Or I can kind of generously lend my narrator like the loose details of my life. Like my career, you know, her career isn't like overly defined. It could be my career. Not name her. And then, do what I want with her, you know, write fiction with that character. And maybe that will actually add energy to the book. Like maybe we're at a point in culture where we can handle something like that, someone sort of creating an avatar of themselves and then using it to tell a fictional story. Like I think we are there. And it can be a pleasure. And it also just spares me, you know, having to like sort of endlessly debate that thing like well I know what I did and I know that it's fun to read like it adds a level of pleasure and and there that's enough and then whatever

knock yourselves out like speculating as we do. Bailey's is proudly supporting the women's prize of fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bayleys 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. The third book that you brought today, which is the IHop Papers by Ali Liebergot, a lonely virgin searching for her sexual identity and obsessed with her philosophy teacher. Francesca has followed her professor Irene to California.

where Irene has relocated to live with her young male lover and former student. Once in San Francisco, Francesca is forced to work at the local pancake house. Much to her dismay, she has to wear a ridiculous Heidi of the Alps uniform, suicidal and euphoric. Francesca seeks solace in anything and anyone who might distract her from her unrequited love for Irene. What is it about this book that appeals to you? Yeah, I mean,

This book should is just like a queer classic. Like any young, butch mask of center person looking for a, like, hero to read about or, you know, whatever, a hapless hero, should look for this book because you just don't, you don't see that narrator very often. And it's so finely written.

It's so funny. I mean, I'm remembering a point where she can't, so just picture this like super butch, you know, lesbian. But yeah, for her work at the International House of Pankton, I guess is the UK thing, but it's like, you know, a diner here that's a chain in the U.S. She has to wear this like uber feminine outfit, like, like, yeah, Heidi kind of outfit. And but she's, you know, it's filthy, right? She's not even thinking about it. She's just her work. And she keeps getting hit on by like biker dudes and like really intensely masculine people. And she just realizes like the way it's holding her body, just like the container that she happens to be in is doing enough work that she's simply femme enough to get asked out by

these men and it's those stories are so poignant and so so funny and interesting and i should say like this book even though it's like blurbed by eileen miles and you know one of ali lebegot's many books i'm pretty sure it's out of print and um right and so many books by our like queer heroes are out of print. Like simply do not like the you know the presses that published them um sometimes don't continue to exist. And, uh, and so they don't find their readership. And then those kids, you know, or whatever people of any age remain. I mean, you, you really do have to see an example of yourself in the world to, to keep living, you know, to know that's possible. And I know there's a lot of representation. Right now, it feels like there's ample representation. But this comes from a little bit of

an earlier era where there wasn't like the, like this person would probably be a man now, you know, but in the era that the person's living in, in like queer 90s, San Francisco, like, butch Dyke, like, that's who you're going to be, you know, you're going to be a butch. And I think the butches of the world have like something to offer this generation that is maybe getting lost because the books themselves. I mean, we have Eileen Miles, you know, who definitely like is from this world. But I think it'd be worth, you know, digging it up and bringing it back in print and reading it. And I think there's a lot more besides just this book, too. Like I think there's a kind of rediscovery that I hope we're on the verge of having.

This book, like you say, it explores a queer identity, the butch lesbian, which is so often underrepresented in mainstream media. And again, like you say, if we lose these books, if they are not printed again, it's a real tragedy. It's a real shame. Reading the diversity of the queer experience is so important. How can we make sure that we don't lose these stories and these stories from when they were written. Yeah. I know. I mean, I guess all I can say like everything else, like you use your

platform, whatever it is to speak up, you know, like that's what I'm doing right now. Like you just keep telling everyone, you know, when something's touched you. And frankly, there's other books that influenced all fours that were completely out of print. I mean, that were written in the 70s that I had to like hunt down an order. online and I guess just to remind people in this time where like you're just really used to everything being available that some of the things you might need that might speak most clearly to you might not come from people who look like you or who even lived in the same era as you and it's kind of fun like we do have the internet to help us do that it's just like a little more

work and listening. I have a list here of experiences from your 20s, a time that we all struggled to navigate, but you're making films while working as a waitress, locksmith, stripper, amongst other things whilst living at the heart of the riot girl's scene. How, how has that impacted? I'll say your work, but also the woman that you've become. You don't realize at the time in your 20s that like this is it this is that this will always have been the twice of that life you know that person's life and so whatever the random pieces were that constituted that time which yes did include um i was specifically a car door unlocker so if you unlock if you locked your keys in your car i came i worked for service called pop a lock that um i had a beeper and

And you could call me in the middle of the night and I would come and, you know, give it my best effort. No, I always got it open, but sometimes it took a while. I guess, I mean, it's all in there, you know? Like it's, I feel like people who read my work or followed my work over years probably are starting to see that, right, it is just one life that, you know, she, I mean, it's in these fictions. there's recurring themes and those are the things I've been wrestling with for my whole life. And it's really interesting how they change as you get older, especially as a woman, because it's like you're suddenly recast. So any, I'm remembering in an interview for all fours, a woman in her 20s telling me that all fours,

horse made her feel like moms are people too, which initially kind of threw me off. I was like, huh, moms are people too. Well, yeah, like I had that voice in my head. And then I remembered myself in my 20s and how I thought of women in their 40s who were often the women who were helping me in my career, you know, kind of gatekeepers who were kindly noticing me. And I, I did not connect the dots between me and them. Like I did not see myself in them or even think about them in an aspirational way. And I could kind of, you know, in that moms are people two thing is kind of that lack of connecting the dots.

And if you picture a young man, what he looks at when he looks forward at a man in his 40s, at least in media representation, is that man might be becoming made partner, might be having an affair with a younger woman, might be, if they're really old, running for president of the United States. And so I don't think he has trouble connecting the dots going forward. Like there's a, you know, he might end up being disappointed, and that's a different issue down the road. But it's kind of fun to connect the dots when there's so many things to look forward to. And in the case of, you know, women starting around 45, 50, it's not even just that it's a negative portrayal, it's an absence. It's just a sort of lack of

storytelling or mythology or songs or so that you don't even notice it's not there. So when we're in our 20s, we're not, there's no way we're going to notice what's not there in our future. And in fact, you know, there's a cliff on the cover of all fours. I think it often is very abrupt for women in their 40s because there's no fanfare. There's no indication of an absence. And so you're just like, what? Oh, what? The road stopped. Like I don't feel like I'm stopping, but there's a sudden lack of you know, of stepping stones going forward in the same way that there was. But the amazing thing is we actually change that with storytelling. I mean, it's, it's not like a fixed thing. Like, that's not science. That's just construction. That's our own mythologies. And that was a lot of

sort of the deeper push behind me writing the book was just like, I don't just want facts about perimenopause. I mean, I do need that as well. But I need like, you know, material here. I need stuff to work with to think about like, what does this time mean? What is its meaning? Because if there are stories about it, it doesn't just stop because you're not alone. If you look back at your 20s, is there anything you wish you'd know any advice that you would give yourself? And would you even have listened to it if you were? Well, I do think you're unlikely to see yourself in someone who is being quietly humiliated. So, and I think a lot of women are, like, in a way that they just have to get through from a certain age on.

and at which point you realize that the power that you thought you had was a you know the power of youth was maybe you were moving through the world a bit um easily for reasons you didn't fully understand um and so uh you know that's that's not something you it's it's definitely like a show don't tell thing like if you say that to anyone it's just like who wants to hear that? I mean, you know, protect yourself, you know, from that. But if you tell a story that really is like, well, this is a love story, you know, it's, it's like it's, like your heart is pounding. It's like a laughing, crying kind of story. Like, that's the way into like a reality, into a new reality is through the body. That's why we need these stories.

is daughter by Claudia Day. Mona Dean, playwright, actress and daughter of a man famous for one great novel, a man whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull, an exact and immeasurable toll on the women of his family. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, her father begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights painfully in this attention.

When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punish for her father's crimes and ejected from the family. Mona's tenuous stability is thrown into chaos, pushed to the precipice. She must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

tell us about this book why did you pick it and who were you when you read it right i was a daughter when i read it um i read it just earlier this year it's it's a new book um yeah i'm seeing just on the inside flap it says to be loved by your father is to be loved by god um which to me is like such a gut punch. I felt just when I started reading the book, I was like, oh, God, I mean, talk about conflating the narrator with the author. Like, I immediately thought, like, and I don't know her. I mean, yeah, I thought, like, is her father dead? Like, how could she write this book? How could any woman with a living father write an honest book about that relationship? even if it was a fiction.

And I just, yeah, it made me aware that, you know, I cry. I mean, if there's like a 30-second commercial where there's like a dad being proud of the daughter, I'll just start crying. Like, I'm so sort of hungry for that. that it yeah it's just a joke like my child will glance over to just like make sure I'm crying you know if that ad came on you know like my weaknesses um although not all the ins and outs of why um and and then I thought well yeah I've seen so many I mean that it's been used so much that that that's a very moving intense bond

the father-daughter bond that it you know i think for men it represents you know like politicians always say you know and i have a daughter and a and a wife and a you know a grandma you know if they're trying to connect you know it's like suddenly this is what humanizes me you know so that's kind of how the bond is used right you're and and i completely fall prey to it every time it works i'm like yes he is a human because he has a daughter um but this this guy, I mean, is such a tricky piece of work. And people are. And fathers are.

And daughters, I mean, the daughter's relationship to him, like, you understand, like if you're always trying to get that love, you know, then you're just going to, that love that is like God's love. love that is the father's love, whatever, the aforementioned love, um, you're here, it's, it's going to contort your life. Like, it's going to make you live a, an oddly misshapen life. Um, even if you've, you know, if you're happily married and you, you know, you're successful as this woman is, you know, she's, she's a successful playwright, you know, good husband. Like, uh, and it just, oh, it was so.

it struck me so hard and is also just very good modern writing. And I had only just let myself out of modern woman writer jail, which I was in while I was writing the book. I couldn't read the new Sally Rooney. There were all these books I couldn't let myself read because they're just too good, you know, and I would get pulled into their voice. And they're, world or maybe just I had nervousness about that and I didn't want to risk it. So I was, you know, not reading the new books as they came out and then suddenly I read them all. You know, I had like a really intense few months of exclaiming about books that people were like that literally came out three years ago. Like it's not that big a deal anymore. Yeah. It's so true how we use

fatherhood to humanize men, whenever sexual assault or harassment is in the press, it's this line of, imagine that was your daughter, and all of a sudden they're like, oh, yeah, now it makes sense. And the way you just described that, you know, an ad coming on the TV where the dad is beaming with pride in his daughter, you were ready for a story that wasn't like that. You've described yourself as desperate to bring people together,

but also that you're increasingly interested in how people sabotage that. Where do you think this interest comes from? I mean, just to bring it back to the father thing and also to all fours, like the father and that in my novel, it's so specific the ways that he needs his daughter and the world that they make together and these are you know it's not a whole book about that the way daughter is but it's definitely threaded through through the novel the ways that he teaches her about intimacy serve her

very well in terms of him in terms of being intimate with him but make her completely unfit to be intimate with other people. And I think that's generally the case. It's not like, oh, this was this one supreme mess of a dad. You know, in general, you learn how to connect from your parents. And then you go into the world and you discover like, huh, that's not, that's just one of many ways to connect. And I actually don't know the other ones. And I'm going to have to learn them from my friends and just from enactments in the world. And there's so much of all fours that's about intimacy, just trying to figure out intimacy, romantic intimacy and intimacy with yourself. And kind of what is allowed? Like, what is delinquent? Because so much, you know, I think so

many women feel their actual desires, their secret desires, are. borderline criminal, you know, like the space described to them is so narrow that almost anything they feel it falls outside of that. And so I wanted to, yeah, not just show a woman falling outside the bounds, but all the anxiety and shame and sort of overthinking involved in expanding your world. You've described fundamental. ability as power, what makes you see it that way? And does it mean that the best books are the painful ones? I mean, I will say for all the joy of writing, and I do find it kind of an ecstatic process, the thing that makes me do it is just unbearable pain and confusion.

You know, I mean, that's what brings me to the pain again and again. There are is something really moving about seeing someone at their limit, you know, that and you can feel that. And I think it's partly why, you know, my book is fiction, but I'm so drawn to memoir and auto fiction and books where you know they had skin in the game, you know, like they lived to tell the tale. I think that is partly why I like consciously muddied the water there with, setting up my fiction because I didn't want the reader to think that I just sat cozily in my armchair, kind of dreaming up a tail, you know, to entertain, you know, which that's cool too. But yeah, there was, that I was aging and living and dying alongside this narrator, you know,

and that I always had her to turn to. I always had this book to turn to, but I too had to, live my life and figure out what to do. And I hope that urgency comes through in the book. And certainly fiction, which includes all the books mentioned today, fiction that does that, books that do that, that's where my heart lies in this lifetime. An ecstatic process, but one that can be born of an unbearable pain. Well Miranda, it's time to talk about your fifth and final bookshelfy book, which is transsex by Lucy Fielding. Despite the increasing visibility of trans and non-binary folks in media, political representation and popular culture, their sexual lives and erotic embodiments are woefully under attended to in both scholarship and clinical practice,

challenging the dominant images of transsexualities that appear in the existing literature, such as an emphasis on avoiding gender dysphoria, the preservation of sexual function, or on sexual losses that may arise as a result of transition pathways. Transsex offers a pleasure-positive approach to working with trans clients. This book draws on Fielding's experiences as both a trans client and patient and as a therapist to shift and expand the conversation and includes contributions from other trans and non-binary providers working at the intersection of gender affirmative care and sexuality. Did you read this quite recently?

How was it changed the way you think? Yeah, I mean, it's a new book. It came out in 2002 and a lot of trans books are new books. And I felt so lucky to find it. I'm not trans. I am a person who has sex and I'm sometimes kind of surprised at how narrow the understanding and definition of what sex is, how narrow that is, given the fact that I mean, I don't even understand where my organs are inside my body. Like my, I couldn't tell you where my liver is. And with sex, it's not just your body that you don't even fully understand why it does, what it does, when it does.

But you're also dealing with a layer of fiction at all times. I mean, there may be some listeners out there who are like, no, sex for me is just two pieces of meat kind of hitting an interlemen. locking and there's no story. There's no fiction. But I find that it, even if it's a sort of fleeting image, you know, that it's a weird physical experience or a physical experience because I think most, even when I have a cold, it's sort of a fictional experience. How much I like build it up or downplay it depends entirely on like my desires for myself, like my plans. and I think sex is similarly abstract, and yet it's historically meant something so narrow that it more or less chokes sex out of even happening.

It almost makes sex impossible and certainly much more painful than it has to be. I mean, both literally and emotionally. And certainly as far as who feels like they might be good at sex or can conceive of themselves sexually, like, that's such a narrow percentage of people. Like, I mean, who are fitting the example of who might be good at that. And this book, it really has its starting point in, like that you you decide what sex is and it's it's an ongoing process and you will be changing and so will sex. You know it says clinical approaches like you don't have to be a clinician

or a therapist to benefit from this book. There's a beautiful metaphor in it. A therapist is talking to a client and I think she has some puzzle pieces. on her table and she's like, try to fit these pieces together. And they're sort of maybe from different puzzles and it's not exactly clear how they fit together, but some of them do and some them don't. And then she says, okay, now, you know, that was sort of frustrating, frustrating. Maybe now look at each piece and just how do you feel about it? Like, what feeling does it bring up in you and the person is like, well, I kind of like this one. It has like a nice pattern. And well, this one's cool because of this. I don't like this one because of this. And it's like,

oh, you could do that with body parts or like ways of touching. You know, you could really just take them at face value and be like, oh, this finger here actually doesn't feel good. I thought it was going to. no, it doesn't. And wow, I've never seen a body that looks like this before. But, oh, the feeling that I'm having right now in this moment is actually like I want to touch that or I want to be touched in this way. Like it is literally just a thing you can can make up in the moment. I mean, there's a lot of like communication and trust and safety. But I've had many friends even completely straight, you know, cis friends, say reading this book completely changed their sex life with their husband or what. Like it opened things up without literally opening things up. I mean,

I think there's so much talk about like polyamory and stuff. This is another way that your sex could be opened up. There is such taboo and so much discomfort around talking about sex and a society. And yeah, you know, it's so necessary to read about different experiences. It encourages empathy. And as you just described, it makes us look at ourselves differently and interrogate what might be going on on so many different levels. I've got a quote here from The Guardian who recently called you a part of a generation of novelists seeking new forms for midlife,

whether it's hot flush noir or the plotless evacuated voice of Rachel Cusk's outline trilogy. how do you feel about about that um sure i always like when someone tries something new and it works you know like um and you often have to try a few times to get to the thing that works and sometimes that's in public and that's part of the process um uh great i mean i feel very good about that And I feel like it makes sense that the form would have to change a bit to accommodate new ways of thinking. I mean, that is how art and philosophy generally works. Like it physically changes culture. It changes how people dress and feel about themselves and think through ideas.

you know, those ideas become embodied, both in art form and in actual bodies. So that's great. Where would you like your art and your creativity to take you next? I mean, I have so many ideas and plans and things written out and conversations I've already begun with future collaborators. And there's another voice in my head that's saying, maybe after all this travel and I'm kind of like halfway through a book tour and maybe just after resting ask yourself if you could do anything what would you do like just you know almost like you would ask a child or just someone with a day to just kind of uh I think often we get stuck in ideas we've come up with ourselves that are, you know, I mean, I meet so many people who,

you know, have a screenplay that they, you know, if they could only make the screenplay, then their life could begin. And I feel like I've, I've had that screenplay. Trust me. And like, sometimes you've grown past it and you've actually grown more interesting. And it's okay. to let go of that version of yourself because the next one is maybe the better one to, you know, take on all the challenges to come. So I want to make sure not to just kind of skip right ahead into, you know, some enticing project, but to just be a little blank for a while and then ask that question. Sometimes we're so tunnel vision when we work towards a specific goal and actually if we just took the blinkers off we could open our eyes open our minds

a little bit more and yeah like you would say to a child without the limitations that the experience of the world and of life has put on you just say what do you what do you want to do now um well i have one thing that i want you to do now Miranda one more thing and um sorry it's a little bit of a tricky question to finish with but if you did have to choose just one book from your list that you brought today as a favorite which one would it be um and why. I think you have them in front of you there. Yeah. Well, I'm going to say Linda Barry just because 100 demons, because that's already stood the test of time and two generations.

So I feel like I'm sure the other ones would too, but this one I have like the receipts on. So I'll go. Well, Miranda, it's been such an honor, such a pleasure to chat to you. Thank you so much for making the time. and for your brilliant book recommendations today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Vic 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.