Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S8 Ep3: Bookshelfie: Eimear McBride

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Author, Actor and Director Eimear McBride on the delayed gratification of her first novel, the  ‘classic combination’ of sex and death and why we should celebrate  female writers tackling difficult topics and themes.  Eimear trained as an actor before writing her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which took nine years to find a publisher but subsequently won the 2014 Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Eimear’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, won the 2016 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Strange Hotel, her third novel, was published in 2020 and her latest release The City Changes Its Face is out in February 2025. In 2022, Eimear wrote and directed A Very Short Film About Longing (DMC/BBC Film) which was screened at the 2023 London Film Festival, and she also writes and reviews for the Guardian, New Statesman and the TLS.  Eimear’s  book choices are: ** The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien ** Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice ** Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald ** The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin ** Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season eight 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 continues to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of season eight? Listen and subscribe now! You can buy all books mentioned from our dedicated shelf on Bookshop.org - every purchase supports the work of the Women's Prize Trust and independent bookshops.  This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

I can't write for an audience. I don't think my job is to cater to the expectations of others. I think the contract between the writer and the reader is the reader buys the book and reads the book and the writer has to do their very best when they write. And that's what you offer. And that's what you promise to bring when you publish a book is that this is the very best I can do with this subject matter

that I can't get out of my head. This is the Women's Prize for Fiction bookshelfy podcast supported by Bayleys. Join us in celebrating women's writing from around the world in the 30th anniversary year of the Women's Prize for Fiction, sharing our creativity, our voices, and our perspectives. I'm Vic Hope and I am your host for Season 8 of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks inspiring and brilliant women to share the five books by women that have shaped them and their lives. Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about the books you should be adding to your reading list. Today I'm joined by Emma McBride.

Emma grew up in the West of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre, London. Her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Born Thing, took nine years to find a publisher, but found a home with indie Gallybeger Press. A Girl is a Half-Forn Thing, subsequently won the 2014 Women's Prize for Fiction, as well as the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year, the Goldsmith Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Emma's second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, won the 2016-Gyenne. James Tate Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Awards.

In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. Strange Hotel, her third novel was published in 2020. In 2022, Ima wrote and directed a very short film about longing on DMC BBC film, which was screened at the 2023 London Film Festival. And she also writes and reviews for The Guardian, New Statesman, and the DHSman, TLS. Her latest release, the city changes its face, is a continuation of the lesser bohemians following Ely and Stephen as their passionate love affair is tested to its limits. A little bit more on that later. But right now, Emma, welcome. It's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast

today. Thank you for having me on. You're of course a winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. We're celebrating our 30th anniversary this year. And looking back, what was your experience of winning like? I mean, it was completely unexpected. I don't think anyone thought that I would and I certainly never expected to be in the room on that night. It was very exciting to be

part of the readings and you know and to meet the other writers who were all fairly intimidating. And yeah, it was a very kind of surprising, extraordinary thing and after such a long journey towards publication to have

that kind of recognition. was amazing. It's such a community. I feel like the night before the ceremonies we're such a special night whenever we have the readings or the writers come together. It's a really special room to be in.

And every writer I speak to every year, they always say it feels like I've wonders being here now because what a great thing to have all these women celebrating one another. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's not really like any other experience I've had with prizes. And just to have everyone together

in those rooms and talking and mixing and meeting and gossiping and sharing suggestions. You know, it's, it is an extraordinary experience. What's the prize done for you as a writer? Obviously, there's the prize money. It's helpful to sustain a writing career. It brings new readers to you. But there's, you know, there's challenges as well with winning such a prestigious prize. Does it give you confidence or ultimately is it just then you and a blank page when you come to sit back at your desk again?

Well, I think I was lucky in some ways that a girl as a half-home thing had taken such a long time because by the time it was published, I was already quite far through the lesser bohemians, so I didn't have to start at the blank page, which I think after, you know, winning a prize like that and all the attention that you suddenly receive would have been quite difficult. But, you know, winning the women's prize, which in a way is, you know, the Goldsmith's Prize is very much about experimental fiction. and the women's prize has a much broader appeal. And I think a book like a girl is a half-home thing, which is obviously experimental and quirky, shall we say,

in terms of its linguistic choices, for that to have that kind of spotlight. Sean and it was far beyond anything anyone could have hoped for and the attention that that book got as a result of winning the women's prize. I think no one really expected it to be the one on the night. Everyone thought it was going to be Donna Tart. And I did too. And to suddenly have that kind of breadth of attention

kind of did wonders for the book actually and opened up a whole kind of audience for me that I would never have had otherwise. This is the thing. Ever since I was quite a young girl, I used to get the Women's Prize shortlist and use it as my reading list for the year. I would take myself to Waterstones

or to whichever bookshop and get those books because they were recommended. So even if they were experimental or quirky, I would know that this was quite guaranteed to be good. So I'd love to know a bit more about you as a reader. What books do you gravitate towards? Is it experimental? Is it quirky? What do you love?

I read all sorts, actually. I have my kind of my big loves in the experimental world, but also I'm a very keen reader of memoir and biography. I read a lot of history. You know, at Christmas time, I like to kick my shoes off and read some historical crime or, you know, I'm really, I'm quite Catholic in my taste. I like lots of things. People think I'm terribly serious and studious, and I'm not at all.

I really enjoyed reading through your notes before we came to this interview today, that you had the names of most of the bookshops where you found these books. It's obviously important the places that you sort of sort them out. It meant something to you, whether it was secondhand bookshops or, you know, know, independent bookshops, are you more likely to pick up books that are hidden in nooks and crannies of shells? Or are you, you know, quite open in how you find your books? I tend not to follow many recommendations. I don't necessarily feel obliged to read the books that are kind of prominent at any point in time. I like to read on whim as much as possible. So I really like bookshops. I mean,

When I want something that's maybe out of print, of course, I'll look online for it, but I try always to buy books that are in print from bookshops. And I love that experience of kind of hunting around and finding things and just thinking, oh, God, yes, I didn't know I was interested in this, but now that I look at it, I think that I am interested in it. And it goes on the to be read pile, the ever-expanding to-be-red pile. And as someone who writes reviews yourself, are you influenced by reviews? No, I never read reviews.

And I actually don't do much reviewing anymore myself for that very reason. If I'm interested in a writer, I will go and get their book, whatever the reviews or whatever the word is. I'm not particularly interested in what everyone else is reading or feeling obliged to read things because they're very popular at the moment. I'm a kind of completest in a lot of ways. If I like a writer, I will go through and slowly read everything that they've written. And, you know, I suppose being a writer, I'm so aware of how you progress through your writing life. And I like to see that in how others do it. Yeah.

Well, let's move on to a writer who you have followed, whose work has gone beyond just this book. And you've followed that. Your first book, Shelby book is The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien. Kathleen, Kate Brady and Bridget Barber Brennan are growing up in a repressive Irish village. after World War II. Kate is a romantic looking for love. Baba is a reckless survivor. After being expelled from their convent school,

they dream of the bright lights of Dublin and are rewarded with bad luck and bad sex. They marry for the wrong reasons, but continue to fight the expectations forced upon girls of every era to become brave new women. Now you told us that this book changed your, and I quote, understanding of life and literature.

Tell us more about that? Well, I think in a way it was probably the first adult book that I read. I read it when I was 13 and I was away at the Irish language summer school and took it with me and sort of read it under the covers because Edna's name was still considered somewhat risque back in the late 1980s. And I suppose I was bowled over by her use of language and, you know, I was on the outskirts of I was in Connemara, I think. And so I was walking around in this place that was so like, halfway between where I was growing up and halfway between where the country girls is set in the west of Ireland.

So I was reading it in the environment that it was written about. And there was something quite magical about that. But then also, you know, there was sex, which of course 13 was quite. Quite exciting to find a book that had some sex. Of course, if you read it now, it's incredibly tame. You would hardly call it sex. But the idea of desire, physical desire, of women having it and of it being something that could be written on a page that could be read and shared and spoken about it, that was revelatory for me. So it was the content and it was also her brilliant, wonderful prose.

Women's bodies being for themselves is something that felt so revolutionary. in, you know what, sort of still does at a time when women are still fighting for their right to bodily autonomy, the world over. Why is it so crucial that we're exposed to books like this and to women like Edna? I think because the world doesn't like to admit that women's bodies exist. They're there to do the labour. They're there to have sex with and to have the babies and to clean the house. And that body exists in itself and for itself

still remains a challenge for a lot of people. You had the pleasure of getting to know Edna, Brian. A little later on, you wrote the Forward as well for this trilogy. She always seemed a real trailblazy, you know, so fearless, so rebellious. And obviously we sadly lost her last year. What was she like? I mean, she was, you know, people.

say don't meet your heroes. She was the opposite of that. She was everything that you would have wanted her to be. She was extraordinary. She was ferocious. She was very critical. She was someone whose mind remained

incredibly sharp right to the end of her life. She had no interest in bullshit. She didn't care for people who sucked up to her. She loved language and she loved life and she loved having a laugh and having a drink and having gossip and she didn't suffer fools and to me she was you know just an extraordinary woman and

and a good friend someone who I could ask advice off and who would never give you an easy answer that's for sure sometimes you need that tough love that honesty but having you know having someone you can turn to that sort of support in an industry in a career that I'm sure can be quite lonely at times is surely so, so precious. And you mentioned it a little earlier, but a girl is a half-form thing. It famously took six months to write and yet nine years to publish. You know, that's a time when you need that support. You then went on to win the Women's Prize for Fiction, 2014. There's so many other prizes. How did you persevere? What was it that helped get you through during that sort of limbo period? Did you have any idea of the success you might go

to achieve? Absolutely not. I think I often find it strange when I tell the story because, of course, people come away from it with the idea that I somehow believed and continued to believe and eventually the dream came true. And it wasn't really like that at all. All I knew was that the book was right, that it was the way it had to be and that I couldn't change it or edit it or do anything to it.

It was as it should be. And, of course, when I first finished it, I sent it out and thought, you know, I couldn't change it, everyone would be clamouring at my door looking for it and and nobody was and nobody was for a very, very long time. And I went through a process of having to decide what it was to be a writer. Was it to be a published author? Was it to be a success? Was it to be able to live off the proceeds of my work? And clearly no was the answer to all of those questions. And then I had to decide if none of those things were going to happen for me, was still a writer and would I keep writing?

And the answer to that was yes. And, you know, and it's not easy in your 20s and 30s to feel like you are a professional failure and that might be the future that you have to face for the rest of your life. But I also knew that writing was the only thing that I was good at. And there was nothing, certainly nothing that I was better at.

and I was just going to have to persevere. So when success then came, that was a great relief. The main feeling was it was relief. You trained as an actress and then pivoted to writing. So what was the turning point? Well, it was after I had finished drama school, my brother died. And it was a huge kind of transformative moment for me, of course, as any big bereavement is.

And I really felt that acting, that kind of public-facing life, that life where you have to constantly be putting yourself forward in front of people and all the rejection that necessarily goes along with that was just not something for me and that I really wasn't a people person that even if I'd got every job I went up for being around people all day long was actually not, didn't suit me temperamentally.

And I went away to Russia and I, and I spent four months in St. Petersburg and kind of wandering around and doing a bit of teaching to pay the rent and kind of working out what I wanted to do with my life and that was when I realised it was time to take writing seriously. I had always been writing all my life and I always thought that I would write

but that was kind of the turning point where I thought, okay, now it was time to grow up and start to do this properly. And what did your time acting teach you? What have you carried forward into writing Shirley there's amazing language in there that you're utilising? I mean, you read your own audiobooks. It was probably one of the most valuable trainings I could have had

because I trained at a method school and it was very focused on what you need to build a human being from the inside. And so when I started to write, those were the tools that I had and that's, I realized I would need to make language work in a different way to make language do the job that the actor's body and the actor's voice does. And that was sort of, you know, the beginning of an interest in experiment

and in just trying to find other ways to affect the reader, other ways of getting the story to enter the reader as it were. I really love that, turn of phrase, build a character from the inside. Yeah, and I mean, girl is a half-home thing is very much that. It's, you know, it's written, it's not a stream of consciousness. It's almost, it's a stream of existence. It's the body and the mind and everything working at once. And what I wanted when I wrote it was for the reader to not see the girl from the outside,

but to feel inhabited by her, to feel as though they were going through everything with her, without that kind of gap for critical judgment to get in, that you would have to just go through the experience. And then at the end, you can think about what that experience was like, what you thought about it, but that in that moment that it was immersive and that it was hard to separate yourself from. But of course, as the writer,

you don't know if you succeed in that until you have a reader, which it then took quite a while to get a reader for it. Well, building a human being from the inside feels a strangely appropriate place to talk about our second book today, which is interview with the vampire by Anne Rice. In a darkened room, a young man sits telling the macabre an eerie story of his life. The story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood. Character-driven, emotionally intelligent and a cornerstone of the vampire genre. Rice's accomplished spine chiller finds the tormented Louis de Point du Lac recounting his tragic immortal existence.

Why did this book make your list? Well, I read it first when I was about 16 and I found it in Castle Books in Castle Bar, where I lived in my teen years. And it just seemed terribly romantic. You know, I was very interested in Gothic fiction, being Irish, of course, the invent. mentors of the Gothic, it is always with us. And it was just set outside the usual historical context you see in Irish Gothic fiction, this kind of this other world, this world of the deep south and the horrors that are hidden inside it and the beginnings of the colonial era.

And also I think there, though, you know, it's that feeling of transgression when you read it. And certainly at that point I was quite young, that kind of the gay element to it was still quite transgressive, certainly in the west of Ireland at that time. And that seemed terribly romantic to me as well. It was great romantic when I was a teenager. And it is a very kind of romantic and tragic book. And also that idea of the story. I've always loved it.

And it's kind of followed me throughout my own fiction of someone who sits and tells their story from beginning to end. And maybe it's the love of biography that comes into that. But I find that incredibly interesting method of storytelling. I loved in your notes you shared about this book describing sex and death as a classic combination. Could you tell us about how this book speaks to your own experience and also to your own writing? Well, I experienced death very early in my life. My father died when I was quite young.

And so I think when you experience bereavement as a child, that's something that travels with you throughout your life in a different way to when you experience it as an adult and you are very aware of the cracks in existence through which people can fall, through which you can fall yourself at any moment. And maybe the notion of eternal life brings some kind of interesting comfort to that, but also the curse of it. And sex is sex, right? Everyone likes sex and is interested in it whether they like it or not.

And it keeps coming up in this conversation. Yeah, it seems I can't get away from it. But that is also about the thing that brings you back into life. That helps you feel connected to life, to possibility, to the future, to other people. And the idea of the vampire, the person who's eternally on the outside looking in but connected is also maybe a bit of a, It's the writer's story, isn't it? Well, we know exactly a focal theme of this novel, and the series of the whole is how memory is a monster.

You know, how it transforms and it warps and it regresses with time. And we see this in your book, actually, in Strange Hotel. Why are you drawn to this theme of unreliable narrators? Well, I think they consider themselves to be terribly reliable. Oh, yeah. I think with Strange Hotel is the idea. of the self with which you cannot make peace. And there's the self you want to be in the self you are.

And so this woman, you know, she travels to all these hotel rooms, but the book is not about international travel. It's about the self you cannot escape. No matter where you are, once you close the door in any room, anywhere in the world, it is you that remains inside. And when you are the thing that you are trying to travel away from, that's quite a difficult thing. You've mentioned elsewhere that Strange Hotel was supposed to be your, and I quote, easy novel.

And instead it became a novel that readers have to work for. How much does the reader experience factor in your writing process? You mentioned just before, you know, you're a writer and then you get your reader, and that's where the magic happens. Did you ever worry that experimenting with form or style it would deter a larger commercial audience? I'm sure it does deter a larger commercial audience. But I can't write for an audience. I don't think my job is to cater to the expectations of others. I think the contract between the writer and the reader is

the reader buys the book and reads the book and the writer has to do their very best when they write. And that's what you offer. And that's what you promise to bring when you publish a book is that this is the very best I can do with this subject matter that I can't get out of my head. And hopefully you will find something in that for you. And the beauty of those readers is that they are also dynamic beings.

They are those selves like you describe, that you don't get away from, but they change, they evolve. You know, there's times when I've tried to read a book, and I cannot get into it, and I've come back to it years later, and my life has changed. I've experienced new things. I've become a different person, and it's the perfect book for me. Well, and I think that's the wonderful thing about readers,

is that they are adventurers and they are open to new things and new things are not always really what they need at that point but as you say you come back years later and you suddenly think my God, this book was fantastic and at the time I had no interest or you know it just didn't work for me at all and I think it's all right then to ask readers

to put a little effort in I think there are a lot of readers who are very happy you know when I when I read Ulysses I didn't get to the end of and think oh my God, what a waste of time. You know, it was hard. It took a long time to read. It took a lot of work to read it.

But I got to the end and I thought, wow, I'm really glad I read that book. I feel like I have to often justify to friends or family who are maybe not as big on reading when I say something has been hard like you just said or difficult. And they're like, why did you read it? But I don't mean it like that. Do you think there's an unfair expectation on female authors in particular to write more conventional literature for it, to be difficult inverted comments, whatever that might look like. I think traditionally it's certainly been the expectation that women write sort of nice stories

that people find entertaining and diverting and that women are, you know, lucky to be in the literary world and therefore shouldn't make it hard for anyone. And I certainly feel like a lot of my writing has had that kind of kickback. Like who does she think she is asking us to wade through this? And, you know, and I think bollocks to that. Essentially. Yeah. That's what I was open for. You know, I feel like as a writer, I don't particularly feel like I'm a woman or a man or anything else.

I'm a writer when I'm writing and I will write what I want and hopefully people will like it. And if they don't, that's okay too. Someone will like it. There's usually a few people around. Exactly. 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. Baileys 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. Let's talk about your third book, Shelfy Book, which is Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, one of the great literary curios of the 20th century. Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel, by Zelda Fitzgerald, who was married to F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when he was working on Tender as the Night, Zelda was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband,

throwing a fascinating light on their lives together and his work as well. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story, the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s, and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of the era. us a little bit more about this book. Why did you choose it? I chose it because, as you say, is one of the great curios. And it's also, it's not only because, you know, she is one of these kind of strange literary figures who doesn't have a literary standing of her own, but was obviously a huge part of her husband's work and of the story of Scott Fitzgerald and of the Roaring 20s.

And she was a kind of a touchstone figure and all of that. And this novel is, normally seen as a footnote is kind of forgotten and people are not that interested. And Tender is the Night is a magnificent novel. It's my favorite Fitzgerald novel, actually. And Save Me the Walls, the fact that it's her telling her own version of that story, of that slide from the wonder and glamour and fun into the terrible mess that both of them ended up in, which is also, you know, the story of Tender's The Night is, it was her taking back her own story and also her attempt to assert her the artist within herself

and her understanding of the problem of that which is the story of the novel is the person who cannot attain the level of creative recognition that she wants we've seen this pattern across history where male writers have allegedly appropriated their wise writing in their own published works, whether it be Hughes or Fitzgerald or Dostovievsky. You read this after having read F Scots, Tender as the Night. How do you think the two compare? I mean, you said that you enjoyed it. You loved it. In a way, I don't want to compare them. I think Tender as the Night is a great novel. Semi the Waltz is also a great novel, but it is perhaps more full of holes. The language is not as beautiful, but there is a lot to admire in it. And I think it's certainly,

worth reading in its own right as well, not simply as an accompaniment to the other side of tenders the night. And, you know, the story around it is also very interesting. Who has the right to tell the story of a life? And of course, as a writer, I always think, me, I am the one with all the rights in this situation. And when you have someone else who suddenly takes that up

and decides that they're going to tell the same story, but from their side, that's an interesting argument. and who has the right to tell any stories at all. And at the moment, of course, we live in a world in which people are constantly telling their stories in all kinds of media and all kinds of forums. And sometimes they would be better off leaving them alone as well. So I think it's an interesting idea to reflect on

coming from 100 years ago when telling those stories was a lot. more arduous than it is today. The idea of who has the right to tell a story features, it's something that it's explored in your new book, The City, Changes Its Face. Can you tell us a little bit about how you do that? So there's a large section in the novel in which Stephen, the male protagonist, he has made a very autobiographical film and the book has the story of the film It has him and Ely and his teenage daughter all go and watch the film together. And of course he's very aware with his daughter watching it

that he's included the story of his relationship with her mother. And also he and Ely have discussed it during the making of the film how much right he has to not only tell this story, which is his own story, but when you are creating something, when you're making a work of art, you're necessarily changing that as well. The requirements of a work of art are not the same as literal autobiography

and how much are you allowed to change a story? Do you have a right to change a story and still call it autobiography or what does it become then? Do you still have the right to change a story when it becomes art? I think as long as you say that you've changed it, that's okay. I think you can't, I think if you're pretending something is very, autobiographical in order for it to you know trade on that commercially but it has transformed then I think you are in the wrong lane but I think as an artist you are allowed to do anything

you just can't pretend one thing is another that's all both the less bohemians and now the continuation of that story in the city changes its face feature an age gap relationship there are 20 years between Ile and Stephen I do want to talk about that. What was it like to explore the nuances in this relationship, in particular, the power dynamics. What made you return to these characters? Well, I think they're kind of everything that I'm really interested in writing about. They both come in the lesser bohemians. You kind of find how they meet and the stories that they bring from their past into that relationship and the complications that those stories create stories of

childhood abuse and the difficulties that that has brought. So initially that age gap relationship was really about people being in two different places in their lives, of Stephen being in his 30s, of having kind of lived with this terrible secret from his childhood and the catastrophe that has caused in his adult life, that he has this kind of very successful professional life, but actually his personal life has been a total disaster. and had problems with addiction and terrible problems with relationships and have Ely who has similar story of abuse in her background

just at the start of being an adult, just at the start of making choices and how those two things interact, those two different experiences that he also sees her making choices that he made and wants to kind of stop her, getting into the mess that he got himself into but also kind of allowing her the space to explore herself and her sexuality and kind of use him as a sounding board

and he's you know able to kind of step back and allow her to do that by the time we get to the city changes its face the relationship has kind of moved on from the kind of mad passionate beginnings of the relationship to two years later and they've kind of outgrown also the fatherless daughter daughterless father element of the relationship They're kind of two people who are happy together, but life is complicated and nothing ever works out easily. And I suppose it's less, the age gap is less of a point, although Ailey still being young and still being kind of finding it hard to say what she wants. And finding it hard to know what she wants in herself, actually, at that age.

rears its head throughout the novel. The power dynamic is kind of interesting because I feel it shifts all the time because obviously he's older and more experienced in some ways, but also there's a lot of damage in him and a lot of things that he has to learn about life. And also he's never been in love with anyone before. And when he falls in love with her and he finally allows himself to be in love with her, she suddenly has a lot more power. in that relationship. She can hurt him in a way that he cannot hurt her. You know, she's in love for the first time,

and that's one kind of experience. But if you've never been in love, there's a lot at stake when you suddenly find that person and you know that they're younger and you know that both of you have difficult things that you have to overcome. That's quite a difficult position to be put in. And I think for him, he's trying to navigate that

all the time. and that sort of terrible feeling of vulnerability, what will he do if he loses her? We're going to move on now to talk about love in a very different form, love of a city, of a place, which I know hugely informed the writing of both the lesser bohemians and the city changes its face. Your fourth book is Samuel Peep's,

The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomlin. Now, Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned a figure of substance. But for nearly 10 years, he kept a diary which recorded with unparalleled openness and sensitivity exactly what it was like to be a young man in Restoration London. Within and beyond the narrative of his extraordinary career, Claire Tomlin explores Peep's inner life, his relations with women, his fears, his ambitions, his political shifts, his agonies, and his delights. You mentioned that you read this book in the early 2000s?

Tell us a little bit more about who you were at that time. Why this book particularly resonated with you then? Well, it was when I had come back from Russia and it was still before I had written a girl as a half-form thing when I was temping. So I was an office temp for quite a long time, maybe I had 10 years all in all. And I was getting up early in the morning

to get a few hours writing in before I would, get on the train in Tottenham where I lived into the city and to whichever incredibly tedious office I was there to do data entry in. And I think my husband maybe gave me the copy of the unequal self for Christmas. And I was working in the city at the time and I started to read it and of course started to see that I was in the place every day where this story unfolded. foals, this place where he lived, the streets that he walked on are still, many of them still there, still have the same names, still the same layout. And so in my lunch times, when I was sort of escape from the office, I would walk the different routes that Claire Tomlin would describe

people having walked and go and see the different churches and buildings that still stood. And I was the beginning, I mean, I had always loved London when I arrived at, for first in the 90s, of course, it was just kind of amazing being teenager, you know, on your own in the big city in the middle of the 90s in Camden was kind of fantastic. Nothing to complain about there. And so I loved the life of the modern city, but this was the beginning of real understanding of the layers of London, of the hundreds of years of people who had lived and worked and died and loved and created and lost

and what traces were left, what you could still find. And it was, yeah, it was a real beginning of a love affair with London that's never left me since. You retraced Samuel Pep's steps. As far as I could. And you can retrace a lot.

You can, as you read, you can still, a lot of those roads still exist. And you can go and see the places where those stories happened and putting lane and, you know, where he's buried. and all of those places are still there and that's kind of the beauty of London

is that it just, you know, as I say myself, it changes its face. We really do have those layers and layers of history that can't be said for everywhere. What was it about Samuel Pepys that fascinated you so much? Well, I mean, he's the first sort of great diarist, isn't he? And he's in a way a non-entity. He's an uninteresting, unimportant, unimportant individual.

who kept this diary, and it's the first record that we have of someone who was just an ordinary citizen, who wasn't royalty, who wasn't anyone important. History would have totally forgotten him if he had not insisted that it remember him by creating this unprecedented diary. And obviously it was all written in code, and it took a long time for it to be decoded afterwards. And he could have, of course, ended up in a lot of trouble with a lot of things that he'd written in the diary, which is why it was in code and politically was a bit dicey

and he probably should have destroyed it but he clearly wanted this ordinary life in which he does you know he fights with his wife and he sleeps with the maid and then has to fight with his wife again about that or where he hides his giant

piece of cheese in the garden to escape the great fire and he lives through all of these extraordinary times but he's not a very extraordinary person He does nothing extraordinary. He's a bean counter really in life. And that makes it so wonderful to see the life of someone who lived all of those hundreds of years ago recorded in all its banality

and how like us he is and how unlike us he is. I love the way you put that. He wrote himself into history because history is so often written by those with power, those who could write at the time. Well, for a start, which for a long time was not women. Yeah. Because they weren't educated, they weren't allowed. And we can keep going back and we can keep rewriting history.

That's the beauty of it because it is the stories of ordinary people. Yeah. And I mean nowadays, obviously there's a lot more resource being put into uncovering those stories of ordinary people. And we're much more interested in the lives of ordinary people than the lives of kings and queens and those who are kept before our minds by history. and in its architecture and churches. And that's the beauty of history. There's always more to discover. And like you say, the city itself is a character.

London is a character. It's a character in itself, in the city changes its face. How important is setting for you in a novel? I think very important. I mean, even in Strange Hotel where all you know was which city she's in and she never talks about the city, she's not interested in the city, It was still hugely important to me that each of those cities were the ones that they were. They were informed by the kind of light that you get in those cities

or the sounds that you hear that you don't get anywhere else and what the temperature is like and what the atmosphere around is like. So even when it's not specifically about a place, where that place is still informs the writing hugely. and you know London is obviously a very important place for me in my life for lots of reasons and I think for Eileen Stephen in the city

changes its face you know it was a place they're both very clear about and Lazybehemians that they kind of escaped to the place they were able to become themselves selves that were not influenced by the choices of the adults around them or the things that had happened to them where they came to become who they wanted to be

as opposed to who they might have to be if they had stayed at home. And in the city changes its face, you know, there's that slight feeling of it's not saving them now. Now London is difficult and it's noisy and it invades the quiet of their flat or to escape the difficult things inside. They go out, Eileen and Stephen's daughter, Grace, go out and get pissed in Camden. And, you know, and I suppose it's a kind of, it's an emotional map in a way, London. It kind of forms, it provides a temperature for them. Well, from London to Copenhagen.

Now, your fifth and final book, Shabby book, is Dependency by Tover Ditlofsson. Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, the Copenhagen trilogy is an utterly immersive portrayal of love, friendship, arts and ambition and the terrible lure of addiction from one of Denmark's most celebrated 20th century writers. The final volume of the trilogy, dependency, is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction and the possible way out. Now, I understand you read this quite early in the pandemic.

Was it a sort of solace for you? I mean, reading was for a lot of people during the lockdown. I don't know. I suppose I don't think about reading being a solace. I always find I prefer to be sort of savaged by the things that I read rather than comforted by them. I think they make me feel alive rather than safe. and this book most definitely does not provide solace for anyone.

It's really an excruciating, terrifying account of what it is to fall into the grips of, you know, the worst kind of addiction and of almost immediately being in the very worst position with it. It's not a slow descent that slowly creeps up on her. It just happens like a thunder clap and she is completely in its crows. and it eats her alive. And I like books that frighten me, and this book really frightened me. I think it really describes human vulnerability

and how easy it is to just find yourself in a different place. We follow Tova Ditloffsen from childhood into late adulthood throughout this trilogy. And like you say, through everything, through the hardest things, was it hard to leave a behind after finishing dependency, the final book? I think it's a book that I still think about a lot, and it still frightens me.

And I think it also, it is a reminder to hold on to your humanity, how easily you can lose it, and how easily others can lose it, and how important it is to be very cautious about making judgments, about others, and the choices that they make in life, for the things that happen to them, because, of course, we do not know what happens in the secret heart of anyone. You mentioned a little earlier, actually, when we were talking about Zelda Fitzgerald,

blurring that line between the truth and a story and when it becomes art, between autobiography and fiction, or auto-fiction, as it can be called, it's difficult to discern between Tover the writer and Tover the protagonist. What was your experience of this when you were reading? Well, I try to take anything that I read at face value. I tend to try and go with what I think the writer has intended.

Rather than seek out clues, I don't necessarily think that auto-fiction is more truthful than fiction fiction, in fact, often less so, perhaps. And I think fiction can allow us to get very close to truths that live. literal truth pushes us away from. I think fiction can allow access to things that we might find too frightening to confront in reality. And so I don't buy into this notion that autobiography and auto fiction kind of is more trustworthy and is therefore entitled to kind of a greater seal of authenticity than fiction.

fiction is, I think fiction frees you to go further, to be less fearful, to be less vain. Fiction does free us on so many levels. How much does self-reflection inform your writing practice without it being autobiographical? It's an opportunity to be freed in some ways. I don't know. I think you can, as a writer, you can never escape yourself. Everything that you write comes from yourself, you know, unless you're sort of busy trying to instruct people. and how to live better or be better people,

which is certainly not the intention of anything that I have ever written, naturally self-reflection becomes part of it, because what do I have when I sit to write only myself and the eyes that I see the world through? And so for me, and this was maybe part of the method training that was so important that I brought with me into writing, was this notion that everything, Everything is inside you.

Nothing that is human is alien to you, as the quote is. And you have to find that human connection at all times. And we don't, of course, we don't all share the same experiences. We don't all come from the same places. But it doesn't mean that we can't know each other and we can't understand each other. And so fiction, to be truthful, you have to find that part of yourself that connects to those people that you're writing about, that you deeply understand. something inside of them

that is under the skin that is far down inside that is something about being a person and things like loneliness for instance every person experiences that in their lives and that's a big part of the characters

in the city changes its face is that finding another person to share that loneliness with that loneliness that you can never entirely be free of And that's, you know, that's something that everyone experiences and that's a truth that fiction can find a way to express. Well, there is such solace to be found in all five books you brought today and also in your own books which we've discussed.

So I am going to ask you, although a lot of those themes are similar, they are so, so different. If you could choose one favourite out of the five bookshel of books you brought today, which would it be and why? I think I'm going to have to say the Samuel Peep's unequal self. Because it explores what it is to be a person and then what it is to be a person in the world. And that's everything that I'm trying to do. It's everything that you're doing and doing for all of us. Thank you so, so much, Ema.

It's been such a pleasure to chat to you today. Thank you very much. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Price of Fiction Boot Shelfy Podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you for joining me for this episode. You'll find all the books discussed in our show notes. If you've enjoyed it, please leave us a rating or review to help other readers discover even more brilliant books by women.

See you next time.