Everything Is Content - Eliza Clark - author of Penance and Boy Parts: Everything In Conversation

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Well, what’s this then?! Welcome to the first edition of Everything In Conversation - where Beth, Ruchira and Oenone chat to the people behind the content that we’ve all been loving! This week - we will be in conversation with Eliza Clark, the author of Boy Parts and Penance. We LOVED Penance when we read it as our book club choice - and we had loads of questions for Eliza - so we asked her to come and chat to us about the book that we all loved so much! Was she a chronically online Tumblr girlie? Does she actually care about true crime? And what is it like when you get compared to your characters, especially when those characters do murders…Penance is out in paperback this week on 2nd May. Grab your copy in your local bookshop or you can buy one here: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571371785-penance/ Follow Eliza on Instagram @fancyeliza—Follow us on Instagram:@everythingiscontentpod @beth_mccoll @ruchira_sharma@oenone ---Everything Is Content is produced by Faye Lawrence for We Are GrapeExec Producer: James Norman-FyfeMusic: James RichardsonPhotography: Rebecca Need-Meenar Artwork: Joe Gardner  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're like a super weird girl, the most exciting thing to find is someone who's even weirder than you. I'm Beth. I'm Richera. And I'm Anoni. Every week on Everything Is Content, we dive into the discourse and unpack the pop culture that is making everyone share a hot take. From literature and films to red carpets and runways, we have a lot to say about all of it.

And we've got something so special for you today. This is the very first edition of Everything in Conversation. Today we'll be chatting to Eliza Clark, the author of Boy Parts and Penance. You may remember that we did a deep dive on penance in episode 14 of the podcast and we loved the book so much that we asked eliza to join us so that we can unpack her work and its impact on the discourse together if there is anyone else you'd love to hear us chat to drop us a message on instagram at everything is content pod and we'll see what we can do. Right let's get stuck into the chat with Eliza. Hi Eliza. Hello. Hi. How are you doing? I'm good thank you. How are you guys? Good. Really good. Really excited to talk to you today. We have been loving Penance. It's our first book club choice and we did a poll on Instagram to decide

which title we were going to read and penance won by a country mile oh exciting and we also wanted to say congratulations on your forbes 30 under 30 yesterday oh of course yeah well done you snuck in you said that you're literally when do you turn 30 i'm 30 on the 4th of may and it's the 10th of april now so i literally i think i was like i think the cut off might have been like the first week of April or something for your birthday so I really just snuck in there oh my gosh amazing that's really iconic to be fair so we all loved and read Penance but for anyone who hasn't read the book and who's listening would you be able to give us a summary in your own words I you know it

never gets any easier to to do the the quick like bullet point list of stuff that penance is about so it's about the murder of a teenage girl by three other teenage girls she goes to high school with in a seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote. And the book is presented as a nonfiction true crime novel, like a true crime book written by a fictional narrator, but it's not real. I made it up. And there's also a lot of doubt as to how much of the content of the book is actually true. I'd say that was a pretty pitch perfect summary. Thank you. To start off with, we had a message from Instagram from one of our listeners,

Tyler. She asked, were you a chronically online Tumblr girly like the girls in Penance? Yeah. Yeah, I was on Tumblr from like 2009 to like, I think I probably stopped using it around 2016, like 2015, 2016. It was basically like, I left uni in 2016 and started working full time, which probably has quite a lot to do with it. And yeah, no, I was super super online I was like a brain just irreparably damaged in many ways by by my heavy usage of tumblr through the 2010s I love that I think we can all relate to that a little bit maybe not tumblr but the internet definitely rotting all of our brains I was really bad I

just used to look at pictures of thigh gaps on tumblr just like constantly that was pretty much my whole teenage-ness time but what are there actually forums like the ones that you discuss in the book these kind of like pro murder forums yeah there's like a fairly like big true crime like sub fandom on tumblr I never really had any like contact with it I knew it was there and every now and again i feel like something would sort of spill over into like the more i was like very much on like fandom tumblr and i felt like every now and again something from true crime stuff would sort of spill over because i think when you're like when you're like a super weird girl the most

exciting thing to find is someone who's even weirder than you so every now and again something would go a little bit like something would just kind of go around on the more normal side of tumblr and it would be like oh my god look at those guys that are even like weirder than us over there um i don't know if like the separate forums exist i would guess they probably do because of the sort of terms of service of it all um of trying to like host that kind of content on like more public websites um I'm not sure some some of it's fabricated for my own purposes but I wouldn't be surprised if something like that didn't exist you said that you were part of fandom tumblr specifically what kind of fandoms were you in to and like what were you obsessed by

oh god um to be honest I was just I was like more into just being able to like write and post fan fiction and have people reading it so I wasn't really ever like hugely invested in the stuff that I was there for so I used to bounce around between fandoms a lot I kind of just used to bounce into stuff that was popular um so I could have people read what I was writing but I don't know just just kind of like a bunch of like various sort of 2010s popular things I always tell people that I wasn't in the super hulock fandom which was like the big one like supernatural doctor who and Sherlock I like wasn't I didn't touch that um but I I try not to be too explicit because I don't I really don't like the idea of people like digging out old stuff I did when I was a teenager but um I was I was very heavily present I think I've scrubbed a lot of

it now to be fair I wonder if you in the kind of promotion of this book whether you've heard from any like reformed kind of true crime heads or anyone who really did go deep into those kind of spaces who were really into the kind of gory true crime who have maybe had a kind of um a u-turn on it or or kind of came from those spaces and then wanted to talk to you not really i've had like people who are sort of who more casually listen to true crime tell me that they're like that they've thought about what they're listening to a bit more um but i haven't heard from anybody who was like deep deep into into it I feel like if your entire kind of universe is taken off by like consuming this kind of true

crime content I feel like you probably are just sort of unlikely to read something that is like critical of your interests like this it's even that I mean I'm a lot more ambivalent toward true crime that I think sometimes people get the impression that I am from the book. We had a question from Aditi and she asked, what was your reasoning for setting the book around Brexit? She said, obviously it was and still is a super divisive thing for the country, but it hasn't been explored in a lot of detail and a lot of contemporary fiction in the way your book, you know, dives into that.

Yeah, it was, you know, it was quite a practical thing. there's like a couple of crimes that i'm pulling on for penance and the the the two big ones that i usually cite as being like big it feels weird to say inspirations but but i guess you know what i mean um the two kind of major crimes that i've sort of pulled on for this were the murder of Shonda Shera which took place in the 90s in in the states and the murder of Suzanne Capa which took place in the 90s in in Merseyside around the Liverpool area the the interesting or something that I found particularly interesting about the the Capa case was because it happened at around the same time as the Jamie Bulger trial it didn't get like any

news coverage like it's still considered to be quite an obscure case even though it was a really really really horrific murder um and I was just sort of quite quite interested in the idea of like something so so terrible happening but it just being completely eclipsed in the public consciousness by something else and I think it was also for practical purposes for the novel i kind of didn't want the the case as it exists in the book to be like a big thing that everybody knew about i wanted it to be like something that was sort of being discovered for the first time so i was thinking like either i could either invent a new story that would eclipse it or I could go for a big news story that sort of really really sucked up the the entire news cycle and the two things I

thought of were the 2012 Olympics or Brexit and it I just kind of went for Brexit because I remember it better like when the Olympics happened I was only it 2012. So I was 18. So and I just, it's just a lot foggier. Whereas you just, I don't know, your brain just cooks a lot more between the ages of kind of like 18 and 22. So I could just remember Brexit a lot more clearly. And I could remember the kind of coverage and I could remember how much, just how dominating it was. And that was sort of why I went for it. I actually ended up feeling a bit like I'd maybe made a mistake halfway through and that I maybe should have gone for the Olympics

because I sort of started to feel a bit anxious about taking on the task of writing a Brexit book. But luckily for the most part, people haven't seemed to have taken it as like my attempt to write the great british brexit novel i think it was so clever and it worked so well because it's so believable the idea that you'd have this father who's like a politician or in that world that can cover things up we see it literally time and time again where people with privilege are able to kind of hide crimes

but what was your initial seedling idea for this book then was it listening to true crime or thinking about people's accessions with it was it about these murders that had happened and maybe gone slightly under the radar or was it a feeling it out and because it I loved boy parts as well I think we've all read that and loved it and it is they're both dark in their own ways but it's very different as a book I'd say yeah I mean boy parts was a very like it was a very like natural sort of feeling thing to write I think because it was my first novel and I wasn't I obviously wasn't under contract I was almost just writing it as like like an like a writing exercise to see if I could write a novel um so it's a lot of things that I was just sort of the almost like the the base level

things that I'm interested in the thing the kind of themes that you'll probably see crop up in my writing again and again and again are the things that boy parts are sort of wrapped around whereas by by the time I got around to writing penance I was under contract so I knew that I had to write a second novel so it was a much more like mechanical and kind of pretentious process I would say in the in the like I knew I was writing it to write a novel boy parts actually hadn't been published yet by the time that I'd started writing penance I started writing it in like late 2019 and I already knew that like the writing was going to be on the wall a little bit for how people were going to respond to boy parts and

it was going to be like people asking me if it was semi-autobiographical people expecting me to be to only be able to write this book again and again and again and like basically people expecting me to just continually churn out the same book about like a young woman going crackers maybe in a big city maybe not um so I thought I really need to do something super different from boy parts otherwise I'm gonna get pigeonholed and and that'll be curtains for me and I also I just really didn't want to write like my first novel again but worse for um for my second book so I thought let's let's do something quite different and let's pick like a topic that will sustain my interest that's like big and meaty and will sustain my interest for a long

period of time but also isn't too far away from what i'm good at and what like people may or may not be interested in by the time boy parts comes out so it was i thought i could i'll do a true crime thing i do a lot of just kind of pinching um i've got a short story collection coming out at the end of the year and a lot of that's a lot of the kind of initial germs of inspiration for that are like articles that I've read or like other kind of non-fiction things um and it's just a bit of a process of kind of pinching a case that I thought would be that I could like work with and like kind of smashing a couple of different things together and then so I had kind of the cases that I thought were interesting and then in terms of the setting it's just my my um my partner my boyfriend is from um he's not from Scarborough but he grew up he spent like his last sort of few teenage years in Scarborough while he was a kid

um and a lot of our friendship group is still from Scarborough as well so it was just kind of like he told me he like casually referred to the donkey stranglings one day and I was like what what are you talking about and and um yeah it was just a reminder that there were all of these really really good local news stories that he told me about over the years so it was just kind of like I said a little bit pretentious and a little bit mechanical but also just kind of like grabbing things that I knew were interesting and kind of smushing them together um into an idea that I knew would hold my interest for like two or three years that stuff around you know the beach towns and the like seaside culture in the UK was such an interesting part of the book I feel like that really is just

such a fascinating part of UK culture that doesn't really kind of get the attention that it could do it doesn't always quite translate as well like I feel like you you really have to um like when i've sort of been in contact with like an international audience i feel like i have really had to explain that it's like oh no it's like it's not just this town that i've made up that is like this it's like they're all kind of like this it's really fascinating you've obviously created this fictional northern town and then we've got this narrator as like a real usurper. Not only is he super unreliable, kind of slimy in that way. He's also just completely not from that world. He's this kind of middle class, kind of like semi disgraced man. at what point in your like crafting of the novel you knew or you realized that the narrator was going to be someone who like boy parts was this kind of unreliable sort yeah that's interesting that actually came like quite late in the process you know I was um again because I was I wanted to

do something quite different from boy parts initially the my idea for the narrator was like because I'd read like a bunch of of true crime books like really high quality and really good true crime books in the research for this that it was stuff like um like brian masters and uh richard like parry's the people who eat darkness that where it's like looking at these these well-intentioned journalists who are writing with like a genuinely like like impartial and fair voice and that that was kind of what I was initially going for is just like a narrator that almost wasn't present and was just this like impartial and fair voice to telegraph the story

but whenever I was trying to like write in a way that was sort of impartial and fair and authoritative I just sort of thought god what a knob um and i couldn't i couldn't quite like get away from this sort of every time i tried to write something that felt like it was the narrator kind of like casting a judgment i just thought like god what an arsehole what a pompous twat um so i kind of decided to lean into it a bit and i wasn't quite sure what i was going to do until i i read'm in Cold Blood by Truman Capote and I had the the experience that a lot of writers do when they read in Cold Blood by Truman Capote which is sort of immediately have a complete nervous breakdown and wonder what the fuck the point in

in anything that I do is because this is like so good but the prose is like it's like the best line level writing I've ever encountered and it was just kind of like immediately like i might as well just like throw my laptop in the bin it's over it's so over um and um then i started reading a little bit more about truman capote and i was really interested in the fact that like quite a lot of in cold blood is fabricated and quite a lot of it is exaggerated and it was written in quite an unethical way in a lot of ways and capote himself had like a really wonky relationship with the truth and i mean i think there was recently like a like a ryan murphy drama about this but he like burned his relationships with a bunch of his like close

friends because he just kept writing gossip about them in the papers and i thought that was just so fascinating as like a character to write this idea of this person who's this like excellent writer but can't like but it's just so like hampered by his own like relationship with the truth that that it that it kind of like ruins his career and he like never finished another book and i was just so interested by that um and i thought that like what what would really probably help me get along with this and make me feel a bit more comfortable with this voice is if i just kind of accepted that not only is he pompous and a twat that he's just probably lying and then i felt so like relaxed by that that it made it much easier to to finish the book I spent like I spent

like about two almost like two solid years like really really fretting and deleting and writing and scrapping like the first kind of 50 or 60,000 words of the book to then write the second half of the book in about six months um and I think that that sort of experience with with In Cold Blood was very um very very freeing and allowed me to finish it in a lot of ways you kind of open the book with that Truman Capote quote and he gives himself so much credit he was like I kind of made the genre popular but I also after me we started tearing it down and I think this this book is such a great kind of taking a part of what true crime is and what good true crime is and what dangerous true crime is so it's a great answer did you ever feel any sort of like meta guilt around I guess being like one extended layer away from this thing that you're writing about if

that makes sense because I guess if some of it was based on true murders that have happened I don't even know that's probably a bit of like a word salad question but no no no it makes complete sense and like honestly yeah like I it's something that I've thought about a lot while um while I was writing it and and while I've been kind of every time I talk about and every time I I mentioned the the Shonda Sharer and the Suzanne Kappa murders I do kind of have this like this like wince where it's like I have i have like repurposed these stories like i mean the the murder that happens in penance is an identical but it's like clearly like you can kind of if you go through and you're familiar with the cases you can see where i've like lifted bits and bobs from from both of those cases and yeah i don't know it's it's i i feel really like

weird about it to be honest i feel quite uncomfortable with it and i think it's it's maybe a bit of a a bit evident that it's sort of the book kind of started as one thing and then morphed into like more of a critique as it sort of went on um i think if i was going to write it again i probably would make something up more whole cloth um than than borrowing just because i have felt quite like icky about it is is I've got on and I know that icky is not exactly the best word to use there I felt super yucky about it as I get right but um yeah I I don't know I felt like I've it's it's been something that I've just sort of felt quite weird about I hope that it like hasn't like taken away too much i think when when you maybe know that like i the writer i'm like not as that i'm a bit more ambivalent about

true crime consumption i hope maybe it like makes more sense and you're able to kind of pass it a bit more because i like the odd kind of bits of of critique that i've seen people who have tended to struggle with the book a lot have been people who like true crime and think I'm being really self-righteous but also know where I've like pinched a bunch of stuff from real cases and like have a lot of trouble reconciling that and I mean I guess I guess I kind of have some trouble reconciling it as well um but yeah I don't know it's it's it's sort of like a bit of a weird, tricky thing. It's the, I guess, part of the problem with writing fiction is that you're always going to be borrowing from real life to an extent.

But maybe, I guess one of the kind of problems with Penance that I don't know if I'll ever quite be able to solve with it is that it is this kind of extended critique that is born out of my own like really heavy consumption of true crime and the fact that I know about like two uh less so the Shonda Sharer but definitely the the Suzanne Caffer case like these two like actually quite obscure cases it was funny because I did literally like two weeks ago after having red penance I did this podcast called drunk women solving crime and it was about a really old crime from like the 1800s.

And we were like laughing and making jokes, like it's meant to be a funny podcast. And then I suddenly remembered Penance as I was doing it. And I was like, no, like, what am I doing? I shouldn't be laughing. It doesn't matter that this is so long ago. So I think actually, as much as you might have that icky feeling, and I think icky is a good word, people who read it will sit with it and think, actually, is it normal to be finding so much pleasure in kind of reading or listening to stories and we saw people's revulsion

at the jeffrey jarmer show well some people loved it some people absolutely were fan at a parent so i think it's like a really timely piece of literature for people to have because it does bring you into the present and think actually why are we consuming this yeah it's i suppose it's like i don't want people to's like I don't want people to stop and I don't want people to beat themselves up about it I just sort of think it's a useful thing to like think about a bit definitely so we had a question from Raquel who asked what is a trait of yours that you gave to Irina? And also, how do you feel about having a question like that? How does that sit with you,

having the comparisons between you and the protagonist of Boy Parts? Yeah, I mean, I think that is sort of a fair way to word it, I suppose, if you were going to ask me if there were any kind of overlaps in in in I guess me and and that character because I think like it's I mean it's a first novel so there's always going to be a lot of like write what you know in there um I always you know I always kind of go out of my way to say that I don't you know I don't I don't kill people I don't commit crimes I'm not um I'm not I'm not I mean I think it one of the worst things about the sort of like, so how much are you alike is me kind of wanting to be like,

she's like a sex offender. But in terms of the like, I was like, I was so angry when I wrote Boy Parts. I always like, I think the further away I've gotten from it, the more I think about how, like, just how angry I was when I wrote it it and a lot of the book was thought up while I was like working in in retail and while I was like bored and like either dealing with shit from customers or like reflecting on like shit that I'd had from customers particularly

like men that I'd had to deal with in public and And I think that's probably the thing that is the biggest kind of overlap there is just the rage and the frustration that I was feeling at the time. I also think like maybe some of the humour of Irena as well, like I feel like she says some of the, maybe like the absolute like worst things that I think that I would never say aloud I think she's such a compelling point of view because she says and does so many of the things

we would never do but there's almost like an empowerment and just kind of reading somebody just just like doing the worst possible things thinking and saying the worst possible things really I've always had like a lot of trouble with with intrusive thoughts since I was like a little kid um and I don't know she's almost like a walking like manifestation of an intrusive thought I think in some ways I was literally just about to say that that's exactly what really impulsed an intrusive it's great in both books there's kind of such a kind of shaky relationship with the truth in both of them it's kind of is left to reader to sit with uncertainty I wonder one whether I guess people are coming to you to like find kind of definitive answers and a kind of um like disappointed or if you know you think it's quite healthy I guess to to have novels where

things aren't wrapped up things aren't solved because I guess that's kind of the quality of life is is kind of constant uncertainty yeah that's that's really interesting because like I I like have had people ask me to particularly with boy parts to like explain the end I was doing like a live Instagram event and there was an audience question that was like can you explain the ending I remember I gave this like really arsey answer I just I like really flatly went like I think people need to learn to be more comfortable with ambiguity and I do I do still think that's true I think like people people need to learn to be more comfortable with ambiguity I think particularly in the last sort of few years it feels like there's this real this real like thirst for

black and white and to be told what's right and what's wrong and to be told what the correct opinion to have is and I think we can sometimes really struggle with um with with gray areas and with um I don't know I guess like just being a bit more thoughtful about things and not being able to have like a not being able to come down with an answer that's right or wrong on one side um and I think i don't know i think it is very human to like want to seek out answers but but i do think it's it's like healthy to learn to like accept ambiguity i think it's i think it's an important part of like i guess like growing up and becoming more mature to to accept that you're not always going to get

answers and that things are just going to peter out and be sort of unsatisfying sometimes. Definitely. And that's the magic of the characters. Every character in Penance especially is given, you know, we see every side, we see that they've been hurt, they've hurt others. You don't kind of,

there's no goodies or baddies in the traditional sense, which I think is just so exciting. I was going to say, when we did the episode where we discussed of everything has gone to where we discussed penance one of the things we spoke about and one of the things I found so affecting was the relationships between the girls and the bullying and the ostracization and how much it triggered me in a way that I didn't know I could be triggered as a third child woman who left school however many years ago how was that writing

that and I don't know why out of everything that was almost the most like traumatizing bit for me it's that feeling that you get in your chest and you think you're being left out or girls are talking behind your back and you're just like how was the experience of writing that yeah I mean it was it was sort of it was unpleasant in some ways I think because most of the book was written during lockdown as well so i feel like i didn't really have time to do much apart from it's just sort of mull over my own like memories and like things that it's a lot of the like the horrible stuff and penances either stuff that i remember being done to me stuff that i remember doing to other people or stuff that i remember seeing other people doing i've got like a really good memory for horrible shit um and

it's just I don't know I feel like I was almost just kind of like picking over like stuff that I remember from high school about those like horrible like power dynamics and hierarchies that that that occur um I don't know it's it's really strange I feel like there's like no time in your life where you're more like you're more like unpleasant and like barely like civilized and i feel like people are just sort of so obsessed with like hierarchical structures like not consciously obviously and like trying to be as like i don't know just trying to kind of like be somewhere in like a hierarchy that's not at the bottom. And I think that's just something so interesting and how that sort of never really

stops as you go into adulthood, but it's like so, so obvious in high school. I don't know, we should probably just stop sending kids to high school. I feel like they should just put you in a pod when you're like 12 and then they can let you back out when you're like 19 and um uh when you're a bit more sort of done cooking but um i didn't find it super fun to to write in some ways it was a lot of like just sort of like staring at the wall and like remembering stuff that i i wish i had forgotten having gone to an all-girls school that detail around the bullying and the hierarchy and the kind of the subtle shifts of power over very kind of innocuous things just was bang on for me in my experience and was yeah as Anoni said very very triggering. One thing that I really wanted to ask is when I was reading I picked up

on a reference that you made about Chad's and stacy's almost as a way to kind of understand the like the murder fandoms on tumblr and how they talk about victims having deserved their outcomes do you think that there are similarities between the two kind of communities and was that you know an intentional kind of comparison between the the sort of true crime and the incel yeah yeah i think there's like a there's like a big crossover in that sort of like i don't know like edgelord heavily ironized half of the internet where i was like particularly interested in there's a case that i think there's there's like a little bibliography at the back of penance um for stuff that i felt like was just a little bit too like influential not to cite if that makes sense um something that that was really really useful for me was um this this series about a young woman called lindsey savannah rath who

planned a mass shooting but was caught at the airport um because she kept posting about it on tumblr um and i she was very in that kind of crossover of like true crime and like right wing and weird sort of social it's like i guess i don't know it's like there's like an anti-social element to it i suppose where there's obviously like a super super normal and very mainstream which is like probably like 95 of people who are involved in like true crime communities or true crime fandoms whether it's people who are like in that into that sort of like investigating side of it or people who are in the historical side of it or people who just kind of follow the news and that kind of thing but obviously when you're getting into this more kind of like edgy fandom-y kind of territory I do really think there begins to be an overlap just because there is this like it's just like sort of inherently quite anti-social

and I think it just makes sense that there would be this crossover in other anti-social communities I think like particularly the lindsey savannah rath case is a really interesting one to look at if you are sort of interested in the crossover between like that true crime fandom side of stuff and that sort of white supremacist in celly neo-nazi kind of side of the internet yeah to sort of zoom out from like that community to like a community that we're all part of which is the internet yeah to sort of zoom out from like that community to like a community that we're all part of which is the millennial community um do you feel like in both books you capture um millennial experiences kind of millennial mindsets do you feel with future work

maybe there'll be an expectation for you to continue to write these kind of really spot on kind of tomes for millennial women or do you feel like you're ready to to go somewhere else yeah I think I am going somewhere else I've already kind of started my um my third novel I'm kind of like a bit of a I'm like a dent into it and I'm doing like a like a science fiction thing I think I'd really like to I kind of want to change genres I think probably with like every not maybe not necessarily every novel going forward but um I could just do with a bit of a change from like contemporary narratives and I think that might seem like a bit of a jump but once my short story collections got a lot of genre stuff and it was like the first stuff I was writing was like horror

and sci-fi and I think I would like to do something that's more firmly in like a genre space that's not necessarily with this sort of contemporary side to it as well because I think that that becomes a point where it does become a bit of a crutch and if you know that you're good at it which which I which I think I am um it like I said it just it feels like it can be a little bit of a crutch um it's the same thing with me and unreliable narrators I think that can be a little bit of a crutch for me so I'm trying to sort of move away from it and challenge myself a little bit with my third novel and do something and never something completely different I suppose that's so exciting and I'm I'm so happy and I can't wait to read that.

I never knew if it was like more publishers. I've heard from authors who say like, once you have a book that does really well, the publishers are basically like, okay, do that again, but differently. So have your publishers been receptive to you being like, actually, I'm gonna, you know, really change tack for the next book?

Yes, well, I'm very, very lucky to be with Faber and Faber who are more than anything, just invested in like supporting authors and what they want to do and they publish a few writers like that who sort of will just do something quite different with everybody i mean but probably most notably that you can point out would be kazuo ishiguro who obviously does like a huge genre shift with every book um who I kind of see is quite a big like inspiration for that I think it's really really cool to be able to sort of shift in a big way with every project um and and really exciting I think that's something that I've always found most exciting in like the artists that I that I like I guess like a really a David Bowie as a teenager I think that's maybe had like

quite a big influence on me this idea of doing like this huge shift with every project is always really exciting to me if you haven't read Penance yet you can pre-order the paperback which will be available from the 2nd of May wherever you get books. And you can follow Eliza on Instagram at at fancy Eliza. Thank you so much for chatting with us, Eliza. And can't wait for your new stuff. Okay, thanks for having me. Goodbye, guys. Bye.

Everything is Content is a Grape Original Podcast and we are part of the Acast Creator Network. This podcast was created, devised and presented by us, Beth McCall, ruchira sharma and anoni the producer is faye lawrence and the executive producer is james norman five