Everything Is Content - Julia Armfield - author of Private Rites and Our Wives Under The Sea: Everything In Conversation

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

She’s everywhere, she’s so Julia (LITERALLY!) Join Beth, Ruchira and Oenone in conversation with the bestselling author Julia Armfield as we discuss her new novel Private Rites. Private Rites follows three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world. The book follows themes of grief, rituals, and legacy… we loved the book and we had loads to ask Julia about climate anxiety, queer horror and sisterhood. Is there someone who you really want to hear in converstaion? Let us know on Instagram @everythingiscontentpod - and we'll see what we can do! You can get your copy of Private Rites here - highly recommended by us here at Everything Is Content Towers!Explore Julia’s work at https://www.juliaarmfield.co.uk/ Follow Juila on Instagram @JuliaArmfield—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.

I don't believe in star signs, I don't believe in personality tests, but if you tell me your birth order, I know absolutely everything about you. Youngest. Yeah. I'm Beth. I'm Richera. And I'm Anoni. And welcome back to another special episode of Everything Is Content.

This is Everything In Conversation with Julia Armfield. Julia is a brilliant author. She wrote the bestseller Our Wives Under the Sea and Salt Slow. Her new novel Private Rights is out now. Private Rights follows three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world. The book follows themes of grief, rituals and legacy. We love Julia's work, so we're really excited to get stuck into this chat with her. But before we do, make sure you're subscribed so you can see every time we release an episode and let us know on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod if there's anyone who you'd love to hear us chat to. So here we go, here's Julia. Hello Julia and welcome to Everything Is Content.

Hello, thank you for having me. We are so thrilled. You are like a listener favourite, I think. Whenever we've done a question of like, what should we read? Both books have come up, so we're very, very honoured. How are you, Julia? I'm good, thank you. I'm a combination of freezing cold and sweaty at all times at the moment, which I think is just how life is now. So I think I'm doing great. great I'm doing as well as I can be very relatable very relatable what kind of summer is this etc yeah exactly this is the kind of summer that I've written about and now I've apparently

manifested so I think this is clearly my fault I'm really sorry we'll get into this but Friday which was also the day that I was like moving out from my newly ex's house you know and it was pouring like rain like you've never seen before and I was in such a bad mood I was like this is me it's my brain like I'm like Ursula in the Little Mermaid but that is the rain I feel like is in the book. Exactly no one is having a good time everybody has to go about and do their jobs anyway and yet it's like this now in the middle of July so we're doing really well. Hell yeah do you worry that you've sort of manifested this by writing a book pre-summer about a world of endless rain rising tides do you do you worry that you've sort of manifested this by writing a book pre-summer about a world of endless rain rising tides do you do you take any responsibility yeah I take all responsibility

I'll take like literally this happened last time I wrote a book about a submarine and then that happened last time as well so clearly I need to write a novel where really great things happen for me specifically because I have our fore foresight. Your power! I completely forgot because when I first met Julia, it was about Our Wives Under the Sea and the submersible thing had literally happened like the day before we met, I think. I mean, it's kind of, it's not good, but it's kind of, it was kind of good because the book's so detailed. It was actually really great. I was like telling people all about the submersible.

I was like, actually no loads because I read this book. I couldn't go online for like three days because people kept just tagging me into it being like have you noticed it's the same and I'm like I say anything I mean it didn't it didn't look great for me so you know it's it's something that happened but there we go so Julia I apologize for my synopsis it rains loads the water's rising could you give us maybe uh a slightly more succinct and uh eloquent description of the book private rights for anyone who is yet to read it yes of course so uh private rights uh in brief is a novel as you say it's i would say maybe about 60 years hence but it's not particularly

clear we're just in a semi-futuristic version of now uh where it's been raining for a very long time and everything has sort of descended into this kind of soggy subsistence. And the thing I was thinking about a lot, I was thinking about the kind of dystopia slash apocalyptic situation where like everything is terrible, but at the same time, you'd be very likely to get an email from your boss being like, come in if you can, which I think is actually very likely what's going to happen. And within that setting, it's a novel about three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, who are dealing with the very recent death of their estranged father, who was an architect who is sort of revered for making the new state of the world navigable, but of course, actually only for the people who could afford it. So it's about those

two things. And it's about, I guess, sort of how we grieve when everything seems to be ending anyway. That was such a good point. I was just thinking about why it was different from other dystopias. It's often when we land in a dystopia, the world's already completely changed and we had to revise and learn like how we got there. Whereas in this one, you've got one toe in and one toe out where it's like it's so believable. We can imagine like sea levels rising, us having to live in these high stories. And then there is this sense of kind of like normalcy, like they're going to coffee shops. It's not that far away,

which I think is what makes it that much more icky. Well, I think that was the thing I was the most interested in because I think I've done this in our lives too, to an extent. I'm just, I'm really fascinated in the sort of almost oppressive nature of normality. The fact that the ordinary and the mundane will actually

assert itself kind of whatever happens and whatever the weather and the fact that whatever is going on, you probably still have to pay rent. And the weird like domineering nature of that, the fact that you almost have no time to take in anything that's happening at a crisis point because you still have to go to work. And that was very crucial to kind of the world that I wanted to invoke. That just makes me think of COVID. And I wonder, was that, you know, a cognizant kind of inspiration for this or does it just feel like a parallel

because everything you're saying just makes me feel of pandemica? Oh no, completely. I think it's weird in a way because I can't remember if I said this when I was talking about Our Wives kind of a couple of years ago, but you don't realize a lot of the time what you're writing and what you're reacting to until you've done it. But at the same time, Our Wives obviously was very much about two women being trapped in two small places. And I'd written

that novel from March to December of 2020. So you kind of suddenly realize exactly what you're reacting to after that. So in some ways, Our Wives was really more of my COVID novel than anything else. And I wanted private rights to be bigger and to be more kind of like out in the world and have more characters. But at the same time, I think you're completely right. I think it's very hard to escape that idea of an absolutely calamitous crisis situation and people still just having to go on and do what they're doing because that's the situation that we live in this is a situation that we live in every day so I think that I'm sort of rollingly always reacting to

that kind of thing so it would be it would be ridiculous not to call it a COVID novel to some degree you're right with all of your writing there's always this sense of like allegory and and mythical nature to it so like was there a second level to this where it's also about kind of like I was wondering even just in the sense of the economic crisis and the fact that we all feel like we're drowning in our work and actually we don't really can't really afford anywhere to live was that kind of like a another kind of layer to it as well as like the literal sense of like we are drowning ourselves with the climate yeah definitely I think that you find yourself I mean we all feel this don't we find yourself in to it as well as like the literal sense of like we are drowning ourselves with the climate yeah

definitely I think that you find yourself I mean we all feel this don't we find yourself in such an absolutely sort of unreal scenario every day for all that everything is so deeply mundane and so normal and so I was I was reacting to the sense of unreality that I think is reality so much and so I think you're completely right. I think also that just like, I've never written straight to realism because it's not particularly what interests me. I'm interested in horror. I'm interested in sci-fi. I'm interested in the way that different genres intersect. And I think it's a, I think it's a poor sort of writer who thinks that one genre is inherently more superior than another. And I also think that like all genres are reacting

to each other all the time. So I was thinking of horror a lot when I was writing this novel and the way that I kind of always am. And there's a lot of, I can't really say much without giving away the entire plot, but I was reacting a lot to this sort of trio of, I guess you would call them folk horror movies

from the late 60s and the early 70s, which is The Wicker Man, which is the one that people know, and Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan'san's claw that one is my favorite um and they're all kind of they're movies about sort of the same thing they're movies about um breakdowns of values in sort of crisis points and the way that uh you suddenly realize that many value systems are actually entirely arbitrary and what people build in those situations. So I think I was thinking about those movies a lot as well when I was writing this. So something that I really loved and found really unnerving was in between the chapters,

so the chapters are dedicated to each of the sisters, and then you have these city chapters, which even though they are quite precise, they're sort of factual, what's happening in the city on a more like factual structural level, I found them the most chilling almost. How did you decide to include this sort of non-human narrator or this non-human element into your chapter structure? No, that's a great question. That was a thing that was going to happen quite soon in the writing process. But then my editors, I think particularly my American editor, actually really quite hard fought to take it out because they thought it would be quite distracting. And I thought it was really, really necessary, both from just like a practical perspective, because you spend a lot of time with the three sisters and you're're not in first you're in close third with all of them but at the same time they're very self-absorbed um and they are very uh you're quite like tight in their vision the entire time so I think you needed it to some extent just as a

break for the for the reader to be honest just to be out of these selfish people's heads um but then also it was very useful to me as a way of sort of like zooming the lens out and being at the other end of a telescope basically and suddenly figuring out that there were a lot of other things going on in this drowning city and a lot of other things going on in this world and I think to some extent it was meant to be a way of showing in a practical sense to the reader that very thing I was saying about how we can only really focus in on very specific things like getting our rent paid in horrible situations and so we often miss the bigger picture and I wanted it to be a way of perhaps showing the reader quite late on that they'd possibly been focusing on the wrong thing

one thing that I'm fascinated by is why you chose to go into sibling relationships specifically sisters as an older sister yeah I just felt myself just like so seen in different bits and horrifically seen because I didn't want to align with certain sisters but I did and sent aspects of them too so yeah I mean I'm an older sister too so I feel you I'm really sorry I always say I am I don't believe in star signs I don't believe in personality tests but if you tell me your birth order I know absolutely everything about you and I really do youngest yeah see I'm just saying I know you're saying red to filth but I think that it was it was always something that I wanted to focus on and I think it being three sort of gives you the perfect one two three of like everything that you want to cover in that

and so I wanted to look at that and I also I wanted to talk about sisters specifically just because I was always going to be talking about queerness and I am best at writing about queer women and so I think that was important to me too because all three of them are queer and they're all kind of I would say they're all different types of queer like Isla is the oldest and she's quite like an assimilationist lesbian I would say she's the only one who comes out to their father for instance and she spends a lot of time I would say playing into straight narratives that don't necessarily serve her and don't make her happy um whereas Agnes on the other end of the scale who is the youngest sister she never comes out to her father she doesn't really know her father very well and she doesn't really exist in a straight

world in any way whatsoever and so she has an entirely different perspective on everything and then Irene in the middle is just that lesbian who's telling you about her PhD which is a type but yeah. Did you get any pushback again I always wonder because it's unusual to get like a plot thick of like especially because all sisters are gay where any of your publishers like one of them has to be straight uh no I think I'm probably I'm quite fortunate in as much as that I have already built up a work a body of work that probably involves enough lesbians that it would be quite what they were like we don't want your perspective on straight people yeah you don't know what you're talking about so I think in some ways I'm quite fortunate but I mean you raise quite an important point as well which is that even now I think we like to talk about

uh things being equal and we like to talk about there being this sort of like great raft of queer representation in literature but also quite a lot of the time you're also watching uh I would say mainstream feminism cherry-picking things from lesbianism without uh quite a lot of the actual meat of it and that's often what gets used so I think I'm very very fortunate to have been allowed to portray it in the way that I did I also have to say I love there's a lot of sex in the book which I think always comes especially in times of peril I feel like desire and passion grows in times when the world is quite difficult and I actually love I always have sex in times of peril definitely

and I loved I loved all the sex I really enjoyed all of that how was that writing it you could exceed good did good sex and our wives under the sea I think as well didn't you you do good sex I do good sex but you can just put that on on the thing for the episode just be like Julia Runfield does good sex and isn't afraid to ask um no I think no it's um I think just it's important to me it's important to me in terms of uh writing queer lives and writing them in the way that I recognize them in the way that I'm interested in them um and I think you're right as well like it's sort of similar to writing horror and writing comedy in the same place I think that it's very seldom that one thing is going on like you might be in crisis but also you might be quite horny and you might be having a horrible time but also someone will probably crack a joke at some point

during the day and and so I wanted to I just wanted to do like quite like hard realism in the middle of all this weird genre stuff I just wanted to show the way that people people and their grubby lives and people in their beautiful lives and the way that all of that kind of comes together that's what I wanted to do something you mentioned earlier, the kind of mundane aspects of the lives and how, I guess, apathy creeps in. And maybe this is not so much a question about the novel or maybe the world of the novel because it's the world that we live in. Do you think that there are any kind of antidotes for that apathy that kind of you've touched on in your life like any kind of like way that we can see through the apathy that I think even I feel about the approach of catastrophe I think oh that's

such a that's such a how do you fix everything question that you've given me there um I think that's very true maybe even if it's just on the on the kind of personal level of like how do I feel I think that it's probably there is something in the fact that we've all been put in this position to some degree or another where you're all just scrabbling to make rent all the time and I think that one possibly has to stop expecting absolutely everything of yourself and at the same time just like do one thing every day that you are possibly too tired to do and I don't really I don't mean that in a grind way. I mean, like, like just go and do one thing for somebody else. And I think that that's, it's something that I wanted to cover in the book a little bit, because as I said, you have,

you have three quite selfish perspectives from the three main characters. They're also quite privileged and they're also dealing with a lot of very specific economic privilege and wanting to take it or wanting to push it away. And so it was quite important to me to have the perspectives of their partners who are all from entirely different backgrounds, dealing with entirely different things. You have a very brief interruption of their voices in the middle of the novel. And like one of them actually works in social care and is exhausted all the time, but is doing something useful. And one of them, on in social care and is exhausted all the time but is doing something useful and one of them on the other hand just does a stupid job that she doesn't care about so she can go and do as many things as she wants that make her happy all of the rest of the time and she has this conversation with Agnes at one point where Agnes is like but like time is

so running out why are you doing this job that you hate and she's like because I don't want to be defined by my job I just want to be able to go and do everything else that I want. And so I think that those are both, I don't really think they're necessarily antidotes, but I think they're certainly alternatives that the novel offers, if that makes sense. I loved, I remember that conversation with Agnes so clearly, because I think that's something that's really missing

because of capitalism, the way society's designed, is like you have to find your purpose in your career. So everyone's like striving to work. And actually, I had a friend who did that she she was doing midwifery and then like wasn't making enough money so went and did this kind of bullshit job where she didn't have that many hours but she's getting paid really well and she was like I don't care if my job's not impressive or cool like this is actually a better way to live so I thought that was a really good conversation I found it really kind of useful to have that because I feel like generally we're

losing that so much this idea that your life is valuable even if your career isn't some like really sparkly shiny thing that's really disappearing I think you're so right I think it's it's the way that the sort of girl boss mentality is foisted on us to a degree whereby actually it's not really emancipating and it's not really helpful in a way to just shove you even further into capitalism be like this is how you do good feminism by doing your job and I think it doesn't mean that it's not good feminism but I just think that it's it's it's a strange imperative to have been shoved onto everybody yeah yeah it's definitely something that I'm grappling with at the moment it's like I know that I shouldn't let my job define me but also I feel like I've walked into the trap and

it's like now I'm in the cage how do I get out the fucking cage exactly and I think it's it's strange how if you are in a situation where you love your job it can become so all-encompassing and part of your identity and if you don't love your job people will ask you why you're not doing a job that you love and I just think it's a weird catch-22 yeah one thing I wanted to ask you is why do you think queer narratives and horror goes so well together? I was just thinking about the book, but I was also thinking about, you know, Jennifer's body and I don't know, I feel like, yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Oh, I have so many thoughts on this. Okay. So I think that firstly, I think horror is just the

gayest genre and I'm always saying this and I think it's true. I think even just from a historical context, if you think about like, I don't know if you think like a case code universal period of horror movies, things like they were often being made by like queer creators, people like James Whale, who's a director who did Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein. And I think that it means that in the sort of outset of horror, the queer subtext is often there on purpose um and therefore it's a genre that is always reinventing itself always building on itself and so it is building on a bedrock of queerness to some degree and so that comes through and then i think that it's also a genre which is very very occupied with the idea of being in opposition to something it's a genre which is

very occupied with the idea of being monstered, being othered, reclaiming the monster, et cetera, and working in cycles in that way. And I think it's so interesting to me as a genre which goes through these sort of endless revolutions. Like Stephen King in the 1980s said that he thought it was in many ways the most conservative of genres because it was often insisting upon the sort of nuclear family norm being reinstigated at the end of the narrative when it had been threatened by something. And I think that that was true to some degree, but I think also now it's kind of come back around again. And there is, there are so many examples of like incredibly great queer writers, queer filmmakers, people who are making these like often terrifying narratives, which are not really like they're about like owning oneself in some

ways. And I think that you think about like people like, like Rose Glass, writers like Alison Rumfitt, I think so many of the most interesting people operating in horror and like adjacent genres are often queer people today. So you start the book with the quote, we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long from King Lear. And then later in the book, I hope I'm remembering this correctly. There's the line. I think it's King Lear's dyke daughters to were you writing it, planning it, plotting it, and then you realise, okay, this is a little bit Shakespearean? Like, what's the tie-in there? Yes, I was writing it and then I decided I am exactly the same as Shakespeare.

I think what it was is that the very first thing that this novel was, it was a novel about sisters. It was a novel about three sisters and subsequently a novel about three sisters and their father. And it wasn't, I'm not interested in in retelling I'm not interested in reclaiming I think that there is there's definitely space for that but that's not what I'm doing particularly but I think it is a poor sort of author who doesn't look at various literary contexts and antecedents that they might have in the format of what they're writing and be like okay well I am in conversation

with this and I think the second that you're writing about three sisters and a father you are in conversation with King Lear to a degree I think you're also I guess in conversation with like three sisters by Chekhov to a lesser degree um and so when I realized that that was probably going to happen no matter what I did I I started thinking about what King Lear is about to me and to me King Lear is about inheritance and it's about abuse and I think those are two things that this novel is very preoccupied with and I think it's also it's also a narrative about fathers and daughters where the father is basically never off stage and the daughters I mean Cordelia you lose her for like the whole middle stretch of that play you do not see her at all despite the fact that she is largely the second most important character.

And so, again, it wasn't that I wanted to reclaim that particularly, but I think I found it very interesting to sort of spin the telescope around and be like, how would this track if the sisters were basically never off stage instead? And so it just became quite a useful way of framing what I was doing and framing what was important to it, I think. Could I ask you about the looming father figure in the book? Because, yeah, the kind of terror he poses and the kind of influence he has was so, I guess, I don't know, intoxicating is one word, but also traumatizingizing can you tell me a little bit about him as a figure so it was it was important to me on the one hand that I mean that this tracks as a novel which is about trauma and abuse because I think it is um but at the same time I didn't want him to take up an enormous amount of space on the actual page so he's from the it's not a spoiler to say the

outside of the novel he has died that's the first thing that happens um and then when you see him in flashback he's often quite distant he's often refracted through memory and and I think that that was quite important to me in terms of writing a queer narrative because god I keep saying this and then being like this sounds awful I really did not enjoy the movie All of Us Strangers I thought that everyone was great in it but I just thought that it was so deeply preoccupied with the like presence of queer shame and the presence of the parents still these figures that you cannot let go of and whose approval you cannot let go of um and I didn't really want to do that particularly I think that a lot of things about that movie were really moving and really worked but I just I found it was it it felt like a queasy way of dealing with shame to me. And I didn't really want to deal with that.

And I didn't want to write about that. So it was important that he was quite distant, but at the same time, it was also, it's also a novel about the fact that I think whether you had a good relationship with your parents, a bad relationship, no relationship with your parents, I think that you were always coming off that relationship to some degree forever and ever. I think everyone is, even if you have no problems and you're perfectly happy, you are still coming away from that relationship. And so

I wanted the presence, not of him, but of their reactions to be the thing that was like constantly foregrounded and that they were constantly returning to. Because I think it's important as well in narratives about siblings to be like, maybe we had exactly the same experience and yet you never have quite the same take on that experience. Even if you were always in the same house, even if you were always like dealing with the same things, I think that your memories of it because of your age, because of how you each had to deal with it because of different pressures will always be different. And so I think that was what was really important to me in writing this.

That particular thing just triggered me because my sisters, honestly, they gaslight me because I'll be like, do you not remember this? And they'll be like, that wasn't like that. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? Because it is that thing, like if I was so much younger as well, so like certain things to me that felt really significant,

they're like, that wasn't a big deal. Oh, triggered. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. Again, it's a very triggering novel the entire way through. It's just done damage to everybody. Can I ask you one last question because this is your third novel and you've built up um a very loving audience who really love your writing was it quite nerve-wracking because obviously our wives under the sea which I adored as well and I absolutely love private

rights how did that feel sending this out into the world off the back of something that was so big were you scared oh yes absolutely awful you send it, I cannot wait to disappoint you all night long. That's how I feel about this novel going out. Thankfully, everybody's been very nice thus far. But it's interesting from a sort of people who actually read your novel perspective, people keep telling you they're excited and you're like, oh, no.

And then when people actually review you, I think quite a lot of the time, what's very interesting about writing is that there's always a slightly sort of maybe gloves off mentality when you're not a debut anymore. And I technically been a debut twice because I was a debut for a short story collection and then I was a debut for a novel, which is apparently a different thing. So, yeah, now I'm like I'm old and tired. So that's like I feel old and tired. That's how I feel because I have had that experience and it's really bad it's like once you like something about an author and

you read their book you are judging them from a different place than if you're coming to them the first time but Private Rights absolutely holds up to be as good as Our Wives Under the Sea it's so good you're so clever thank you this conversation I'm like god she's making I need to go and read more stuff all of your references I'm like shit better read that yeah you're the author we want to grow up to be I'm not I'm not hiding one book I'm just like I watch films those are the things that I've said so it's possible it's all content it's a very cinematic book though I mean yes I can never see I got really poor imagination for like visual I know what's going on but like I'm like whose hand is where what's going on like I was in that I could

see it I was like oh my god I feel like I'm in like a really moody like film I won't know what kind of film because I'm not a cinema girl but I was like I can see this which is actually very big for me so that's really nice thank you Private Rights is out now so you can go grab it wherever you get your books and Julia for us internet dwellers where can we find you on the web you can find me on instagram it's just my name or you can follow my terrible sub stack about uh three stars fine horror movies which is called three stars fine i cannot wait to do that right now i didn't know you had that stunning thank you everyone so much for listening and thank you so much julia for joining us and we'll see you on friday