How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S14, Ep4 How To Fail: Natasha Brown

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Natasha Brown is the author behind one of my favourite novels of recent years. Assembly runs to 100-pages and has already been compared to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It was shortlisted for both the Folio and the Goldsmiths Prize, as well as being named the Foyles Bookshop Book of the Year. It tells the story of an unnamed Black British woman working at a bank in the city, who is confronted with the numbing aggression of racist encounters and systems as she confronts a life-or-death decision.When I first met Natasha, I knew I had to get her on the podcast. She is so wise, clever and emotionally intelligent. She talks to me about failures in social media, learning French and a tele-sales job that taught her about the power of language itself. We also discuss how she feels about failure given her objective levels of success, the concept of separating your own identity from what it is you do, race as a construct and what 'privilege' really means (if anything). Also: what she learned from studying Maths at university (yes, she's one of a select bunch of novelists with a Maths degree, including David Foster Wallace...).--Assembly by Natasha Brown is now out in paperback and available here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/444/444275/assembly/9780241992661.html--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Natasha Brown @wordsbynatasha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. Natasha Brown spent a decade working in financial services before writing her first novel. She is a Cambridge maths graduate and therefore versed in the art of concision, so perhaps it was no surprise that the resulting slim volume ran to 100 perfectly precise pages. The novel Assembly tells the story of an unnamed black British woman working at a bank in the city who is confronted with the numbing aggression of racist encounters and systems as she confronts a life or death decision. Such was the quality of Brown's prose and of her ideas that the novel sold for six figures and has gone on to be shortlisted for both the Folio and the Goldsmith's Prize, as well as being named the Foyles Bookshop Book of the Year. Brown has been referred to as a modern-day Virginia

wolf, while Bernardine Evaristo hailed her as a stunning new writer. And not that it matters, but I was blown away by Assembly too. I feel we read so many books about a guy or a woman who has it all but still isn't totally happy, Brown says. As people of colour, we don't get that narrative because it's so rare we even see a character who has all of those things, let alone is dissatisfied with them. I wanted to say, we can have a dissatisfaction story too. Natasha Brown, welcome to How to Fail. Hello, thank you so much for having me on and for that lovely introduction. It's a real joy to have you on. And I found that quote so interesting because I do think that although strides and advances

have been made in the publishing industry, et cetera, et cetera, I found that a really interesting point that actually the kind of narratives that we allow people of colour are still very monodimensional. So can you tell us a bit more about that and whether you wanted to set out to challenge that? didn't necessarily want to challenge that per se but I noticed sort of as you said if I wanted to as who I am write a debut novel I'm essentially writing within a genre because that's what gets published there's a sort of self-reinforcing loop of the books that get published seem like the only reality so only books that fit into that reality will get published. So I was very aware of the constraints that that effective genre put on how I could approach the story. But I also wanted to see if I could subvert that expectation a little bit and play around with something that through

experimenting within the narrative form would hopefully bring about a conversation around what it does when we force certain identities to be effectively genres on people. Because this is a podcast all about failure. I don't know if you've heard, but it is. And one of the things that I have seen you say repeatedly is that assembly is also about the failure of language itself. Can you explain a bit more? I was really interested in the question of whether language is neutral and how to go about examining a language from within that language itself. So examining some of the ways that we use English, because that's the language I work in, how I can use English to defamiliarise the way we talk about things, the phrases we use,

and try and look at them from a slightly different perspective. And I think a novel perhaps doesn't seem like the natural way of going about that. But I'd sort of hoped, based on some of the reading I'd been doing, and how I wanted to try and almost borrow some techniques of satire to do this in a slightly interesting way, I could use this story of this woman on this weekend to explore some of the bigger narrative and linguistic constraints on people like her. And I should say as well that it is very satirical. I made it sound in the introduction like it was extremely profound, which it is, but you can also read it as this kind of journey to a country house weekend, which is incredibly

entertaining at the same time. So I know we're getting very deep very quickly. But do you believe then in sort of Derrida's concept of linguistic determinism, that idea that language is a kind of prison, it serves the people in power, because they're the ones who wrote it? I think perhaps my statement wouldn't be so strong. I certainly think there can be an assumption on all of us using language that it's neutral and objective and we've come up with words to describe pre-existing concepts and that's how language maps onto the world around us. But I would personally think that these languages evolved along with the people who use them and speak them. And we come up with concepts with phrases, and we organize the world into various items and concepts and structures in a way that helps to facilitate the activities that

we want to undertake. So I guess what I'm saying is, as you learn a different language, you realize sometimes concepts don't map cleanly. And I think that question of the language just being an objective way of describing the world, that was what I'm not entirely sure that I agree with. So what do you think of the concept of failure, given that you are an objective success? And it's a sort of question that I find really annoying, and I sometimes get asked it. And it's a sort of question that I find really annoying and I sometimes get asked it. And it's sort of, it's a generous compliment in a backhanded kind of way. But the thing is, like this is your first novel and you came out of the financial services and seemed to appear on the scene, just this fully formed, extraordinary writer. I suppose it's two questions. Answer

first, like how do you feel about the book's reception as you say that's very kind I think I've been really touched by the way the book's been able to resonate with people and so many people I think it's easy for us to sort of get siloed in our reading and for books to be marketed in a very narrow way I mean it's really been heartening and wonderful to be able to have conversations of sort of retirees in Australia who say something in the book resonated with something in their life, particularly with it coming out during the lockdown at a time when the world felt very small and closed in. It was just really a delight for me. Did you get any racist responses to the book? It's an interesting one. I think when a reader picks up a book,

and I say this because my primary experience has been as a reader, not a writer, I think that's a very open-minded, open-ended thing to do. And as long as that book sort of pulls you in and draws you in, I think you come to it with generosity. It's a generous thing to read a book. I think it's been interesting when you're in situations where the book or me as the writer are being turned into content for profit, if you know what I mean. So speaking to say, newspaper journalists, I think in those situations, there's certainly been some very crude, I suppose, ways of engaging with the book and with me. But I think that's to be expected. And that's a broader question than fiction. But in terms of speaking to readers, it's not to everyone's taste. because Natasha Pratt is eviscerating the person asking the questions but in such a measured polite and unbelievably clever way it was just genius but yeah does it annoy you when there's a sort of level of lazy thinking? I think laziness not at all I think we can all be lazy I had the experience I went to a sort of music art and literary festival in the Netherlands

and I was a writer in residence so every night I was writing about what happened the night before it was very tough actually to have a first thing in the morning deadline something you have to write so I think laziness and sort of falling back on stereotypes almost I completely understand and I think it happens to all of us I don't have as much sympathy for aggression, which sometimes happens in these forums. And I think there's never any, for me, any excuse to be rude and aggressive to other people. Absolutely. Going back to my earlier question, how do you feel about the concept of failure? I think it's interesting.

It's got a very negative association, which I appreciate you have these discussions to remove that somewhat. And I completely agree. I feel it's hard to move out of a comfort zone to try something new without risking failure. And I was talking to some writing students about experimenting with form recently. And a big thing that I certainly believe in the way I write is most of what you do will fail. That's how you do it. You kind of do it and redo it and fail at it until you get to the thing that most of what you do will fail. That's how you do it. You kind of do it and redo it and fail at it until you get to the thing that achieves what you want. And so I think it's really healthy to approach things that might not succeed. It can be easier and harder depending on

what the task is and what the situation is. But I think it's a crucial part of development and growth absolutely and how do you deem a book a success I mean one that you've written and is that assessment separate from how it's been received because I really struggle with that because I know I know that the key to contentment is to love the craft and the doing and to believe in your work and then to disconnect that from people who have negative responses to it or indeed positive responses because the work itself is what's meaningful and that doesn't change according to whether someone picks it up or writes a one-star review on Amazon but that's quite a struggle for me to get into that mindset and I wonder if it is

for you? I think it sort of comes down to one of the things I say often, which I know can sometimes seem quite glib or flippant, but I don't see myself as a writer in the sense that I don't think writing is what I'll do forever. And it's not how I define myself in a way. And I think by making it something I'm doing for a while and something I'm exploring with or experimenting with, it allows me to maintain some distance in my mind between who I am, my sense of self-worth and the things that I write. Not to say that's always easy, but I think it draws a line for me between a book which you know once it's been published and it's in someone's hands it's completely not up to me how it's interpreted and who I am and what I

consider about what I've done. So wise. I mean that's the theory it's sometimes tricky in practice in terms of what I consider success for a book I I think for me, my view is that it's going to change book to book. With this first book, I had some specific goals in mind. I particularly wanted to let this book facilitate the sort of writing that I want to do going forwards. And it's done that for me. I've got the opportunities now to write other things that I'm really interested in doing. So in that sense, it's been a success for me. But I think there's also the smaller goals of success in writing, which I was mindful of, but don't feel so personal. So does it grab a reader? Does someone enjoy reading it? So I had a lot of friends and then in the end, strangers as beta readers, I read the manuscript before I

submitted it, I got their feedback. And I really fed that in and tried to make sure that it was giving a satisfying reading experience. Because to me, that was, I don't feedback. And I really fed that in and tried to make sure that it was giving a satisfying reading experience. Because to me, that was, I don't know if I'd frame it in terms of success and failure. But to me, that was a clear requirement of writing a book, something I wanted to achieve. So I want to come on to a series of geeky questions about how you write and your writing style. But you said in your very enlightened way that you don't define yourself as a writer. How do you define yourself? It's an interesting question. I don't know it's one that I have a clear answer to, but I think I'm big on defining things through

their deeds and somewhat intense as well. But I try and live a decent life, which does not sound very sophisticated at all. But I think my relationships with my friends, my family, the things I try and do, just in the way that I can, hopefully, being good to those people, that's what I consider sort of what I am. For me, it's not tied to education or career or anything like that. I think it's sometimes easy to consider yourself, your career, particularly, you know, when you're in these very results orientated environments. But I like a smaller definition, I think. Oh, my gosh, I love that so much. I feel as I'm talking to you, the metaphorical pennies are just dropping all around me.

metaphorical pennies are just dropping all around me. But it is quite difficult to write that on a passport form, isn't it? Occupation, the friend and the family member I am. So on a passport form, would you put writer? Well, you know, I think I won't need to renew while I'm writing is my expectation. Such a good answer. Okay, so on to assembly, you mentioned there that one of your goals was to afford yourself time and opportunity to continue writing. Tell us how you came to write assembly whilst also working full time in finance. Well, I think I'd already had the question or the conversation with myself about what I wanted for my career. Was I trying to, you know, in quotes, get to the top? Or was there something else I wanted? And it became clear to me that I wanted a work life balance. And being super ambitious wasn't for me. So I was trying to quite explicitly make time for myself in the weekends and evenings

to pursue hobbies. You know, initially, that was just the normal thing, sort of gym membership, seeing friends. It was sort of on a whim that I took a writing class. I'd been spending a lot of time a few years before I started writing on what I call my reading project. I've always had a hobbyist interest in linguistics and I wanted to really read around that quite seriously and some of the other ideas and areas of study that I'd never had exposure to because I hadn't pursued those areas in my education. So I'd been doing that for some time and there was one essay in particular, Myth Today by Roland Barthes, where he defines myths as appropriated language or imagery that's sort of taken out of one context and used to signify something else and he goes on to talk

about the role of the novel in exploring these myths and says that a novel functions as a kind of meta-myth because it appropriates the myths that we have as a society and uses them to signify something new. And something about the way he framed it and he talked about the function of myths turning what is history into something that seems more like nature really resonated with me in this question of the neutrality of language. And his case for the novel as a way of exploring these was very convincing to me too. So I decided to take a writing class to at least better understand how you go about writing, how you go about using language in that way. And it sort of snowballed from there. I think when you take your first writing class, it's a bit of a dangerous

slope. Did you enjoy writing? I didn't really enjoy writing assembly because it almost felt like, not what I'm supposed to say, but it almost felt like I had, it was really a very planned out novel and I was very deliberate and careful about what I was trying to achieve and trying to find this narrative voice that could really pull the whole thing together and make it work with the constraints I'd put in place. So no, I didn't find it enjoyable per se. I think it was nice, particularly afterwards, getting feedback from people in that editing phase was really helpful to see it resonate and to see that spark of communication. But largely, I didn't enjoy it. I think I enjoy writing a lot more now, just because I write what I feel like writing and it feels a lot more free and loose. And was part of the reason you didn't enjoy it, I mean you talked there about being deliberate and careful, but also you are tackling and analysing huge and dispiriting issues. You are looking at systemic inequality, the history of colonialism. Was there a heaviness to the issues you were addressing that you felt too?

heaviness to the issues you were addressing that you felt too? Partially, I think. You know, I think most contemporary fiction is engaging with these ideas more or less explicitly, just because they are, I guess, the backdrop to the world at the moment. So I think a lot of fiction that I read, I notice it's engaging with these ideas, however it intersects with the narrative. So I didn't think it was necessarily different to most fiction in that respect. But I did know that I wanted to be deliberate about how I engaged with various ideas, and also to not step over into too much direct engagement or to something that would be politicised, I suppose. Because I think because I'm the writer, the that would be politicised, I suppose, because I think because I'm the writer, the book will be politicised regardless. So I wanted to try and

have as light a touch as possible with these ideas, because I felt that that would remove some of the barriers to reading. I think one thing I'm very conscious of learning how to engage with literature is when we see that first person, when we that eye there's sort of a default identity that we assume as readers and we know who it is and for me I felt because I was using that first person from a slightly different perspective I could either sort of try and put in a lot of detail to bring the reader up to speed but I decided I wanted to try and strip away as much as possible to leave room for the reader to bring themselves into it veered a little bit away from the question. I know that's so fascinating and that's why she's unnamed because actually our responses to her that's what's interesting. Absolutely I think as soon as you put a name in there it's almost like it ruins the suspension of disbelief I feel

sometimes when you're writing quite realistic fiction, there's a higher bar for world building than in more fantasy style writing, because we're all familiar with the world today. So if you give a character a name, there's immediately a question of, well, would she have that name? What does that name mean? Where is she from? All of this. I wanted to just leave those questions to the side by embracing the space. And it brings us back really to Roland Barthes, that idea that a name itself is a myth. We all have associations with lots of names. I don't like Jennifer because I went to primary school with someone called that. It's just, sorry, Jennifer. I mean, I don't think she listens to this.

Sure, you're lovely. You said there that because you're the writer, the book would automatically be politicised. What did you mean? Well, I think sometimes the way the book is received isn't so much about even what's written in the book necessarily. It's about, as I talked about this genre that I sit within, it's about as I talked about this genre that I sit within because of you know I say what I look like because I don't like to talk about race as though it's a real thing and a person can have a race it is a social construct it's a way that we decided to group up the world quite explicitly because of that construct and because at the moment it seems so material if I'm writing from that perspective I think the expectation that the

book is political is already set up. Yeah. So interesting. I could literally sort of fall down a rabbit hole Warren complex just talking about these issues. But let me get on something that I know our listeners will really want to learn about, which is your specific writing routine when you were juggling that full-time job with Writing Assembly. Would you just talk us through how you managed it? Sure, absolutely. So I'll preface this by saying I had pretty much no social life during this time. I would typically start writing at five or six on a weekday morning for an hour or two and then you know have my work day all the rest of it. In the evening I would spend that time reading or editing and sort of not trying to write anything new but I guess just thinking about what

I'd written and ways I could improve it and then the weekends I would spend planning out the next week's writing. I like to sort of have when I start the day already a plan of what I'm trying to write. So I'd spend the weekends planning that out, reading the whole thing over, comparing it to my plan for the novel, updating where it was necessary, all of that sort of larger scale work. And when you had those hour-long writing sessions in the morning, you were writing about 100 words, is that right? Yeah, I would typically aim for 200 words. And when I say that, I guess I mean, I would usually write probably thousands of words, but 200 words I thought were good enough to keep. That doesn't

mean they, well, it's easy to produce thousands of words, but to be able to say these 200 are okay, I found. I didn't always meet that bar, but that's what I aimed for and then it just sort of oh sorry no no no I'm just exclaiming in admiration that's what you heard there I knew left to my own devices I wouldn't write anything if you know what I mean I'm the sort of person who'll just never consider it good enough and cross it all out. But what I found was by setting myself this mini bar of, okay, get some of what I'm writing each day to be a bit better and how I'd start those sessions. I think this is something recommended in the book, The Artist's Way, but I do morning pages. So I'd set the timer for 10 or 15 minutes and just write by hand, just kind of anything to kind of get my brain in the right mindset for producing words.

And I didn't keep those, I just threw those away, but it was like a warm-up. And then I'd focus on typically typing to sort of get some things. I'd have like a folder for drafts, and most of my stuff would stay in the drafts folder, and then a few things I'd put in the building manuscript. And then what I'd do in the evenings and what I'd set up for the coming weeks is to rewrite those sections. So I write them from different characters' perspectives. I'd write them in different voices. But just by continuing to engage with the scenes and the passages that I was trying to write, I felt slowly but surely you get to a version that's good enough. That's so interesting. You're the first person I've ever heard of who has done that, that idea of writing the same scene from a different character's perspective, not to go in the book, but just so that you understand it as the author. And it's very cinematic, actually.

an art GCSE a very long time ago but you know you do all of these studies you look at you know the light in a separate area of what you're trying to paint you look at the whole thing all together you approach it from a lot of different ways different mediums and then that all comes together to form the kind of final painting or piece that you're trying to produce and it certainly seemed to me that that was a helpful way of approaching this book particularly because we see it mostly through one character's perspective, but I really wanted all of the other characters to feel very real and very rounded, even though we only glimpse them. So I would often write just in a third person, sort of free and direct style, the other characters' perspectives, how they came into the

scene, how they came back out of it again, tried a lot of different ways. It really helped me to let the right bit of dialogue pop out for them sometimes or the right little detail, something that the narrator then notices when I come back and write it from her perspective. Is that something that comes from maths? You'll have to forgive me because I barely scraped maths GCSE, but I can imagine that maths at cambridge university level you have to look at things in different ways to find the theorem have i got that right yeah yeah that's very true i think especially the way we learn maths at school we learn it as you know learn this rule and then apply this rule and it feels very prescriptive but certainly learning to approach university level maths it was much more creative you have different domains you have

different subject areas but often results from one are applicable to another and the approach of learning to think in that way is to be creative about how you consider a problem and how you approach it so I definitely think studying maths approached how I you consider a problem and how you approach it. So I definitely think studying maths approached how I approach learning, I guess, and how I approach problem solving. But I imagine someone perhaps going from literature to maths might find similar similarities. Okay, I've got one more question before we get on to your failures. And there's no seamless link. It's just that I know that you enjoy spin classes and you gave this incredible quote which made me understand why I love them too so I'm lucky enough to have a peloton and I'm obsessed

with it and you said true spinning sometimes has a dystopian black mirror feel but maybe that's why I like it and you're so right there's something that's such a strange but compelling thing. So when did you discover that you loved spinning? It's weird. I'd taken spin classes before. I didn't love it. It didn't feel so dystopian to me until, like you, I got a Peloton. And it's weird. You enjoy it. You feel a part of something. But it is odd odd isn't it yes but it's like I think it's the perfect thing for someone who's a natural introvert but maybe has become conditioned to appear extroverted when necessary who can feel part of something but also just be

in the comfort of their own home and then switch off the screen and go back to being alone you know so much I think that ability to just switch it off and all of the noise stops and you've had this interaction but now there's a clean start I think that feels yeah I'm an introvert too and it feels amazing who's your favorite instructor now I've not been on my peloton for a couple of months so it's going to be tough for me to say but the British lady Either Hannah Frankson or Leanne Hainsby. Oh, Hannah Frankson. That's it. I love Hannah Frankson. Yeah. I love them both. Just FYI, Leanne Hainsby has been a guest on How to Fail.

That's how obsessed I am. Apologies for anyone who doesn't like spin. I appreciate this is niche content, but we are zealous. We are zealous. content but we are zealous we are zealous Peyton it's happening we are finally being recognized for being very online it's about damn time I mean it's hard work being this opinionated and correct you're such a leo all the time so if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This.

As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mass, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your

podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. So your first failure, Natasha, is learning French. Tell us about that.

So I've taken French classes since childhood. My mum studied French and was keen for me to be able to appreciate French. They've been trying since childhood. I never really got it. When I went to school, for some reason, we had a class that was geography in French, which I was completely hopeless at. But I really did try. And I took it up to GCSE. And then even at university, I tried taking French lessons and continued to not really improve. At one point I did, sort of when I was older, I was working in an environment with a lot of French people. And I was practicing more and using it in more of a social way and I got a little bit better but I've never really I can't hold a conversation in French. Are you a high achiever Natasha? In some areas not in French. But do you feel like this doesn't make sense because normally when I

put my mind to something I can achieve it so my comparison in my life is tennis I've just never been good at tennis I've had lots of lessons I'm relatively tall I should be good at tennis like I love watching it and it frustrates me because I feel like I've tried so hard and there's no improvement and I can't understand why from a logical basis that is yeah you know I think it really is something like that I think all of my approaches for learning something just were not working with learning a language and I think it was interesting because what I would do is I'd learn big lists of vocabulary. I'd read up on the grammar, try and understand that. I'd really try and just brute

force this problem. And that would sort of get you far with reading. I could read okay, but it didn't help in conversation at all. And I think that phase where I got a little bit better, I realised that it's far less about trying to learn everything in advance and then all of a sudden you're fluent and much more about just stepping out on a limb really and trying to say things and making mistakes and I think that going back to your question of failure it made me realise I don't like making preventable mistakes you know if you could learn a grammar rule up front and then don't make a mistake using that grammar rule. That's how I try and go about it. But certainly, I think for me, learning a language that way didn't work. I can't tell you how much I relate to this, because I think with a language,

you described yourself as an introvert. And I think if you are introverted, like the way that you, as you say, will properly learn a language is to speak it. And therefore you have to be willing to make very public mistakes and you have to be self-confident enough and extroverted enough to put yourself out there to do that and to have people say, oh no, that's actually not how you say it. And I found it, it's actually, so I haven't thought of this for years. I'm finding this quite triggering because I was very lucky in that my mother is originally from Switzerland and speaks fluent French and raised both me and my sister speaking French. And so French comes naturally to me in a way that when I started learning languages at school, so I learned German and Russian, they didn't come naturally at all.

And it was actually really discombobulating for that reason I was just like who am I and also that sense of like who am I in this language where I can't fully be myself because it doesn't feel relaxed speaking this did you have that experience? Yeah absolutely it kind of made me think a lot about how you get your personality across you know yes because a lot of people are multilingual they have a bad the same personality of course across the languages but I couldn't imagine getting to a point of fluency where it would feel natural to communicate in the same style and convey who I am through the way I speak in another language. I really didn't feel that. I mean, it sounds like I'm almost taunting you now, but when I speak French,

I mean, I'm by no means fluent, but I can understand. But I have that slight embarrassment of speaking out loud because I know I'm going to get things wrong. But when I am speaking French, one of the things that I really enjoy about it is that it's a language that decontextualizes me. So in English, I have a certain accent and you might make certain assumptions about that. And I guarantee you most of the assumptions will be wrong. But in French, there's none of that. And then I think also because France has a very different class system, it just, in that respect, feels quite freeing. I've got no question. I suppose I just want to know your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I think that's so interesting. I think voice and accent and all of that is huge in the UK, right, what that conveys about you. And it is strange to put on another language where you don't have those signifiers anymore. Yeah. Do you think people make assumptions about your voice and your accent? Oh, yeah. What do you think they are? I think a lot of the time, people don't really hear me. If you know what I mean, I think I always sort of considered my voice quite fluid in the sense that I tend to talk like the people around me. If I'm in America for a long time, I'll start to pick up a slightly American accent. I'm a bit of a chameleon in that way. But one thing I've noticed is that, particularly kind of interacting in a work environment,

everybody sort of adopts this corporate style of talking, if you know what I mean. There's a real corporate culture and everybody just sounds the same and sounds like the company. And in a way, that's quite freeing. It feels like your voice isn't saying much about you. But now sort of being this Natasha Brown, the writer, I suppose, and having people interact with that person. I don't have a good answer to that. But I sometimes feel that I'm not really heard. I'm just seen in a way. Tell me more about that. Because I'm not sure I get the subtlety of it and I know there will be great nuance in it. Yeah I think when we were doing the audio shortlist for Assembly the voices that had originally been picked by the publisher were very very young they weren't at all like what you would

expect the narrator of the book to sound like so So I didn't feel it came from the character. They didn't sound much like me either. But they sounded like, I think, the voice that we hear in our minds when we hear young black woman, which is essentially what I am in this world. I think it goes back to this idea of being a genre. But if you picture that, if you say that for other identities identities sometimes a voice comes to mind sometimes it doesn't because it's so vague but I certainly think when I speak that sort of default young black woman comes to mind rather than whatever it is I sound like. Got it and actually that audio process must have been a nightmare for you because you had deliberately made this protagonist as and I mean this in a complimentary way,

as kind of pared back and blank as possible without ever losing the readerly interest. So then to have a voice to her is so specific. That must have been so difficult. Yeah, that is exactly how I felt. Yeah, because it's like you can do things in fiction where the reader brings their voice, right? And they fill it out. And you can can do things in fiction where the reader brings their voice right and they fill it out and you can't do that in the audiobook form and you certainly can't do that in film and tv which is why I don't really feel assembly is right for that sort of interpretation but with the voice in the audiobook what I felt was well what's the equivalent of an invisible voice in an audiobook you know and that's really what I wanted to go for.

And in the end, we got just a fantastic actor, Pippa Bennett-Warner. She read it and she reads a lot of books for the publisher. And I think she just had that voice that feels invisible when you hear it, which was, I think, the closest it could be to the reading the physical book experience. You mentioned at the beginning of this failure that your mother wanted you to learn French. Do you feel that it's bothered you partly because you didn't want to let her down? Yes, I feel that. Not so much, I think, because I have maybe in the typical millennial way, parents who are just really happy when I try. So the outcome doesn't matter too much

I felt it would have been nice if it was something I could do because it was something that you know matters to her as well and we could share this thing yeah are you an only child no I have a sister and what do your family think of this new incarnation of Natasha Brown? I mean, they are so supportive. Yeah, my parents, my grandparents have just been absolutely incredible because this is not something they thought I would ever be doing. But they're really supportive of everything. And all the new stuff I write, they're my first readers, which is really nice to have. And it was your grandmother I think who got you into reading in the first place is that right? Yeah yeah because we would spend the summer holidays at my grandparents house as my parents worked and they had an absolute ton of books there not really geared towards children's reading but lots of books

which we were encouraged to read and they would also take us to the library. What's the most influential book of your childhood? That is a tough question. It's tough because so much of it just all sticks together in my mind. I don't really remember books so separately, but I'd probably say 1984, which was maybe early teens I read that. But it was certainly a book that made me think about the way we use words a lot and I think it stuck in my mind and was one of the books I didn't enjoy English at school and certainly not you know English language the creative writing side I really didn't get along with that but I had a fantastic teacher in secondary school who got me into the English literature side and thinking critically about writing and language and how it creates the effect that it does. And I think once I had started to develop that lens in

my teens, 1984 was a book I kept coming back to because it was the first book I think where I'd seen the flashes of that. Okay, so your second failure, which we've never had before on this programme, is a university telephone campaign, which was a student job that you had calling up alumni to ask for donations. Why did you choose this as one of your failures? I think because it was such a colossal failure for me. I was really not very good at it. I mean, it's the worst job for an introvert, cold calling people and asking for money. It is. But, you know, I had a lot of student jobs that wouldn't have been the natural fit for me.

And particularly sort of doing younger student, like school children, trips to the university, teaching a lot, all of those things that really would have taken someone like me out of my comfort zone. all of those things that really would have taken someone like me out of my comfort zone. And I got a lot out of them. And I found that when you put in the time and you sort of learn how to do it, you can get better and have a really rewarding experience, which was not the case with the telephone campaign. So why wasn't it the case? We had to call up former students and ask them to make a donation to the university. And you had sort of a book I don't know what you'd call it like a script book that would tell you you had to sort of start the conversation off yourself and build up a rapport and then guide them to one of these

entry points and then the book you sort of have to turn to different pages depending on how the conversation went to sort of follow up in how you guide them towards making this donation and some of it felt quite cold like if they were older and they said they didn't have enough money to donate right then you would guide them towards the section where they leave a gift in their will which it all felt really odd to me yeah and also we had this session at the beginning which I think has really been something that's stuck with me and has continued to be relevant about how you deal with people saying no. The thing that really stuck with me was that if someone says no, you don't keep pushing, you back away immediately. You talk about something else, you get them to relax, calm back down again.

You build up that rapport once more and then you ask them again. If they say no again, you back right off. And by the time you've done that three or four times, it's incredibly difficult for a person to say no, because just each time you come back around, it becomes much tougher. They have this relationship with you. Whereas if you keep pushing from that first no, they'll dig their heels in and just say, no, absolutely not. And I think it was very uncomfortable for me to follow this script. Just the assumption that you could immediately build a rapport in the first place was tough. And then being able to put someone in a situation that I knew I wouldn't want to be on the other side of, I really felt quite uncomfortable. And if someone said no, I tended to just back off, which does not make you good at that job.

which does not make you good at that job. I'm feeling like a total sucker now because I'm going to admit I went to the same university as you did but much much earlier and I once got cold called by a student doing exactly that job and I don't think it was you because I would have recognised your voice and I don't know what came over me because I could not really afford at that time to donate but I ended up donating 250 pounds on on the strength of that phone call I have never done that before and I was sort of taken aback with I didn't understand why I'd done it and now I'm like wow I just was so susceptible to that rapport building well I don't even think it's susceptibility right I think it's just so human that we are susceptible to that and it's been one of those things I notice when I'm in situations where someone's applying pressure to

me completely different to the telephone campaign but it tends to follow that script which is why I'm glad I did it and I have that experience because it's a bit easier to recognize once you've been trained up in how to do it so interesting and were there any students who were really good at it and have you kept in touch with them and are they now like Tory MPs yeah I think some were just ridiculously good at it and we had like these little headsets that you'd put on and they'd be leaning back and having an easy chat I remember the person running it had recommended to me I have a glass of wine before the session to loosen up I think I was the absolute worst there were a few people who weren't great but I was right at the bottom but yeah some people I think if you stick to the script I think that was the absolute worst. There were a few people who weren't great, but I was right at the bottom.

But yeah, some people, I think if you stick to the script, I think that's the interesting thing about it. Even if you're an awkward person, if you stick to the script, it does work. And you went to Cambridge. What was university like for you? I think it was interesting. I enjoyed it. I think for some people, university is this huge phase in their life. It doesn't feel like that to me. I think for some people, university is this huge phase in their life. It doesn't feel like that to me. I sometimes find it strange because it's like a part of my author brand, I suppose. So you get asked about it a lot. But it just felt like I was in this place for a while. It was really interesting. And then I wasn't.

Were you pleased to be in that specific place, which is heralded as this elite place of learning? Not especially, I think. You know, I wanted to do well. I wanted to study maths. And so I did. I think already by that point, it was feeling like you could make these things your identity, you know? And it didn't feel like that to me.

It just felt like a place I was in, an experience I was having. Which isn't to say, you know, I've had lifelong friendships from there and I'm very glad I had the experience it's interesting occasionally I'll go there with friends or something like that and it will seem like quite a big deal to have been in that place and it certainly was but you know maybe when I was 18 19 I wasn't in a place to fully appreciate the size of it. Now, I want to preface this question by saying I would ask anyone this question, which is about opportunity, because that is something that, you know, I get asked as well about having had the privilege of going to an elite institution, whether there is enough opportunity for other people who might not have had the privilege that

I had or come from my background like in your eyes is somewhere like Cambridge doing enough to ensure that there is diversity in all of its forms at that institution well you know I think privilege particularly when we apply to education, is such a strange and I often feel unhelpful term. I heard someone talking about being privileged to have a mainstream publisher, which just seemed to me like, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but a bastardization of the term. It's so removed from its original idea and concept that it was meant to be getting at. I feel for as a person who's British in the UK, you've essentially won the lottery in life. It's incredible the opportunities that we have here.

And it was interesting. And you know, it's always interesting meeting people from very different walks of life, who just haven't had education for us is free school level education and university, while certainly not free at least it's somewhat accessible it shouldn't ever be a blocker your income going into university what specific universities should do to broaden out opportunities I don't know that I really have the context to say I think I certainly found it rewarding when I was a student I taught the entrance exam to students from backgrounds where, similar to at my school, we didn't have any teachers who could teach the

entrance exam. And I think that was certainly very necessary because being taught something makes all the difference to students who have the aptitude. But I also feel at the same time, an elite university shouldn't be the only way to various opportunities afterwards and I think sometimes there's a focus on on that aspect of things whereas I think just more broadly things should be open to people on the basis of whether or not they can do them not what university they have written down it's very roundabout answer I suppose no it's a great answer and I'm really fascinated in terms of how you view privilege because it is it's a word that comes with a sort of toxic flattening and I guess what I mean by that is the idea that people feel

they can say obviously I'm very privileged because of this and this and this and do the kind of checkbox declaration and then go on to say everything that they were going to say anyway. I can understand the meaningful intent behind that. I've done it. And the signal that you're sending to people that you acknowledge it, but also I worry that it becomes so automatic that there's no real acknowledgement of the structural inequalities that underlie it all like you'd almost be better off not saying it and doing it do you know what I mean yeah yeah completely you know that made me think of going back to barts and mythologies this idea that this word had a meaning in a particular concept has been appropriated to communicate something new

about the speaker and also to be quite dismissive, because I think one of the big ideas in my novel that I was really thinking about was this economic shift to the quaternary sector kind of, you know, starting and growing in the UK. So knowledge work, information services, so the type of jobs we imagine people doing in banks or consultancies or tech companies, that sort of almost meta work that's a few steps removed from the actual products, I suppose. And these jobs didn't exist 20, 30 years ago, which is why I think the story in Assembly couldn't have been set 20, 30 years ago. And I feel like The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid really sits on this shift as well and has a protagonist whose circumstances are created by this type of work. But for me, what I think it's fascinating as a

writer to explore is that this shift and this creation of new jobs, which are much more racially agnostic than the sort of work we had before, because they're not customer facing, there's no benefit to restricting access to these roles on the basis of race, it has sort of undermined the guarantee to the class system that the racial system was explicitly constructed to provide. And sometimes I feel the use of the word privilege and how it's applied these days is almost a sort of reflexive response to this undermining of the class system which is why I'm cautious about it the word doesn't turn up in the book and I tend to not even really engage with that as a concept because I just don't know how helpful it is to actually doing things and

having conversations that make a meaningful difference to people. A reflexive undermining of the class system tell me more about that because I think I'm almost there with the understanding of that yes I speak in a very abstract way so I love it um leave the world behind by Rima Analam which is a novel I really enjoyed it hinges on the idea and we have uncertainty for the first 50 pages about whether or not a black couple could own a nice house in the Hamptons that suspense could only be sustained for so long, because we as readers are bringing the context of what it means to be a black couple, and what it means to own a house in the Hamptons. And in that novel too, the character, the protagonist, the black couple, they work in finance, and that's what's facilitated them having this home. And so this is what I mean, that assumption of class based on, you know, this race that we've constructed is being undermined by the opportunities that these industries have opened up.

Oh, leave the world behind. I'm going to go and order that as soon as I finish talking to you. It's a fantastic read. Your third failure is using social media. Tell us about that. And I suppose start off by saying, do you feel like you have to do it? I think it's certainly something you get encouraged to do as particularly a debut with it coming out during the lockdown. But I think even before it was moving this way, you're encouraged to set up Twitter and Instagram and whatever else to engage with readers more generally. And I was very cautious going into it.

I've never really, I remember, I was one of the first people to just get off of Facebook because I realised I just, it was way too overwhelming for me, just keeping so many conversations going all at once I'm much more old-fashioned a text conversation works better for me yeah so I knew I didn't want to wade into this space that I didn't understand how it works what the culture was there but I did decide to create an Instagram account for the book particularly because there weren't any in-person events when my book came out and I wanted a way to be able to if someone wants to send me a message or ask me a question be able

to interact in that way. And so why do you think you're a failure at it? I think because number one I am so out of touch with it someone wanted me to send them a message I'd seen or like a post I'd seen on Instagram and I sent them an email with the link to it without realising you could just message it I'm so out of touch with the basics of how it works and I remember the first time I did a live which was with Sarah Collins and I was so excited to speak to her I found out afterwards people could only see the bottom half of my face so I don't know what I thought I was doing, but it wasn't correct. So I think those basic sort of, I'm getting a bit better at it, but understanding how you use this platform is quite unfamiliar to me. I was really glad I did it because particularly during that

time when you couldn't meet people in person, it was lovely to get messages, to have questions, to be able to have, often after a virtual event, I'd get a few messages and some back and forth. That was really nice. Also as a way to create relationships with various bookshops, and that would often turn into either an event or a visit. I found that was just such a wonderful way to be able to engage with these shops when you couldn't have a book tour in the classical way. So that to me was really, really worthwhile.

But I've also found particularly as, and it's not like I have a large presence on social media at all, but it becomes a lot of work and a lot of time to keep up with everything. And I think I've started to find that difficult to balance with other time commitments and trying to find the right way of being able to get all the benefits out of the platform without spending two hours on it a day or something. I mean you are someone who has such a wise head on young shoulders just to lob a massive cliche in your direction so I can imagine that you're very good at separating what social media is from how it makes you feel does it ever make you feel less than or grubby or insecure?

Surprisingly, no. I was worried because I read the scare stories about social media. And I wonder if it's because I came to it relatively late. I hadn't been using it this whole time. And I really engage with it for book content, rather than lifestyle content, which I think might create more of that feeling. But I think also as well, I don't know, I don't tend to browse. And I think it comes back to that introverted thing again. I find it quite exhausting to browse and quite exhausting to try and maintain a lot of conversations all at once. So I tend to just treat it almost like a messaging app, really, and I respond to people and that type of thing. But I don't know if I consume it in the right way to have that problem with it and I'm glad to be honest but I think something

in me stops before it even gets to that point and I just find it too overwhelming before even getting there. And I'm just going to ask you this because I know that you'll have a very interesting answer. What do you think social media says about us as a society? Why do we have it right now in this period of time? I think it's an interesting question. I can't remember where this quote comes from, but something about the best minds of a generation are all trying to figure out how to make people click ads. And really, that's what social media is. It's a way of serving us all ads, trying to convince us to buy things. And it seems like at the moment, this is the best way of keeping a population engaged. So we look

at ads and buy things. And I wonder how that will develop going forwards. And, you know, I think New Blade on a film and all of these sorts of sci-fi dystopias where you see the augmented reality and just adverts everywhere. I don't know if it will go in that direction. But it certainly seems to me that it's a way to keep us engaged and keep us buying things. I mean, it all comes back to that university telephone campaign, doesn't it? All those strategies. I hadn't thought of it, but yes. Oh, Natasha, this has been such a joy for me. Final question. Have you written your 100 words today? No, I have not. I'm behind on the words and behind on the peloton at the moment. Okay. Well, listen, I don't want to take up any more of your time because I am just so looking forward to whatever comes next from you.

comes next from you. I hope it's a book, even if you're not defining yourself as a writer, because Assembly, as you know, because I just would not stop banging on about it to you, is it was one of my favourite books of last year. It arrived like this extraordinary comet of brilliance. And I want as many people to read it as possible. And it is such a joy to talk to someone who thinks with such depth. And I can't thank you enough for coming on How to Fail. Oh, thank you so much. I've so thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. It's been such a dream speaking with you.

Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently it helps other people know that we exist.