If I Speak - 14: What does it mean to live authentically? w/ Oisín McKenna

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Ash and Moya talk to Evenings And Weekends author Oisín McKenna about living authentically, intense female friendships, and how financial precarity limits our self-exploration. Plus: compulsory heterosexuality and suspicious new boyfriends. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley

Good morning or evening or whenever you've pressed play on this episode of If I Speak because I don't know whether time will still be enthralled to the clammy grasp of Greenwich for future generations. We've got a really special treat for you today, a guest. But before I reveal them, I am also here with Captain, oh my Captain, Ash Sarkar. Ash, how are we doing? Oh, captain, my captain, I feel like I should say fallen, cold and dead, which is from the Walt Whitman poem. You know what that poem's about, right?

I have no idea what that poem's about. It's about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So the whole thing is like after a victorious war, the ship comes in and everyone's celebrating and the flags are going and the trumpets are trumpeting except the captain lies dead upon the deck and it is a metaphor for the end of the american civil war anyway that's just how i wanted to open the show why don't you continue before i start talking about alt whitman anymore america loves killing people who might make it a better

country uh sink on that uh okay but yes as mentioned we're very pleased to be joined by the guest and it's neither abraham lincoln nor walt whitman instead it is a man who has reluctantly from the interviews i've read uh authored the book of the summer and that book is called evenings and weekends it is a story set in 2019 over one weekend in hot muggy London, Essex and spiritually Ireland and we're following the lives of an intergenerational cast as they navigate financial pressures, queer identities and making choices about who they really are and who they want to be. There is also a whale in the Thames which really did happen and reminded me that it happened when I started reading this. This book is really set in my world and I think your world too, Ash, which is Millennial London. So I was particularly moved by it, but it is

really a masterful debut of empathy and uncovering the inner lives of people. So we're thrilled. I'm thrilled, Ash is thrilled that we've got Evening and Weekend's author, Yashin McKenna on If I Speak Today. Yashin, welcome. Hello welcome hello hey thanks so much for having me on it's lovely to be here do you think that was an accurate blurb of your book what's the best way you've seen it summed up by reviewers yeah i find it really hard i mean i think you've described it probably better than i would because i feel like when i like particularly in social context when people ask me to describe it i get kind of nervous about like taking up too much time and end up kind of like summarizing quite a like dense plot in this really inadequate way. So I think that was, yeah, I think that was

fabulous. Well, that makes me happy. But sometimes it takes like external perception and also limited time in order to accurately summarize something. I know Ash has also read Evening and Weekends what did you think Ash? Yeah so I read it in a single sitting over the weekend because once I picked it up I just didn't want to put it down and I didn't want to interrupt this experience of being immersed in a world that was so familiar to me like I feel like at any moment reading that book like the camera would pan and they'd be like oh a five foot two South Asian woman has accidentally done ketamine again at this party like I felt like I could walk into it at any minute um my summary of the book is um everyone can have PTSD um everyone can have a little bit of ptsd as a treat um and all the

various ways in which trauma manifests in the body and through behaviors and the one thing which i was like yep it's a work of fiction when it's uh when eric dyer scored a goal i was like eric dyer it's been a long time since he scored a goal it took me back to those halcyon days um and so yeah i suppose my opening question before the little questions we do is how how does it feel for a book to go from being a labor of love to a product that's out in the world and it has to be marketed you know it's a commodity now yeah that's an interesting feeling I feel I mean for such a long time I was working on the book for about five years before it came out and for most of that time I mean I thought a little bit about audience and like how it would sit in a marketplace

but actually I didn't really know very much about the world of publishing. And the kind of process of turning it into like a commodity for the marketplace. I mean, yeah, part of that is quite, it's like a strange process. Like it feels quite good now in the sense that it's sort of, it's like marketing identity feels congruent with the sort of like aesthetic world of the book. But it took a little bit of time and like back and forth to like get it to that place but it's also i guess i guess there's also a version of it where like i feel like i'm making myself into a sort of marketing like commodity

it's to an extent in the sense that you know i've done like different media so if i've written some like non-fiction pieces in which i talk about my own life and there's also like context in which I'm like speaking at events etc and in those contexts I feel very conscious of oh like part of my role is actually to be like an entertainer now uh like in the in those contexts when people come to hear me speak and that's something which is yeah it doesn't sit that easily with me in the sense that it's not like it's not the skill set that comes most yeah naturally to me so some of some of that feels a bit uncomfortable and I'm I'm kind of yeah if it feels like I'm learning how to feel easy in that world but it makes me feel quite vulnerable though

I think yeah I feel vulnerable. I just wanted to add some context for our listeners actually. So sorry to make you do the exact thing that you've just said. It makes you feel a bit uncomfortable. But how did you come to write this book? How did Evening and Weekends be born out of your mind? Like what was your background within fiction? So I started writing it in 2019.

At that stage, I'd been living in London, actually, just for about a year and a half, so not for very long. I moved at the end of 2017. And I'd been making like theatre and spoken word for a number of years, but became a bit frustrated with both the kind of like diversity of audiences, but also like the breadth of audiences in the sense of like even if you like make a show that does really well and gets to tour it's still like very limited in terms of the people it reaches and I wanted for sort of like careerist reasons to have the possibility of like reaching more people and like to some extent like making more money which feels like a sort of like unsavory

thing to admit but that was definitely a part of it um but so there were kind of like careerist impulses really at the start of it but it was also like artistic in the sense that I realized that I didn't like that much theater that I saw but to some extent I liked like the vast majority of novels that I read and always had and actually like not novels as a form were the things that had always influenced me more and I was at a point where I felt kind of artistically and professionally confident enough to do it um but then into in terms of ideas when I started it there wasn't I didn't really have like any particular ideas the idea was to just like do a thing

and I just started like gathering what I had to hand in a sort of like mood board like way and some of those were like relationships I was interested in like long friendship between like gay guys and mostly straight women I was interested in like the relationship between like parents and children when the child becomes you know sort of more cosmopolitan than the parent but basically I was interested in the like political moment around jeremy corbyn what that meant politically also what it meant like emotionally um and also i was interested yeah in london like i i really i moving to london was such a sort of huge thing for me in lots of ways like it often felt that my life really

properly began when I moved here and particularly those early years in London were really special for me and I was interested in capturing that with a lot of loving detail so I just kind of gathered all of those things and started to slowly build characters and plot out of it. I'm scared of turning you into even more of a commodity but it's time for 73 questions minus 70 our traditional icebreaker stolen from vogue but obviously we don't have the ip all the time for 73 questions so are you ready asheen yes let's do it question one what is your sneeze like my sneeze i think i've got a few different versions of it sometimes i've got quite i sometimes i've got quite a petite sneeze um I would say I I would say I think my petite sneeze is slightly it's not quite affected

but it is it's a sneeze that is born in the knowledge of uh of how of potential fear of inconvenience to others which is not something that i like consciously think of but which is i i think i am someone who worries about oh what if my sneeze interrupts someone's thought flow i don't know it's a weird i think i've got an impulse to make myself small sometimes is what i'm saying and that uh that translates into my sneeze but then also i think there's a, I have much bigger versions of it too, when in a company with whom I feel very at ease. Question two, in your book, Believe by Cher features very prominently as a karaoke song. And it's also kind of a moment of emotional revelation.

So my question for you is, what is your dream karaoke song? Not your go-to, not the one that makes you feel safest, but the one that you fantasize about being able to do? you know with a powerful vocal I feel like my my singing voice is not is not really that good and I can kind of like yeah do a sort of like funny but like um you know vocally underwhelming performance but I feel like to do a sort of like big song like that you've kind of got to have the vocal chops for it and I would love to I would love to be able to manage it. Final question. When did you first realize that your parents were human? By which I mean, not the best and the worst people who ever lived somehow simultaneously, but human beings much like yourself.

Yeah, it's a good question. I feel it's probably a realization that kind of comes in waves throughout childhood and maybe has to be learned and unlearned on a number of occasions um i it's quite yeah it's a difficult one to answer i think it's it's actually a little bit i think there's a real there's a sort of painfulness in that question i'm not sure i'm not sure if i can say yeah i'm not i'm not sure it feels uh too much maybe too much to reveal in a public context i can reveal in a public context if you'd like me to fill in for the oversharing portion of the podcast i'm happy to do that um okay ashina i really respect your the

right to privacy that you give your family i don't hold the same status sadly um when i think i think when i realized this was age five listening to lauren hill in the car the miseducation of lauren hill and it's i think it was x-factor it was always x-factor that i associated with because my mom played played lauren hill i don't even know she likes lauren hill that much but i love lauren hill and so i just projected but x-factor was like it could all be so simple you'd rather make it hard and i suddenly thought i wonder if this is how my mother feels about my father and got a sudden rush of realization of her as a separate emotional being with not not connected to me but someone who had her own pain

and that was when I first realized she was a human being and not just my mother she I won't say her name but you know she has a name and that was her identity and that she doesn't just relate to me as a mom and that's the only way she exists in the world but she has her own story listening to Lauryn Hill that she had on the car I think we were bombing up the m25 or something like that as well we were on our way somewhere i feel like you both realized it so much earlier than me because for me i'm like okay i was definitely like 19 or 20 and i remember like going to dinner with my mom um and i think that it was important that we were meeting in a third space. So I wasn't

going home to see her, but we're meeting out and about. And it wasn't that I learned new information, it was more that seeing her in this context allowed me to contextualize information that I knew before in a really different way. So it wasn't like there was a grand revelation where she was like, telling me some deep dark secret, it was a way of reflecting on some of the events of my childhood, which were either like a bit illegible to me or I'd interpreted through either like saint or irredeemable sinner lens, right? She could only be one of those two things. And I was like, oh no know you're making human choices you know you were faced with uncertainty and you made a choice um so yeah you're like oh it happened throughout my childhood um you know I was learning this in my childhood more you're like I was five years old and I was paying council tax.

We're on to our mystery question, except this week I've come up with it, so it's only a mystery to Yixin. There's no text tone that's going to come from this, so I think I need a drum roll. Could someone furnish me with a quick drum roll that way I don't know Chao too much? Mystery question. on furnish me with a quick drum roll that way no chow too much mystery question what does it mean to live authentically and i wanted to ask this because reading evenings and weekends i feel like a thread and i might be wrong and i'd love you to correct me if i am but i feel like a

thread that runs through all of these characters of all the different ages different identities is this struggle to live an authentic life and one that feels like they're being true to the majority of parts of themselves and when we meet them at the start of the book then and i'd love to dive into the bit more but i don't know how many spoilers you want to give when we meet them at the start of the book then we've got this pair um in a heterosexual relationship, Maggie and Ed, who Maggie's pregnant and they're thinking about moving back home to Essex in order to raise the baby.

And then you've got their parents. Is it Rosaline? Am I saying that right? Yeah. Great, Rosaline. Rosaline, who is the mother of Maggie's best friend, who is a major, major character, which I loved because usually when you have millennial novels, then it's just like the millennials and then a couple of parents come

in, but she is a full character in her own right. And as we go through, she's just got this major diagnosis that's going to change her life. And she's trying to tell her son, Phil, who is Maggie's best mate. And as we go through the book, this storyline emerges about Rosaline that means she has much more in common with her children than we would know but she's also trying to you know it's making her get back in touch with a place that she left behind which is Ireland and the people she left behind there and parts of herself and I just I want to talk about what it means to live authentically through the prism of evenings and weekends so i wondered if you had any initial thoughts to that question machine yeah yeah it's a good question i think in terms

of the way it plays out in the book part of the drama of the book is that lots of the characters have got quite conflicting desires and i think there are some ways in which it like becomes it feels there are some glaring ways in which there might be an inauthenticity in the way that they're living in the sense that they have some really deep core desires which are part of them themselves which for whatever reason in terms of how their life is set up that desire can't be fulfilled, whether that's because of choices that they've made in terms of relationships, in terms of outward expressions of sexuality, or because of things outside of their control.

So for example, like this inability to live. So one of the characters is pregnant and needs to leave, is leaving the city in order to raise a child because she can't afford to do so in London. So kind of in the cases of all of these characters, there are these like conflicting desires and have to,

they've got to kind of like approximate the best version of uh of like happiness that's available to them but i think i don't know i guess like it's like quite difficult to say what living authentically means i think there's i guess like a common understanding of it which means uh living in a way that's congruent with something really deep about yourself whether that's like deep you know deep desires like deep values um you know like saying and uh saying and acting in a way that is like congruent with how you think and feel on the inside i think that's the sort of like common understanding of it. But I guess so many people think and feel entirely like contradictory things or, you know, think many things which appear contradictory, but which are true at once.

And acting in a way, living in a way which is congruent with what's going on inside you can often mean like abandoning certain parts of yourself, like abandoning certain deep parts of yourself. So I think it's really difficult to live in a way that's like fully authentic and congruent with everything that's going on internally. But I think, I guess, I part part of the place that the book gets to is that um despite the fact that there there are some some important some kind of key

key stories in the book in which uh characters aren't uh in which they've got some really core desires in which uh which there is no kind of like public public outlet to express in their in their life particularly around sexuality so there are there are no kind of like public outlet to express in their life, particularly around sexuality. So there are a couple of characters who's like, the outward appearance of their life, it doesn't hold everything that's going on inside in terms of sexual desires and like sort of like gender, feelings about their own gender.

But part of the place that the book gets to is that that doesn't necessarily mean living in an entirely inauthentic way. And in fact, lots of the things that they do are congruent with other like deeper parts of themselves. So I'm not sure. I think it's hard to say, yeah, what does it mean to live authentically?

I think that there's also at this kind of like particular like cultural moment, there's such a kind of like capital placed on the idea of authenticity. And I think that's often because there's a lot of, you know, people experience a feeling of like inauthenticity in their lives i think i think probably i guess like partially because so much of the way we live is refracted through a digital

sphere which often it doesn't feel like a very like nutritious way to live in terms of some of the kind of like um uh like ways of connecting with others ways of like experiencing and like describing yourself um there there feels often that there's like a sort of inauthenticity to it whatever that might mean um so i think a lot of people yeah desire desire a feeling of authenticity but it's like difficult it's a little bit it's a little bit intangible it's hard to put a finger on it um so there's there's some initial thoughts initial thoughts be curious to hear what you guys think leaving aside the question of what does it mean to live authentically for a second because i'm not sure that's possible um you know we're a social species who are so acutely aware of all the ways in which we're being perceived I wonder if there is such a thing

as living socially and authentically um I wonder if that's possible but one of the things that really struck me about the book is that uh Rosaline when she's reflecting on her childhood she thinks about being told that she has bad insides and how this thought about having bad insides creates this lifelong fear of revealing something bad about herself and in so many different ways characters are afraid of revealing something bad about themselves whether that's a trauma from which they've internalized the shame or whether that's something to do with their sexuality or if it's just being a bit naff or uncool because there's a part where like two of the female characters are doing karaoke and they're so acutely aware of wanting to be perceived as though they're doing it

with a certain knowingness and like an ironic wink because if they're just two women doing karaoke and having like a powerful emotional moment it's too much to bear and so I suppose you know one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is like have you felt kind of curtailed and restrained by this permanent need to appear ironic that you can't just like something and say well maybe I just like Lana Del Rey maybe I just like karaoke maybe I just you know in the phrase from Zadie Smith's On Beauty maybe I just like the tomato right You can say everything apart from the fact that you like the tomato and it's straightforward. Yeah, I've got a complicated relationship to that.

And it's, I think it's got like different sort of like class and cultural dimensions at play as well. Like in the sense that when, so when I moved to London at first, I kind of landed in a sort of, cultural dimensions at play as well. Like in the sense that when, so when I moved to London at first, I kind of landed in a sort of, I guess like South London, like, I don't know,

like intellectual, political scene, whatever. And there were certain ways of engaging in that, which certainly were refracted through irony, through like particular kind of, particular cadences which were not what felt a little bit opaque to me i found it difficult to like understand uh what people really meant and i think through during during that time i became like a uh a really pared down version of myself uh in terms of like the ways that i spoke the kinds of things that i spoke about also the way i dressed uh i felt like there were these

yeah the sort of like aesthetic codes that people were working with i didn't like quite like understand uh there was this i guess there was this like version of like of like kind of like dressing down or like wearing quite like clothes which like in the mainstream might like be perceived as like not very nice but which were sort of within this kind of like world acquired a certain kind of like capital and it also had had this relationship to like wealth in terms of like wearing like you know often like people who like had a lot of money like dressed in like clothes which maybe obscured that i don't know um but the but there was a sort of like yeah and i i think out of like a desire to like fit in i sort of like maybe went along with it or try to speak in that cadence try to speak

in that visual visual language um but that was also to do with like obscuring or like downplaying my own sort of like cultural identity in the sense that I did kind of like, the kind of cultural world I emerged from in Ireland is really different from that. And I felt really, I had a real chip on my shoulder about being judged. I was really kind of sensitive to that.

And actually like having been in that scene for, you know, much longer now, I've kind of learned that actually, no, I don't, well, were they judging me? I don't know. I don't think so. Like a lot of those people who I was once, once felt very intimidated by are actually, you know,

really fab and nice. And I feel like very at home with now. But there was also yeah i guess this process by which i did kind of change a lot of parts of myself but i think now and yeah in terms of like irony do i feel uh do i feel a need to uh like refract my experience or like tastes through irony i think i think i i i feel like really averse to that way of like being, a way of thinking. I definitely have a desire to like the thing

and just say I like the thing and for that to be okay. And I feel sometimes in context in which I kind of see that kind of like ironic mode of like, you know, preferences, I feel, yeah, I kind of push back against it. But yeah, complicated. I think, yeah, I'm not immune to it. One thing that I found really interesting in the book was how the location seems to represent class.

Sorry if that sounds really pretentious and annoying, but the location seems to represent class. And London is pitted as the site of freedom almost where you can pursue your desires and explore yourself uh and then you've kind of got these you know this this fear of going back to essex this fear of revisiting essex um and also a fear of revisiting island on rosaline's part where she's worried about what she'll find but as the book goes on it actually becomes a source of freedom which was fascinating to see but I wondered about like how you think class and class position impacts how you're able to like live your life or how you think you're

able to live your life um and also I want to talk about heteronormativity in a minute because there's one couple in it who are the most heterosexual and i would say have the most miserable fate in the entire book but let's let's start with the let's start with class let's start with class yeah so i guess one of the things i was really interested in when i was writing the book was yeah so this feeling of like possibility in london this feeling of something really big in your life could happen like that that's one of the really pleasurable feelings i found in my early days here that particularly on like a hot day that if you know something is always about to kick off like if you just go to this party some like life-changing events gonna happen

and like that that event like it rarely happens or like never happens or maybe happens in like a partial way for a very short period of time but like that feeling of like where something's really gonna kick off like i find that really like pleasurable um and i guess so i was interested in the ways that that's like thwarted like that that kind of like promise of like possibility adventure romance it's so often kind of thwarted by the need to make money basically and like how difficult it is to live here um like for example when i moved to london at first i uh i lived sort of near the old kent road and at that time there was a bus which i don't think actually goes anymore but there was a bus that went from like big tesco on the oakland road to hampstead heath and on the front of the bus it

said hampstead heath that's where it went and it felt like getting on that bus from like the oakland road to northwest london like it felt like that was like getting on a spaceship like those were such like entirely like different sort of like visual like sensory worlds and like even that promise like in the infrastructure like you can get on this like one bus and that's gonna like take you uh you know into this like entirely different space like that that felt to me to like promise like a huge kind of like sense of adventure and possibility which definitely didn't exist in the context in which I grew up um but it was also sort of um but yeah the kind of like the the need to like uh the need to or like the possibility that was like posed by that was like yeah like totally thwarted like the the sense of like yeah this like transformative um transformative potential of the you know the

168 was um yeah like very like was it was very difficult to engage with because i had to you know go to work and earn money um so yeah i but i guess in terms of in in terms of class i'm interested in the way that yeah like class and money like limits this like sense of adventure and possibility and like particularly in the sort of like queer world so some of some of the kind of dynamics that play out in the book um so there's a sort of like kind of like attempted throuple situation or like potential throuple situation one of the one of the participants and that is a really he's basically like a really rich guy and part of the kind of thing that i was interested in exploring in the book was how it's much easier to uh or i i guess so being precariously housed uh having precarious job contracts feeling precarious

in the city already entails such a large you know large amount of you know financial risk obviously but that financial risk takes an emotional toll and part of the sort of like thesis of the book is that it's like much more difficult to take on additional like emotional and social risks that are involved in more adventurous ways of living queerer ways of living often it's more difficult to take on those like additional like risks additional sort of like time when you're already experiencing like the emotional tone of toll of financial precarity so yeah so i guess i was yeah interested in this like push and pull between uh the kind of queer, more adventurous ways of living proposed by London, or which can

be proposed by London, and how those things are often being thwarted in various ways by matters to do with money. I mean, one of the things that really struck me reading the book, and this is a way in which I'm not in the book, is that I was born and raised in London so that's the place where my family is so I will never ever have the experience of moving to London and feeling that this door has opened into a world of fantasy and possibility and romance and then you live in the reality and the precarity just chops you know the branches of you know that tree of possibility you know I'll never ever have that um and I suppose I wonder if you know how different would those characters have been if they were experiencing the same life events of, you know, intense anxiety and working out who they are and economic precarity, but their family

lived in, I don't know, like Bromley or something rather than Basildon? Would that have made them different people? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think probably, yeah. I think there's also, so I guess, so a lot of people I know here are, you know, Londoners, people who grew up here. My partner is a Londoner. And there was something, I think like his experience

and the experience of people who live here is like different, yeah, for those kind of social economic reasons but I think there's also there's also something about how you sort of like move through the city like I feel and this isn't like I guess this isn't like ubiquitous but like one of the things I really like was kind of struck by by like certain people that I met when I lived here was this sort of like this sort of like like confident kind of struck by by like certain people that i met when i lived here was this sort of like this sort of like like confident way of moving around a confident way of speaking um and so for example so my so my partner who some of you will know as michael from navarra live i was wondering when that was going to come out like how coy were you gonna be about it's like

yeah my partner who you know yes yeah I was yeah I was I wasn't sure I was like do I do I talk about it but yeah this is I think this is the relevant anecdote um so I remember that we I mean we knew each other for you know for quite a few years before we you know decided to uh you know get together properly uh but i remember the for the first night we met it was like not that long after i moved to london it was at a club night in tottenham i went there with a group of friends who he knew and i remember like when we we were introduced in the smoking area and he was sort of like sitting on what in my memory is like an electricity box maybe it wasn't an electricity box but it was definitely infrastructure not designed as like seating and he was sort of elevated and cross and cross-legged and I remember

like having this sort of like thought or feeling where I was like wow people in London just sit on whatever they want which sort of like sounds like this really um which sounds like this sort of like quite naive thing to say but I think there was something about yeah the confidence with which you know certain Londoners like yeah as I say it's not ubiquitous but I think there is like a distinct like it's kind of like a kind of like cavalier sort of quality with which like you might sort of like like appropriate the sort of like environment for your own ends and not worried about getting told off and that felt really alien to me in the sense that like i feel there's a there's a sort of like there's an irish kind of character which is like intensely aware of the

possibility of getting told off and you know structures like an entire like social social persona in the in the kind of pursuit of uh of not being told off um so so so i think yeah there's like there's yes like for people who grew up here there's like there's these different like social economic reasons in terms of having family in the city which means your experience of the city is different but i think there's also a sort of there is a sort of like confidence to you know to for a lot of people I think who grow up in a you know major you know major metropolis um and which is something that I think is different as well and it's also I mean like it's something that I think is like I find like really like hot and

cool you know like that was definitely something that I really that really kind of struck me and continues I continue to continue to strike me about Michael which is uh you know uh which is very lovely um I mean one of the things that I again also I keep starting my sentences with like I really liked this about the book and I really like that as if I'm trying to prove that I've read it um but one of the things that I did like about the book is that it presented the edges of sexuality as being very very blurry and you can have people who spent their adult lives being defined by their own sense of heterosexuality but having had experiences which weren't heterosexual um in the case of

Rosaline this like very romantic friendship which I think for me as a straight woman just felt so true that there are these friendships that women have particularly as teenagers where there is love and affection and loyalty but also an element of desire and not really sure if you want to be with this person or be them um and so yeah i was i was wondering like you know where did the inspiration for that come from the sense of you know the blurry edges of female friendships yeah it's a good question i can't really remember exactly when i thought that that plot element would be a part of it i think it's definitely i mean it's definitely something that i've like observed in people that i know i think it's also something i mean it's definitely something that's like happened in my own life in terms of sort of like blurry edged friendships and yeah i

think it is exactly that thing of like one one yeah yeah of sort of like blurry edged friendships and yeah i think it is exactly that thing of like one one yeah yeah this feeling of like wanting to be like them certainly like intensely wanting to be liked by them like really desiring their like approval and their approval be kind of becoming such a sort of like um you know such a kind of like sought sought thing that it's like um yeah that it does kind of like it takes on like such a charge that it's like oh is this like an erotic charge maybe but like it's sort of like um like i guess like at that point it's sort of like i guess it like yeah it almost like ceases to matter whether the charge is kind of like erotic or sexual because it's just like it's just like so like there's an intent there's an intensity to it that it's like

um that it becomes yeah it does become kind of it becomes blurry at the edges because it's such such a kind of intense desire to be with be liked by um to to you know to be like them um so i guess that yeah that's something that I've kind of felt in my own life. Maybe it comes from that. I want to just ask quickly about Ed. I think Ed is such a fascinating character. He is presented as sort of the platonic ideal of the straight man who's kind of happy with his life.

He's like the most popular and handsome guy at school. It's almost like he peaks in high school and then he goes on to this very stable, solid relationship with his girlfriend, even though he doesn't have, you know, doesn't make loads of money, doesn't have the most like high profile job. But as we uncover Ed,

it turns out he's got a very rich inner life and all these vulnerabilities and questions about his identity and by the end of the book and I don't want to spoil it but there are so many questions about who Ed is and Ed doesn't know himself but it's such a fascinating thing because he's almost presented as like the stable one in the book the one who like has it knows where his life is going in contrast to Phil or even Phil's brother callum who's like older straight but is like a drug dealer and a bit of a mess and has all these and like has mental health issues he doesn't know how to talk about and then you're phil who's

riddled with indecision but turns out to be the one who stays kind of most true to himself and kind of pushes himself constantly to actually like go further um and ask questions and actually try and open up to people and i just wanted to like ask where did the idea for ed come from and why did you want to write him in this way yeah so i guess ed ed began life in some ways as uh as a response to certain other cultural products so when i when i started writing the book actually yeah it was it was a little bit after actually when i started working with ed probably in 2020 and that was that was during lockdown and the the tv adaptation of normal

people had come out which i really really loved and adored uh but found like very uh found like really sort of like difficult to watch in the sense that the town in which the the town in which the early parts of the book are set their school days like really resembled my own their school life resembled my own in lots of ways and i knew so many people like the two main characters in that like connell and marianne and it was so sort of like there was there was something so sort of like yeah like jarring and difficult about that but also in the sense that i um i didn't see like myself in it in the sense of um you know a kind of like queer young person and that's not to say that there's that that the you know the book or the tv show like constituted some life

failure of representation in the sense that you only see from those two characters perspectives anyway and the fact and the fact is that most you know it's it's not that likely that there would have been like out young people um in the in the you know school that they go to at that time um but i was still very conscious of the yeah that that that character and how so many young gay guys, I know queer guys, whatever, had private various kinds of sexual, even romantic relationships with guys like that. Like these sort of like archetypal male characters um and i felt yeah i felt i was interested in in that um but then that the character the way the character developed sort of it sort of happened in a kind of like organic way i didn't like entirely like plan to write a character like that but i think first firstly

because those those those characters that that type of character is someone that a kind of person which whom you know i had like complicated experiences with growing up and i didn't instinctively feel that warmly towards and i think because of that i initially wrote the character using a certain amount of kind of caricature like wrote in maybe a not particularly generous way um and that that that that felt less narratively interesting it felt like maybe it had like not that much kind of like political like utility um and and I felt yeah not like the ethos of the book that i wanted to write um so i guess like slowly i'd have a desire to like understand like what the complexities like driving somebody like that might be he ended up yeah having this much more kind of expansive inner life and yeah posing

all these questions about who and what he might be um yeah so it happened in stages i guess you said about this book um and the generosity it took to write someone like ed and the overwhelming thing i got from evenings and weekends it's just empathy it's so empathetic to so many different characters and those viewpoints and i think that's what made it feel real because i know ed's and I know you know people who present as straight or present a certain way and then you talk to them and you build this space where they can actually speak to you and you find out there's all other stuff going on um and you might it might be someone that initially you would have just viewed as caricature or sort of dismissed because you're like it's really easy for them they're this you know this this white straight cis man.

How do you develop that empathy? How did you go in? Are you always someone who just has that in the first place? Or did it take like an actual practice of constantly trying to get in the heads of these people? Did you consult anyone? Do you have a consultant straight man that you were talking to? I did not. I didn't have a consultant straight man. Maybe that could have been a good, yeah um maybe that could have been a good yeah maybe that could have been a good good approach but yeah i don't know i mean i guess

like i wouldn't say the kind of empathy or or compassion it's not like it's not always um it's not necessarily like an you know an entirely instinctive place for me I mean like at times it is but like of course yeah there are lots of times when I think about others with you know not very much generosity or compassion but I definitely I kind of brought broadly speaking like believe in it as a good way to think about other people or at least to like consider the complexity of other people around you like consider um yeah consider the kind of like complex lives that they've had uh which inform how they think and feel and act now um and i guess there was there was something in it that i was interested in in terms of like so the kind of like like bad insides thing that we touched on earlier i think so that

the character rosaline who feels this thing about herself that i mean actually all all of the characters feel this about themselves in some ways that they've got some internal badness which might become known and if it ever becomes known a catastrophe is going to take place um and i guess i was interested in like i think a lot of those characters feel that for reasons to do at various like um you know external traumas that have happened like to them but i think in the case of ed i mean it's not it's not it's not true to say that he uh it's not true to say that things didn't happen like to him also but there's certainly some really there's some really unkind things that he's done and I'm interested in how like people live with

the knowledge of having done unkind things which everyone's done and I think there are yeah there I think I mean I'm interested in that yeah what do you do with the knowledge of doing of having done like bad like bad things I think there are like some ways in which people can kind of like you know kind of improvise a like a moral code which you know puts them in the right or like says that what the action that the actions were justified um or there's like some people who can come to a more sort of like emotionally um emotionally like nuanced uh position on it forgiving towards themselves but also like knowledge of like the gravity of whatever the thing was but i think in the in the case of ed um i was interested in like this entirely

corrosive and like uh entirely corrosive understanding of the weight of the bad things that he, you know, that he's done, but like no capacity to kind of integrate those into his life, no capacity to like forgive himself and how that kind of like that weight of like sense of his own badness, you know, you know, takes this enormous toll on his like mental health capacity to like have like a good relationship with his partner and with others in his life um and i think that's yeah i think that's like very that's very painful and hard and so i was interested in like allowing that to be painful and hard also allowing the things that he's done to have been painful and hard for others and for those

things not to you know be in contradiction to each other it's just all true at once um so I felt like yeah that was the that was the ethos that I was interested in thinking about it with I mean that was the thing reading the book where I was like Ashin get your foot off my neck because traumatized Londoners with an outside sense of shame and like jangling nervous systems I was like this is too real for me speaking of getting too real it is time for I'm in big trouble which is the bit of the show where we address audience dilemmas and we can put some of that McKenna empathy to work if you want to submit one of your dilemmas to us, if we couldn't possibly make any of your life problems worse, please do email if I speak at

navaramedia.com. That's if I speak at navaramedia.com. Ashin, are you ready? Do you feel qualified to do this? Qualified, not sure. Ready? Yes. Right, I'm going to read out the first dilemma. Dear If I Speak, my male partner and I have been together for six years since I was 20 and have lived in different cities for the last four, initially due to COVID. Once COVID was over, my partner showed little interest in us moving for the last four, initially due to COVID. Once COVID was over, my partner showed little interest in us moving to the same place again. Last year, we had a fraught conversation which ended with him suggesting that we live together again if I moved to where he is in the north of England. In the year since that conversation, I have completed

an MA in London and I'm now looking to make that move. However, my desire for the move and for my partner has dipped over this past year. I was openly out as bisexual on my MA, which was more meaningful for me than I anticipated, and I've started considering how much I am attracted to men and how much it might be compulsory heterosexuality. I've also clicked with a lot of the people on my MA which was in a creative subject. My partner is interested in art etc but from a more analytical point of view and I've enjoyed being with people who emotionally engage in the art that they make in the same way that I do. I'm a very independent person and part

of me rebels at the idea of moving somewhere to be with my partner, especially with my two issues mentioned above. I'm worried it might be a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, we have been together for a long time and I feel like I owe it to the relationship to discover fully whether it will work for me or not. about compulsory heterosexual etc i'm keen to be very intentional in what i now do but i'm still struggling to work out the best course of action if i speak as what should they do it sounds to me on first listening that that the that the the writer perhaps knows what they want in terms of the in terms of the way that that they describe this way that their life has opened up uh in the past year in terms of artistic interests in terms of potential like sexuality it sounds that there's a real sort of excitement and enthusiasm from the the the writer about that which i i was struck by when when they kind of list the

when they speak about the um the on the other hand they feel they owe it to the relationship it felt like that felt like kind of like quite quite a sort of stark shifting of attention away from their own desires and towards a sense of obligation and it's not that that sense of obligation is not to be taken seriously, is not to be like considered, but it sounds like, I mean, yeah, to me, it sounded like the, maybe they know what they want to do. Well, I mean, what can you add to that? That was a perfect read. It was a perfect summation of the issue at hand, which is that the letter writer knows what they want to do. As you said, Sash she in one side is very like enthusiastic and excited about the potentials of this new these parts of themselves that are being

drawn out by their new environment and the other half is this sort of idea of like obligation and chore um and i owe it but my question is why do you think you owe it to a relationship you've been in for six years to continue in the same manner? Like, I think maybe they need to read evenings and weekends for a start. I think this letter is really asking us for permission to follow their desires and follow these new parts themselves. And it is it does seem to be this classic like case of, well, on the one hand, known and on the other I have the unknown and the unknown is exciting me but what if that is a false promise what is that what if that is something that's just like you know the temptation because I don't have it now uh and I would say that it's it's more than that it's clear that

this is opening up new roots for you and it's clear that this is opening up new sides of yourself and I think if you go into the you know if you you settle back into a relationship where you don't feel all those parts of yourselves are being felt or you haven't explored them enough you will always chafe against the limitations that are being set like you've been with this person for six years and this is the avoidance speaking but if you feel like you're getting more growth and more experiences elsewhere and that when you come back to this person you said your desire for your partner has it's not just your like desire for the move it's your desire from your partner has dipped over this past year and i i don't think you know you should always just dip out relationships when your desire fluctuates because they will go up and down

but you you're looking between this like real commitment which is you'll move somewhere to be with them you'll settle down and you'll be stuck in it it's almost the basal genetics problem isn't it you're going to move to the basal genetics you're going to settle down in this very set life for yourself and you don't want that like deep down you don't want it you're looking but you're having to make a choice and i think you know this will end the six-year relationship you keep talking about compulsory heterosexuality so i know that you listen to chapel roan and you've read the lesbian master doc and i do i do think if you've read the lesbian master doc and the lesbian master doc is talking to you you've got to follow you've got to follow that thread you've got to follow that thread

because otherwise you the resentment will start to build anyway but i do think you're seeing kind of summed it up best which is that you're looking for permission from you know what you want to do you're looking for permission from us so here i you want to do and you're looking for permission from us. So here I am, I'm giving you permission to not move and to call time on this if that's the actual outcome that you want. I mean, the first thing I'd say is never leave London. Someone who loves you will not want you to leave London. It's the best city in the world.

Just fucking stay here, all right? Stay here. I mean, in all seriousness, I completely agree with everything both of you said and Moya when you said the word permission I started doing like gun fingers here um in the room that I live stream from because I was like yes this is what this dilemma is all about it's not actually a dilemma it's asking for permission to break up and I think that there is something interesting about the way this is sort of put together which

is it's almost as if there has to be this big political reason which gives you permission to break up where it's like oh no I'm not breaking up just because this relationship's run its course I'm breaking up because of compulsory heterosexuality it was compulsory heterosexuality that was keeping me here and I'm not trying to undermine the power of heteronormativity and the pressures that that puts on people particularly people who are bisexual but it seems to me that if you take the words compulsory heterosexuality out of this email you still have some very very good reasons to break up um you know one that he doesn't seem interested in you guys moving to the same place and if you do it you have to become a part of his world rather than him becoming a part of your world to your desire to live that kind of lifestyle up you know where he lives in the north of england

you don't have that desire your desire for him is dipping and also you do so much changing between 20 and 26 you know you are you are basically unrecognizable in those years like I never want to see a picture of myself from when I was 20 I can kind of live with myself at the age of 26 you do so much changing um and I think that the point I would make is that you don't need permission to break up and I know this because I really felt this way um I guess when I was you know breaking up a relationship that I'd been in between the ages of like 21 and 25 which isn't that far off from the age um that our our listener is the moment, is that I felt like not wanting to be in the relationship wasn't a good enough reason. And I became so, so anxious

and I felt really afraid to be like alone by myself because whenever I wasn't with him or being distracted by work or friends, I was just thinking that I didn't want to be in this relationship. And it made me feel like a bad person. It made me feel like it wasn't a good enough reason. But not wanting to be in a relationship anymore or feeling like there's more to explore as an independent person is a good enough reason. You know, you don't have to like hook like baskets of concepts onto the situation that you're in, in order to not break up. to the situation that you're in in order to not break up well one one thing that I just when you were describing that one thing that I'd say about it was that like yeah I had a similar experience of like a long relationship around you know similar age brackets and there was a period of

time where I felt kind of a similar thing in terms of owing it to the relationship also owing it to each other to keep going in the sense that actually it was a really good relationship really mutually caring happy and supportive but there was a feeling for me that there were like things beyond that that I wanted to that I wanted to explore and I think likewise I felt like a really bad I felt like a bad person for wanting to do it but I guess like what I will say from the other side of it is that that person is still a very very dear friend a very kind of happy part of my life and maybe that's not what will happen in this case but there's like potential in these things for the thing that you feel you owe to the relationship by by by by kind of finishing the romantic aspects of the relationship, it's not necessarily

the case that that relationship can't, those kinds of sense of obligations that you feel for all the time you spend together, it's not necessarily going to be a sort of, yeah, a sort of end to that. And I guess the other thing that I say is, I'm not sure if this applies to the listener but certainly when I was that age 26 I felt like I felt so old I was I felt like I was like wow I'm really this this I felt like okay I've got to you know nail my flags to the mast I've got to decide what life I'm gonna have um is is it gonna be is this it am I gonna have this life and kind of now uh looking back so much of what feels like the real kind of like meaty part of my life took place after that and I mean I feel like in many ways like I feel like my actual life started um you know from my kind of late 20s onwards um so maybe that's something to consider as well yeah like you don't like it's not

logan's run you don't just die at the age of 30 like there is so much life to come uh let's let's move on to dilemma number two dear if i speak my dilemma is regarding how i approach a situation that my very good friend is in. She has started a relationship with a man who has been in a relationship with another woman for a number of years. They've just opened up the relationship to allow him to start seeing my friend after months of flirting. From what I have heard from mutual friends, his girlfriend is not happy with the open relationship and is not seeing anyone else herself. Meanwhile my friend is head over heels in love and finding it harder and harder to share his time and affections. He will often let my friend down and cancel plans saying he wish he could see her but

can't because of his girlfriend. From an outsider perspective and from my protective instincts I think that this man has manipulated both women so he can have his cake and eat it. I know this is not a progressive take on something that deviates from the normal relationship, but while I know an open relationship or polyamory would never work for me personally, I have no problem with them as I recognise they work for others. I just think this man is using these recently more common labels to absolve himself of any responsibility towards either woman but especially my friend i don't know how to convey this to her without seeming judgmental or old-fashioned and feel like i can't give my honest opinion or be supportive as as i would like as a result any advice i'm smiling because i feel like i could

have written this dilemma i see so much of myself in it which is like i know this works for other people but it would never work for me and because i love you it would work for you either like i can see so much of myself in this letter um ashene you have of course written a novel in which someone is you know the for want of a better word like the side piece to an opened up relationship, what's your take? Oh God, it's so hard. I mean, I so so for example uh i i was in a long relationship before which in which my partner uh wanted to open it up which we agreed to do but quite quickly he became in a in a relationship with somebody else uh in the sense of they were like proper boyfriends which felt like i i mean i was unhappy about it in the sense of they were like proper boyfriends which

felt like i i mean i was unhappy about it in the sense that it was not really what we'd both kind of signed up for um but i decided to you know try to make it work um but yeah i mean it's it's very difficult like obviously i can't say for sure what's happening in this situation. I think at the time when I was in that situation, I definitely, because I was really hurt, I definitely, I perceived in such a way that there were like bad faith actors. I was kind of being treated unkindly. And perhaps some of that was true but it was also true that everyone in the situation was kind of just muddling through trying to uh like approximate

some version of happiness it was also the case that so in this like long relationship that I was in we weren't really that happy in it and we weren't ever really saying that and actually what transpired in the end was that my partner uh we broke up and he and the other guy stayed together which was like absolutely the right thing to happen they were much better suited than he and i ever were um but for like a long time that idea of being like the one left out like the one who's left was so kind of scary it seemed to like pose all of these it seemed to pose all of these challenges to my kind of like self-worth um uh but i guess what i kind of what i kind of like

the position that i came through came to through that was that I had more agency for my own happiness than I let on um I'm not really sure what to say to the listener I think they're like they're quite complicated situations I don't really know what to what to advise your friends um I don't know what do you think uh I have thoughts which is that once again this dilemma is not a dilemma uh asking really for advice per se but asking for permission you are asking for permission to speak to your friend uh about how i guess you're taking pills for her headache and she hasn't asked you to take any of those pills and i think there's a difference between being a good friend who is giving advice and supporting someone and trying to control a relationship set up that you can see isn't probably going to be best or going to be healthy but you

actually cannot do anything about at this stage really beyond saying things like you know are you all right are you are you happy and being supportive which doesn't mean being like this looks great this is fantastic but as i've said many many times before means showing alternatives to like what happiness can look like and making sure that elsewhere she's still possessed of things like the ability to know that she has agency and that she's not a passive action in her life and that she has a right to be treated with respect but she's not going to listen to you right now really if you go in and say this man is manipulating both of you and doing all this and doing all that because while I think what you said is actually accurate and I think from what it sounds like this open relationship doesn't have

any of the three c's that you apparently have to have according to scientific studies for an open relationship to work, which is communication, consent and comfort. It doesn't matter. Your friend is infatuated and this probably is part of a wider pattern that's annoyed you. There is something about this that annoys and triggers you about your friend's way of relating to men or what your friend settles for in relationships or what she's drawn to and i noticed that when you said you know they've been flirting for months and he's just opened up this relationship and you're like i don't want to seem judgmental but there is a bit of judgment there you're annoyed your friend has been flirting so much with this man he's in a relationship and that she's been stupid enough in your eyes to

fall for his lies and now she's head over heels for him but that doesn't matter none of that matters that is actually not your problem um your problem is that you feel like you can't be open and honest with her and just let her have it both barrels about what you really think which is why you vented out to us which is so legitimate and so fine i'd rather you vented out to us first than going on your friend because it would just make her feel bad um what you've got to remember is something that i have to let go again and again and again is you can't fix this. You can't fix your friend. You can't make her have like a secure attachment.

You can only furnish a situation that she can learn to have like self-esteem and self-respect in. But you cannot give that to her. and you won't give it to her by um you know criticizing this man overtly criticizing this man and like really going on everything you think is bad about him i know ash sometimes has a different opinion to me on how much you should uh go in on someone else's partner but i think at this stage when someone's in infatuation they're so defensive of their relationship they're so defensive of their setup and they're so like this is this is it this is that that you have to come at things sideways um and i wonder what your other friends think about it you are invested enough in this that you want to interfere and that says that you have a different relation to your friend and your friend's relationships than

maybe others do because there's situations that i've talked about my friends recently where it's like i'm i say why does this not bother you about x person the way it bothers me and we've gone back and we've worked out okay it's because it reminds me of a similar situation with say family or another situation where it's like i felt powerless and i've tried to take control and that's why i'm uniquely affected and triggered by someone else's behavior compared to you know someone else but you have to remember this is not your three-way relationship this is not your thing to sort out all you can do is sort of furnish your friend and if you want to rant about how fucking annoying or judge or any judgment or any you know thoughts that make you feel like less than a good friend that you feel like you

have to frame in a like a really i don't know structurally supportive way like you have here uh you just got to find someone to bitch to and say I just need a bitch session I need a bitch session to let out so I can be a good friend to my friend again and not let out on her that's my advice see I feel like not only have I in my life at various times occupied all three points of the triangle as well. I've been the side piece, I've been the unhappy girlfriend, and I've been the reckless manipulator trying to have their cake and eat it. But I've also been what I would call the German shepherd friend, who feels intensely protective, and also feels that an aspect of their personal morality is being breached here and is wondering,

of their personal morality is being breached here and is wondering like what to do with that feeling because something which I do really feel about my close friends is that I feel very protective about them particularly with men particularly in situations where they're hurting and they're going to get more hurt and it's like I want to patrol the perimeter of their emotional boundaries like growling and snapping to try and like you know get this intruder away from them um and that comes from a place of love it also probably comes from a sense of unexamined superiority on my part and a feeling that i know what's right and i know what's healthy and i know what their path to happiness is going to look like and also maybe it comes from an inability to deal with things which are perhaps challenging to your own sense of personal morality and might be right the things that you feel are

wrong might be right and that's a difficult position to be in I think sometimes as the German shepherd friend so I think the first thing is to acknowledge that that's what's going on for you and that's not something that you have to entirely chuck out of the window but you have to be aware of what the drawbacks and bad things are about it and I also think that you have to accept that you can advise your friend and I think you can be real about it and I think you can say look man like I think this guy's kind of manipulative I can't lie but ultimately you have to acknowledge and accept that advice might not be taken and it might not be taken because it's not the right advice for this person it might not be taken because it's not the right advice right now or it might not be taken because it's not the right advice for this person, it might not be taken because it's not the right advice right now, or it might not be taken and it is the right

advice, but that's just how it goes sometimes. You know, I've made loads of mistakes and learnt things the hard way in spite of very good advice that I've received, and I think like everyone has had to learn things the hard way and your friend is no different you can't deny them an experience which might teach them a lot about themselves and teach them a lot about their desires teach them a lot about their boundaries their communication style you can't protect them from that you know like nature only has one tool for growth and it is the mistake that's literally how evolution works and i know that because i watched the film with paul bettany um i'm a woman in stem like mistakes are really important mistakes are how we evolve and you can't protect your friend from that you can only advise um

but what an episode of if i speak this has been it has been literary um me and moya have proved that we can read which feels important to establish for the podcast ashene you have been an incredible guest and an incredible dilemmas advisor i kind of feel like i want you back on the show every week just so you can solve people's problems in a way that me and moya can't thanks so much for having me it's lovely to be here. It's been a delight. I hope you feel ready for the way your profile is about to blow up. Not sure. This has been If I Speak featuring evenings and weekends. I've been Ash Sarkar with Oisin McKenna and Moya Lothian-McLean.

See you next week.