Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - Ordinary Time by Cathy Rentzenbrink with Cathy Rentzenbrink

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

This week's book guest is Ordinary Time by Cathy Rentzenbrink.Sara and Cariad are joined by the writer and Sunday Times bestseller Cathy Rentzenbrink. Her books include Everyone is Still Alive, Write It All Down and The Last Act of Love which was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.In this episode they discuss Jane Austen, affairs, quiet people, Anna Karenina, grief and blue cashmere jumpersThank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Trigger warning: In this episode we discuss grief, early loss, traumatic events and suicide.Ordinary Time is available to buy here.You can find Cathy on Instagram @catrentzenbrink and Twitter @catrentzenbrinkTickets for the live show at the Southbank Centre with special guest Harriet Walter are available to buy here!Cariad’s children's book The Christmas Wish-tastrophe is available to buy now.Sara’s debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad’s book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Follow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Pasco. Hello, I'm Carriad Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we've created the Weirdo's Book Club.

Join us. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. A place for the person who'd love to be in a real book club, but doesn't like wine or nibbles. Or being around other people. Is that you? Join us. Check out our Instagram at Sarah and Carriad's Weirdo's Book Club for the upcoming books we're going to be discussing. You can read along and share your opinions.

Or just skulk around in your raincoat like the weirdo you are. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is Ordinary Time by Kathy Rentson Brink. What's it about? Well, it's about Anne, a reluctant vicar's wife who has to move to Cornwall and make some spiritual and moral decisions about how much she actually wants God in her life.

What qualifies it for the Weirdo's Book Club? Well, Anne is not only a former librarian. She met her best friend at a library and she's trying to set up a book group for the parish. She's one of us. One of us. In this episode, we discuss. Jane Austen, fares.

Quiet people, grief. And blue cashmere jumpers. And joining us this week is Kathy Wrensenbrink. Kathy is an incredible writer. She is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller, The Last Act of Love, as well of several other brilliant non-fiction works, How to Feel Better, Dear Reader, and Write It All Down.

And she's also the author of a fiction novel, Everyone is Still Alive. Ordinary Time is her second novel. Trigger Warning. episode we do discuss grief, early loss, traumatic events and suicide. Kathy! Welcome, Cathy Renton Brink. Thank you so much for being here.

It's really nice to be here. We're so excited to have you. Really excited and starstruck. Yeah. And, you know, big fans already, but absolutely love your book. Ordinary Time, which is out now, available to buy now. Has it been going? Good, I think.

I find it a bit, I don't like to be too involved with, I think once a book comes out, the temptation is to just become completely obsessed and therefore a little but insane about it. So it's my sixth book, I think, and I think I finally, on book number six, worked at how not to go completely mad on publication.

How is that? By trying to focus on the fact that I wrote a whole book and some people like it, and that's great. This is what I tell myself all the time. Feel entitled to nothing, treat everything nice that happens

like it's a delightful surprise. You know, I think we might intellectually grasp that if you're going to put content into this world, people are going to have opinions about it. It's a really different thing from reading, reading people talking about what an idiot you are oh that's really wise very very wise

I feel like we need that that's good very wise I mean it's an easier said than done thing there's lots of the good advice yeah but reminding yourself so you're always putting yourself back on that track four works of non-fiction obviously yes the Sunday Times bestseller

last act of love was your first book so your first book was very successful about something very personal and then you've moved into writing novels, is it slightly easier in the world of fiction than nonfiction? So what I feel is I think, fictionally, I think is harder to write. It's not that writing memoirs easy, but you are, at least you have some parameters, I think. And certainly for me, the difficulties in writing a novel is I just want to keep,

it could be anything, couldn't I? Spiders, Mars, underground, back in time, you know, more characters. Oh, I like this side character. Maybe I should be writing a whole novel about them instead, and maybe I should set it in Spain. You know, so that, managing that's quite tricky for me. And also, I think in nonfiction, when it's a memoir, you can say every so often things along the lines of, I've no idea why I did this.

I know it seems bonkers, but I did. And if I was going to tell you a reason, it would be a lie. Yeah, yeah. As in I could make up some stuff. Yeah. But then I would be suddenly dishonest. Yeah. And I think you can, so in a way, memoir I think, allows for the fact that we're complex,

nuanced people, not always in control of, or in charge or particularly knowledgeable of our own motivations, let alone anyone else's. Yeah. Whereas in fiction, you want to make it really, you want to make it feel like it's really nuanced and complex. But I think you do have to obey some almost like internal rules of character consistency. So you can't really have a character who says, yeah, I don't know why after the, you know, half the book was set there. Then I just woke up one day and felt a bit bored and thought I'd become a French speaker. Like you can't do that in a novel.

Did you study writing as well? I did French and English at university. I'm not sure it's actually that helpful, wasn't helpful for me really as a writer, I don't think. So I think it can be a bit overwhelming. There's something about the academic way of looking at books, I think. Well, yeah, we both did English, and I definitely stopped reading. I'd say after university for about two years, I couldn't enjoy it at all.

And then it comes back, but it does destroy the kind of love of like, I'm just going to sit down and read a book. Your head gets into essay mode, doesn't it? When I've taught writing at universities, which I have, you know, I've taught a term at university, and I've done quite a lot of guest lecturing. And actually what I always feel is they've done reading lists are too long. Yeah, so long. And they've got too much to do.

Even the creative writing students. They're being told, there's too much of a programme, which means they can't follow their nose creatively. They should be like spider charts because usually reading something then opens up an entire world of things that are connected to that. Yes. Yeah. And if there's a linear way for you to go, there isn't space for you to go, okay, I've just gone down a hole. I need to read everything this writer has read and then all of their influences. And then the historical context for their writing.

And I guess that's what that kind of reading list does not allow you to do. That's right, because even if someone's trying to set something with that kind of good approach, rather than we've got to take a chronological walk through this and look at these ways the novel was done or whatever. Even if someone else is doing that in a really imaginative way, it's still not factoring in the fact that it really has to be the person. It has to be the creator, bringing their own self to that process, I think, and then following their own. Yeah, what interests them?

Yeah. What are you reading at the moment? Can you read when you're writing as well? I can't, I mean, I need to always be reading something, but I can't read the thing that's like the thing that I'm writing. Oh, yeah, has to be really different, yes. But that's actually led. My next book is actually the thing I was doing as a SkyV project

whilst writing this novel, which is reading Agatha Christie's novels in publication date order. But your character does go and read some magazines for Christy. Yeah. That slipped in there, isn't it? I know. Well, actually, so there's lots of reading and your central character reads. But we never get to find out what she's reading. Well, I tried really hard to not make her a reader.

So the first draft, she wasn't a reader. Because I just thought, like, I'm always completely obsessed with books. Why do I try and do something else? So she wasn't a reader. And I tried really hard. And then I reached a point, I just thought, I just actually can't do it. I can't inhabit a whole. In my first novel, there's lots of different perspectives of different characters.

So there are some non-readers amongst them. And I felt I could do it for about... A bit. I can do it for about 5,000 words. That's the limit. And I just can't really get inside... And I think I could get inside anyone else's head, actually. And I love writing men.

I love writing from male perspective. So there's all sorts of things I feel I could do. But actually, non-readers, the hardest thing. And I just thought... Who are they? What are they? Yeah. Also, it symbolised... I mean, because she's a mom and she's got a lot of wifely duties,

not necessarily chosen in ordinary time. In ordinary time. So the idea of lying down on a sofa reading a book is decadence because of the time. So the reading is important not just because of what she's absorbing, because that is her hobby that she's not allowed to by the prescriptions of her life allowed to do. I think probably all the time I just kept thinking like, wouldn't it be, like if I could really give this woman a treat. She could just have a comfy sofa

and some books and lie down. And some central heating that works. Some central heating that works, yeah. It's about this woman called Anne that marries a vicar, becomes a vicar's wife. She moves from London.

They go up north of a bit and then sort of settle in Cornwall. So they have this much more village, pastoral, rural life. And Cornwall's beautiful. It's beautiful. And it's described so beautifully. So that part of me is like,

I was going to be miserable in a marriage. Yeah. Go and do it. Go and do it looking at the same. I found that very aspirational. Yeah, that was nice. And it's lovely to read about miserable people. Yeah, yeah.

Really lovely because I loved her, I loved Sam, her son. The idea of being married to a vicar? Yeah, let's talk about this. Because of the community. Why did you make her a vicar's wife? So my aunt was a vicar's wife, and I used to go and visit them when I was really like 7, 8, 9. And I used to really notice how my uncle, who has long died,

I used to just be fascinated by the fact that he had to go to church and be like nice to loads of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he'd come out and then talk about God a lot and God's love and how great God's love was. And then he'd come home and not be very nice or patient with his wife or his children. And they were living in this amazing place which I loved.

And I do, I mean, I have a lifelong utter adoration for graveyards. It was called Cemetery Lodge. Wow. Because it was right on the edge of a cemetery. It was just blissful, like wandering around the graves. Yeah. It had not everybody not know I was going to be a writer. What would you like to do, small child?

I'll just walk around the cemetery on my own. please making things up and looking at the greystone. Yeah, but it was freezing cold and I think there were rodents, you know, and he didn't really see why she was making a fuss, which she wasn't making a fuss. She was terrified of the mice and bringing up two small children in this like filthy place. You show so beautifully what happens when one's spouse's attention is elsewhere. That's the thing with the vicar and his job. It's not just that that is his job, it's that his focus is always on other people.

Heavens or the community. And so the idea of cooking for someone who thanks God and never you, which is why I say it's my nightmare. The idea of being sort of servile to someone, that is itself such an act of... Coming soon, you married a vicar. He never thanks you. You've made him a sandwich and they've just pushed the plate a couple of inches. He never washes anything up.

But it was the thanking of someone else, not the person who's doing it. when, you know, it's an act of love to make someone some food. It was a very particular kind of salvageness. I thought that was interesting. And I've remained, and I still am very interested, I guess, in partnership, which, I mean, to be honest, I don't think I'm a great fan of it. I was thinking, the other day I was looking, I don't watch much telly. And I thought, like, all right, I'm going to try and watch some television.

I was obviously a low air, but there was nobody else around. Like someone who picks up a book. I'm going to give it a go. Yeah, that's right. I think I'll try to watch some television. There are basically some things I like, and I watch them obsessively again and again and again, know them. and they're all funny.

So I thought, I'll try and watch something. So I kind of like managed to work the telly, which was quite a leap. And then, because I watched stuff with my son, but like he drives. Anyway, I managed to get it on,

and I looked at Netflix. And the top program was something, it was got something like the 10 worst exes. I just looked at it and I thought, like, we're not sure of evidence that romantic partnership leads to some pretty hefty,

horrible things. And yet we're still caught in this loop where we're like so many people are chasing it. Yeah. I think it's something wrong with you. if you don't have it. But I've just always been interested in how it works and how outside of that first thing of when people get together.

And I love that thing that I really wanted to explore in the novel, how like she thinks, how on earth did I end up here married to a vicar? But actually I think it's quite, I look at people in relate, you know, when you look at someone in there, you think, how did they end up together? But actually, it's like some sort of be a goggle, love goggle thing, isn't it? There's something about people suspending disbelief and in terms. intentionally tricking themselves into some relationship with someone.

You say in the book so beautifully, it's like sort of catching someone at the right moment. So he came along and she was sort of not quite sure what she was doing. She was working in this library and he had a nice scarf and he was kind. And just that moment where you sort of think there could be so many other moments where you're like, nah, this isn't worth it. But she just sort of thought, oh, okay. And then it just rolled into a marriage. Escaping childhood.

Yes. So with her husband, Tim, we find out, you know, a bit more about his background much later. But if you've had a certain kind of upbringing, people leap into something else to escape. Yeah, yeah. And they don't have any knowledge of what the opposite is like. They just know they don't want to have that anymore.

Yeah, you know, if you've got an alcoholic parent, someone who seems the exact opposite of someone who would drink for pleasure because they don't do anything for pleasure, isn't, there's an attraction there of, I can't repeat that pattern. I loved the relationship that Anne has with her mom. Her mom's constantly saying, like, you know, your father is so awful, your father was so, so you're lucky, you're lucky, the Caesar, he's a saint, basically.

And that gives her nowhere else to go. And no criticism, isn't it? It's like she hasn't learned how to criticise anything because her dad was so terrible, this extreme version of husband and father. Therefore, anything that's not that is perfection. And that leaves you with such a binary solution of men, isn't it? It's either they'll drunk and they'll leave you

or they're in heaven and you must be grateful. Life is so long. So the thing with the relationships are there, not a courtship. Courtship is fantastic. I do like courtship, bringing that back out. There's a reason that so many books end and, you know, TV programmes and films end with weddings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because that is, you know, a journey, linear, up to a high point, bang, can't tell it what it was afterwards afterwards. We live for a really long time and it's very, very hard. And I think that's where the honesty comes in. This is what's so wonderful and very positive about reading your book, even though some really sad, sad things are constant in it is because you have a character trying to be honest, which then makes other characters honest. and honest people are very good because they are offering someone the opportunity to

or here's the information you can now leave, I'm not tricking you, you can respond to this. You can change as well. There's change offered with truth, isn't there? It's hard. And I think that's why Anne is such a likable character, even though she's not perfect, that's why I think she's a good character,

because she is trying to change her life. She's really brave. Yeah, but in a very small way, a very small way, which is nice to read. But loving her son the way that she loves her son, And that's such an act of bravery, not just going, well, I'm going to do what I like. She's got this sort of quite vulnerable child, hasn't she? He's talking about her son made you a bit weeping.

I've got two sons, Kathy. I've sort of started to cry. God, it's so hard. I cry the idea of them being old men in an old people's home, people not being kind to them. I don't have any strength for the world not being a nice place to my children. I think there's something about boys as well, like the fragility of them. And the, well, men, one of my joke-working titles for the novel, actually,

because I always have a sort of a joke, I always have a few joke-working titles. And one of my early ones was just, I was still calling her Anna then, was just Anna and the men. Because I wanted to write about this woman who's surrounded by men in different ways. You know, her sort of a dead father and her living brother and the husband and the son. Yeah, and she has her best friend and then she marries her brother. So she becomes her brother's wife. So she's always caught up in the problems of the. the men, but I do, I mean, I really love men and also feel really sort of compassionately towards

men because I think often there is a, I don't know, there's a vulnerability that they then have to sort of cover up. Yeah, an armour, which then, that's what they call it, I guess, the toxic masculinity thing is that they're forced to survive in the world. We make them do a thing and then criticize them. I have to say reading it, Cathy, there was one moment when I turned the page and it was like, my dad died when I was 15 and I was like, oh, right, Cathy. That's a bit close to the bone there, thank you. I was like, oh my God. Did you find the grief creeping in to this book when you're writing it?

Yeah, I did. I did. And I so was really trying to not write. And I really felt like, oh, maybe this is the novel that I would have written if my brother hadn't been knocked over when I was 17. Like, maybe this is the novel I was supposed to write. I always wanted to write, and I wanted to write kind of social comedies about people, you know, getting into a bit of a pickle and having adultery, like, that kind of thing. and I thought, like, yes, I'm finally going to write that novel because I just couldn't really escape.

And in my first novel, I tried to write a character who'd never suffered, well, who didn't suffer a grief as a teenager. Right. So in my first novel, there's a character called Juliet, to whom nothing bad has ever happened. Right. And then the novel takes place in the year after her mother dies. But she's in her 40s by this time.

And I really intentionally tried to write about someone who hadn't had a traumatic event in their teenager. Yeah. And again, and I think I sort of matter. managed it, but I mean, it was hard. It's a conscious exercise. Conscious exercise. And is that because are you protecting yourself as a person

because then you don't have to write about it or are you just seeing if you can do it? I think in the first novel, again, I just wanted to write a novel that wasn't about grief, which sounds a ridiculous thing to say, doesn't it, in a novel that someone's mother has just died. And then there's also a life-threatening accident in the novel. But it was still

my attempt to not write a book that was kind of grief-soaked. But of course, I think possibly there's something I've also maybe reconciled with the fact that I can't be a person that didn't have something terrible. In that time of my life, I won't ever be that person. But also every single writer, their brain is still processing what they've ingested. So for some people that will be, you know, the 60s, the swinging 60s and their brain will keep doing different versions.

We don't criticise them. We don't go like, oh, that man is always a misogynist. All of his characters treat women terribly. We just go, oh, that's what Martin Amis writes about. And so I honestly think that's where the writing impulse comes from. It's a brain going, okay, different direction. How am I processing it this time? But we talk about that a lot because all of my stuff comes.

I feel like grief leaks out of my fingers. And I will try. I just wrote a kid's book and it's grief soaked. And I was like, come on! You're always trying to answer that narrative. That's what writing is. You just answer it in different ways. And reflecting it at a different point in your life.

This is a very different example. It's much more flippered. But when I started comedy, as you stand up comedy for my job, and people kept talking about the fact it was like woman's stuff. Because every time I went on stage, they saw a woman and then woman talking about that stuff. And it was such a frustration that I was trying for such a long time to write like androgynous material until I realised I cannot help that I have lived as a woman.

And so it is a woman's perspective and I didn't choose to do. And it's not derogatory. Whereas I heard criticism that I couldn't appeal to everyone or whatever. and it wasn't, it's just that there's some stuff you can't shake off. I felt that a bit as well with the, again, I think the novels sort of like hyperdomestic. Yeah. And I could imagine sort of, I did slightly imagine, you know, like literary people sneering because writing about the kitchen sink is, I don't know, boring or teacups are boring.

Because it's considered women's work and that's why it's considered less. Women's textile art, the Royal Academy banned any kind of miniature painting, textiles, embroidery, they said it's beneath us because that's what women did. And so that art. So they thought it was like hobbies rather than artists. And they drew the line. I can't know. It's a famous artist. And he was like, this is now good art that men do and this is rubbish. And you go, that's just a man saying because you, because you're talking about it, it's not worth listening to. And a few years ago at the National Theatre, whoever was in charge said women write very small plays. Yeah, yeah. Like they don't dare. Like men dare to write these huge, like 40 characters. As if huge means better.

Again, it's always like fucking size, isn't it? It's like, well, therefore it's a better play because it's got bigger special effects in. Or it's a bigger set. And it's like, I loved the ordinary domestics of this. And it reminded me of Jane Austen in a way because it was like, yes, it's observational. Yes, it's small and quiet and domestic. But that doesn't mean, I go, it's shit.

But Jane Austen also had trapped women. They were trapped by, yeah. You can say trap wind. I don't know why. Jane Austen had trap win. ever wrote about Trapped Wind. There's a really beautiful storyline where there's another character, Liam,

who wants to write a novel inspired by Anna Karenna and what would happen now. I guess you're Liam? Sort of, yeah, yeah. And everyone's like, Liam, leave it. It doesn't seem like this is the book you should write. Liam was in my first novel as well. Oh, really?

And that's kind of pegged around a novel that he's trying to write and doesn't finish it. And then he also doesn't write a novel. You know, he also doesn't, not too much of a spoiler to say, he doesn't finish his novel on this one either. I'm rooting for Liam, the underdog. And actually, Liam is, do you know, I'd completely forgotten this until the other day

and I was mentoring someone and I remembered, I was stuck writing my second book and I decided, I now think probably wrongly, that if only I was a man I wouldn't be having this problem. I felt it was all to do with, you know, and I'm not sure that was even true. But what I did was I thought, I'm going to invent an alter ego just like me but making male. So I invented this, you know, half Irish character. I called him Liam Quinn and I got him to write parts of my second book for me, which he did very successfully. I thought this is fantastic.

No more writer's block for me. Anyway, as soon as I let Liam start writing a novel, he got really stuck. But then at some point, I decided to put him in the novel. Oh, interesting. And I can't remember how this happened. It would have done as well. Yeah.

It's so real to you. Yeah. And I'd now forgotten that that's her. So when people say, like, how do you create characters? I'd forgotten that, oh, well, actually, that one didn't. And I never expected that to happen, but it kind of did.

and then I'd forgotten all about it. And this is so interesting because the person you invented, this man who should be able to keep you do it better, he's in this book not, is failing and not doing what you did, which is finishing a book. And his partner says,

don't ask him about writer's block. Yeah, yeah. Boring about it. Yeah. I think that's really interesting. You've locked him in there. I do think Liam's really like me. It's really funny when you write novels.

He doesn't finish the book. You finished it. That's it. That's it. I do manage to finish things. Yes, successful Liam. Yeah. But I feel sorry.

I feel really sorry for Liam as well. Having said that Liam's like me, be compassionate. I do like him. And it's that thing when you write, because my other novel had quite a lot of male characters in it. But I find people always think that, people always think that you're like your female characters.

Whereas I actually think I'm much more like my male characters. But no one ever notices, so it's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. We reread Iris Murdoch, right? When we first started this podcast. You read it under the net. We had thought at university would have said, you know, she writes these incredible men.

And we read them, oh, she's writing women. They're just called him Bill and John. but they're absolutely, they're women. They do things that you're like, that's an odd thing for a male character to do, Ryrus. You're like, oh, these are all women. Yes. I think that's a great way to deal with Writers Block to invent this far more arrogant man.

But it's interesting that we... And then lock him in a book. We tell ourselves that something in our life would be easier if we were different in some way. Yeah, absolutely. And then as soon as I really properly thought myself into Liam, Liam became very nervous about whether or not he has the right to say anything. Yeah, yeah.

And haven't men said it all already? And then Liam got really stuck. So then at that point I had to take back over and fold Liam into the novel that he was supposed to be writing so that I could write the novel about him trying to write a novel. You needed to do it, Cathy, not Liam.

Yeah. Are you a massive and a Karenna fan? Like is it a book that you come back to? Yeah, so I've been obsessed with that as well for years. And I remember the first time I read that after having a child and thought it was astonishing that, for all I'd read it before, I had really seen it as a love story that goes wrong. And then when I read it after becoming a mother, I noticed really for the first time that she's a mother.

I haven't read it since having kids. I, yeah, as soon as you said that, I was like, oh, she got a kid. Like, oh, God. I know, and you read it and you just think, like, Tolstoy. Yeah. But it's just a very different reading experience. And I'm always interested in that how you, I love rereading books. I sometimes think I'm only reading books to audition them for whether or not they make the, you know.

Yeah, yeah. reading a book once, it's just a one-night stand for me. What I'm really looking for is something more than that. You know, I'm looking for repeat action. I'm sorry, that went a bit picky, isn't it? A lifetime commitment. Yeah, and then you just change, because you the person changes,

and then the book's telling you something different. You see it from a different angle. So I've always been really interested in that. And really since, so I think since my late teens, I wanted to write a book with this idea of, do women have to be punished for their transgressions? You know, so again, that 19th century novel thing of, you know, they always end up dead by their own hand if they dare to do anything outside of the norm.

So I wanted to write something that looked at that. And then after I'd become a mother, I also wanted to write a book that was sort of a bit of a spin on Anna Karenna, but possibly both of the very different treatment, both of whether or not the woman had to be punished, but also the role of her child in how it went and how she saw that. Why this book is so brilliant is like, you've got Liam in the book being like, oh, I want to do modern Anna Karenna and he's imagining something big and huge and epic. And actually what you've done, a modern telling of Anna Karenna, is very domestic and quiet and small.

And a woman on a train trying to work out if she should, you know, go meet this man and then going back home because people need her. And that actually does feel like the truthful retelling of that story, rather than like, you know, we must go 2024. Like, that's not what that story is about. it is the small details. In terms of small details that are so huge, the moment in the car park where a man who's a sandwich

short of a picnic is shouting at her and she's pregnant. And a stranger takes care of her. That is awful. And the stranger says to him, you need to sort your priorities out, mate. Yeah. Because he's so worried about the man shouting, not his heavily pregnant wife

who's sitting down in a stranger's car. I found that really upsetting. But that's huge drama. But also it's the kind of thing that you, look small, you're embarrassed about, but then you tell a friend and your friend gives you that look of like, it's not okay. And it's what they call red flags. It's a red flag. It's a real red flag. And it's a real like, a woman talking to woman being like, so he did that and you'd have to put your face on of like, oh, did he, oh, well, did he then say sorry? Did he, um, oh, did he, how did he? Because

you want to say, what the fuck is wrong with him? Have you ever seen force major that film? Oh, God. You never watched that film. Oh, it's horrible. Well, it's really worth watching because it's about masculinity. Yeah. And I haven't watched it for a long time, but there's an avalanche. There's a family, two children, and the mother grabs the children. The man grabs his phone. The man, like, jumps out the way and she grabs the kids and look and is like, where are you? And he's like, well, we both know what you just did.

And then they have to sort of deconstruct what he did in that split second. Everyone survives. Everyone's fine. Everyone's fine. Apart from in that moment, she now knows what he would do. And it was an instinctual reaction. And he thought she was fine. And anyway, it's about it's about what we expect from men.

The lovely, yeah. Jamie, when she, when again an act of kindness where someone sees her pain and doesn't run away from it, which is think is such a great introduction of this character that you're like, oh, he's a good, it's a green flag. This is why men that women write are so sexy. They're so sexy. So I did think, I was enjoying Kathy's version of this man. I was like, this is nice.

Yeah, really nice, sexy Jamie with his creamy cheese. It's a barata. I've never had karate. So I just have this description of this creamy mozzarella. She's vegan. Sorry, it just sounded really rude. I found it so difficult to write, Jamie. He's the most made-up person. But I found it so difficult to do.

And then at some point I just thought, hang on a second, I am a novelist. I can make this up. And if people think he's unrealistic, they're tough. I'm going to make up what I think is the sort of man that would make. And I'm going to talk to lots of other women about what would you like. And because what he is is he's really kind. Yeah. And he's very practical.

He washes up. He gives a glass of water. Women's needs are so small. He made me a sandwich and I'm not thirsty. Time to have an affair. Let's go, Jamie. He's just kind. He's kind.

And it's so lovely to have a puff shop clothes. Yeah. He's got a navy jumper on. We don't want much. Yeah, lots of calming blues. Yeah. Notices if she's cold. Yeah, imagine.

Yeah, imagine so. Got rid of the jumble. Got cleared the shit at me house, you know. She never has to do anything she doesn't want. Yeah, he knows that. It's so small what we need. It's so small what we need. But also, I mean, it's impossible not to miss having a crush on people.

Yeah, that you've got that crush, like, that sense of, like, hysteria that happens with crush, I thought was really, like, good. And all of those points in it where it's like, yeah, that would be the wrong thing to do. No, I have to go home. No, I can't text you. Oh, and the staring at the phone, deleting messages. And it was nice, I thought it was really interesting to have this character that has been traumatized as a teenager, tried to become a grown-up and do the right thing. And then it's whisk back into teenage world. Like, that's what she's dealing with.

And again, it comes up what we're saying. She's dealing with a teenage life that she didn't have because it's not full of trauma. This is maybe what she would have had, like, texting boys and drinks. She didn't get that because she had this, you know, horrific grief. And then her life turned upside down. And also she was living with a nan and granddad with no money. And you do think about that a lot when you've had a grief as a teenager of like, well, what, yeah, what would it be like if I didn't? What would a normal look like?

And you never know. You just never know. So it's nice to give Anne that moment where she's just texting a boy and that's, that's it. You know, there's not trauma wrapped up in it. And also to then live out the consequences of telling her husband. Because that's what I really, really loved, because there was a moment maybe. I know, 50, 70 pages from the end where I thought, well, how will Cathy resolve this? Yeah.

And I love so much that she. Tiny spoilers. But whatever the consequences of talking to her husband. Yes, yes. Which I'm not saying. But that is what a human relationship is. Yeah. I thought their relationship was so real.

If you don't give someone the information, you are cutting off their ability to choose and react and to live an honest life. And to change, yeah. Like you can't, if someone's being shit and you need. never told them. Yeah. You know, you can't keep blaming that person for being a shit husband. If you never explain, this is what's hurting me.

And that is what Anne is not giving him. And what Tim hasn't felt able to do, he didn't feel able to talk about his childhood. Yeah, and why he's like that. Yeah. Yeah, I did want to shake him a bit at the end. Did you? Yeah. She said, I'd have this conversation fucking ages ago, Tim. God's sake.

Come on. Like, but some people don't like talking. That's not me. If you're going to be married to me, you're going to do some talking. We've been together a long time, so he's learned how to talk. But when we were going out initially, he did not like talking. And it was a long post. It was like, no, no, we have to do talking.

Yeah. Like, otherwise, how can you, you can't be with someone for a long time if you can't talk through that stuff. And again, that's why I love this book. So it was just so honest about marriage and long-term relationships. And not in a, like, big, you know, dramatic. It was just like, yeah, you have to have a conversation. And that's actually terribly hard for people. For a character who has children, what a wonderful example it is.

to your child to not lie to them, to not lie to their partner. You have a line in that, I think, where what someone says, the best thing you can do for your children

is love their father. And that really resonated as in, I don't know that it's necessarily true, but I think it's very true about honesty. If you live your life for an honest way,

what a wonderful example for your children. I realised writing this book, I'm only really interested in writing dialogue, actually. Like, I just wanted to write, I just wanted to write conversations

between the people and write the dialogue. There were bits where I'd written it as a, almost like written it as a script. Right, yeah. And then, which I still think is quite a good work, because a lot of people just waste, I think you ought to make friends with the cutting room floor as a writer. You write lots of scenes, some of them,

you needed to write them to learn about the characters, but you don't need them in the book. So writing those as scripts is just quite good. But then I was definitely got to the point where I could just, I really wanted actors to do it. And I really wanted, there are, it's interesting, isn't it? And I think I never watched much telly, but watching some things,

obsessively and I just got became really obsessed about like that like you know like the sometimes you get like an eyebrow twitch in an actor and I wanted that I wanted that level of subtlety with some of my lines and I didn't want to I felt at one point like I was adding in all this stuff and it's oh these people always having to gurn at each other I just want the words to do it and then I want an actor to be able to just deliver this line with just kind of like a you know one little twitch at the corner of the mouth that's kind of like what I'm after but when I found I don't know whether it's just I'm not good enough or there's another way or I'll learn how to do it.

Trying to like narrate those micro movements of the face just felt over much, you know. You have to try, you have to kind of trust your reader a bit, don't you? That they will also be imagining the face. Yeah. I think there's two moments. I think the dinner party where they're sort of mind reading, I think you do do that. And no one's gurning at each other.

It's the exact opposite where they're around the tape. I mean, especially Anne's got, you know, her brother there, her best friend and her brother. And they don't know what she's feeling. They know a man's looking at her, and she knows everything that's going through his mind in response to these questions. I think you did that, all of that so brilliantly. Oh, thank you. Without any other character going,

why is he poking his tongue out at you? Why are you winking? That's what I mean about trusting your reader is like, I think that trust that your writing is good enough, that the reader is imagining the actor like you are. And, you know, that we're imagining slightly different faces and, like, different ages or something. But we can put those micro-expressions in for ourselves.

Yes, because I always want all the actors, all the action I suppose I'm probably interested in almost like the emotional movement of things and I want the action always to be like the most subtle most understated version of what it could possibly be and I want to decide to have hurt that level of emotional control like she's learned how to emotionally control herself so much that almost nobody knows how miserable her internal landscape is. Which is to come all the way back to Austin. Yes.

Because that is Austin's women. Yeah. He's a women who are madly in love with someone, you know, across the room and you wouldn't know. Oh, persuasion. And sense and sensibility. When she's so miserable. And like everyone just thinks she's fine. She's fine.

And Elliot is fine. And that's my favourite, I think. I mean, I think as you get in due age. I think like when you're young, you probably like hiding for you. Which is fantastic. End up. But you get older and then it's just kind of like, oh, persuasion. And there's that, yeah, that like understated, restrained pain and loneliness.

But I think that's why you're a brilliant writer because I think it is very hard to do it. And I think lots of people don't spend that time chipping away to go, how much less can I give you? How much less do I give you? And still, it's very clear what the story is. And that's what you've done. It's very bittersweet and melancholy but beautiful. And that is one of the things I love reading, that kind of, that sits between those two places of pain and joy. And I think people who like books quite like that place.

Oh, really like that place. And I loved it, Kathy. It was brilliant. It made me want to be miserable by the sea. Have a Cornwall tourist office spin in touch? It may we want to get the train to Cornwall, definitely. I mean, I'm obsessed with the super train. Yeah, yeah.

The super train to Cornwall is a brilliant thing to do. But then sometimes people do it because I've told them it's brilliant. I can see they're a bit nonplussed. Because again, that's a situation where the super train to Cornwall is brilliant, but I'm bringing a lot of imaginative work to it myself. So again, I've clocked that over the years. It is brilliant, take your own imagination. Yes.

It's not going to feel like you're on the blue train. train in 1926 unless you bring that five. Also, like, the things that are romantic about trains are the speed of which you're travelling, which is quite fast, but also quite slow. Yeah, not too fast. You've got this long chunk of time, which is then all your time to fill. You have to be a kind of person who is excited about, I've got five hours. You have to be a reader.

And it is, that is part of it. Because that's like, sometimes you recommend a book to someone. They're like, oh, and you're like, what did you bring? Like, where did you bring your imagination to like what they're telling? You know what I mean? Save your recommendations. I used to have a joke about how sometimes the acting in people's heads isn't very good. Yeah, I agree.

Because that is what reading is. Yeah. Some people can't do it. Yeah. Some people literally can't imagine things. You know, there's people who don't have internal pictures. They don't have dreams. My aunt still goes to church and she helped me with my church research.

And then one of my aunt's church friends read it recently. She made the comment that I didn't describe the people very much so she didn't know what anyone looked like. And I said to my aunt, I said, well, that is true because I literally don't care what people look like. And also I think it's nice for the reader to supply the information of what they would like. The man wearing the blue soft sweater, what do you want him to look like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because your brain just automatically fills the space. Yeah.

It's why when there are adaptations of books, it feels so stupid, but also it feels like the minute you've put their actor and they reprint the books sometimes. With their actor on the top, I know, I don't like that. I hate that. I hate that. Yeah, it's not good. Because you then have this cognitive dissonance of like, okay, well, that wasn't true then. Well, it's accepting that imagination is a very personal experience. Well, we have that with pride and pride of pride.

because I came to the 995 adaptation. So which is the 95 adaptation? Colin Firth, the best one. Jennifer Lee, BBC, the original. Okay. That's not true. There's many before that. But people in my age, that's how we discover Jane Austen.

And then younger kids watch the Kiranightly film. And they, to them, Matthew McFadden, is Mr Darcy. And that to me is like, I can't get my head around it. But then we were doing an ostentatious and we were talking to this old lady afterwards about Colin Firth. And she said, oh, no, no, no. the 1970s BBC and there's some actor and when she showed us a picture of him we were like, oh my God, like he looked so 70s BBC.

Like I was just like, I can't. And then you realised, oh, everybody has their Mr. Darcy in their head. And like we were all allowed our own Mr. Darcy or you're Jamie. And that's, you're allowed to imagine it. Yeah, I tried to watch a couple of Anna Kareninas. Oh, yeah. And again, I can't even remember what they were. But I think Anna Karenina is a very hard.

Yeah. That's very hard to live up to anybody's imagination. I would think, but because I think like a reader. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the, that's it, isn't it, whether you're, and I think you're right, you know, about readers and I think readers and writers probably are all living in that joy and sorrow. Imagination, treading that narrow line, existential despair. How am I going to get over it?

I know, I'm going to read this book. That, I think, the best reason really to write, I reckon, is to have thoughtful, perceptive readers. I might start crying. But it's just been such a joy to have my book read by you both. so, yeah, with such attention. We loved it. We loved it so much. Kathy, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Oh, it's been such a pleasure. I can't tell you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Weirdo's Book Club. Tickets for our live show with our very special guest, Harriet Walter, as part of the London Literature Festival are on sale now from the South Bank Center or plosive.co.com. My novel Weirdo and Carriad book, you and us alone are both out in paperback.

And available to get now. And I have a new kid's book. the Christmas Wish Tastrophe, which is available to buy now. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading.