The New Yorker Radio Hour - Tessa Hadley on What Decades of Failure Taught Her About Writing

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

The New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley in 2002. Titled “Lost and Found,” it described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood.  Hadley’s fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale: tight dramas close to home. She captures, within these relationships, an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its thirtieth story from Hadley—a higher count than any other fiction writer in recent times. That figure is particularly remarkable because Hadley had such a late start to her career, publishing her first work of fiction in her forties. She talks with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman about her long struggle to stop imitating the writing of others, instead telling stories authentic to her own experience and voice. “I was just a late developer, and I was trying to write other people’s novels for all that time,” she says. Treisman also asks Hadley about why her work has been labelled “domestic fiction” by many critics. The term is disproportionately applied to female writers, and “tends to have a bit of condescension to it,” Hadley says. But she is willing to at least consider whether her work is too focussed on certain kinds of bourgeois-family relationships. “I almost completely accept the challenge,” she tells Treisman. “I think one should feel perpetually slightly on edge as to whether your subject matter justifies the art.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2002, the New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley, titled Lost and Found, The Story Described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood. Hadley's fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale, tight dramas close to home. But within these relationships, she can't. captures an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its 30th story from Tessa Hadley.

That's more than any other fiction writer in recent times. She spoke recently with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. So I want to talk to you about your new story collection after the funeral, which I think is your 12th book of fiction. But before we launch on that, let's... go back to your first accidents in the home, which was published in 2002. And a lot has been made of the fact that you published your first book in your 40s. So what happened in the years before that, before accidents in the home?

Lots of writing and failing. Lots of trying to do it and getting it really wrong. It wasn't like a slow, gradual buildup. And then I started writing something that seemed truthful and okay. It was like, it's not like falling off a cliff. It's the opposite. It was like I was under the cliff and just treading water and not getting anywhere. And then I don't know quite what happened in my 40s that made that.

The connection flowing down from my brain, down my arm, into the keyboard. Or I might have even still been the typewriter at that point. but I don't know what quite happened to get that right. In those years, when you're writing and you feel you're failing, how are you, at what point are you assessing something as a failure? There's a lot of self-deception in writing always. So I would be writing a novel that I hoped would work, and I would have a horrible feeling it was wrong,

but then I still have a horrible feeling it's wrong quite a lot when I'm doing it. So then I would tell myself that's probably just that silly horrible feeling and it might be all right, really, and I would get to the end of it and I would have this sort of hope against hope. I sort of think maybe I was just a late developer and I was trying to write other people's novels for all that time. And getting it right eventually in as far as one ever is sure of getting it right felt like, wandering around in other people's wildernesses and then coming home, putting a key in the door, opening the door, walking into your own house, recognizing the rooms of your house thinking, this is where I live, and this is where my writing lives. And that's what it did feel like.

It felt like, I know what I think about this. I'm not faking it anymore. But so what kept you going through the years when you did feel you were faking it? Why not give up at that point? I kind of just the strangest insanity really. Nothing good, nothing virtuous like perseverance or strength or will. So that desire is so awful. It wasn't nice. It was so awful that I sort of almost felt I wasn't properly alive unless I could write,

which is absurd, lunatic, but that was what it was. And so each time I would fail and I'd think, that's it, do something else, be a nurse, you know, love being a housewife, whatever. And then I'd think, oh, but what if I wrote that book? That book would be good. Surely that book would work and I would start again. Well, you know what impresses me over and over in your writing is the understanding that you have of your character's emotional and psychological lives. and I often have that sort of Alexander Popian feeling, you know, what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed, where I've had this feeling, never put it into words, and there it is on your page.

So I wonder, you know, I wonder often how you get so deeply inside your characters and are able to both know what feelings they're having and to express them with such clarity? I mean, I would think it relates a little bit to fantasy and to being very impressionable. And I can remember as a very little girl, we were quite odd, there were three friends. And we just played out fantasy games every day in the playground

and if we came to each other's houses. and they would be like acting. We would be, you know, the governess with the naughty children or the kidnapped by pirates or we were three women who lived. This was one of, some of them were long running. There were kind of soaps rather than short stories. You know, we were three women who inexplicably with no men involved, had children, all named, all ages and everything.

And we lived on an island and we had to row to get shopping and things. And all of us had purpose. personalities that were not our actual personalities. So, yeah, writing draws on empathetic, imaginative faculties, which feed into fantasy and then they feed in in a more ordered and disciplined way into fictions and paintings and films and so on. The writer Tessa Hadley speaking with Deborah Treesman, fiction editor of The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to Come.

Well, I'm thinking now about a specific story. that is in the collection. It's the last one in the collection called Coda, which very much takes three characters, I suppose, two main characters at a specific enclosed time in their lives and sees what happens in these few weeks. Yes. And I think you were going to read a short passage from this story,

so maybe we'll do that now. I'd love to. It was three o'clock on a November's afternoon, and I hadn't turned on the light. Already the air outside seemed blue with the evening. The wilted shrubs in the front gardens and the double row of parked cars were desolate, shrouded in cold. I thought at first that there was no one out there. I treasured these passages of a stringent solitude stolen from my day. Then I saw that I wasn't alone after.

all. A woman was standing beside the wheelie bins in the paved front area next door, smoking a cigarette. I hadn't noticed her at first because she stood almost directly below me. I was looking down now at the top of her head into the thick mass of her black hair. Her back was more or less turned to me. She couldn't possibly have seen me, and I'm sure I'd have been invisible to her anyway, even if she'd chosen to look up behind her. The window panes would only have reflected darkness. Nonetheless, I took a step away from the window, which was steaming up from my breath on the cold glass. This woman's character seemed strongly expressed in her physical presence. With her shoulders tensed and her head held back defiantly as if she expected to be challenged.

She flaunted her cigarette, wrist-angled coquettishly, turning her face away to blow out smoke. Her black coat with its fake fur collar was shrugged on against the cold. beneath it she had on a white housecoat like a nurse's uniform, which made me think she must be some sort of carer for the old man next door. We didn't know him very well. We'd spoken to his grown-up sons going in and out. I'd offered to do shopping for him, but they said they could manage. I guess that this carer was pent up like me,

bracing herself for a return to the daily perpetual work of kindness. She sucked on that cigarette thirstily, holding her right elbow in her left hand, left arm clasped tightly against her body. When she'd finished, she ground out the cigarette end under her heel. Before she went inside, she cast one quick look up at our window, which made me start back again. I was sure she couldn't have seen me, but she might have had an animal intuition that she was being watched. And as she punched the buttons on the key safe before unlocking the door and disappearing into the house, I had time to see that she was much younger than me, but not young, 40 perhaps, with something faded or hardened in her smudged, brash, sultry looks,

snub nose, full mouth, luxuriant, thick lashes, scarred, bad skin. With her stocky build and dark colouring, she might have been Spanish or Portuguese, Margot wouldn't have considered this woman in the least pretty or sexy. She'd have said that she was coarse. I can see how some people might find her attractive. Her judgment on such matters was always inflexible with that little twist of distaste in her face behind the show of concession and self-doubt.

What were you doing in the spare room? She asked when I went downstairs. I went to the loo, I said. I went to look out of the window. Anything happening out on Desolation Row? Nothing. No. No one. So there's so much in that scene. How did this scene come about?

You had in place this 92-year-old mother and the middle-aged or late middle-aged daughter coming to live with her in the pandemic. You had them both in a house. You had their complicated. relationship, but then you needed another element, something to throw it off. Yes, I needed another element, yeah. Yes.

And I think a physique fell into place. And often it's that. And it was, it's based on somebody who has no actual relationship to that character in that story. It was just a woman who used to wait at the school gate years ago and had kids who played with my kids. And it was when I got her physique. And actually she was Maltese.

She was Maltese, which is what this Teresa turns out to be later on in the story. That was my key. The physique somehow precipitate something in the story between these rather English mother and daughter, the elegant sort of charming, lush mother and the uptight daughter. I sort of needed something brash her to make the triangle flood. and break up the stasis between the two who know each other so well after a long life in close relation. And it becomes a very strange sort of love triangle in the end. It does.

So a lot of your fiction like this story involves families, relationships, marriages, and I've seen it described in various places as domestic fiction. And I personally take a little exception to that term because it's really aimed almost always at female writers and very rarely men who also write about marriage and families. I've never heard Knazgard called domestic fiction. No, exactly. You know, he writes all about that stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is domestic fiction if you want to see it that way.

and William Trevor drawn up like so many people. So I'm wondering how you feel about being classified in that way. A bit resigned because, yes, it's familiar. And everything you've just said, it tends to have a little bit of condescension in it. But it's a sort of domestic, Domus, the House, most fiction, not all fiction, but so much fiction, And right back to Greek tragedy, it's all in the house, Ordeceus from his odyssey coming back to find his wife still weaving and the suit is all there. That's domestic. That's the home, the half.

Of course, there are the Robbins and Crusoe's and the adventure stories, and they're really important. But most stories are kind of based around those fundamental human configurations. But of course, of course, of course, sometimes. you know, if you've read the newspaper that morning and you are aware of some of the extremities happening in the world, I almost completely accept the challenge. Why are you writing here about, you know, a woman looking after her elderly mother in a relatively privileged situation where they have plenty to eat and nobody's trying to, you know, kick them out from the home? and so on. Yeah, yeah, I think one should feel perpetually, slightly on edge

as to whether your subject matter justifies the art. But in the end, there we are. Also, you don't get a choice about what you write. Again, that's very much to continue from what we were talking about at the beginning, finding your own home in writing. You don't get, oh, which house shall I live in? shall I write the sort of, you know, post-colonial novel? Well, in fact, I think that rather is what I was trying to do in those years of failing.

I was reading Gordimer and Courtsy and, of course, thinking they were stunning and wanting to write books like that. Well, that wasn't what I knew about, so I couldn't. Yeah. It seems, it does. In other people's work, the holding of the tiny and the parochial is, I don't. don't have doubts about that value, but I think one should hold the doubt about the value of what you're doing yourself. That's fine. It keeps you on edge and it would stop you being complacent. I actually, I was going to say, I think most of your work does in a sense take place against a larger backdrop. I mean, especially when you know you're writing about the 60s or the 70s. And there's always the kind of cultural political context there. It's unavoidable because it is part of daily life. Yeah.

Well, I love you saying that, and that's what I try. I kind of, I mean, I get, I think certainly in the UK, I get described as writing about bourgeois life as much as about domestic life. And that's probably a slightly more stinging critique. And I'm, yeah, of course, I'm aware of it. Sometimes I push when I feel I could, I push my terrain out a little bit. But in the end, that is what I know. And what interests me, there is a great. tradition, especially a 20th century tradition of British writing about the bourgeois domesticity.

But for most of its duration, it was quite politically, you know, kind of elitist and privileged. You know, the writers I love best of all, like Elizabeth Bowen, you really don't want to know what she thought about grammar schools, you know, let alone comprehensive education. Now, it's changed. And in my lifetime, that same bourgeoisie, obviously it comes in every. political shade, but somewhere, the one I know, and its majority, I think, is kind of conscientious, anguish, definitely to the left, you know, and I don't mean I'm saying that that's, I'm not talking about the virtue of that, but I felt no one had described that. And I thought it was a great

subject, you know, the people with the political posters on their wall and the little joke I have in the news story where, you know, the sort of rather well-on. husband and his ghastly mother think they love the working classes. They just don't love his wife's dad, who's a right-wing old military man, who's definitely working class, but they don't like him. So those sort of ironies and jokes of class and politics as to how we are now, that seemed like in some ways a new subject that has, of course it has been written, but it hasn't been written as much. Well, thank you so much, Tessa. This was really great.

Lovely to talk to, Deborah. Thank you. Tessa Hadley's latest collection is called After the Funeral. You can hear Hadley read one of her short stories published in The New Yorker on our podcast, The Writer's Voice. Deborah Treasman is our fiction editor. And I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gophen and Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.