TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Writtenology: There Are More Things ft. Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Author Yara Rodrigues Fowler joins Riley and Alice to talk about her book, There Are More Things. There Are More Things is a love story, a history, and an exploration of the radical possibilities of fiction. What does good, radical fiction look like? Find out here! Check out There Are More Things here! And get the whole episode on Patreon here!  *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg *ROME ALERT* Milo and Phoebe have teamed up with friend of the show Patrick Wyman to finally put their classical education to good use and discuss every episode of season 1 of Rome. You can download the 12 episode series from Bandcamp here (1st episode is free): https://romepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/rome-season-1 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

I want to talk a little more about London as well, right? And we've alluded to this already, which is this Venite tube I have in the document at all caps. And one thing that you about London, and we can extend a little out as well from just like these either doing touristy things in Notting Hill or sort of living and eking out as much utopia as you can in my land. We also have sort of frequent trips to Soho

and trying to enjoy the street corner of standing outside the pub near where she works and we'll talk about where she works, where Melissa works. And you have lots of parks and people eating in public. It seems as though, that you've also sort of, in addition to being a kind of, it's a four-learn love letter in some senses

and that you see all these wonderful things about London, something that really impacts me is all the good things about it are basically public, the public spaces, street corner demonstrations, the night tube, buses, and coming to know the city by the roots of the buses and parks and green spaces. It's basically illegal things like protests or, you know, like, club nights that are sort of like running slightly beyond their license, things like that. Yeah, exactly. And I just, it's, I guess I was again, perhaps with the romance of lockdown.

But I mean, I guess Alice, you remember this, but having those under 18 oyster cards was just so incredible. Yeah, genuinely. This is one of the things. Governments in this book only really take the form of like, you know, the Brazilian sort of like, incipient coup that's, you know, in the outsting of Dilma Rousseff or the dictatorship itself in the 70s. And then there's this one instance of like, a policy that makes people's lives better. Or there's a couple because there's that and there's EMA in the section where Melissa's

growing up. And again, yeah, that's all stuff I remember was EMA and then the introduction of tuition fees and everything like slamming back down and all of those for rise and sort of closing again. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I hope this is something we're going to talk about because I know we want to talk about Mark, but there's such like a generational, almost like dramatic irony between the millennials who read this book and then like the boomers who read the book. I feel like the millennials are like, yeah, we get all of this. It makes all makes sense to us. Whereas I feel like some of the older people who read the book, they don't think it's funny. They don't get the jokes. And I think maybe a lot of the jokes that's because it's like laughing at Mark or it's like making a little bit of a joke about like how the millennial girls agree each other or whatever. Or like how much they love the night to you. Like it's all of it silly. Friend Ivy who shoplift from like, you know,

very wolf. Ivy the man is a consultant, yeah. Yes, yeah, I love Ivy. It's a killer bag. I love I've eaten so much. Yeah. And, but not I, I am absolutely, absolutely familiar with this stuff because there's, there's a long section about Melissa's upbringing in South London. And I felt that sort of like creeping closer to my location, like the least scanner in aliens, until I read the words, house passie with dullage boys on the page. And at that point,

I changed my name, moved into witness protection. As a recovering one of those, it's like, it's so well observed, genuinely. There's this one line where it's, oh god, let me find it. Is it physically that you tense when you read the phrase, dullage boys, the Henry or Mark or Charles or Ralph or Hugo or Joshua? Yes. Yeah. Just. No, I've had, yeah, please. No, it's, it's triggering. I've had people feel like, oh, no, I'm sorry. So I mean, I want to move on to some of the sort of, some of the politics and then the section I have called Mark. I mean, we're not going to get, I don't like we're going to get to talk about everything,

but they're, I get there are so many things, but there's a lot of Brazil in here that I'm not qualified to talk about and that I have very sort of like in complete thoughts about. But I want to say one more thing about London and how I reacted to your portrayal of it, which is that I've always since I moved here, I've felt a kind of a sense of loss that I've a loss of something I never had, which I felt since I was a teenager, because I grew up in a very lovely small town in Canada, a cold Niagara on the lake, where I couldn't leave anywhere, I couldn't do anything, and nobody my age lived there. And so I grew, I spent my entire adolescence, essentially completely by myself, desperate just to get older so I could move out. It wasn't unpleasant, right? I had a perfectly fine relationship with my family, you know, with

sort of a lovely house, all that, like it was perfectly pleasant. And yet it was tortured by boredom. And we were sort of stuck there and we couldn't really leave. And they realized that my parents, I think, realized they made a horrible mistake moving there. But then we couldn't really leave because the business that my parents were in was so connected to the place. And I think they were also so paralyzed with this that they, we never really took a lot of trips really. I think we all just put our heads down and tried to get through it. And I've been sort of, and then sort of when I moved to London,

I had never had, I sort of had to build myself a social life here entirely by sheer force of will and effort. And I sort of grew up wanting, knowing, not knowing what a normal, you know, sort of urban social life looked like, but knowing that I wished I had one. Should have grown up in South London. Yeah. You're just a skill-ish.

I mean, I feel like, and I think this is sort of just kind of what Melissa experiences, but I feel ready to socialize with like one person a week now. I feel like I was so overexposed to like being black out drunk and pills as a teenager. I sort of see in London, I see in your portrayal of London, this young person's view of the place and it feels odd to me to see that view so clearly and to know that, you know, it's like what, it's what 16-year-old me was kind of desperate to escape into. Right, you and I are of one mind on this one because despite growing up in South London, despite being on the periphery of some of this stuff, like not really being cool enough necessarily,

but like as a trans woman, like a lot of the depiction of specifically a girlhood in South London is something I had no idea I wanted at that age. And so yeah, absolutely the big year and there, you know? Yeah, but both Alison, I were like, DW holding the fence. Looking at. So yeah, absolutely the big yarn there, you know? But both Alison, I were like, DW holding the fence. Looking in.

Oh God, well, yeah, Melissa doesn't even enjoy it at the time of day, I think. She's. No, that's that's that's a thing about London too, like more broadly in the book is it's a lot of people are very, very excited by something that is in a lot of ways kind of shit. And all right, let's talk about Mark.

I love Mark. I love Mark too. I love Mark too. I love Mark too. Mark is Mark is Melissa's boss. She's a software developer. What he actually does beyond sort of like company director is not entirely clear. He makes... Can I say, I've had a job interview with Mark before. When I was finished at LSE, I applied

to a bunch of places. among them was a PR firm, I made like 40 job applications. Among them was a PR firm based in sort of Golden Square area in Soho. So not Soho Square, Golden Square, Little South, but nevertheless, and he was a committed blare right who wanted to go for drinks immediately after the interview. And shared, I think, Mark's enthusiasm about London and confidence that it's still 1997.

But look, I think you've written Mark as a comic character and he's what I want to talk about for a bit because obviously on the podcast we meet Mark all the time but he's sort of portrayed more as baffled and bemused and kind of an unintentional clown than someone who's particularly vicious. He sort of recognizes that he was in the right place at the right time like in and around the fringes of the labor party, that he came up close enough to it that he can largely trade on his connections. And it sort of implied quite heavily that most of his business is just doing kind of busy work for his much more successful

and ruthlessly capitalist brother. Yeah. Yeah.