Episode Three: Heidi James

This episode we hear the five books on the hypothetical shelf of the prize-winning author, essayist, poet and podcaster, Heidi James. Her critically acclaimed novels include: The Mesmerist’s Daughter, Carbon, Wounding, So The Doves, and most recently, The Sound Mirror which has been described as ‘An exhilarating, heart-rending work’ by The Irish Times and as ‘An exceptional novel’ by The Guardian. She hosts the wonderful podcast, First Graft, inspiring and supporting all creatives with their first draft anxieties. She lectures in Creative Writing and English Literature and hosts writing and artists retreats in Sussex.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello and welcome to the hypothetical bookshelf. A kind of desk island desk books. Inspired by Talo Calvino's essay, Who Do We Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf. This is a podcast that asks writers what other works their writing is in conversation with, looking for ways new work can make connections between different books on a writer's and reader's hypothetical shelf. I'll be interviewing a different author each time and asking them to name five books of fiction or non-fiction that can be put beside their own on that imaginary bookshelf. Calvino also writes about how this juxtaposition and conversation between different works can question the established scale of values and code of meanings generally accepted by the wider culture. And I'm keen to test that theory, asking authors about different approaches to storytelling techniques and traditions to inspire listeners with new reading lists and new creative practices. Today I'm going to be talking with Heidi James, the prize-winning author, essayist, poet, and podcaster. Her critically acclaimed novels include The Mesmerist Daughter, Carbon, Wounding, So the Doves, and most recently The Sound Mirror, which has been described as an exhilarating, heart-rending work by the Irish Times and as an exceptional novel by The Guardian. She hosts the wonderful podcast First Graft, inspiring and supporting all creatives with their first draft anxieties. And she lectures in creative writing and English literature. And she may and has in the past host writing and artist retreats in Sussex. So maybe she'll do that again, fingers crossed. Welcome, Heidi. Thanks so much for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Oh, it's lovely to be here. Thank you for asking me on, Rebecca.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

I'm very excited about this conversation. Heidi's given me some very interesting books, and I think we should get straight into it. So your first choice is Knoll Street Field's Ballet Shoes. And it's a classic, isn't it? First published in 1936. Tell us about why you chose this.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

So and every book sort of I feel nourishes me in some way. So choosing these was tough, but no Street Feld. I think it's the first book that I remember reading as a child for myself that I reread and reread that was about the act of reading as something uh sustaining and not learning to read as a skill set. So uh this is the book, I'm sure there were others, but this is the one I really remember touching me deeply. Um and and I came from I grew up in a you know working class family. They were not at all anti-intellectual, they were very much about learning and reading. But we, you know, they they weren't formally educated. And what the Street Field does is ballet shoes. I mean, I was a dancer too, so it was it was working with that for me. But it was there's a moment in there where they're performing in Midsummer Night's Dream, and that was where I first encountered Shakespeare. And there's something about that text. I mean I still remember there's a little moment when they're about to go on stage and it's um the the fairy flat the um fairy the flower fairies and she says, And I, and I, but I still remember that moment from Midsummer Night's Dream from Noel Streetfield, and there was this it was that kind of intertextual moment, which I wouldn't have known it was that at the time, where that book opened the door on every other book in some way. It performed that uh transcendent magic that books have, certainly for me, where they connect and interconnect in the most profound proximity that yeah, sets me alive, sets me afire. So, yeah, that's it. That's why.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Well, that is an incredibly amazing answer, and it's one of those books that so many people I know have read and have been a part of their their journey into reading or writing or just you know, whichever. But I have actually never read the whole thing. Um, it's just terrible, isn't it? And I I've I picked it up from my shelf uh because I bought a copy because everyone kept saying to me, Oh my god, you must read this book. Um, and actually I found it quite difficult to stop, but I had to stop because you know I had to get on with other things. But should we hear a tiny bit of the beginning? Yes, please. Uh so uh this is from chapter one, and I'm just gonna read a very small bit. Um, and the chapter is called Great Uncle Matthew and His Fossils. The Fossil Sisters lived in the Cromwell Road, at that end of it, which is furthest away from the Brompton Road, and yet sufficiently near it to be taken to look at the dolls' houses in the Victoria and Albert every wet day, and if not too wet, expected to save the penny and walk. Saving the penny and walking was a great feature of their lives. Gum, Pauline the eldest would say, must have been a very taxi person. He couldn't have ever thought about walking, or he'd never have bought a house at the far end of the longest road in London. I expect, Petrova II would argue, he had a motor car all his own, and he never hired anything. G U M Gum was the quick way of saying Great Uncle Matthew. He was a legendary figure to the children, as he had gone on a voyage and not come back before any of them were old enough to remember him clearly. He had, however, been of the utmost importance in their lives. Um we've only just met two of the of the three, haven't we? Um but yes, uh it's kind of got a even just in that, and the idea of this kind of magical figure who first collects fossils and then collects babies somehow madly. It's just a wonderful story, even just having just read that first bit. I've no idea what goes and happens in it, but I love the fact that that intertextuality also was there for you, and that you read it so many times. You were an avid reader as an early as a child, weren't you?

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Yeah, I was, I really was. It was my what's really striking, I haven't I don't own the book anymore, and I haven't read it since I was a little girl. But I I um teach, I work on the Cromwell Road. And one of my formative experiences besides reading was going to the Natural History Museum and the Great and the Victorian Albert Museum when I was about five, that I still remember. So just hearing that is like you know, it's that how we are made and unmade. Now, obviously, I did not build where I work, so that's coincidental, but it sort of feels like a a charming coincidence. But I'm wondering about how much of things in memory remain significant because they're prompted by other cultural scripts. And do you know what I mean? Like how much of us is us and my response to the museum, or was it I was already primed? I don't know. Anyway, I'm getting I'm getting lost in a thought there.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

Very, very hard to know about that, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Right, it is, but with all these multiple layers, it's so fascinating. Um, what actually happens in that book is they are encouraged, I mean, the irony, because it wouldn't be like this now, but they're encouraged to take up the arts, dancing, acting, and one of the sisters isn't isn't particularly talented uh in the performing performing arts, to make money for themselves, to be able to sustain themselves. Isn't that funny? Because now you of course you'd say, please don't do that, you won't earn any money. But they and they do, and um it's a very lovely, it's a very charming, lovely book, but it doesn't shy away from some of their struggles, and they're all orphans, these these girls. They're orphans, and he's collected the them, gum has collected them on his travels and brought them back to look after them. And that resonated with me as a little girl because I didn't know who my father was, and I felt very I was I was loved by my family very much, well most of them. But it was a s it was a difficult um they were difficult relationships and uh this is the 1970s, and it was unusual to to for parents to be divorced, much less have a single mum. And um I was I was very much aware of that as um that I didn't have a daddy that I wasn't loved by a daddy, you know, so that it kind of resonated for me like in that sense too.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah, um, and it's it's something that resonates uh with me because yeah, I also had a had a single mum in the in the 70s and and a bit of the 80s. So yes, it's uh and uh you know yes, but it's strange, isn't it? Because this is a father figure gum. I don't know how much he appears later, who's there at the beginning, but then he disappears. But anyway, we're gonna come back to the daddy later because uh uh I'm excited to to come to come back to to more of your stories. Um so you had that as a kind of foundation, um, and a book that in a way brought you Shakespeare, uh, and a love of other books, which is so wonderful. Um, and then your second choice um is Pigtails by Mary Dariac, um, which is originally uh uh written in French. Um I'm gonna say it drastically terribly as Truisme, I'm guessing. Uh, in night and that was published in 1996 in the French, um, and then got translated um by uh Linda Coverdale. Uh and it's this, I mean, it really is a fantastic novel, this, isn't it? Um I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start by reading the opening, and then I'm gonna ask you to talk about it a bit more because I feel like the opening is almost like sells itself, I think. Um so this is, yeah, this is the Linda Coverdale translation um published by Faber and Faber. Um I know how much the story might upset people, how much distress and confusion it could cause. I suspect that any publisher who agrees to take on this manuscript will be heading for trouble. Heading for prison, probably, and I'd like to apologize right now for the inconvenience. But I must write this book without further delay, because if they find me in my present state, no one will listen to me or believe what I say. Simply holding a pen gives me terrible cramps. I haven't enough light either, so I have to stop at nightfall, and I write very, very slowly. I won't tell you about the problems I had getting this notebook or about the mud which dirties everything and dilutes ink that's barely dry. I hope that any publisher patient enough to decipher these piggy squiggles will graciously take into consideration the enormous effort I'm making to write as legibly as possible. Even the act of remembering is quite difficult for me. But if I concentrate hard and try to think back as far as I can, back to right before the events recounted here, I manage to recover some images. So that's uh that's how it starts. Um tell me a bit more about pigtails.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Right, okay, I mean obviously you read so many things that are wonderful, but this was something that shook sort of grabbed me by my hair and shook me. This was something else. And even like hearing you read that, you think this book is it's already in that opening paragraph. Talking back to Virginia Wolfe's A Room of One's Own, of the struggle of women to write anyway. I mean, we know that she's struggling to write for some other reason, but but she's not, she's struggling to write because she's female, because she doesn't have time and space, and she's reclaiming language, and and this kind of gesture towards fiction, I just think it's genius. But what I absolutely loved is this book is is about the monstrous female. She becomes a pig. I mean, that's obvious from the title, right? But yeah, and and and but the monstrous female has been a figure of fear and horror for for forever, right? This is not new. But um and it it it is about that fascistic impulse that if it doesn't adhere to so-called norms, therefore it is a monster, etc. Um, but this book reclaims that monstrosity. She sort of by becoming a sow, she escapes sexual slavery and oppression, she reclaims language, she reclaims autonomy, she loves sex again, she loves eating, she becomes entirely in her body, and that's what I loved. That being physically present and autonomous is monstrous. It's just brilliant. And it kind of there's that thing in Foucault about you know, um authority making bodies docile, you know, and we're seeing that, right? We even see that over and over, but we're seeing it right now. We seem to be living in this you know uh discipline and punish. Um it's the Foucault where bodies are made docile, and she talks. There's a passage in it where she talks about um her pimp or her boyfriend wanting her to perform for clients again, and her being a docile good girl, and there's something about becoming other, exploding that docility, taking hold of language, telling her own story, which is something we're I'm guessing we're gonna come back to actually, because one of my other texts sort of talks about this, telling her own story her own way, um, and being utterly present in the sort of phenomenon of her body. I love that. That's just it's brilliant, it's brilliant, brilliantly written. It's brilliantly written.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with you. It's a it's a book I absolutely love and just and also it's fascinating too how the transformation she undergoes is attractive, you know? So it's that thing, isn't it? That when you claim and you own yourself, you you you know, you people are drawn to that. They're drawn to her kind of like rosy health, I guess. But uh, which is, I think, I don't know, there's also something very pleasing about that, that kind of sense of shirking off all of these expectations, um, and and that in itself is appealing and attractive. And yeah, she's like, yeah, I am a beast, and so what? Um, but so tell me a bit about how, because we've uh from the Neil Street field, that's obviously some early, and I'm guessing before you did a lot of writing, although I presume you probably were writing early, and then this novel comes a bit later. So, how did how are these books sort of working in the background of your writing, do you think, at the at this sort of point?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

In some ways, I feel like I I'm still working against the street field towards the um dio sec and other text that we're going to discuss, in that there's a part of me that still works to give myself space to have a voice, still has to find navigate a place of wanting to make pretty which in some ways I feel the Street Field gave me, which was a gift. I I wasn't I mean I don't want to belabor it, but there were moments in my childhood that required dissociation and fundamental escape. And I still work in attention in my own work to not make the ugly pretty and to not want to ple you know to try to please the people pleasing and and I having a right to speak. All of those things I still really struggle with. Sometimes I'll read someone's just an Instagram post or you know those awful, awful articles that writers are asked to do that basically, hi talk as if you're an expert on this, but really you're selling me your book, you know, those awful things. I read those and I I really admire how people do it because I I struggle to think, well, who's gonna want to listen to what I've got to say about this? Um and so I kind of there's a tension I I think between what I learned with the Streetford, which was wonderful and beautiful, that I'm undoing to an undoing in my life too, to it's not just kind of a polyannoorish looking on the bright side, but lacquering over ugly hard things. So that's where I think there's a tension for me. That is interesting, it's a knot that I enjoy picking at, but it's but it's present for me.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Yeah, it no, I mean I I think it's interesting that you've you've in a way by looking at those two books, and so I'm just thinking of uh The Mesmerist Daughter, which is I mean, technically I guess it's a novella, but it feels like a novel in its scope. So that kind of sense of kind of you know, it it tackles the fairy tale, tackles those kind of like children's style, you know, looking at the world as a child at its heart. Um, and yet it is definitely and and it's also looking at at you kind of metamorphosis, which the pigtails is exploring. Uh, and it's looking at mothers, it's looking at absent, you know, fathers, um and and how a person as a child and as an adult then has to negotiate that. And all of that is packed into that very small space with the idea of that the that the character has that her mother becomes it turns into a wolf. Um and for me that that that is still a really uh it still really resonates with me today, that that story, and I often recommend it to my students, you'll be glad to know. Um because I I think yeah, you are doing almost everything you're saying, you're trying to do now. I think that's there in that very early work. Um, you know, reclaiming different spaces, um, and talking about the things it's very hard to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's lovely. Um, yeah, I mean she doesn't she is a wolf the mother. She actually wears a mask, a lady suit. But uh yeah, that I that I I think you could say I was writing that from the age of about four. Like I those opening lines were with me for a very, very, very long time before I finally wrote them down. I honestly did believe my mum was a wolf. I remember the moment of watching a cartoon of the three little pigs, I think it was the Disney version, and seeing the wolf, I'm thinking, ah, that makes sense. She's a wolf. Because I couldn't understand how she would flip between being really kind and gorgeous, this wonderful woman, to you know, violent and cruel and difficult in the extreme. So I I it made sense to my very little self, like preschool, that she was a wolf and she put a mask on, a ladysuit on. And I would she used to let me brush her hair, and I'd brush her hair, and I would lift her hair up and I would look to see if I could see where she zipped her ladysuit up. And I would have dreams of her at night. I would have nightmares. I can picture it vividly, and I would hear her claws clicking on the floor when she'd come in and eat me every night. And so that just I mean, it wrote itself that book. That little book wrote itself.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Well, it's I think the fact that you you had those words that the the weight is there in them, you know, that they've they they feel like they've been held, and when they're finally spoken, they have a real punch. And yeah, I'm not gonna spoil it for anyone, but I like the end. So uh but uh yes, uh uh moving on from From wolves. But yes, just thinking about, you know, that story where the wolf eats the chalk, you know, um, to disguise their voice and puts flat, you know, all that stuff about how they they they put their paw through and it looks all white because it's covered in flat. There's a lot going on in those stories, aren't there, that that kind of sit in our in our kind of um less kind of articulate brain. They hit something underneath that, don't they? I think those early stories. Anyway, um, let's have a look at your next choice, um, which is The Piano Teacher by Elfreda Jelleneck. And this is a German novel that was um published originally in 1983, uh Die Klavespie. There we go. Germans out there can tell me I've done it wrong, but that's my effort. Uh, and it was translated into English by Joachim, again, probably I'm not going to say this brilliantly, New Graschall. And that was published in 1988 in New York and 1989 here by Serpent's Tail. Um and I mean, you know, talking about themes, this kind of ticks into all of those themes, doesn't it? It's an extraordinary novel. Um tell us a bit about why you've picked this and we can maybe do an extract in a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

I read this and it blew my socks off and spoke to me in I mean, uh I feel that her the rhythms of this, and I I so I I actually this became the focus of my PhD, so I actually did read it painstakingly slowly in German with a translation with a dictionary. My German isn't brilliant by any stretch. And this is a phenomenal English translation, I think. Obviously, you know, it is just extraordinary how it talks to female desire to identity to that relationship. The mother, again, it's the absent father, and I haven't it's only now I'm thinking about this. God, I'm so boring, I'm such a one-tracked mind. But it's there's an absent dead father, and the daughter is replacing the father, and oh my god, what she does to her body, and how she expresses herself, her sexuality, and this and she's brilliant, she's brilliant, like she is incandescently brilliant, the protagonist of this novel, and is brought low by these fools around her, including Walter Klemer, who is the he's not a love interest, let me say that. Like, but this sexual object that she that becomes a part of a sadomasochistic scene that oh my god, it's the way it explodes the body and trauma and and and how we communicate trauma. It's just extraordinary. It it honestly, if you haven't read this book, read this book. It's this she really deserved the Nobel Prize. She deserves way more laurels, I think. Elfreda Yellowneck. She takes no prisoners.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

No, it's an it's an absolutely unbelievable book, and I think some people may have seen the film, um, which I think does a pretty good job of you know um of translating, I guess, I guess, the novel into a different media and format. Um and some of the intensity and some of the struggle is there in that film, I think. Um but in a weird way, I mean it doesn't quite softer. Yeah, it is softer.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Which any if you've only seen the film when you haven't read the book, is probably sounds quite an extraordinary thing to say because it's not a it's not a gentle film. You don't you don't watch it, you go, oh god, I feel so uplifted at all. But there's some and this is I think true about all um books that become movies that they are very different things, and you know, you can love both, but there is something there's something that movies do, so I'm not this is in no way denibration that that so beautifully in a shorthand the camera pans we pick up on all those details that show us something about a character. A book needs to tell us more carefully, but no matter how much you hear the narrator in a film, it's not the same as being subsumed in the mind of of your protagonist. Whether and I personally love uh free and direct third person, I love that more than first person. Um you are so in this psyche, it becomes you, you're not looking, you're thinking with, and that's where this book is just brilliant because you are thinking with her, not watching.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

That's where it differs, I feel, from the yeah, you're inhabiting that mind. And yes, you're right. Well, with a film, all you can do is watch, isn't it? That's what it's set up for.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

I mean, I guess you can listen, but yeah, no, but it but it's you are you are a voyeur, you are spectating. Whereas when you're reading, it is though those words, those thoughts are literally becoming yours. They are incorporated. It's an incorporation, which is absolutely can I swear? Yes. Fucking mind blowing. Like I don't think we pay enough attention to the act of reading itself that it is an incorporation, that your synapses are check they you are with someone else's thoughts. Nothing else does that. It's mind-blowing. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

Yeah, I I also I know what you I mean it's magical, isn't it? You're you're having a very intimate connection in a book, um, you know, across a time, you know, across time, uh, across space. You and that's that's what's I think magical about it. It's you, you know, you're communicating directly with someone who could have written this book, you know, hundreds of years ago. And yet you feel that they're right there with you, you're right there with them. Yeah, it's totally amazing. And actually, what you said is very pertinent to this book because that whole concept of kind of inhabitation of being in the body and of speaking and of feeling. I mean, uh the idea of being an observer creates a completely different kind of concept with this film, doesn't it? The voyeur is something it's actually exploring. So, in a way, exactly, it has to become a different kind of thing, and I think it does that quite well. But yeah, uh, which let I'll give you the I'll just give you the very, very beginning so so listeners can get a sense of of what it of what it sounds like. Um so yeah, this is the opening chapter. And excuse my my German uh names. The piano teacher, Erica Cohert, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erica her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She's trying to escape her mother. Erica is in her late thirties. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother. The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erica entered, her father exited. Eventually, Erica learned how to move swiftly. She had to. Now she bursts into the apartment like a swarm of autumn leaves, hoping to get to her room without being seen. But her mother looms before her, confronts her. She puts Erica against the wall under interrogation, inquisitor and executioner in one unanimously recognized as mother by the state and by the family. She investigates. Why has Erica come home so late? Erica dismissed her last student three hours ago after heaping him with scorn. You must think I won't find out where you've been, Erica. A child should own up to her mother without being asked. But mother never believes her because Erica tends to lie. Mother is waiting. She starts counting to three.

SPEAKER_01 30:38

I mean, honestly, she in that she sets us up. So this is about the primal relation between the mother, then the child, the daughter, that that stagger, that gap with the the child is a where uh is a whirlwind, the child, and it's a late 30s woman who's austere and incredibly well educated. You know, she's so accomplished. And then, of course, and we cannot lose the fact that this is an Austrian writer, and this is set in Austria, this fascistic authoritarian moment of the mother is the state in control of the body, is privy to everything that you know, there's this kind of uh the starzy, she's the starzy. I mean, it's just and she does this movement. I mean, it's staggering. She does that extraordinary movement in such a simple, deeply unsettling a few sentences. I mean, it's I read that and wanted to just you know I you know if I'm if my work's in conversation with two books only, it's the street field and this. And you can never, ever this for me is the absolute apogee. I could never write like her. I will never, I don't know anyone who can. But what a what a torch to hold up and light your way and try. I mean, and you know, you know, it's like you do a PhD. You have to read something over and over and over, and this rewarded every rereading. It was smart of me to choose this book because it was a gift to reread and reread, and there was so you know, I could have written four PhDs. I could have never stopped writing about this book because there's so much in there. It's just, I think.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

I mean, I agree, it's a a really wonderful book. Tell me about how because obviously you say you study this for your PhD uh in creative writing, and part of that was writing wounding.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

So yeah, it was a kind of joint, it was sort of my PhD was actually sort of between lit philosophy and uh creative writing. It wasn't really just but yeah, so I was really looking at um trauma, trauma theory. So how this works is that you know, trauma theory, and we're going to talk a bit about that in a second, or some like there's different theories within it, but ultimately, how is it spoken? How is it represented? Is it possible to to to um truly represent it? And what really I loved in this book is how she uses self-harm as a form of self-expression, as a new language, as a grammar, it's a syntax. Opening up these new tiny little mouths in her flesh that speak to her pain. It it and also her sexual like there's sexuality that's subver considered subversive, but she claims it. This is I mean, there's an incredible scene where she goes into a peep show. So this is before the internet um and she's watching pornography in this little kiosk, and it's just how she is much larger and shatters these narrow expectations of women generally in society, but her mother's expectations the student, she's a piano teacher, obviously. But I mean, not just a piano teacher, she's in a conservatoire, she's she's a maestro, so it's just I think it's a staggering book. I can't find the words to justify it really.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

And I'm just thinking about what when you were writing the novel part of the of the the PhD, how how it influenced some of your thinking around how to write it.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Um for me, okay, so the novel part is wound became wounding. I mean so obviously it's slightly different from what it was in the PhD, but um it's very much interacting with this idea of how violence for women in uh in the way we're cultured, acculturated how society influences us, it bec often becomes internalized and expressed. Anger becomes something that we express on ourselves. So anorexia, for example, self-harm. It's almost like whilst that's absolutely not looked at, you know, I mean, I think the taboos are certainly less than they were, but it's almost the only acceptable way to express anger is against yourself. And so in wounding, the character is a mother, and actually she thinks she's a dreadful mother, but I personally feel readers all might have a different feeling about this, she's a very good mother. She's working very hard to subsume any feelings that I think are natural things, of like of ambivalence, and I I just am shattered, I don't want to do this, and she's struggling. If she was allowed to just mother in the way that feels natural, she'd be fine. But she's mothering against society's expectations and her own expectations, her mother's expectations. Um and instead of hurting anyone else, there's a moment she loses a temper, but she's not. I mean, I I don't think she's that bad, but that comes from maybe my own way I was parented, but she hurts herself, and that's what uh wounding is in conversation with the piano teacher, and that it's that um the self-harm becomes its own language, its own syntax. It's a way of expressing the inexpressible. It becomes trauma becomes a way of expressing something that she cannot speak.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Yeah. Let's let's bring in um one of the other books uh we'll jump ahead to, I think, because that could be interesting. Um, is Unclaimed Experience by Kathy Careuth, and uh that was originally published in 1996 uh by the John Hopkins University Press, and I know that's one of the books that you've chosen. Um give us a bit of an insight into how that kind of interacts with um your understanding in a way, I guess, of the Yellanek and also um how that made its way into your writing. You've got an extract, haven't you? Maybe maybe we should go there first and then because I just I'm just thinking about those. No, no, feel I would be great if you could. Um just thinking about those voices that speak from wounds.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Yeah, so there's the scholar in me wants us to say that this is there is many things I picked apart about this book, uh, and I read it alongside Lacan, Deleuze, Freud himself, Charlcott, Ruth Lays, many, many, many, many other trauma theorists. But there's something about her work that talks interestingly about from a female from a female perspective um about why trauma might be considered unspeakable, and is it is it just that we don't hear it, that we don't want to? So let me just read. This is from the introduction. And the introduction is the wound and the voice. So there we go. Um if Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet. I mean what more can I say, really?

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Um But she does, doesn't she? Um I mean you've you've read the book, I've I've read little bits of it.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

She explores it really, really beautifully, and she moves through lots of other theories and and um yeah, she looks at demand and can't. Um it's so the title, I mean it's called Unclaimed Experience, and I think that again it's about what we're not allowed to say and what people won't listen to, as opposed to Freud's kind of idea that uh trauma existed as an experience outside of language, and so that's where I was playing with wounding and self-harm. But Caruth kind of explodes that a bit and actually says, No, actually, it can be said, it's just are we willing to listen? I mean, in a nutshell, she says it is obviously, but and I think it's that la she sort of talks about how language and culture uh make uh trauma unspeakable, not the trauma itself. And that sort of actually, if you think about it, takes us to Virginia Wolf, who again had experienced a great deal of trauma and suffered horribly. Um she talks about in um On Being Ill. And I say on being ill, she talks about how um what is it? She says something about how a schoolgirl can have her expressions of love and longing expressed by Shakespeare by Lear King Le. But language falters at expressing feeling uh ill or something. Um how you can't how how difficult it is to describe suffering to your doctor or um language language can be this vehicle for glorious expressions of emotion, and yet describing suffering is incredibly difficult. And that I think what Karuth explores so beautifully is that that's not the fault of the trauma or the speaker, but but the fault or the problem of language itself and the listener. And I think that's where my work, my my own work is intentional with that too.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

So since do you do you think since the PhD, obviously, I mean, you know, you've gone on to to write um many more things. Do you think that that those those ideas are still uh like you're saying, they're still affecting your writing? So um how how might it I'm just thinking about how it might be moving through, say, for example, um like the sound mirror, maybe. Um and um it where there you almost kind of like the idea of passing trauma on is very much alive in the sound mirror, isn't it? That idea that that the history of trauma continues through you know what we inherit from what's gone before us. I don't know whether Karu touches on that at all.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

Um she does actually, yeah, but she's not this was out uh published before we understood more about the epigenetics of trauma and how trauma is expressed through the body via epigenetics, let alone you know, the body keeps the score, which I yeah, let's not talk about that. I have an issue with that. Um but but also in the transmission of testimony, so you know, your family, your sense of self is shaped by your history and what you're told. Um but it's all very complicated and interconnected, but yeah, that's definitely part of the sound mirror. And also, but where the sound mirror, I think. Um I had a once discussed this with Terry White, who's a phenomenal journalist and writer. Um and she wrote this beautiful, extraordinary memoir, and we were talking about the difference between writing fiction and memoir, and how I've again, this is the street field, chosen the pretty, the coward way, in a way. I've always written fiction that is very close to my own experience, but in some ways, fiction gives me room to move outside and play with things and think about what things happened, how things might happen differently. But I remember being in a group therapy session and being told that what I was sharing in that therapy session was deeply painful for everyone and they needed space. And I have still That I barely said very much about my experience in in that moment of testimony. And I still never talk about what really happened to me as a child and as a young woman because I'm so aware of it hurting other people. And so the sound mirror she does. She has been sexually abused, but I talk about it such I sort of hide it, you know. I say something like I think and obviously I haven't read it since I wrote it, but something like she knows what men are capable of, she's known it since she was a little girl, and things like that. So and I remember talking to Terry and Terry being like, you know, why should we make make nice for other people? Um so the book I've I'm currently writing doesn't and it's as we say that kind of not people pleasing finding voice working against that being a good girl.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

Do you think that's something that has you've got stronger in as you've got older? Do you feel I mean, you know, that your writing has kind of grown into a sense of um caring less about making nice, as you put it?

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Uh and just myself in general as a person, I've changed in that sense. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

Yeah. Um for for those of you um who haven't read The Sam Mirror, one you should. Um, but it's it's partly it starts off with Tamara setting out to kill her mother, which is kind of wonderfully. But there are these three characters, there's Tamara and then her grandmothers, uh Claire and Ada, and it kind of follows the obviously her uh Tamara's history through her two grandmothers. Um, and then we kind of learn about um, you know, why she might be what she might be doing on that journey to kill her mother, and then we learn about her sort of family history and how that's shaped her. Um I also love in that book. One of the things I really enjoy is the is the voices of the of the kind of mitochondrial DNA speaking. Um, and I think this idea, isn't it, of and there again you've got voices that we don't expect to hear, that have been um that are not part of history with a capital H I S. Um and and I think you're very good at at exploring those uh you know, those voices that are coming out of wounds, effectively, but that have always been there and just haven't been heard. Um it's a wonderful book. So yeah, I mean, well, all of your work is wonderful, but it's definitely something to people should be going exploring these things. I'm excited by what I hear about what you're writing now. But it's interesting, isn't it? This like because I think in in a way it goes that what you said about about uh that person interviewing you, Terry, to do with taking I don't know that it is I don't know that it's the coward's way out, because I think there is something in the knowing and unknowing, and even a memoir steps into territory, the territory of memory, and memory is a knowing and an unknowing, and there's always a space in which fiction interferes to some extent with that. Um and I and maybe fiction isn't the right word, but you know, no one's well Yeah, go on, go on.

SPEAKER_01 47:46

I say it in the back, actually, I've got a sound there nearby. I actually talk about the I quote this, I think. And I'm not new in saying this. I um trying to think of the poet, the French poet. Yeah, Jean Genet. This is in the beginning. So in the Jean Genet says it's a true image born of a false spectacle. So that's what I think fiction does, and I uh so I say in the acknowledgments because sometimes the imagined tells the truth better than facts, and I feel very strongly around that. But there are facts, but fiction isn't a court of law. We're not trying to so I think fiction gives you space to explore uh the emotional impacts of what it looked like as opposed to attempting to do service to other people's experiences. And I'm trepidatious about memoir. I think there can be a kind of textual violence that goes on in memoir, but it's from your perspective, and I love to read memoir, and I but I'm talking from my own person, this is not about other people's memoirs, but for myself. I feel more comfortable with fiction, even if it's very close to experiences I've had.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

Yeah. I I'm very I'm it I think we spend a lot of time thinking about drilling things down fact, truth, reality. Exactly. Um and we know that those things aren't drilla. You know, there's no way of kind of fixing them, they are mutable things, and I think this idea for me, I'm really interested in nuance, which I think fiction does so brilliantly. And I think the best memoirs also do that. Um uh and I think, yeah, that idea of you go into a space in fiction which is interpretable and it's meant to be. You know, you're exploring how someone else sees the world is going to change the way you see the world, and and in in like, for example, in the summary, you've got more than one character, so you have more than you know, that you've got more than one experience going on, bouncing off each other, um thinking it through. I was I was uh when I was thinking about your choices earlier, I was thinking about um something in Annie Erno's Shame, and obviously she is writing, I guess, I don't really know that you call it memoir, but it's definitely it's hitting into those sort of it's it's it's written from the self, right? So um, and in in in this book, Shame, she writes for the first time about witnessing her father throttling her mother, basically. She walked in on them and she she describes it, and then she says that you know, this is the first time I've written about it. Um and it struck me because what she says is narrative lends normality to people's deeds. So this is uh in the uh English translation um in the Fitz Coraldo edition. Um and I just think, you know, I find that interesting. That this idea of narrating something, it's complicated, isn't it? Because you narrate something and it's in a sense we go, we fall into a space which feels comfortable. Stories fit a certain pattern, you know, that that to some extent could be a comforting pattern. But obviously, we all know that stories and those patterns can trick us, right? You know, that they don't the life doesn't necessarily fit into those easy. So I think it, I don't know, I just find that in itself quite interesting. This sort of, you know, the the this this push to create a a narrative out of something in a way is is a grappling with, isn't it? It's a desire to wrestle and tame it to some extent. And yet, if you're someone like uh Yellinek, then you're gonna be at the same time trying to push against what you're already wrestling with. But you know, you're you're trying to hold it and contain it, but you're also trying to push against what holds and contains because you're saying, well, it is more than that narrative, it is more than you know, you basically she's cutting holes in that.

SPEAKER_01 52:19

And no surprise, I guess that's a bit cheeky of me to say she's cutting holes, but um yeah, Elinek actually is excessive, she exceeds the language. You can feel there is something bulging through the word, like it's you can feel it, like you understand that it's those words are like this mesh barely containing something. But I I think I know I'm right that in some ways creating narrative and shaping um particularly difficult, very difficult experiences in a way neuter them. Or it can feel like they're being neutered.

SPEAKER_00 53:05

It's tricky, isn't it? Is that is that dance again between like you know, how do you express something? And I think that's why literature and fiction, and let's turn to your other choice, um, poetry, because in a way it's it's playing with language as and not just using a kind of straightforward prose can be one way of thinking of different ways of expressing yourself through language. So um you've chosen the wonderful uh Sylvia Plath, and you've gone like all of her works, which I think is fair enough. So tell us why you picked Plath.

SPEAKER_01 53:46

Well, I feel like there's that odd um, and maybe I'm just this is personal, but you know, sometimes there are things that women and girls love that are formative. There's almost this kind of, oh you know, don't like pop music, oh Sylvia Plath, uh, and I feel like fuck that, you know, there's a demeaning happening to the things that are important, and I think that's all part of the silencing, all part of the denigration of our wants, our needs, our desires, etc. So I am unashamedly claiming her because I know that this is in my work because I have to sometimes go and even all this. I mean, I read Plath avidly, assiduously, you know, around 15 to 25, say, over and over, to the point where when you said, you know, let's read from Daddy, I was like, well, I all I can remember most of it, like it's there for me. So when I'm writing, I sometimes have to go back and undo sentences because I feel her voice, I feel her rhythm in my own work. Um, and I was lucky enough to be a part of the very first Sylvia Plath festival. Um, and read, I think, from Sound Mirror, and as I was doing it, I was thinking I could hear like the cadences, the kind of it's so in my blood. And I've said this before, and I'm never ever gonna apologise for it. Fury, I am furious. Rage is my fuel, and I think it was for her too. I think it is for many women, and uh I love that her work is burning with rage. I love it. I just am so sorry for you know, I wish I could recuperate her, but who am I to think that? That's so fucking patronizing. Anyway, let me just read a tiny bit from I mean you could I'd love to read the whole thing, but you you can't. So, okay. And what's interesting actually, just as an aside, I honestly I read these some of what we've talked about and I think, oh my word, these echoes just go through everything. Anyway. Daddy by Sylvie Pleth. If I've killed one man, I've killed two. The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart, and the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

unknown 56:23

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 56:26

Oh my god. It's a joy to hear you read that.

SPEAKER_01 56:29

Yeah. Oh she's just yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yeah, it's it's and and it's rhythm, and it's interesting use of word choices. You know, I mean, there's so much going on in what she's doing, isn't there, that ripples. Um to tell me about that um when you read the sound mirror and you heard you heard the cadences, and you I mean there's a there's a joy in that, don't you think? And that's almost like a direct conversation you're having there.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

Yeah, I think there's um I don't think I think if you read as deeply as writers tend to, you're never uh I mean I remember giving a lecture once about how there's no such thing as an original work, and people got really upset by that. But you're using you're using language, this material, this medium, that is how uh I guess what I'm trying to say is everything we do is in some way in in conversation with everything with heard and read, and because you're using language, these very you know overused little bits of sound, there's this you know, these symbols. Um but I don't think there's anything wrong in that. Like the human experience and how we encounter it can be told originally, but what do we mean by that? Like, I think I personally I'm not interested in the original, I'm interested in authentic, and I suppose the reason why Plath echoes for so many of us and is part of our own DNA is because there's something so authentic. She isn't trying to make nice.

SPEAKER_00 58:27

Yeah, I I struggle with the word authentic. I don't know why. I think it's because in some ways it's been I think it's been stolen. So tell me what you mean. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:38

For me, it's where it it is about that speaking honestly without cliche, without making nice, without trying to render the experience or your or the emotion in a way that is it you're trying to make it communicable and understandable, but you're you know, but you are for and you're forging connection, but you're not tampering with it. You are allowing its power imbalances, you know, instead of yeah, I suppose that I can't I could just or you're not making nice. Yeah, no, I don't know. I know because if you're thinking about audience, you're you're still making nice. It's about this is what I am saying. Here it is, you're making it intelligible.

SPEAKER_00 59:30

That's tricky, isn't it, when it comes to thinking about the publishing world, which I guess we could have a whole separate conversation about that.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

Yes, yeah, and that is again where we're always gonna have to struggle because there'll be you know, you write something that you feel is really hitting some truths and and doing something that you feel is important, and then you're told, well, we don't know how to market that. And then as a writer, you have to make a decision about what you're trying to do with your work. Do you want to make is it about making money? Is it about sales, or is it fuck it? I don't care if only one person reads this and it means something to them, you know what what is it you're doing and why? Um and for me, I I don't want to write pretty things, I don't care. You know, if it's about money, we we did on something else anyway.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:25

Yeah, it's amazing though, isn't it? Because when you say, you know, you don't want to write pretty things at the same time. One of the reasons that Place poetry is so great, and one of the reasons that you know there are passages from your work that have really affected me is because there is beauty in them, and that that be and that beauty isn't about prettiness, I guess. It's it is about uh a free expression of something that resonates, you know, something that touches your inside and gets you in the gut.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

Yeah, and I use pretty against in j like in opposition from beautiful, like pretty for me is a superficiality. Like pretty is acceptable, like beauty can be overwhelming, incredibly powerful, almost ugly, you know, there's a stink, like so, yeah, and and I think we're talking about musicality, which is not the same, it's it's kind of like um a fragonar painting is pretty against say Artemisia Gentelleschi, against Caravaggio, against Francis Bacon. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

Yeah, yeah, I do. Um, you've said so many things that I would be intrigued to ask more about, you know, just thinking about the idea of saying the unpretty and what that means in our current world. Um, because I think that is a difficult thing, um, not least because we have reached a point where we're anxious about upsetting others, you know. So there's a lot of lines that it that kind of like um it crosses, you know, in different ways. Um, but um I'm also conscious that I would like to to uh not talk for too long. Um so I guess it'd be it would be good to say uh to maybe just like think about um oh, there were so many things I wanted to ask you about. It sounds like you're writing something very exciting now. Obviously, part of the inspiration for this podcast is an interest in reading, right? And and how and how reading affects our writing. Um, and I wondered about whether you I feel you do. Do you make kind of do you have like sort of your own little reading lists for new projects? Do you have books that resonate with a specific book that you're writing?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:07

Yeah, I do actually. And I think I'm I'm sure most people do, but there'll be I always think of them as touchstones, and it they might not even be the or the connection may be quite tenuous, but there's something about the confidence or the skill, the craft in that person's work that I might, if I'm stuck, I'll pick up and just read three sentences, and it that's how you do it. That's how you do it. Like yeah, so I do. I create, I have these little sort of almost cairns of books that that I'm hoping to be in a conversation with, even if it's very badly, but I'm trying to talk back to.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:51

I know it's not badly. And you've you've got no, uh and you've got um, so you know, there is obviously the the non-fiction. You did there were plenty of others. I know it was a difficult it is a difficult to ask to to to force you to narrow these things down to to such a small number of books. Um, but do you ever read sort of factual books as well, like kind of historical books? Um yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:21

I love history. I read a lot of history, I read lots of philosophy and theory. I mean, Mark Fisher is huge in my work. Um, Rosie Bradotti, phenomenal. Um, I'm fascinated by correlationism, speculative theories, uh, delues. So I read lots of that. I do read a lot about history. I'm fascinated by what it is to be a human and all the anything that explores human, but I also love to read about science. I love nature. Um yeah, yeah. I my mother always used to say, your nose is either in a book or you're writing.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:56

Oh, sounds very nice. Uh sounds nice to me anyway. So if if you had to pick one of these, I mean you sort of said you felt that there were two you were working between, but if you had to pick one, I was like, okay, Heidi, narrow it down. What would it what would it be for me?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:20

I think it would have to be Yellinx, the piano teacher, because I feel like she too incorporated that Plathian rage and musicality in the language. I mean, and you know, I'm not a native German speaker, but even when I've the German is very there's something wonderful about her sentence structures and the the English translation is just wild. Um, so yeah, it's gonna be that. That's what I choose. Quick, brilliant. Yep, okay, brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

Well, I mean, you know, one might change one mind tomorrow, and that'll be fine. Uh so thank you so much, Heidi. Thank you so much for joining me. Um, thanks to everyone for tuning in. You can find a list of all of the books in the description of this episode on my website, and there will be a bookshop.org page where all of those currently in print can be purchased. So go away, read more books, and um see you next time. Thank you very much.