‘I feel like people will take me seriously when I’m 50’: Novelists Eliza Clark and Julia Armfield in conversation | Fiction

Wwhen Eliza Clark wrote her debut novel, Boy partscame out in the summer of 2020, it almost slipped under the radar. But soon, buzz on TikTok catapulted the book to cult status. Since then, there has been a one-woman stage adaptation at the Soho theatre and its sequel, Fineabout a journalist investigating a gruesome true crime story set on the date of the Brexit referendum, is being adapted for television by Juno Dawson, now 30, who was last year named one of Granta’s best young British novelists.

Julia Armfield, 34, has attracted a devoted following with her gothic, horror-inspired books, lyrical language and aquatic imagery. Her 2019 debut collection of short stories, Salt slowlywas as thrillingly macabre as you might expect from someone who wrote her MA thesis on teeth, hair and nails in the Victorian imagination. Her spooky 2022 debut novel, Our women under the seawas nominated for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award and won the 2023 Polari Book Prize. Both authors are publishing their third books this year. Clark’s extensive collection of short stories, She is always hungryreturns her to her speculative fiction beginnings: readers may be surprised by the amount of spaceship content (it’s excellent). Armfield’s evocative second novel, Private ritualsreinterprets King Lear set in an apocalyptic future where three sisters feud while the world is underwater.

The rapport and easy banter between the two is evident when we meet in a South London café, their mutual enthusiasm undimmed by the oppressive heat of the hottest day of the year. Armfield says of Clark: “Apart from how skilled she is, and how much variety and mastery there is in her voice, it’s always just funny. I’m so happy to see a joke.” Clark is full of praise for Armfield: “I was really impressed by Salt slowlyand The Great Awake, which the White review story prize – it makes sense that this would be a career-launching story.”

Their work draws not only on literature, but also on pop culture, classic cinema, and the weirder sides of the internet (Clark is now obsessed with Japanese batsūor punishment games, which are usually based on endurance tests). When they talk about their process, they both use different memes. For Armfield, it’s a two-part drawing of a horse, one beautifully executed and the other a child’s sketch. “It’s my idea of ​​what I’m going to write, versus me when I start it and screw it up by being myself.” Clark’s technique is more like the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” meme: “It’s two years of sketching these two circles, and then in about six weeks I’ll draw the rest of the owl.” She wrote the last 10,000 words of both of her novels in one day. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily a boast,” she says. “It becomes a bit like, ‘No TV and no beer make Homer crazy.'”

How did you meet?
Julia Armfield It was during lockdown and I was asked to interview you for your Instagram Live book launch. It was extremely well attended, considering a) it was Instagram and b) this was a debut novel. You had your hair rolled up and were wearing a pink outfit, and I was wearing dungarees.

Eliza Clark I tried to make a little bit of the fact that I was in my house. So I wore a nightgown and a sheer robe with a marabou feather trim on the sleeves and I looked ridiculous, but it looked like I was having fun.

YES It was hard Jayne Mansfield. And then we became friends.

EG We met up with our partners online a few times and watched movies together.

YES You made us watch Cats. I still don’t feel good about it, to be honest.

You both write short stories and novels. How do the two relate to each other?
YES It’s really interesting because I started out with short stories, and what happens when you do that is people say, “That’s cute, but can you suggest a novel?” Now I’ve found that writing novels allows me to do what I want to do better and more complexly, but that’s been a journey. For me, short stories focus on a trick or a twist, whereas novels focus so much on characters and moods. They allow me to spend more time with people.

EG I have lots of ideas, but it’s about finding the scope of an idea. I like to write both. You can’t really fail with a collection of short stories, because of the amount of commercial anxiety around them – they’re almost set up to fail. So anything positive that happens with them is a success, whereas with a novel you can really fail.

YES There’s room for you to go more hard-genre in short stories and still be considered literary. I think there’s a lot of genre snobbery in there – in a way I’ll never be taken completely seriously as a novelist, because there’s often a sea monster. And I think that frees you up. It’s a different aspiration.

Are short stories and polyphonic narratives also a way to avoid people assuming that you are your characters?
YES They’ll still try. They’ll try to find one voice among many and say, “That’s you.” It’s an incredibly frustrating cliché to present to female novelists. But at the same time, you’re writing about reality, to some extent, so you’re often writing your own voice. In Our women under the seaI found Miri a much more annoying voice to have to write than Leah, because she was much more me.

EG I had a rather bad faith assessment of Finewhere the person completely ignored that there was a narrator in the story and wrote about what her impression was of my political beliefs. I didn’t really get much of it because it was so extreme and clearly far removed from my life, but someone found a way.

Every few years someone will claim that the novel is dead. Is that true?
YES It’s a bizarre claim, except that it boils down to the fact that “the version of the novel as I personally very, very much like and perceive it has probably been out of fashion for some time.” I think that’s a much less hyperbolic and hysterical way of saying exactly the same thing.

EG I’ve expressed this fear to you before – sometimes I worry that I’m personally contributing to the decline of literature. You could put it more positively: that I’m interested in pushing it in different places. Not that I’m a great experimental novelist – I’m not Rebecca Watson, who’s much better at that. I’m interested in experimenting with form. But then I worry, ‘Oh, should I have read Dostoevsky?’ I feel like people will take me seriously when I’m 50.

Sometimes when you hear people talk about their relationship with writing—strangers, not anyone I know—you think, do you really like writing, do you really want to write? Or do you like the idea of ​​writing? For some people, the purpose of writing a novel seems to be to expand their lifestyle brand. No one is forcing you. You don’t have to write a novel. You can just read books, or you can find another creative outlet. If you really enjoy it, it feels less like you’re fighting other people over scraps.

YES And the vast majority of the time you’ll probably have to work a full-time job to support it, and therefore you’ll be tired all the time. In the end it’s worth it because you either want to do it or you don’t.

Do you work full time?
YES Yeah. I’m doing great! It’s important to talk about it. There’s a real misconception that once you sell a book, you’re done. And that makes people feel extremely intimidated or like they’ve failed. But that’s true for 80% of writers I know. In the vast majority of cases (when people are writing full-time), they’ve either been exceptionally successful in ways that aren’t easy to replicate, or they have private resources.

EG I don’t have a day job—I had one until August 2022. But even among full-time writers, many of us also have a matrix of freelance work. Usually teaching, reviewing manuscripts, copywriting, working in publishing in some way. There’s definitely a perception sometimes of, “If I don’t get a seven-figure advance, I’ve blown this.” But when someone does become successful, it’s really the exception, not the rule, and that’s miserable.

Compared In countries like Scandinavia and Ireland there doesn’t seem to be much government support for writers.
YES It’s a real failure of this country in general – it’s terrible and so obvious. It’s just not respected as a profession or a culture. The idea that places like the White review have to close, while that is precisely the place where so many people have made an incredibly important start, because they have no financing. It is an absolute disgrace.

EG Especially because the United Kingdom has such a strong literary tradition, but this has faded into the background.

YES We both should have gone to STEM.

EG No, I got a C in GCSE maths. You know those interviews where writers are asked: what would you do if you weren’t a writer? And you usually get a very romantic answer. But I think I’d probably still be working in digital marketing for non-profits, and that’s not a nice answer.

What are you reading at the moment?
YES I enjoyed it Hendrik Hendrik by Allen Bratton, which was fascinating. After doing press for Private ritualsit reminded me of a lot of the same things – it reminds me of Shakespeare in a way, and it’s about abusive parents, and accepting who you are when you’re not taught to be good at something. I thought that was really good.

EG Right now I’m listening to Taking blood by William Joseph Martin, formerly Poppy Z Brite, because your wife recommended it. I really enjoyed it Beautiful corpse And Lost Souls. This was considered his worst, but it’s still very good. In Australia I recently did a panel with Patrick DeWitt and Jonathan Lethem, so I read The sisters brothers And Motherless Brooklynand I liked them both.

She is always hungry by Eliza Clark will be published by Faber on November 7