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CHRIS: Nick, you've mentioned that the germ of A Long Way Down came when you began thinking about a bridge in London noted for its suicides, and how, given its popularity, potential suicides must sometimes meet there. Do your works generally come to you through a premise, like this? Or do you first begin thinking of characters and voices? Or the underlying ideas you end up exploring?
NICK:
It's usually a premise. How To Be Good began with a scene in which the narrator's husband David gives away eighty pounds to a homeless person - it's such a large amount, and yet it's such a small amount, and it left them penniless, but of course middle-class people are never literally penniless ... It seemed a complicated gesture, and I found myself thinking about it a lot, attaching characters and other situations to it. About a Boy was the same - the cynicism involved in a guy inventing a child so he could meet single mothers seemed appalling and funny.
But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week. Most of mine are rubbish, and some, it turns out on further examination, have been written by someone else anyway. (My brain goes like this:"Hey! What about...some guy...maybe a guy who works in TV or something, who's doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he's actually learned somethi....Oh, shit.") But some stick, and it's not just (or rather, not even) because they're good ideas - it's because I have detected, I suspect subconsciously, that something in the idea allows me to do something I have been wanting to do, and something I can do. In the case of 'A Long Way Down', it was the idea of writing four monologues that appealed. When I wrote 'NippleJesus' for Speaking With the Angel, I realised that I was happiest writing in speaking voices, rather than with a 'literary' voice. And then the idea seemed to have the right happy/sad/alienated mix, and I then found that I was thinking about the people all the time. I always think of this process as jumping up and down on an idea to see if it collapses on me. So the ideas end up choosing themselves, almost, because a lot of them do collapse.
CHRIS: You've had a reputation for writing about "small" or "domestic" topics - a reputation which seems to me startlingly unfair; books like How to Be Good and especially A Long Way Down may have domestic settings, but they are, at heart, addressing nothing less than Big Questions - the nature of love, of goodness, "to be or not to be." (My favorite example may just be "NippleJesus," a short story which addresses, better than just about any work I've read, the complicated relationship between the viewer and a piece of art, with room left over for speculation about the nature of blasphemy.) Looking back over your work, do you think of your books in these thematic terms? Do you have a larger thematic plan you're following?
NICK: I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids. And divorce, unemployment, alcohol or drug dependency and depression are commonplace. So the domestic novel can accommodate, should accommodate, a lot of extremity. But I don't have any thematic plan. I'm just trying to push myself and my territory as far as I can.
As an American, I'm curious about the character of JJ in A Long Way Down. How difficult did you find it to write cross-nationally? Was this more or less difficult than writing in the voices of the novel's women, Maureen and Jess? I ask especially because JJ's reasons for feeling suicidal are often a mystery to him - he's struggling to understand his depression in a way the other characters aren't. Did you match this struggle to an American on purpose? If not, how did JJ develop?
I wanted to write about the fear we all have about not being allowed to fulfil our potential - a feeling that is, I think, particularly acute among those who have chosen the field of the arts to work in. JJ is autobiographical in that when I was his age, I felt angry and frustrated and afraid, because for a long time it didn't seem to me as though I'd ever be able to make a living out of writing, and I dreaded the professional alternatives that were open to me. And if JJ is struggling to understand his depression, it's because he feels that he isn't entitled to it. There are so many worse things that can happen to people, so he's embarrassed.
I wasn't afraid to write in an American voice - I tried it for a short story ('Otherwise Pandemonium'), and no-one laughed too much, so I'd had a trial run. And it helped JJ's sense of estrangement that he wasn't from around here, and it also helped me in keeping the voices from seeming too alike. On top of that, the music I wanted him to make seemed to belong to the US - I know that there are a lot of bands like that across the Atlantic, and not so many of them in the UK.
CHRIS: You've spoken elsewhere about your sympathy for Maureen, given your own history, and your son's struggles with autism. But how difficult was it to write about - or perhaps the better word is through - Maureen? I ask because of all the characters she's my favorite; in many ways she's the most stable of the pack, and you're able to play off that stability to great comic AND tragic effect...
NICK: Well, I think she's the soul of the book, a sad, still point who intimidates the others, really, simply because her suffering isn't self-inflicted in any way, even though some part of her suspects it might be. I wouldn't have thought of that character if I didn't have a disabled child of my own, but she isn't me, and her son isn't my son. But my son opened a lot of doors, led me to people wouldn't have known about, and helped me to think about things I wouldn't have thought about - not for long, anyway. I didn't find it hard at all to write about her feelings or her situation.
I found her Catholicism a lot harder to empathise with - as I was writing the book, I realised that Maureen would have to return to the church if she was ever going to get happier, and as an atheist that isn't something I'd ever propose as a solution to anything.
CHRIS: You've been asked, with the release of every one of your novels, how autobiographical the new work is. This curiosity is, I suppose, natural, given that Fever Pitch established your voice so strongly. But the key to each of your novels is also its first-person voice - it's difficult to read, say, High Fidelity and not develop a personal connection with Rob, to think of him as real, to associate him with you, etc. This prompts two questions: Are the multiple voices of A Long Way Down (and before them, the voice of Katie in How to Be Good), in part, a reaction to this propensity in your readers? A way of deflecting the question? And: Would you ever attempt the third person?
NICK: I tried third person in 'About A Boy', but not terribly successfully. I mean, that book might as well have been in the first person...At the moment, the book I'm thinking about next seems to be third person, but I'm sure I'll find a way around that. But yes, the conversational style I tend to favour creates the illusion, helpfully or not, that someone real is talking to the reader, and as I'm the only real person around, then it must be me that's talking. I don't think I'm consciously trying to put readers off the scent. It's more that, as my writing career goes on, I simply want to extend the range of people I'm writing about. I'd still like the reader to have that same connection with the characters, though.
CHRIS: Do you think your level of fame - the familiarity that people have with the details of your life - affects the way you approach the writing of your books? For instance: does your experience in the public eye result in sympathy for a character like Martin that you might not otherwise have had? I know this is a useless and perhaps unanswerable what-if question, but: How might you have written A Long Way Down if you were still a beginning author? Could you have written it?
NICK: It would have been a very different book, if I were a beginning author. And of course I'd like to think it wouldn't have been as good - or rather, it would have been a lot worse. The experience with Danny wouldn't have happened, for example, and I wouldn't have had any kind of perspective on my professional frustration. Yes, my own experience has given me some sympathy for Martin - and of course I've met a lot of people like Martin over the last few years, promoting books. There's a little passage in A Long Way Down when Martin first meets Maureen on the roof, and he simply can't believe that she doesn't know what he's done and why he's up there, and that's exactly what it feels like, if you've had a little public exposure - you're positive that everyone in the world has seen the bad review, read the revealing profile. And of course very few people have. A friend of mine who's a recovering alcoholic read A Long Way Down and told me about a phrase they use in AA - 'The piece of shit at the centre of the universe' - and Martin's reaction to Maureen, I see now, encapsulates the self-loathing and the narcissism implicit in that phrase. But of course that sentiment is not simply about celebrity, or about alcoholism. It could be applied to all the characters in the book. And I'm not sure it's anything you're likely to understand, intuitively or otherwise, when you're young.
CHRIS: I wonder if you could speak for a while about Jess and her origins. I mean this as a compliment: there are a number of places in the novel where I was more than willing to boot her off the ledge myself. She's such a strong character, with such random behavior - where did you get her? I wonder, too, from a technical standpoint, if she's in the book to jumpstart the plot: the other characters are so often dragged along helplessly in her wake...
NICK: Well, of course the function she comes to serve is wonderful for me. She could start a fight in an empty room, so if I ever wanted anything to happen, she was my girl. But she wasn't born of narrative desperation. I used to teach a couple of girls like that, wild, ungovernable girls who were as funny as they were scary and frustrating. I can remember one who started smoking in a drama lesson, and I remember feeling quite proud of myself for persuading her to smoke near a window.... And after I'd finished teaching, one of them kept coming back to me, particularly in dreams - she clearly represented something, I'm not quite sure what. So I suppose she's a personal archetype, and I had no trouble at all finding her voice.
CHRIS: You've written with great forthrightness about certain elements of your life and history - such as your struggle with depression in Fever Pitch, your experiences with your son in Speaking with the Angel and in 31 Songs. But your novels are also highly personal - it's easy to see, knowing a few details, that your private struggles do surface in your fiction. How do you decide what to approach through works of autobiography, and what to transform into fiction? Do you see another major autobiographical work on the horizon?
NICK: The autobiographical elements of the fiction seem to me to come from a different place. I've had an experience - eg. with Danny - and I can see something in that experience that is interesting, or universal, resonant in some way, anyway. And I attempt to dramatise that something, and it comes out as Maureen in A LONG WAY DOWN. So to me it feels as though there has been an autobiographical spark, somewhere along the way, rather than an urge to write autobiography and disguise it as fiction. (Not, incidentally, that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld said in a different context. If books work, they work, and I don't care where the source material comes from.) All the times I've written 'straight' autobiography, it's been about my relationships with something else, football or music or books. That's an area I find particularly rich, our relationships with culture, and I can see myself doing that again. Part of the joy for me in writing my Believer column is in being able to write about the circumstances surrounding the reading of a book - we all know that this has an enormous effect on how we come to view something, but critics are never allowed to say so, even though they are probably more susceptible to that than anybody.
CHRIS: Are there any topics you're too afraid to approach? I ask because A Long Way Down takes such strength and force from its central topic-this is, after all, a book about suicide, and you maintain considerable tension even in the comic parts, because we never forget the abyss over which the characters are dangling. But is there anything too dark, too frightening, for you to address? Anything in which you could not find complication and humor?
NICK: Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. And I can't imagine writing a book that didn't have humour in it, and I can't imagine that there's anything within the domestic context (but see above) that I wouldn't want to write about. But that's not the same thing as wanting to be funny about those things - the trick, surely, is to be able to accommodate as many tones as possible. I've always thought that 'The Accidental Tourist' is a model book in that way. It's funny, and yet Macon Leary has lost his child, in a horrible way, before the book starts. And of course Anne Tyler never makes jokes about his grief. She simply recognises that, just as the pain never stops, the humour never stops either. We have to make room for both whether we want to or not. |
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