Nicola, as an author, would you say that all stories, even fiction, are somehow about the self?
I imagine a writer like Rachel Cusk might say: “The you is inescapable.” And I accept that, even when it comes to fiction. I want to be able to connect to something human. I think that’s what the value of literature often is: to capture that ineffable feeling of being a person, when you read a book and you close the final pages and you feel more connected to humanity and what it means to be a person. One could write something entirely disconnected from personal, but I wonder what you’re sacrificing in order to do so. Whatever book you write, if it’s about dogs in space, surely there’s still some emotion that you’re connecting to, that you’ve experienced. I don’t believe there’s ever a clean divorce between a writer’s hand and their brain — or a writer’s hand and their heart.
Your first two novels dealt with characters and situations which were not too far removed from your own life. But what happens if you’re writing about a world that’s completely not your own? How does subjectivity bend in that context?
Actually, I’m writing my third book Vessels now and feels very far from my life experiences… It takes place in 1987 in Hong Kong, so there’s a real sense of disconnection from my own life in 2026. And yet, I still really see myself in a lot of these characters. They seem to represent different parts of myself, often in opposition to one another. So even when I’m not intentionally writing about myself, there will always be a bit of myself in my characters. But I also think there’s value in subjectivity. We’re trying to access intense emotions, and in order to do that, we have to really access times that we felt them. We have to channel the personal in order to create something new, and something that appears different to ourselves is often accessed through ourselves first.
“What kind of life do I want to live? Why do I feel left behind compared to my peers? Why is the future so scary? All of these questions are things that I’m navigating in real time.”
Has accessing those past emotions and experiences helped you understand or know yourself better?
Well, in my first book Bellies, there’s a real sense of a fight to understand one’s own identity and purpose, and those are questions I was battling with at the time. Likewise, in my second novel Disappoint Me, we have this these characters really struggling with the big question of: What kind of life do I want to live? Why do I feel left behind compared to my peers? Why is the future so scary? And all of these questions are things that I’m navigating in real time right now. The writing is so informed by how these dilemmas unfold in my own life. It’s been incredibly useful and instructive for me to be able to write through that. So it’s not necessarily that I understand myself better — I think lots of us actually have quite a good understanding of ourselves — but it helps me, I think, move through life with a bit more calm and clarity.
I love the way your characters grapple with themselves and each other; even the small interactions and mannerisms of characters who aren’t the protagonists really stick with me.
That means a lot because I extend a lot of care to the side characters! I try to maintain an appreciation when I’m writing that each individual character is going through their own journey alongside the protagonists, and so I’m always quite conscious of making sure that they have their own dramas, even if the book isn’t necessarily the place to breathe full life into that. In Disappoint Me particularly, I was very focused on giving all of these characters a central crisis around the way that they live their lives. As I touched on earlier, many of them are sort of trying to explore this question of: Am I living the right kind of life? And if I feel that I am, why is the world telling me that I’m not? That’s a very profound weight on a lot of the character’s shoulders, and we see it in Max, of course, but we also see it in her best friend Simone, in her brother… So yes, I do want these characters to exist outside of the main character’s tensions.
It’s like real life, we’re only the main character in our own story, the entire world can’t revolve around only our own issues.
Absolutely and I think it serves to make the protagonists of the novel, Max and Vincent, feel a little bit more like people because the way that people work in reality is navigating problems outside of their own life. It’s often the case in books that characters don’t really do that, you know, everything is in service of one central relationship, everything is in service of one character’s life. But as you said, life doesn’t work like that, it just doesn’t work that way.
“I’m not sure if I had found my voice then, or if I’ve only just found my voice now. But maybe the point isn’t to have found the voice, but just for your voice to move with the times.”
As a result, your stories really feel like real, lived experiences. How did you go about developing that kind of a voice for yourself as an author?
The question of voice is still one that I’m navigating. I don’t read my books back, but last week I read Bellies again for the first time in four years and I really thought I was going to hate it and cringe at myself. I actually left feeling a sense of lke appreciation for what the book did and the place in life I was when I wrote it, and appreciation for the voice in it whilst also feeling like my voice has moved on. I was sort of thinking, I’m not sure if I had found my voice then, or if I’ve only just found my voice now. But maybe the point isn’t to have found the voice, but just for your voice to move with the times. Maybe that’s how you mark your evolution as a writer: the continuous changing of your voice in response to the writing you’ve done and where you want to go.
It’s honest, and I think that’s what good writing is about.
Exactly, it’s an honest account of my voice at the time. I was actually really true to myself, and that’s something I hold a lot of pride for. That’s how I always feel about the work, and what I try to remind myself is that as long as I feel as if the voice is true to who I am, then there’s that sort of fundamental sense of integrity. Sales and everything else, the commercial aspect of the work, falls into second place. It’s far easier to manage failing when the failure is something you feel proud of. There’s this feeling with my work now, where I know that one day I will probably look back on this and have some changes, I might cringe, but I feel proud of it, and that’s what matters most.