On the fear and joy of total artistic freedom

Your career trajectory has led you from being an editor to working with animals to writing [a novel]. I’d love to hear about your path and how it has influenced your writing.

Well, I was editing educational stuff, and I didn’t like working in an office. I just felt so bored, really. I’d go into work and think, “I’m going to feel exactly the same when I come out.” It made me feel depressed, to be honest, and I think my boss at the time could tell, and he was like, “You should use the health insurance and go to therapy.” I went and then [the therapist] was like, “What would make you feel better?” I started writing these little zines, I took them around London, and sold them in some shops. I just wanted to feel more part of the world or something. The office just felt like I was dying, like I was in a coffin. I also started working at Battersea Dogs Home. I loved the dog’s home. There are hundreds of dogs without owners and you could make friends with these sad dogs. I wanted to do something where I could tell I was making a difference.

It’s nice that you were able to understand that. Many people have that desire to try something else, but they don’t know what questions to ask themselves. Were you still writing and making those zines after you became a veterinary nurse?

Zines were really easy to do, but writing just takes me forever. I never really had the time. Then in the past seven years, I became a single parent. I couldn’t go out and I didn’t want to just sit and watch TV, I don’t watch TV anyway. I’ve always read constantly, but I needed to communicate. I was just on my own all the time. I was lonely, I guess. On a Friday night, I’d think, “Who do I want to hang out with?” Then I’d choose a book and feel almost like I was hanging out with that person. My therapist suggested I take a writing course. I felt a bit too old to start a course, but she persuaded me.

How do you balance the demands of being a mother with working and writing?

It has been hard. I don’t have family down here and at one point I was doing 12-hour shifts at the vet. Five years ago I just started my own cat-feeding and dog-walking business, so I can take care of my daughter during summer holidays, otherwise it’s impossible. She just comes with me on dog walks. I kind of work every day and throughout Christmas. It’s not that well paid but it’s so nice. It doesn’t feel like work to me. It’s just looking after a friend’s pets in a way.

I took this course with Chelsea Hodson called Finish What You Start. That was really helpful, and she helped me get a routine that would fit into my life. She’d ask, “What can you do? What can you commit to?” I tried an hour a day, and it adds up. I really like what Karl Ove Knausgård says about writing. He said having kids is actually good because it takes away the angst of thinking you have to do something important.

It doesn’t make you a slave to the thing that you’re trying to do.

Yeah. In a lot of writing classes, people do talk a lot about how difficult it is to sit down and make yourself do it. I had a bit of that as well when I was in Finish What You Start. I remember saying, “[Writing] just makes me want to start smoking again. I just feel so stressed.” And she was like, “Why don’t you think of your writing as something you get to do? You get to hang out with your writing. It’s not something you have to do. You’re choosing to do it.” Imagine if someone said “I don’t want to see you writing, don’t you dare write.” And then that would make you want to do it.

Let’s talk about Happiness Forever. I loved the way you explored obsession and how it can really tangle someone’s sense of self. How did this idea for the book come to be?

I just find it so interesting that you can feel like you don’t connect with anyone and then one person will just drive you insane and you don’t even know why. And when it’s unrequited, it just gives it fuel. I thought that was interesting, and I thought obsession with a therapist would be funny because [the client] could tell them they were obsessed, but the therapist can’t leave. They have to keep seeing you.

And it makes sense too, because in therapy you’re sort of working through your obsessions, whether it’s an obsession with a person or things in your past that have plagued you or whatever. Focusing all of that anxious energy on the therapist is so clever. How did you translate that feeling into something legible?

I was just remembering how it feels. I mean, I did it my whole life. There was a teacher I was obsessed with. In university, I did the same thing. Recently I was obsessed with Ryan Gosling and I watched every single film of his. I think I was just scared of being bored, I wanted to keep that high of obsession. I was reading some books about obsession too. There’s the Lena Andersson book Wilful Disregard; and I Love Dick as well, I really like that one.

Did writing the book change your perception of obsession?

Maybe when I made the Conrad character say: “You wouldn’t want someone else to base their life on you.” When I imagined someone else being obsessed with me, I was like, “Oh, it would be so gross. I would hate it.” So maybe, but I’m slightly obsessed with someone at the moment, so maybe not.

We’re always ourselves, we can’t get away.

In writing classes, they were always like, “The protagonist has to change. You want to see them change.” And I thought “I don’t know. I don’t think she’s going to change.”

Earlier you mentioned that trying to write for an hour a day really helped you. Have there been other pieces of advice that were either useful for you or maybe even advice that didn’t work for your creative process?

You know the book that Ottessa Moshfegh used, The 90-Day Novel? I just couldn’t do it. That kind of planning just instinctively, I don’t know, it just felt so fake and pointless. I think books are better when they take a while. You just have to choose something that you’re really obsessed with, that you wouldn’t mind thinking about every day.

The frightening thing about writing is you could write anything. The possibilities are endless and it’s hard to decide. But then also, that’s the great thing. It’s the only place where you can do exactly what you want, you can say anything. It might not get printed, but you can say anything, do anything. Remembering that is amazing.