What do you hope readers will take away from your story?
What I hope readers get out of it is this experience of remembering how language colonises us. It colonises our bodies, it makes life feel the way it feels. I’d like readers to think about that in their own lives. They know that already, but it’s nice to read a book where you’re watching someone show how that played out in their life. That’s what I’m offering. At the same time, it’d be cool if the masculinity theme gets picked up.
What books have you loved lately and what’s on your TBR pile?
I’m really into Elena Ferrante. I love the fact that she really crosses taboos about motherhood. She makes it real; she doesn’t just lean into it. She goes for the jugular then goes beyond. She’s breaking taboos and that is thrilling as a writer, isn’t it? I think that’s why she’s so popular.
I promised myself I would say to read bell hooks’ The Will to Change. It’s about men and masculinities. We don’t do a very good job of talking about how men are attempting to embrace contradictory expectations that are put on them in the modern world. When we’re critiquing masculinity, we just critique it, but we don’t spend enough time thinking ‘how does it get that way?’ There’s this entitlement thesis that goes around—‘it’s just a sense of entitlement, that’s how guys end up the way that they are’—and I just think that’s way too two-dimensional. It lacks a depth of compassion. You can be critical and compassionate at the same time. I think that we can’t understand something unless we can allow ourselves to flow into it and imagine what it feels like.
Siri Hustvedt—she wrote The Shaking Woman. She just ploughs right into these questions of ‘What is consciousness? What is the body? What is the mind? Why do we imagine this illusion?’ She’s not being a hippy about it, she’s being much deeper. Hustvedt is on a board of psychiatry even though she’s a creative writer. She’s really well-respected in what they call medical humanities circles. She’s wonderful, you should read her if you’re interested or if you’re suffering from an illness that’s ambiguous in some way in/around mind and body.
You can pick up a copy of Fragile Creatures at your local bookstore today.
