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Emotionally Weird? Moi? Kim Bunce interviews Whitbread-winning author Kate Atkinson about God, motherhood and the uncontrolled imagination Observer: What is
Emotionally Weird about? Obs: Did you find it difficult to write ? KA: It was quite difficult getting the hang of the tone. I also started to write it too soon, so I threw away a lot of stuff. I couldn't hit the stride of how it was supposed to feel or sound in my head. I felt very frustrated at the beginning. But that trilogy is finished now - the trilogy being the first three books. I realised they are based on Alice in Wonderland in one way or another - but the young girl has now reached 21 and is grown up. I've had enough of that kind of writing. I need to move on to the third person. Obs: What made you choose Dundee University as the setting for Emotionally Weird ? KA: Behind the Scenes was set in York in the time of my childhood, so that was fascinating and cathartic as I used to feel very homesick. But so many people thought it was autobiographical. The second book I wanted to be about the imagination, but it was a strain to make up a location. With this book I thought, OK, we'll go back to the other way and set it somewhere I know. The next book will be set in a real place where I've rented a house for six months, so people can't say I lived there and say it's autobiographical. Obs: Does it bother you that people ask if your stories are autobiographical? KA: Yes. Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I'. Obs: Do you draw your characters from people you know? KA: I can think
of a few characters in this book that had a real basis, but in the
end there is only a trace element. Effie is completely made up and
so is Nora, but Bob is so many male students I know all rolled into
one. Everybody has been out with Bob. Obs: Were you wholeheartedly involved in university life, the direct action and the drug-taking? KA: I think everyone was, even people who were quite straight. The big political things that happened had finished, although the students hadn't realised it. I remember one sit-in. But it was very hedonistic and there's nothing more sexy than revolution. In the first week I joined the Socialist Society and I formed the Dundee University Women's Liberation Society. Obs: After winning the Whitbread, did you worry that you wouldn't be able to match the achievement? KA: It worried me more that I just couldn't write another book. I had already written half of Human Croquet before I won the Whitbread, but I think it would have been really hard to start another book after winning the prize. I felt that many people wanted Ruby II - more of Behind the Scenes - and they were never going to get that. The whole time I'm writing I don't think I can do it. I only start to relax when I'm about three quarters of the way through. I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket. Obs: Do you like to move the goalposts and experiment in your novels and not write to an audience? KA: Yes, I do. Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics. Obs: Do you suffer from creative angst? KA: I'm a bit like the padre in Catch 22 where he thinks everyone is going to die and terrible accidents are going to happen to his family. It is like the cat is always going to be killed on the railway line or the other motorist is going to drive into my daughter's car. But I never actually articulate those things because it is like tempting fate. So it becomes a dark wash in the background of your life. I'm also very good at being aware of all the awful things that could happen and also consciously closing the door on them. My attitude is that I know what the world is like but you have to behave like those things couldn't possibly happen to you. Otherwise, you are always living the possibility of the plane falling out of the sky. Obs: The next novel? KA: I won't be writing it for another two years and I don't know that much about it. There is a youngish woman in it, but she is going to be in the third person and one of three or four main characters that become more of an ensemble. Obs: Where did the idea for the next book come from? KA: I don't know. All sorts of places. From leftover things. It's so complicated and ridiculous. The title is going to be Dogs In Jeopardy, but it has no dogs in it and it's based on chaos theory. It's to do with chance meetings, the billiard ball theory that things ricochet off each other. I've got three main characters in my head so far and one is a murderer. I find it very hard to take large space in a text with a character that has a really bad story because it makes me feel unhappy. I have to have other people who are not having bad stories. The dark and the light. The balance. Obs: Do you believe in God? KA: I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are. I find faith fascinating because there is no intellectual content to it. It must be a wonderful thing to say you believe in something. I would love that. To do away with doubt and fear. Obs: You were once described as having "strikingly unfriendly attitudes to men and domestic life". Does this still hold true? KA: I have reached a point in my life where I no longer have sexist thoughts. I don't think that women are superior to men any more. But whether that was to do with marriage I don't know. There were times in my life where I believed women had natural superiority, but women have terrible faults and flaws. Part of that feeling is me as a wounded writer speaking because I am always reviewed by women and I've been at the end of bitchy journalism from women. In a way I think that has led me to reappraise women. There is no sisterhood. Women are their own worst enemies and behave very badly in some circles, in particular the media. Women are as helpless and hopeless as men but have their own areas for it. On the whole, apart from the war, violence, aggression, drunkenness thing, men are much better behaved. They have better manners and codes of conduct. I didn't have brothers and I haven't had sons so I've had a very insular female experience. Despite having been married twice, men are still a bit of a mystery to me. If I had brought up a son then that element of mystery might have been removed. Obs: What do you wish for? KA: If you could
give me one gift it would be siblings. If I had my time over again
I would have five children at a young age when I had the energy, before
I could even think about it. It would have been absolute hell for
eight years, but then I would have all those children to look after
me when I'm old. Being a mother is the most satisfying thing you can
be. You know without a second thought or backward glance you would
lay down your life for your child, and for me that is an extraordinary,
amazing thing. You wouldn't do it for anything else, but you would
do it for your child. |