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Interview

Scarlett Thomas

talks to Danuta Kean

From Issue 36 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2008

When I was 12 my father said to me, ‘You think too much.’ Like thinking was a fault. The incident came to mind as Scarlett Thomas recalled her own childhood in the airy kitchen of her Canterbury terrace. At 12, the author of The End of Mr Y sat on beanbags in her parents’ sitting room listening to their friends – cultural theorists, academics and radical activists – argue about Foucault, feminism and Thatcher. In such an atmosphere, the only sin the intellectually precocious teenager was in danger of committing was thinking too little. I have to admit, I felt envious.

‘There was a sense that anything could be said,’ she recalls. ‘It wasn’t that rarefied Oxford kind of intellectual situation, where someone would sit very calmly and talk about philosophy or that kind of thing. It was much more eclectic and eccentric. It felt like it had a real energy.’

The recollection helps explain why Thomas is one of Britain’s most unusual as well as gifted writers under 40. Her fans include Douglas Coupland, Jonathan Coe and a generation of blogging hip-litters from 3:AM Magazine to Bookslut. Her four literary novels (three crime novels were published by Hodder at the end of the 1990s), fizz with ideas that range from the angst of modern living and gender politics through post-structuralism and vegetarianism to maths and homeopathy. They have been described by critics as everything from ‘blueprints for a revolution’ to a ‘passport into the world of mind-bending science.’

They also achieve a rare feat in literary fiction: they push intellectual boundaries, which, according to Jonathan Coe, put ‘flesh and bone on intellectual ideas,’ without ever compromising plot. ‘You have to get the plot right because otherwise nobody gets pleasure from the book,’ she says as an aside during a long explanation about self-criticism.

Her hit rate with the zeitgeist is startling. Bright Young Things (Fourth Estate, 2001), about a group of twentysomethings stranded on a desert island after answering an ad in the Media Guardian, anticipated Big Brother. Going Out (Fourth Estate, 2002), combined the themes of millennial angst with media saturation and alternative therapy as our paranoia about allergies to everything reached a peak. PopCo (Fourth Estate, 2004), about Alice Butler, a puzzle developer at a cool toy company commissioned to create a ‘killer’ brand for teenage girls, appeared as the anti-branding movement went mainstream. In The End of Mr Y –which marks Thomas’ switch to publisher Canongate – PhD student Ariel Manto finds herself in possession of a cursed book that leads her on a trip through human consciousness to God, Derrida and some very startling mice. It was published this past summer, as the debate about free thought and fundamentalism heated up.

"In my mind...is the sense that, if you are in language, you can go as far as you want. You can go right to the edge."

It is a hit rate of which Thomas is aware but uncomfortable about. ‘Being accused of being zeitgeisty can really wind me up,’ she admits with a wince. ‘I had all those ideas about Bright Young Things before Castaway and Big Brother were even announced. Because publishing takes so long to do anything, I was writing it in September 1999 and it came out in February 2001. Big Brother happened in 2001.’ She does acknowledge a habit of anticipating trends, caused by a hyper-awareness developed in childhood. ‘I am so geared up about observing. I see all the little details of everything.’

I wonder whether her complicated childhood is to blame for this acute observation. Before she was ten she lived with her mother and the man she believed to be her father in an East London council flat. ‘It couldn’t have been a more working-class background,’ she says. ‘My family on my mum’s side going back were all miners in Newcastle or in the Borders. My dad’s, or who I thought was my dad, were kind of gypsies and rebels; that was my life for ages.’

Her mother went to university to read cultural studies as a mature student and met Thomas’ stepfather. ‘He was her lecturer, and she ran away with him. So the intellectual part of my background only kicks in from when I was about ten or 11 – before that it was completely different.’

She pauses and looks at me with the look of someone who has spent too much time explaining a tangled family to strangers. She draws a breath and adds, ‘And then, when I was 12 I found that my father was someone else entirely, so I ended up with three fathers.’ This third father was Gordian Troeller, manager of electropop duo Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Cool and rich, he paid for her to attend a girls’ boarding school, The Princess Helena College in Hertfordshire.

‘I had three lives,’ Thomas says, summing up her history. ‘One was this council flat life; two, this academic, purple wallpaper and people coming around and sitting on beanbags talking about Foucault life; and three, this weird glamorous music kind of life as I got to know my dad.’ The next comment comes as no surprise. ‘I found it really confusing growing up.’ Who wouldn’t? My envy of her bohemian teens while I festered in suburbia evaporates. It sounds a lonely existence.

Her next comment confirms my suspicion. Looking for photographs from her childhood to illustrate this feature, she says she felt disturbed. ‘I got this really overwhelming sense of being an outsider looking at myself. It felt really uncomfortable.’ It is said with neither sadness nor self-pity. ‘I still feel an outsider now,’ she adds as an afterthought.
The edginess of being an outsider, at once desperate to be part of so-called normality and at the same time fiercely rejecting it, pervades her novels. At one point in The End of Mr Y, Ariel, fleeing from sinister men, who may or may not be CIA, seeks refuge in a Christian café where the waitress looks on her with apparent contempt. The scene captures perfectly the rebellious discomfort one feels around strangers whose values we do not share. It is claustrophobic, trapped.

‘I’ve always felt trapped and wanted to be free, but have trapped myself in relationships, bad situations and responsibility,’ Thomas admits. ‘I feel trapped by language in the sense that Ariel is. The section in the café, I have felt like that in my life so many times. All that judgement of you, I think that happens a lot to young women, especially transgressive young women.’ She confides laughing: ‘When I was an insecure 12-year-old I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to be called Tracey and to have my ears pierced twice and to have the right skirt to go to school in. I drew on some of that experience in PopCo.’

"'I still feel an outsider now,’ she adds as an afterthought."

Writing has been an escape since childhood for the 35-year-old, who lectures in creative writing at the University of Kent at Canterbury. ‘I tried to write my first novel when I was six. It was called The Disappearing Floor.’ Written in a school exercise book, she illustrated it herself. ‘I had to fill seven or eight pages of this book and I drew pictures as well because I thought it should be illustrated. I have always been terrible at drawing! I mean, how do you draw a disappearing floor?’

That first literary effort contained the seeds of the future author’s approach to writing. ‘I remember really vividly – it feels the same now – starting off with all these ideas, my influences of the time – Enid Blyton – and thinking, I want to make people feel the way she makes me feel. So I had that urge then that I wanted to make people feel entertained.’ Even her six-year-old self’s approach to plot resonates. ‘I had plot problems,’ she recalls. ‘It is the same thing as I have now of knowing that a plot isn’t working and that the narrative has gone a bit wonky, and feeling really uncomfortable and that I had failed.’

Although she continued writing into her late teens – an academic friend of her stepfather noted her talent when shown an angst-ridden novel written when she was 18 – she did nothing with it until she landed in London, unable to pursue her academic ambitions due to lack of funds, alongside a partner ambitious for literary stardom. For someone who achieved publication in her early 20s, it comes as a surprise to hear her say, ‘I never thought in a million years that I would ever get published, or that that was something worth aiming for.’

It is not false modesty. Until recently Thomas was wracked with self-doubt about her abilities. ‘Hmm,’ she ponders when I ask if she is very critical of herself. ‘I’m....’ There is a long, thoughtful pause. ‘It is interesting. The more successful I am, the more self-critical I am able to be publicly, because for years it felt like, “Shit, if I say I am crap, then there is no one who will say I am good, so I am going to have to say I am good otherwise no one else will say so.”’ She lets out a short laugh. ‘Now I can look back and say I made this mistake or that mistake and I am completely fine about being honest about that.’

That does not mean she is unscathed by criticism. ‘I really wanted to bludgeon Jeanette Winterson to death on Newsnight Review,’ she blurts out in a long discourse about what she thinks of sentence-level writing. ‘She sat there and said, “Scarlett Thomas does not care about language.” I thought, “For fuck’s sake, my whole book is about language.” I care passionately about it.’

It was a stupid criticism: language – and conscious thought – is the heart of The End of Mr Y, which is also a book about the relationship between writer and reader: their words enter our subconscious and lead us into other minds and other worlds, other ideas. ‘In my mind,’ she explains of the book’s ambiguous ending, ‘is the sense that, if you are in language, you can go as far as you want. You can go right to the edge.’

The ambiguity is deliberate. She is fascinated with consciousness and deconstructing narrative, to the point where she admits to being ‘freaked out’ by Freudian archetypes. ‘It traps you in a way, because it suggests that all the stories and all the archetypes are the way they are because that is the way they are and there is nothing you can do about that,’ she explains. ‘Men are this, and women are that and this figure will always reappear in stories because that is the way it is.’ Put that way it sounds like Hell.
Thomas wants to take the narrative beyond the archetype of happy ending for those who conform, or tragic ending for those who digress: Eve would have let rip at God if Thomas had been the writer of Genesis.

‘The idea,’ she exclaims, ‘that a happy ending is a wedding for God’s sake! That drives me insane that a story about two people, who do not know very much about each other, have sex or whatever and it doesn’t work out, but then something happens and they end up married. The idea that the story ends there! I mean there is a long time between that and death. So what happened then?’

We are both laughing, and she tells me a game she plays with her students to make them understand narrative drive. ‘I say to them, “You have a girl who is beautiful, has a perfect body and is intelligent with lots of friends and a perfect boyfriend. What happens next?”’ She looks at me, an eyebrow arched provocatively. ‘They all go’ – she adds with a sadistic snarl – ‘“She dies!” That is really the only place to go.’

Thomas’ next novel – as yet untitled – will play upon this theme even more than Mr Y. ‘I have been reading quite a lot of Nietzsche,’ she says. For most writers it would be an unusual place to start their research. Not for Thomas. She sparkles with excitement at playing with new ideas, new thoughts. ‘It’s very exciting. I think Derrida says this, that Nietzsche is probably the only philosopher in the history of western philosophy who has come up with a plan for escape.’ She is in thrall to the theme of entrapment, it seems.

‘We are constrained by nature and language and all the rest of it, but Nietzsche seems to be saying, “Just give yourself up to passion. Make mistakes, it doesn’t matter. You might have a better time that way and learn more about stuff.” The new book is a lot about that, though it will probably still end up about being trapped,’ she guffaws.

The plot sounds equally playful and as engaging as her other novels. A ‘tragic love story,’ it will feature a science fiction writer and the theme is the constraints of fiction. ‘I plan to have someone in a coma, but only if I can do something new with it,’ she adds. Only two-and-a-half pages have been written, but it should appear next summer, fizzing with ideas, thought experiments and pop culture.

It is as one would expect from the woman who admits that, as a teenager, she would one minute be talking to her stepfather about Derrida, the next watching Beavis and Butthead with her younger brothers. As in her novels, high and low culture are completely integrated in Thomas’ life. I am envious again, thinking of my father’s crass comment. ‘Ideas are absolutely everything. I can’t think of anything more important,’ she says, shortly before I turn off my tape. She frowns, as if suddenly remembering something. ‘Oh, maybe love,’ she adds. But I am not convinced she means it.

DANUTA KEAN is a journalist who writes for a variety of publications, including the Financial Times and Independent on Sunday. She wishes she could find a potion to get into the minds of politicians and really mess with them. She can be contacted through her website: www.danutakean.com.

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*36 The Thomas Method

• Write out your ideas in notebooks. One of the first words I wrote down for The End of Mr Y was ‘memory.’ I wanted to look at memory and how it works.
• Think about what you want to communicate. Don’t sit down and think, ‘If I can just knock out something that is industry standard and get it published, then my life will be wonderful.’ Writing is a form of communication. You have to have something to communicate.
• Plan everything. Plotting is like planning the perfect bank robbery. You need to take care of all possible contingencies so you don’t get caught out.
• Avoid adverbs – but don’t be afraid of them. My entire professional life at university seems to be telling students not to use adverbs, and I then open my book and there’s an adverb.
• Look for the substance behind the feeling. My students come in quite well-versed at doing emotional metaphors with no reason behind them. What is underneath it that’s driving your desire to write it down?
• The really interesting thing is: what do we really care about? Not when we look at ourselves, but when we look at the world. What do you see that confuses you, and how do you interact with the world?
• Don’t feel that you have to write to a timetable. Find out what suits you and follow that timetable. At the moment I am spending my time playing my guitar and hanging out with my friends. The new book is coming together in my mind. There is no point in me getting up at three in the morning to write because it is not ready.
• Always think of the reader. I really want the reader to have a good time, which is why I spend so long plotting.
• Work in your own way. The last 10,000 words of The End of Mr Y I wrote in a weekend. I was, by that point, just so into the book that I couldn’t tell the difference between my life and the book anymore. I was completely mad.
• Maintain the energy in your writing. Sometimes I read something back and think, ‘I know I wrote that at two in the morning and it is first draft, but it has edge and I am going to leave that there because of the energy.’
• Don’t bother with ‘morning pages.’ All that Dorothea Brande stuff – there is too much emphasis on writing about your childhood or using the most emotionally overwrought crap you can.
• Don’t go to workshops. The workshop is the death of writing. No one should ever attend a writing workshop ever. I can guarantee you that Tolstoy or Shakespeare never went to a writing workshop.

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