Author Focus

Focus on Kate Pullinger, Author of A Little Stranger


Your book, A Little Stranger, focuses on one woman's dire unhappiness with marriage and motherhood. Why this subject matter?

When I wrote ‘A Little Stranger’ I had two small children myself and felt that there weren’t many books that dealt honestly with the difficult subject matter of how tough and lonely parenting very young children can be.  Since I wrote the book there’s been a real explosion of work dealing with this subject matter, though often through memoir instead of fiction.  But it is definitely part of the current zeitgeist to speak about what had previously been difficult, almost taboo, subject matter.  I found having babies isolating and lonely at times; however, I never contemplated leaving – I wrote this book instead!  Despite all the progress women have made in terms of equal pay and equal rights, at the end of the day we are the ones who have the babies and the arrival of a baby into the life of a couple changes the status quo in ways that neither partner has anticipated.  So the book arose out of my own experience, but it is not autobiographical. 

Fran chooses to leave her life abruptly and fly to Las Vegas. Is Vegas a metaphor for the change she must go through?

I love Las Vegas, and have been there a number of times, and once did stay for 9 whole days, which felt like a lifetime.  Vegas for me represents the US at its most excessive and crude – it’s all about money.  It’s also a place where people behave in ways they wouldn’t ordinarily, so it’s kind of magic, while also being a lot like I imagine Hell might be like!  So, yes, Vegas is a kind of metaphor, but to me it is also the kind of place where, down on your luck, you might meet the one person who can help you – like how Fran meets Leslie.

The "B Plot" deals with Fran's difficult relationship with her own mother. Does this serve as the catalyst for her own decisions?

Absolutely.  Fran removed herself from her family at an early age, so she hasn’t been through the same processes that her father and sister have been through when it comes to dealing with Ireni.  She has to track back through that before she can move on.  I also found Ireni a really interesting character to write about.  Until I was 10 we lived in a part of Canada, in British Columbia, the Kootenays, where there were Doukhobor communities, and they were famous for getting arrested for using farming gas in their cars, and then appearing in court naked.  As a child, this fascinated me, of course, and I took writing this book as an opportunity to learn more about that community.  As well as that, having an alcoholic parent is a heavy load to bear; I’d seen friends go through that and what I noted was the absence of parenting, the way my friends had to parent their parents. 

The book honestly looks at the stresses facing women today - motherhood, marriage, career. Do you believe that women can have it all?

I think there are enormous pressures on women and that it is tough to combine our various roles successfully.  But I see women all around me who are combining all these roles and getting a lot of enjoyment from it – from work, from family, from relationships.  The trick is to be hugely organized and to find ways to steal time for yourself!  I like to think that when Fran returns to London she finds a way to get a better balance in her life, and they all live happily ever after! 

Who are some of your literary influences and why?

There are so many writers and books that I love.  Scott Fitzgerald for the sparkling and spikey quality of his prose, Philip Roth for the depth and humour of his male characters, Margaret Atwood for her range and longevity, Mary Gaitskill for her sharpness and brutality, Cormac McCarthy for his hefty take-a-deep-breath style… the list is very long.  But I also take influence from cinema and television and digital media… from the whole range of media that we have access to. 

If you weren't a writer, you would be....

Oh god, my imagination doesn’t really extend beyond writing, I’m afraid.  One thing I am profoundly not is entrepreneurial.  I think it would be interesting to be some kind of entrepreneur – successful, of course – some kind of business person, someone who sees commercial opportunities and then knows what to do in order to exploit that opportunity.  I am so not like that, and it would be very interesting!

Future plans?

I work in digital media a lot these days – see www.inanimatealice.com and www.flightpaths.net, among other projects.  I’ve also just finished a new novel (ALS came out here in the UK in 2006), ‘The Mistress of Nothing’, which will come out in the UK in 2009.  It’s a historical novel about two English women who go to live in Luxor, Egypt in 1864, based on a true story

Literature Chick Meets Robert Nisbet

• Short story versus novel.

I have always felt that the short story is a wonderful and potentially fruitful form and it’s something of a “writer’s form” too. So many practitioners bow much of the time to publishers’ (and readers’) demands for longer work but will return time and again to the short story.

At its best, the short story can combine the narrative interest of the novel with the sharpness and focus of the poem. It will tend to deal with one simple base or situation, and then to enlighten it with often a very simple image, one moment’s revelation. This whole sense of completeness will sparkle and resonate through every successful short story.

• Title

Downtrain comprises 20 short stories chosen from 75, and our short list of 30   contained a story called ‘Down Train’ which was eventually left out!

The phrase recurs though at the start of the second section of the story ‘Nightingale’. That story is one of the earliest-written in the book, and was and is important to me as a kind of manifesto, as within its pages a young writer offers his girl friend and  his readers a personal view of what writing in a small  community can mean. Many of my early stories, contained, as subject matter and motif, the image of train and road journeys, down West, back home to the small community.

• Sadness/truth

I am always a little surprised when my stories pick up this reaction, but they very often do. I don’t feel that I’m by nature a sad person – but am I a sad writer?

I tend to be on my guard against sentimentality and a facile optimism, but I do very much want to depict the “truth” of those things that really matter in life: loyalty, love, kindness. But, not wanting to be glib, I often try to set up tough situations and let the “good things” work their way through.

In the opening story in Downtrain, ‘Miss Grey of Market Street’, an elderly lady has to overcome all manner of personal prejudice if she is to forge a bond with a mentally retarded nephew, and this bond has to be mediated through a world of football and male company which the rather prim Miss Grey finds uncongenial. For that reason the ending of the story, the final bond, is very much an under-stated one. My own feeling is that that gives it more chance of being “true”.  

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My first reaction here is that if you thought the stories had the feel of non-fiction, then you must have found the narratives at very least credible, at best convincing. So I’m pleased with that.

I do think though that they embody a kind of “truth”, but they are essentially fiction, and not fact. Not one incident in the book actually happened in life and yet I flatter myself that all of them might have done, and I wanted the book to read as if they had done.

Each story is meant to embody and carry one main insight, one main mood – the nostalgia for boyhood of ‘Barber Shop Blues’, the mingled excitement and frustration of teenage beach holidays in ‘Jam Jars of Seaweed ..’. the mingling of earnestness and farce in the teaching world in ‘The Ladybird Room’. Twenty separate stories, twenty separate insights.

But all of us, as writers, perceive most clearly the differences between our works. Readers, I suspect, tend to be more aware of the similarities. So I am quite ready to believe that for you and other readers the 20 stories, the 20 insights, will cohere to form one view of things.

Maybe that view of things will constitute a kind of “truth”. But what I feel is most important is that at no stage did I attempt to write a book (a novel maybe or even a group of schematically-linked stories like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio) which was for one moment tilting at “the truth”. I started twenty times over, on twenty different stories, and I really did feel that each of those stories would offer in its own way, “a truth”, but not “the truth”. Surely a strenuous attempt at “the truth” would have been too self-aware? But “a truth” multiplied by 20? That seemed a good idea.

• Advice

Take your time. Don’t look for any tutorial or seminar to offer a quick fix or ever think of any writer, group or style as offering the one right way. Read plenty and reflect on the writing options there for you. Aim in time to develop your very own voice.

• Welsh/American

I suspect it may be possible to make general statements about Welsh writers vis-à-vis American ones, just as you can make statements about Jewish, Caribbean, gay, conceivably even women writers. But general statements rapidly become generalizations and start to distort. Basically there are good writers and bad writers, and the good ones always, absolutely always, have individual voices and are rather more than their respective sociologies.

• Influences

When I was 20, I was well on into a degree course which involved a specifically    critical training. I had assumed for some while that my future would be as a critic, teacher, reviewer maybe, and that the writing of original work was for some obscure and rarified group of people “out there”. Then I grew captivated by two short story writers, each writing out of a small community, and I grew enthralled by the thought that there was nothing in law or logic which forbade me from trying to do the same. The two writers were Dylan Thomas, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog       is set in the West Wales I knew so well, and John Steinbeck, notably those stories and novellas of his (The Long Valley, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men) set in the Salinas Valley.

I now read, enjoy and love the work of many, many fiction writers. In North America, Updike, Proulx, Munro, Atwood. Nearer home, William Trevor, Rose Tremain, Helen Dunmore, Penelope Lively. I read to enjoy essentially and I presume I’m being influenced, but it’s neither a conscious process nor an imitation

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LC:   Did you always know you would become a writer?

TH:   I think I knew from a relatively early age that I wanted to be a writer, even if that’s not quite the same thing as knowing I’d become one.  At about ten I also desperately wanted to be a professional cricket player but the years since have slowly led me to the crushing realisation that I am, and always have been, a pretty mediocre amateur one.  I hope I’ve done a bit better with my writing, or - to paraphrase Samuel Beckett - I’ve at least failed slightly better. 

I can actually remember quite vividly the moment when my own literary ambitions took root.  I was eleven years old and fishing with a friend, off the coast near my father’s farm, when I lost my last remaining lure.  Because my friend wouldn’t lend me one of his, I was forced to retire moodily to some nearby rocks and to fill up the time I started reading the book I was supposed to have read for school the next day.  The book was Of Mice and Men.  When I finished it I suddenly realised that my face was embarrassingly wet with tears and - after nervously glancing over to make sure my friend hadn’t witnessed this - I began to marvel at how words on a piece of paper could have created this effect on me.  These apparently mute lines of ink were more like the incantations of magic spells, and I guess in that moment I first became truly aware of the emotive, transformative, conjuring power of language.  And from then on I was well and truly hooked.

LC:   In your book “Send My Cold Bones Home,” you use language in such a poetic and visual way.  Do you see any difference in the ways American writers versus Welsh writers use language to tell a story?

TH:   I’m not certain if I do see any particular difference.  One of the great strengths of American literature is its ever-bubbling, ever-evolving stylistic variety - from the honed and minimalist, to the jaunty and vernacular, to the opulent and ornate.  For every Melville there’s a Twain, a Faulkner for a Hemmingway, an Updike for a Carver.  And I’d like to think the same held true for Welsh writing.  Besides, style is a very individual attribute, a personal signature, and its origins are usually drawn promiscuously from across national boundaries.  Books are border-crossings: reading them we find ourselves amongst all sorts of different accents and languages.  And when you eventually come to discover your own voice as a writer it often carries a trace of them, though hopefully transfigured by your own distinct imprint.  I suppose a writer’s voice is a bit like a travellers’ passport: a proof of individual identity, but at the same time stamped with all the places it’s been to.

LC:   In the book, the narrator, Jonathon, relates the story of Johnny Ifor, a shut in.  The characters mesh in such an emotional way.  How did you come up with the plot? The characters? 

TH:   Jonathon and Johnny Ifor - or at least the idea of them as characters - were vaguely based on two real people; one of whom I knew for many years, the other for about ten minutes.  When I was growing up there was an old man who used to live in a cottage near my grandparents’ place; a recluse who rarely ventured beyond his front door.  But because my grandmother helped him out I spent quite a lot of time in his cottage, listening to his stories and exotic family history - genealogy has always been a favourite topic in Wales.  I was intrigued by how far his imagination took him, that while anchored in his kitchen he was able to travel so freely.  And yet I don’t think he was ever entirely satisfied with this mental journeying; there was a yearning in him for the places he described so eloquently but could never go to.  The memory of him eventually became Johhny Ifor.  Jonathon was taken from a brief meeting in an airport in London, beside a baggage carousel.  I was waiting for my bags when I started chatting to a guy who’d just got back from Thailand, via Indonesia, Australia, and half the world it seemed.  When I asked where he was heading home to he just looked at me rather blankly.  He hadn’t thought about that he said.  But where’s home, I persisted.  And he said he wasn’t actually based anywhere.  He’d moved around a lot when he was a child, had lost touch with his father (he didn’t mention his mother), and had spent the last ten years almost continually travelling.  There wasn’t really anywhere that he thought of as home.  Later on I found that that thought haunted, and slightly frightened, me.  Johnny and Jonathon became mirror images of each other, reflections of the missing elements and lacks in their lives.  And that’s what draws them so closely together.

“Send My Cold Bones Home” also owes a great deal of its plot, themes and structure to the place where it’s set.  I come from an island off the north-west coast of Wales, called Ynys Mon or Anglesey, and in retrospect “Send My Cold Bones Homes” is very much an ‘island’ book.  Islands represent a paradoxical mix of isolation, detachment, and connection: the sea that cuts you off also links you to the wider world.  And on Ynys Mon this used to be ingrained into our way of life; you were either a farmer or a sailor, a stay-at-home, tied to a particular patch of land, or a sea-farer, intimate with all the far-flung ports of the globe.  The novel, moving as it does across continents and oceans while never quite leaving Johnny Ifor’s front door, definitely reflects this.     

 
LC:   

TH:   Yes, I was born in a small town called Atikokan in northern Ontario, where I lived for four years before moving to Wales.  My father met my mother when he left Wales to work in Canada, but when his father fell ill he returned to Wales with us to look after his family’s farm.

 
LC:   

TH:   I was brought up, and have lived most of my life, in Wales, so I guess it must define my identity to a certain degree, although at the same time I’m very conscious of my Canadian background as well.  My mother still has her family over there and I try to visit whenever I get the opportunity.  

It may be something to do with being a farmer’s son but I’ve always had an incredibly strong attachment to the Welsh landscape I grew up in.  For as long as I can remember I’ve been surrounded by grandparents, uncles, aunties, great-uncles and great-aunties, cousins, neighbours etc., who have filled my mind with stories about the place - ghost stories, family stories, folktales, tall tales, histories, legends - and this has given me an acute sense of the landscape as being profoundly textured and layered by story, narrative and history.  I think this influence has fed directly into my own writing, where place - and in particular the island of Ynys Mon - has tended to be a focal point.  In fact, you might say it has become the central character in all my fiction.

And yet I wouldn’t want to imagine that Wales, or my Welshness, necessarily ‘defined’ my writing.  On the one hand it was very important for me to learn that what Faulkner would call your ‘own little postage stamp of native soil’ was a sufficient, indeed inexhaustible, subject for fiction (I’ve now written three books about it and discovered that I’ve yet to even really scratch its surface).  But on the other hand, and this is something I probably also learnt from Faulkner, it’s equally important that that exploration of ‘native soil’ should be aiming towards a more universal set of human concerns and subjects.  By looking intensely and carefully at what’s just outside your door you can begin to apprehend and reveal much broader horizons.  I think writers must be continually wary of allowing national, or any other limited notion of identity, to restrict their vision.  Without wanting to sound too grandiose, literature should ideally strive for those moments of recognition that simultaneously capture and transcend those notions.  I want someone sitting reading my books in Greenland or China or India to not just get a sense of the special and particular nature of the place I’m writing about, but to think ‘yes, I can see something in this place or character or story that’s entirely familiar to me’.   

LC:   If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

TH:   I’d probably be fairly depressed.  Writing is a not altogether healthy compulsion for me.  But maybe if I wasn’t a writer then I wouldn’t mind being a rambling, late night radio DJ in some small, remote town - like that guy in Northern Exposure.

LC:   Who are your influences? Your favourite writers?

 
TH:   

LC:   What’s the one thing you dream of doing that you have not done so far?

TH:   I’d like to play cricket at Lord’s Cricket Ground, preferably against Australia.