Sarah Perry, award-winning author of After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth, is a writer whose work I’ve admired for a long time. She kindly agreed to answer some of my questions:
1. I love your exploration of the importance of different kinds of friendship in both The Essex Serpent and Melmoth – what sparked your interest in this topic?
I think I have always been interested in different kinds of love and intimacy, not just romantic or sexual intimacy, which tends to get most of the column inches these days, so I was always keen to write about friendship. Then just before my debut came out I spent a month as writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library and did a little research around the friendships between Gladstone, Tennyson and Hallam, the young man for whom Tennyson wrote In Memoriam, and it really rekindled my interest and showed me how friendship used to be a very deep and intense topic for writers (such as Montaigne, whose essay ON FRIENDSHIP provides the epigram for The Essex Serpent).
2. Your novels are heavily influenced by the Gothic tradition; why do you think this genre is experiencing such a resurgence in popularity at the moment?
Historically I think the Gothic has had a tendency to be popular in the aftermath of periods of scientific development or extreme rationalism, and also at moments of political upheaval. The first Gothic novels were published at the tail end of the Enlightenment which kind of reduced the strangeness in the world through its scientific inquiry, and a little later was also a time of enormous unrest in Europe because of the French Revolution. Then you get another flowering of the Gothic in the aftermath of Darwin, and now again when the political picture is so fractured and uneasy, and when there is this deep mistrust and distaste around superstition and religion, we get another resurgence, which I think is very telling,
3. What is your proudest achievement as a writer?
I wrote an essay on pain for the Guardian in 2018 and it is my proudest moment partly because I think it’s technically the best thing I’ve done, but was also an act of courage, as for a long time I could not talk about the pain I had suffered without becoming quite distressed, so that essay marked a kind of physical and spiritual recovery I think.
4. Do you have any literary pet peeves?
I can’t bear the phrase ‘strong women characters’, for a number of reasons, not least that I dislike the idea that if a woman is to take centre stage in a novel she has to be ‘strong’, which is to say to demonstrate masculine qualities. If Hamlet and Lear get to be querulous, foolish, indecisive and weak, and still be titular heroes of great literary works, then so should women. It also absolutely staggers me that in 2019 we should still be greeting central, vital, fascinating women characters in novels with an element of surprised and pleasure.
5. Do you feel that your time at Chelmsford County High School for Girls shaped you as a writer and if so, how?
Certainly. We had a wonderful A level English teacher called Mr Zambellas who is pretty much legendary among my peers, and one hot day when it was really too warm to work we closed the blinds in our room and he read to us Tennyson’s The Lotos Eaters. The combination of the heady weather, that extraordinary poem and a teacher who trusted his students to understand what literature could do without having to explain it was amazing. I had always wanted to write, but I think that was a moment when I fully realised how powerful and beautiful the written word could be.
6. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?
I think I would tell her to hold on. I was quite a strange child with a very unusual background and often felt like an outsider, and wanted to look more like my classmates, wearing ordinary fashionable clothes and going to the places they went to. Of course now I understand that it was my strange background and my outsiderness that was all working towards my becoming a novelist…
7. Which three of your characters would you most like to go on a road trip with?
It’s tempting to say I would take Cora Seaborne but honestly I think I would strangle her on the second day. I would like to introduce Helen Franklin from Melmoth to Luke Garrett and Martha from The Essex Serpent: they could cheer her up, and I would enjoy their company, and even if we travelled somewhere dismal on a rainy day, the Imp would be very entertaining.
8. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Aside from ‘look after your back’ (which I mean quite seriously!) I always say to new writers that they should read as widely as possible. There is a real danger of getting obsessed with certain kinds of writing, or fetishizing particular writers, and then ending up writing imitations of the writing we admire most, or just wanting to live a kind of writerly life. The only real way to develop an authentic voice is to read widely and enthusiastically across all genres and forms, and ideally in translation and outside of one’s own ethnic or gender or sexual identity.
9. What can we expect from your next book?
I am working on something which draws a lot on my childhood and youth in a very strict, very old fashioned Christian fundamentalist church, which is quite a challenge for me and a real departure from what I have done before. I hope always to write a different book each time, and this one has so far proved by far the most challenging!
The Roguish Apostrophe 