Sophie Mackintosh: 'I never really set out to write a feminist book'
I stumbled across it online. And I remember just thinking it was such an interesting story, so I just filed it away in my head. But I kept thinking of it. I think it was something about the idea of a mass poisoning — in the sense how quickly a town could just tip over from one state to another and how it affected everyone.
There's something very terrifying about it and kind of primal, too. While a really good straightforward non-fiction book could've been written about it, and there has been stuff about it, I didn't feel like I was the right person to tell that story. I liked the freedom of the fiction form. The town is not even mentioned by name in the book. It kind of becomes [the story of] any town but it's still the story of the town if that makes sense. With fiction, I was free to interpret it in a way that was more about the relationships and the dynamics [people share], focusing on the elements that I wanted to explore, say, how quickly things can change, about the violence under the surface. Fiction gave me more freedom essentially to do what I was interested in doing.
240pp, ₹559; Hamish Hamilton Ltd
The opening sentences of the book signal a deep suspicion of the nature of reality, as from the get-go the book questions if an incident of the sort actually happened. Were you shining a light on the politics of remembering in the reconstruction of the incident? How challenging was it to depict this duality in the narration?
I wanted to signal the unreliability of the narrator immediately because so much of the book is about memory and desire. I think about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and also about the script of our life. So, Elodie [the baker's wife] is basically living in a fantasy and she's living in memories and they become almost more real than real life. I wanted to signal that sense that she is very much slipping between these worlds, between these [different] modes and [perhaps] we can't really trust her. She can spin us a good story but she's only telling us one part of it, right? I think it's really interesting that the narrative provides the possibility of remembering and misremembering.
There's a lot stylistically in the book in terms of repetition and stuff. And some reviewers have said that the book is a bit repetitive. That was done on purpose because I wanted it to give the sense of ruminating, going over and over and over something because you never remember anything the same way. You're always slightly misremembering, which changes the story each time. So, Elodie's memory is not the same memory that she originally had. Even though I was confronted by all the ways that this story could be told, it just felt a bit overwhelming for me. However, this ruminative effect was something that was really important for me.
Interestingly, all your books have this distinct style. Tell me a bit more about the playfulness of your writing style. According to GauZ' this is very basic to storytelling.
I suppose we all, as writers, have these things which are really precious to us. Things that we really treasure in our own writing or things that are our trademark. I would agree with GauZ' here: style is fundamental. I love style. I feel like I put style at the forefront of my stories too. I like to keep it a bit spare though, but with style, I try to bring about a distinct texture. Maybe it's just texture then? I like writing that has these textures. I like something that feels tactile and also something that feels very immersive. I feel like I'm always trying to find a balance between writing in a way that's overwritten and writing that's too sparse. But I'm very precise about how I do my sentences at the end. They've been refined a lot. So maybe precision? I don't know. It's not really pretentious, I think. [Laughs.]
You're right, the sentences are really chiselled. They say a lot but still conceal something. How do you strike a balance between repetition and sharp writing?
I think there's ambiguity there as well. Again, like you say, there is a lot left unsaid, too, in the story. I'm very interested in what we can leave out to let the reader fill in the gaps a little bit. It's nothing but just trusting the reader really. I feel like it's a collaborative effort when you're reading. You're having a bit of an adventure together.
There have been several narratives like the Blue Ticket – a dystopian world, policing of women and their sexuality, how they are treated and mistreated just because of their ability to reproduce. I was wondering what sort of literature may have inspired it. Is Margaret Atwood an influence on your writing?
I never really set out to write a feminist book or even specifically focus on women's stories. I think it was just the things that interested me and things I was thinking about. So, with The Water Cure, it was sisterhood, but then you have these patriarchal elements, too. With Blue Ticket, my second one, I was thinking about having a baby. So, I thought that I'm going to explore this in a larger social way but also a very weird way. I guess Cursed Bread was the one where it's kind of [based on a] true event. But still, I was like, oh, I'm drawn to desire and the idea of its role in this specific time. I guess I am very much interested in [exploring] the power of desire. And it manifests in different ways, something like female desire especially because it's often pathologized or is seen as something gentle or non-existent. And I'm like, no, it's ferocious and it'd be great to think about it as more like a propelling force.
304pp, ₹546; Doubleday
About the hero-worshipping of literary giants like McCarthy or Neil Gaiman – you may have read the Vanity Fair piece on how McCarthy exploited and appropriated Augusta Britt's real life. You've also written a piece on McCarthy. There are also allegations about Gaiman. What do you think of them now?
I don't want to support the work of someone who has done quite monstrous or bad things. I don't find it difficult to approach it objectively at all. In the UK, at the moment, you have a lot of very transphobic writers and journalists. In no way do I want to support them. I can't separate the artists from their work because it's like, well, how do we separate ourselves from the work? It's what we do as well. Maybe that's just something I feel.
This is your first time in India and being here at the Kerala Literature Festival. What sort of similarities and differences have you noted between Indian and English literature festivals?
It has been great being in India. And I think here versus in the UK, it feels more democratic. There are so many people coming to the talks, and it's much more accessible. I really loved seeing a lot of young people and school children attending the festival. This is something that we really don't get to witness in the UK, which is a shame. I wish we had something more like the literary festivals in India. Then, I think the array of topics has been broad and some interesting topics were platformed, too. The diversity here actually reflects that no one is afraid to shy away from difficult subjects. Not that we are in the UK either, but I think there were some really interesting discussions here on the legacy of colonialism, for example.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
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The Hindu
3 hours ago
- The Hindu
Review of Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Torrey Peters came into the spotlight with the tender and entertaining debut novel Detransition Baby (2021), in which three people — cis and trans — consider being parents in a queer domestic arrangement. This was one of the first novels by an out transperson released by one of the big publishing houses (Penguin Random House), and the novel was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. But before the publication of this novel, Peters was part of the erstwhile trans literary scene of Topside Press — an indie press publishing stories written by trans authors for trans readers — where she self-published two novellas. As she says in the podcast Between the Covers, the press created a 'Topside test' like the Bechdel test: was there literature where two trans people talked to each other about something other than their medical transition? Peters' interest was in writing about what trans people did in each other's company, rather than seeking empathy and acceptance from cisgender readers. The four novellas of her new book, Stag Dance, emerge from this era and decade of Peters' life, written, as she says in the acknowledgement, 'to puzzle out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition — otherwise known as ongoing trans life'. Experimenting with genres The novellas are of different lengths and genres — horror, coming-of-age romance, a Western and a short story. In 'The Masker', a young sissy joins a trans meet-up in Las Vegas to cruise, befriended by an older transwoman, Sally, and pursued by a fetishist who wears latex masks. The story shows us the messy, uncomfortable social dynamics of sissy culture, cross-dressing and feminisation, exploring boundaries and taboos around sexuality, and the fears, vulnerability and insecurities that come with them. In 'The Chaser', teenage roommates at a boys' boarding school get entangled in confused and lusty desire for one another, working out how to be boys or girls in a gendered world. Humans can no longer produce sex hormones in the post-apocalyptic science fiction story 'Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones', and are forced to choose their gender each time they inject themselves with hormones (in a transpocalypse). Flawed people In the titular novella, we meet a lonely hulk of a lumberjack, Babe Bunyan, who works and lives at an illegal logging operation in wintry Montana in the early 20th century. He wants to be courted as a woman in a ritual stag dance that takes place at the camp, where men can vie for the attention of other men by pinning a cloth triangle to their groins. Bunyan wishes to be courted as a woman, 'a desire unbidden by me... a desire that, without my desiring it to, made itself manifest', struggling with himself and ridiculed by others as he has a profoundly trans experience. The stories in Stag Dance are astonishing in their range and craft, heartbreaking, provocative, acid and funny. They are full of flawed and intense human connections, and crackle with the possibilities of gender and performance. Peters pushes the boundaries of what trans writing can mean, showing us how people try to understand who they are to themselves, and what they can become. It is a book that refuses to pigeonhole trans people, asking, if all of us could choose, what gender would we be? The Mysuru-based writer and editor covers books, queerness, and mental health.
Hindustan Times
6 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Yael van der Wouden: 'History also serves as an unfinished thought'
On winning the Women's Prize for Fiction, you note how you stand on the shoulders of queer and trans people before you. Please share the significance of the prize for you? Author Yael van der Wouden (Courtesy It's a huge honour, first and foremost. The word 'woman' as a possessive for me hasn't always been a straightforward one, but my love for stories always has, as has my appreciation for platforms that elevate stories written from the margins. Being acknowledged in this way and read so kindly by the judges — and by so many people — has been a gift, and fully unreal. I've been reading along with the lists for years and can hardly believe I have a little Bessy [the bronze statuette] living in my house now. The other day, I caught a glimpse of my new paperback cover on the counter, and now it has the green circle and the word 'winner' on it. I had my first true, 'Oh my God' moment where the realisation briefly hit home. And then it was gone, and I went back to peeling ginger. 272pp, ₹799; Viking The Safekeep asks readers to reconsider what they own, and discusses people's possessiveness about objects and land. It also raises a wider question about the idea of theft. Were you deliberately invoking these propositions, or did it happen as the story progressed? I come from both a European Jewish heritage and a non-Jewish, Dutch heritage. I have grandparents who fled the war, and grandparents who had to live through the German occupation. I grew up in Israel/Palestine, in a city shaped by colonialism and built on the remnants of destroyed Palestinian villages that go unnamed and unremembered in contemporary Israeli memory. The question of choices made in war, of theft and of land and how people dealt with those choices after all was said and done, is a question that sits at the core of who I am, my position in history. I've been wanting to write something about that for a long time, and for a while, I figured that something would probably end up being an essay or a long read. The idea for the novel came to me almost as a surprise! But once it did, and once I saw the scope of it play out in my mind, the writing became almost compulsive. It's a conversation I'm having with myself, a meditation on homes, on desire, on who benefits from apologies — the person apologising, or the one who is there to receive? Reading The Safekeep, I couldn't help but think of the connections Olivia Laing makes in The Garden Against Time between gardens and post-war real-life stories. Then, I read your essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, where you mention reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. The consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden explains humans' origins in many cultures. There's, however, something unmistakably erotic about that act. Gardens are also private little paradises where a lot of pivotal scenes in your novel are set, alongside the unabashed, unapologetic eating of the fruit, with its core and all. Am I making puzzling connections here, or were gardens and erotica on your mind, too, while working on this book? Oh, you're absolutely not making puzzling connections here — that's as bang on the money as it gets. My background in academics was a niche within a niche: in Comparative Literature, I was doing Memory Studies, and within that, Landscape Studies. That's a very complicated way of saying: I was writing about and looking at the ways national identity-making and memory-making define the way we shape our environment. One of my favourite lectures to give was one on the history of the suburban lawn, where we trace the path of a lawn from being a symbol of wealth (consider the renaissance Venetian garden, and compare it to your run-of-the-mill monastic garden: the former says, 'I have all this land, and I don't even need to use it for the production of food, that's how wealthy I am!', and the latter says, 'I'll use every piece of this garden to feed and maintain my community'), and how a patch of grass — a plant kept in infancy by its continuous mowing, so it's never allowed to grow into maturity or procreate — has therein become a marker of control—of nature, of wealth. Run that through the mill of industrialism and the making of the suburban city, the creation of the individual under capitalism, and what you end up with is the middle-class home with its small square of well-kept grass to tell the neighbours: I too have money, I too am in control. And yet nature pushes back: continuous weeds to pull out, the roots that grow too deep and the seeds that spread too quickly. The garden is nature's glorious excess, and our relationship to it is one of restraint, of nipping the one to allow the other. There's something compulsive and almost fetishistic in that, isn't there? Certainly, a kind of eroticism in the pretending that we do when we keep a garden, the same theatre of control that we apply to bodies, to desire. In leveraging the diary Eva maintains to further the story, were you trying to invoke the most popular historical record of WWII, the diary of Anne Frank? Eva's recollections are markedly different, for they're not manipulated by hope but document what the diarist has been robbed of; entries are almost tainted by a feeling of revenge. Then, there's your history with Frank, when, looking at you, children in school chanted Anne Frank! so much that the 'nickname stuck'. Initially, when I started writing the novel, I didn't mean for it to have a diary chapter at all! I knew that there needed to come a moment of reveal for Eva, where we find out her true thoughts and desires and how she ended up at the house. My first idea of how to do that was very convoluted and involved a set of initials and an aunt and a trip to the local library — things that bored me just thinking about having to write them. So, I put them out of my mind and began writing the first chapters, figuring that I'd solve that piece of the puzzle when I got there. I realised in that process that Eva had a book with her, and that book was there so that she could take note of certain things and not use it much else, which is how I wrote that at first. The diary solution was a sudden one and one that I definitely struggled with for a few whiny days — I didn't want to take that route, worried I was going to fall into a gimmicky trap, worried indeed over the Anne Frank associations! I wanted to move away from conventional war narratives in many ways (another thread I desperately wanted to avoid: most war stories tend to focus on middle-class and wealthy families, because those are the families that tended to be able to afford the cost of hiding in someone's attic. Those are the ones who more often survived, because there was a delay in how long it took for them to get deported. There's a whole class element to who survived the camps that I rarely see spoken of, and I wanted that woven into the novel so badly … and simply couldn't make it work within the plot). What became clear, though, was that there was my will and then there was the story's desire towards the path of least resistance — a clean, neat story where no one ever leaves the house, and all the explanations needed are there already. In the end, Eva's diary chapter ended up being my favourite chapter to write. I wrote the first half on the six-hour train ride to Berlin, and the second on the return. It was such a relief to get to cast off Isabel's restrictive narrative voice, but especially to get to do it all in the form of a grand reveal. Much of it was cathartic: after a hundred pages of not-knowing, to get to kick down the door and scream out everything that's been happening below the surface. It scratched an itch I often have when in conversation with non-Jewish Dutch people, when the war comes up: this desire to shout, 'You don't even know what you don't know!' The choosing of what went in and what would go was a more collected, restrained exercise; a lot of the research didn't make it in, and I had to be careful and make sure that it still sounded like a diary, not a mouthpiece for academic research — a list of facts. When I sent it in to my editors for a first round of edits, I was sure she'd say that half of it had to go. Surprisingly, they both said: more of this chapter, more of Eva's voice. Great news for me, of course, I had plenty more to say! One of the most satisfying experiences of reading The Safekeep was its deliberate suppression of the characters' train of thought, as if verbalising what's on their minds would give finality, a real shape to their thoughts. Interestingly, as these words hung in the air, someone else would pick them up and carry the conversation forward, as if a co-creation of something mutually thought was being signalled. In the incompleteness of the dialogues, you perhaps wanted to test the thresholds these people could cross or wanted to respect. In that sense, could you reflect on the dialogue writing in the book? The primary rule with Isabel was — she cannot have access. Not to her thoughts, her desires, her feelings. When she feels anything at all, she starts pinching at herself; when she feels desire, she redirects it into anger. When she thinks something that in any way goes deeper than an inch below the surface, she cuts herself off. The moment Isabel has access to herself, that's when we, as her audience, can stop wondering why she is the way she is — and the tension is broken. Isabel herself believes she knows herself, and that fantasy is only maintained as long as she doesn't dig too deep. So much of the novel was writing out bits of dialogue or thoughts and then backspacing them out of existence immediately because 'Isabel would not know this about herself.' I wanted the unfinished nature of thoughts and dialogue to mimic also what it feels like to exist in an environment where history also serves as an unfinished thought. READ MORE: Review: The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden Finally, in celebrating the fierce fire-like desire of a bodily want, you note multiple times that a body doesn't exist unless it's forced into being in the moment during an act of love. While same-sex desires have been considered deviant, there's something utterly mechanical but also philosophical about the love between Isabel and Eva that you describe in the book. To me, so much of that has to do with the body as it's seen and unseen. Both Isabel and Eva enter into the narrative furious with how the world perceives them — they feel utterly invisible in their true form, and only visible as a projection. Isabel is seen by her brothers as an extension of their mother; Eva is seen by her lovers as a mirror image of whatever they want her to be. Neither woman is considered in full until they are pitted against each other. And what they see, at first, is something ugly. Both women despise one another, but there's at least the relief of being despised for who you are, rather than loved for who you're not. The physicality of their desire becomes an extension of that: the body responds to being perceived, especially through Isabel's perspective, which is so deeply tactile. From the very first page, you see how intensely she experiences the world. Everything is vibrant and green, and every smell is overpowering, and every sound is too loud. A breeze could knock the poor woman over! She exists in her body, and the body overwhelms her. The physicality she finds with Eva is both about truth and perception, and it's also about channelling the very tactile way she exists in the world into something physical — touch. Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
Hindustan Times
09-07-2025
- Hindustan Times
Sophie Mackintosh: 'I never really set out to write a feminist book'
Your novel Cursed Bread was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. How did you learn about the mass-poisoning incident that is the subject of the novel? Author Sophie Mackintosh (Saurabh Sharma) I stumbled across it online. And I remember just thinking it was such an interesting story, so I just filed it away in my head. But I kept thinking of it. I think it was something about the idea of a mass poisoning — in the sense how quickly a town could just tip over from one state to another and how it affected everyone. There's something very terrifying about it and kind of primal, too. While a really good straightforward non-fiction book could've been written about it, and there has been stuff about it, I didn't feel like I was the right person to tell that story. I liked the freedom of the fiction form. The town is not even mentioned by name in the book. It kind of becomes [the story of] any town but it's still the story of the town if that makes sense. With fiction, I was free to interpret it in a way that was more about the relationships and the dynamics [people share], focusing on the elements that I wanted to explore, say, how quickly things can change, about the violence under the surface. Fiction gave me more freedom essentially to do what I was interested in doing. 240pp, ₹559; Hamish Hamilton Ltd The opening sentences of the book signal a deep suspicion of the nature of reality, as from the get-go the book questions if an incident of the sort actually happened. Were you shining a light on the politics of remembering in the reconstruction of the incident? How challenging was it to depict this duality in the narration? I wanted to signal the unreliability of the narrator immediately because so much of the book is about memory and desire. I think about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and also about the script of our life. So, Elodie [the baker's wife] is basically living in a fantasy and she's living in memories and they become almost more real than real life. I wanted to signal that sense that she is very much slipping between these worlds, between these [different] modes and [perhaps] we can't really trust her. She can spin us a good story but she's only telling us one part of it, right? I think it's really interesting that the narrative provides the possibility of remembering and misremembering. There's a lot stylistically in the book in terms of repetition and stuff. And some reviewers have said that the book is a bit repetitive. That was done on purpose because I wanted it to give the sense of ruminating, going over and over and over something because you never remember anything the same way. You're always slightly misremembering, which changes the story each time. So, Elodie's memory is not the same memory that she originally had. Even though I was confronted by all the ways that this story could be told, it just felt a bit overwhelming for me. However, this ruminative effect was something that was really important for me. Interestingly, all your books have this distinct style. Tell me a bit more about the playfulness of your writing style. According to GauZ' this is very basic to storytelling. I suppose we all, as writers, have these things which are really precious to us. Things that we really treasure in our own writing or things that are our trademark. I would agree with GauZ' here: style is fundamental. I love style. I feel like I put style at the forefront of my stories too. I like to keep it a bit spare though, but with style, I try to bring about a distinct texture. Maybe it's just texture then? I like writing that has these textures. I like something that feels tactile and also something that feels very immersive. I feel like I'm always trying to find a balance between writing in a way that's overwritten and writing that's too sparse. But I'm very precise about how I do my sentences at the end. They've been refined a lot. So maybe precision? I don't know. It's not really pretentious, I think. [Laughs.] You're right, the sentences are really chiselled. They say a lot but still conceal something. How do you strike a balance between repetition and sharp writing? I think there's ambiguity there as well. Again, like you say, there is a lot left unsaid, too, in the story. I'm very interested in what we can leave out to let the reader fill in the gaps a little bit. It's nothing but just trusting the reader really. I feel like it's a collaborative effort when you're reading. You're having a bit of an adventure together. There have been several narratives like the Blue Ticket – a dystopian world, policing of women and their sexuality, how they are treated and mistreated just because of their ability to reproduce. I was wondering what sort of literature may have inspired it. Is Margaret Atwood an influence on your writing? I never really set out to write a feminist book or even specifically focus on women's stories. I think it was just the things that interested me and things I was thinking about. So, with The Water Cure, it was sisterhood, but then you have these patriarchal elements, too. With Blue Ticket, my second one, I was thinking about having a baby. So, I thought that I'm going to explore this in a larger social way but also a very weird way. I guess Cursed Bread was the one where it's kind of [based on a] true event. But still, I was like, oh, I'm drawn to desire and the idea of its role in this specific time. I guess I am very much interested in [exploring] the power of desire. And it manifests in different ways, something like female desire especially because it's often pathologized or is seen as something gentle or non-existent. And I'm like, no, it's ferocious and it'd be great to think about it as more like a propelling force. 304pp, ₹546; Doubleday About the hero-worshipping of literary giants like McCarthy or Neil Gaiman – you may have read the Vanity Fair piece on how McCarthy exploited and appropriated Augusta Britt's real life. You've also written a piece on McCarthy. There are also allegations about Gaiman. What do you think of them now? I don't want to support the work of someone who has done quite monstrous or bad things. I don't find it difficult to approach it objectively at all. In the UK, at the moment, you have a lot of very transphobic writers and journalists. In no way do I want to support them. I can't separate the artists from their work because it's like, well, how do we separate ourselves from the work? It's what we do as well. Maybe that's just something I feel. This is your first time in India and being here at the Kerala Literature Festival. What sort of similarities and differences have you noted between Indian and English literature festivals? It has been great being in India. And I think here versus in the UK, it feels more democratic. There are so many people coming to the talks, and it's much more accessible. I really loved seeing a lot of young people and school children attending the festival. This is something that we really don't get to witness in the UK, which is a shame. I wish we had something more like the literary festivals in India. Then, I think the array of topics has been broad and some interesting topics were platformed, too. The diversity here actually reflects that no one is afraid to shy away from difficult subjects. Not that we are in the UK either, but I think there were some really interesting discussions here on the legacy of colonialism, for example. Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
