1. You first started to write A Private Man while caring for your grandmother. How did her descent into dementia shape the novel and the writing process?
Poetics of dementia - cruel disease but also really profound to watch the end of someone’s life like that - started to talk about things she’d never mentioned before - had always been private about what happened in the years 1948-1963 and I found that fascinating. Her dementia made me a very active and collaborative listener, it refined my ear. The voice of the grandmother in the novel is very faithful to how she spoke.
2. A Private Man is inspired by your grandparents' story. How did you navigate blending family history with fiction?
The version of the story my mother was given as a teenager was very sparse: they told her it was an intellectual decision, a kind of protest against a repressive institution. My mum’s cousins, who were teenagers when it all went down, referred to this passionate love story, which I think always confused my mum. I always thought that made for a rich combination: it could be both.
3. Can you tell us a little bit about the importance of the intellectual chemistry between the lovers at the centre of your novel, Margaret and David?
I wanted to do justice to the fact that David has had this very all-male education: until he meets Margaret, he’s actually not met any woman his own age who is his intellectual equal, and I think he is totally bowled over by how sexy that is. I wanted, as well, to create a slow burn love story: the two main characters don’t actually meet until quite far into the book, so I wanted this sense of these two individuals freighted to meet and then smacking into each other. I spent a lot of time in writing this novel thinking about the erotic: I think we live in a hypersexualised culture, but actually a deeply unsexy one. I wanted to widen the examination of what the erotic is. A really good conversation can be erotic, when you’re picking up on everything your conversational partner is putting down, and it’s energising. It’s like a dance. At one point in the novel, when David and Margaret are apart, he reflects on how it feels as if his mind is missing its dancing partner, and I wanted to get a sense of the mind being fully embodied and vice versa.
4. Different forms of love and intimacy are really important to A Private Man, how did you find the right form to write about sex and love in your novel?
I was observing the publishing and general discourse boom around maternal cynicism: there have been so many memoirs lately, or podcasts, about how hard it is to be a mother. And that is valid and important work. But I was starting to feel we were reaching a bit of a saturation point, and the discussion always shorted back to “but I love my kids” or, maybe, at its most bold, “I love my kids but if I knew then what I know now that I’ve had them…”. In other words, that sugarcoating bothered me. My first experience of caring for someone was not for a child, it was for an elderly person at the end of their life. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but also the best. It is an extraordinary form of physical intimacy, and I wanted to do justice to that. So much of the way I write dementia in the novel has to do with what I call the poetics of it: there is also the intellectual intimacy of knowing someone really well, how they think, how they tend to react to certain situations or topics, what they might be trying to tell you. What is falling into the gaps, and how can we parse that gap in understanding between the two of us? So dementia became a kind of formal constraint. It helped with the structure of the novel and its narration.
I liked the idea that Adrian, the grandson, has this very embodied relationship with his grandmother, and then a very disembodied relationship with his mother, who is thousands of miles away, and when we hear from her in the novel it’s mostly over the phone. I thought that was a nice parallel to the concept of prayer as a form of address: talking to someone very far away.
5. Margaret, like your grandmother, is a passionate advocate for women’s rights during the early days of the women’s liberation movement. How do you feel your novel fits into the wider discourse around feminist ideals now?
I mean there’s the obvious response to that: that we are currently witnessing a backlash against gains in women’s reproductive rights around the world, and that is terrifying.
But I think also that one of the things we forget about so much of that progressive legislation, to do with sexuality and sexual, reproductive self-determination, is that it all hinges on the right to privacy. And so the re-encroachment on these rights is not just a women’s issue, it’s about much wider issues concerning all of us, and how we live with one another in the here and now.
6. A Private Man is set against the backdrop of the Second Vatican Council. Why did you choose to anchor the novel to this historical moment?
The Second Vatican Council is really interesting, because it acts a kind of litmus test for the decline of religion in our culture today. Chances are, if you weren’t raised Catholic, you don’t know what it is. But it was a huge deal: after the Second World War, the Catholic Church decided it might be time to modernise. The last time they had thought this deeply about their role in the world had been during the Counter-Reformation, when they decided to just double down on a very authoritarian mode. So what you have in the mid-20th century, is a medieval institution trying to lumber up into the light. But the men who are setting the terms of the debates - the cardinals - were all born in the 19th century and were already adults when the 20th c. began. And just think about everything that has changed in those four hundred years. Feudalism, the divine right of kings, laws around the person, habeas corpus, the rights of man. It’s nuts.
7. How did you approach writing a novel set between two timelines?
Out of necessity really. At first I wanted to write just the story set in the 50s and 60s, but it was just falling down. It needed some tension. I found that writing a story is a delicate act of making a cat’s cradle that then has to stand up of its own accord. I think also that I realised that I needed an avatar of myself (Adrian) who was raised largely in ignorance of religion - as a direct consequence of what happened to my grandparents - so as to write both for people like me, who didn’t know too much about religion, and those who do. My hope is that Adrian can act as a kind of guide for the former. For instance, the highly emotional response that many younger, non-religious people had to the Notre Dame fire was really interesting to me: what does that building represent, if you aren’t religious?
8. How did you use food – especially all the vivid descriptions of stone fruits – to explore the various relationships and forms of intimacy in the novel?
In writing this book, there were a lot of cheap tricks I could have pulled in terms of biblical allusion, but I didn’t want to. I did, however, want to play a little with that and be a bit meta and wink wink. And I wanted to write evocatively of food as just a test for myself. It was fun! But I suppose I also wanted to keep reflecting on the erotic, and how to live a fully embodied life.
