I am no arbiter of cool, but I think anyone would have a difficult time denying the title to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. For everything they had in common as California natives of the same era writing about many of the same places and people, these two writers had just as many stark contrasts. Even their versions of cool operate in different realms. Didion’s is captured in the many black-and-white photos of her that proliferate in the literary world, from tote bags to bookmarks to nearly every single cover of any book written about her. Hers is a severe, sentence-fragment kind of cool. Babitz’s cool is the charmer’s cool: gregarious, seductive, biting, intimidating, hilarious, sexy. Didion’s cool was quiet and physically unassuming, which she used to her advantage in her reportage. Babitz’s cool was boisterous and socially dominating—the kind of cool that would drink you under the table and then go home with you.
Another contrast: Didion has remained a prominent figure, though she’s become almost ubiquitous in the past two decades, whereas Babitz’s career followed a much (much) rockier path. In fact, until 2015, when an article in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik sparked renewed interest in Babitz’s work, many of her books were out of print. Anolik then expanded that piece into Hollywood’s Eve, a hybrid biography of Babitz’s life and career spliced together with Anolik’s reflections on her own relationship with Babitz in the aftermath of the Vanity Fair attention. Then, a few years after Hollywood’s Eve, Babitz passed away (one week before Didion did), and Anolik discovered a box of materials she hadn’t seen before, which included a letter Babitz wrote to Didion, a note so telling and revealing and evocative that Anolik had to return to her subject a third time, only now with a compelling foil. The result is Didion & Babitz, truly the culmination of Anolik’s already excellent work on Babitz as well as a brilliantly cutting examination of the complicated legacy of Didion.
Anolik uses the phrase “a man’s woman” to describe both of her subjects in Didion & Babitz, and it struck me as ironic that these two figures could be, as personalities, so appealing to men and yet, as writers, mostly seem to appeal to women. At the very least, much of the commodification of Didion’s and Babitz’s cool is aimed at women. Didion in particular is so universally known that pretty much any woman embarking on a literary career will inevitably be faced, again and again, with her essays. Katie Roiphe, in In Praise of Messy Lives, puts it this way: “I don’t think I have ever walked into the home of a female writer, aspiring writer, newspaper reporter, or women’s magazine editor and not found, somewhere on the shelves, a row of Joan Didion books.” In Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour puts it a little differently: “I have read Didion my whole life and have been told I should worship Didion my whole life.”
Understandably, many women have a complicated relationship with Didion. But what relationship, if any, do men have with her? And what about Babitz, whose reputation as a “groupie” often discounts her credibility? Is it because of the “Cool Girl” label? Do men think these writers will only reach women? Or are men reluctant to learn the truth about how women think, live, believe? Are they afraid of what they’ll learn? About women? About themselves?
When Didion and Babitz started out, they entered a hostile literary environment where some men spoke of women writers like this:
At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.
Norman Mailer, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind the fact that he wrote this in 1959, the same year Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House and Lorraine Hansberry premiered A Raisin in the Sun—Mailer manages to toss pretty much any non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-Jewish person into his pool of also-wrotes. This is the secret core of prejudice: It is never isolated. It will always indict more types of people under its purview. In this way, bigotry is all-inclusive.
Let’s start with Didion. Her literary career began officially in 1956, when as a senior at UC Berkeley she won the “Prix de Paris” essay contest administered by Vogue, where she would work as a copywriter until the mid-sixties. Anolik points out that although Didion liked to wax proletariat, as in her claim that “the people with whom I preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations,” she was, as Anolik writes, “every inch the all-American bourgeois girl.” She was also decidedly ambitious. At the end of eighth grade, she gave the graduation speech in front of her classmates and their families. In high school, she sat on the Sophomore Ball committee, worked on the yearbook staff, was elected to the student council, and hobnobbed with the children of elites, such as Nina Warren, the daughter of California’s then-governor Earl Warren (of the Warren Commission fame). At Berkeley, she joined a sorority, where she befriended Barbara Brown, the daughter of Pat Brown, another California governor. Also during this period, she wrote her first short stories, reported for the school’s newspaper (including an interview with the poet W.H. Auden), and won a place in the same guest-editor program at Mademoiselle that Sylvia Plath had won two years before, which she would later immortalise in The Bell Jar.
At Vogue and later Life and The Saturday Evening Post, Didion launched a career as an essayist and journalist, though her true ambition lay in fiction. Indeed, her first book was a novel, Run River, which debuted in 1963, but it wasn’t until the publication of her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem that Didion began to establish herself as a major writer and generational voice. As the sixties gave way to the seventies, she was counted among the ranks of the New Journalists, an umbrella term for magazine writers (from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson to Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin) who challenged the conventions of journalistic style and form. For decades, she worked as a Hollywood screenwriter with her husband and co-writer, John Gregory Dunne, though few of their screenplays were actually filmed; they were more prolific as script doctors. She was known for her detached style, often referred to as “cool,” which works perfectly in concert with the black-and-white Julian Wasser photos of her that feature on the covers of any book written about her.
From a certain perspective, one might reasonably assume that the Didion so described—native of the West Coast, working in Hollywood, participating in a nonfiction revolution, an epitome of Cool wearing sunglasses in ads for French luxury brands—would lean, or even swing, toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. But although her allegiances changed and evolved throughout her long career, she tended, on the whole, toward the right. Her perspective has been described alternately as “a Goldwater Republican” (Bret Easton Ellis), “a dyed-in-the-wool Republican” (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar), and “among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America” (Thomas Mallon) on the one hand, while on the other she’s been called an “apostate” (along with John Leonard) by her former editor William F. Buckley. Additionally, one of her iconic black-and-white portraits was emblazoned on a tote bag for the website Literary Hub, a decidedly liberal publication. She’s also been described as a feminist by writer Evelyn McDonnell; “not a feminist, my ass,” is how she puts it. Writers as various as the conservative firebrand Christopher Hitchens, the pop culture writer Alana Massey, and The New Yorker critic Hilton Als have considered themselves devotees.
That’s because Didion isn’t so easy to pin down politically. She herself characterised her politics as “pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics,” the “same as they were when I was voting for [Barry] Goldwater.” She dismissed feminism in the seventies, refused to read Virginia Woolf, and once declared, “I agree with every single thing that Norman Mailer puts down on paper” and that he “is one of the few people who can write about sex without embarrassing me.” She could, at times, espouse a by-your-own-bootstraps ideology we still hear right-wingers spout today. Yet she could also accurately diagnose the media’s racist groupthink about the Central Park Five in 1989, see through the Republicans’ mission to impeach Bill Clinton by any means, and generally capture the duplicitous realpolitik of twentieth-century America. During the rise of Ronald Reagan, a disillusioned Didion registered as a Democrat—“the first member of my family (and perhaps in my generation still the only member) to do so”—only to discover that the switch “did not involve taking a markedly different view on any issue.”
In American politics, Didion remained her most pitiless and unforgiving; her repeated mention of Goldwater seems spiked with equal parts nostalgia and resentment. In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion writes, “It was clear for example by 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.” In 2001, she remarked in an interview with L.A. Weekly, “I don’t know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” Her disillusionment with the American political system might well be her greatest gift to the men of today: By falling out of line with mainstream conservatism while never fully embracing conventional liberalism, Didion maintained an outsider status that both elevated her analysis and made her career, retrospectively, a benchmark against which to measure the right’s cyclical descent into fascism.
Here is how a contemporary man should approach reading Didion to get the very most out of the experience: One can follow Didion’s trajectory, her merciless observation of American political and cultural life, as a narrative of how American conservatism has radically shifted since the sixties. Not that the Republicans of this era were moral paragons by any stretch, but there is one hell of a contrast between Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex and Donald Trump nakedly trumpeting it. If Didion was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican” in her early career, how does she compare to our present-day diehards? How do her conclusions (as vague or as lofty as they may be at times) about American power and money, about the futility of our electoral process, the crass, calculated cynicism of it—how do these square with conservative thought now?
Reading Didion, then, is to read through our recent history as much as it is to read about it. Men can read her essays, her reportage, her immaculate nonfiction for Didion’s own perspective, but what’s most productive is to read her against everyone else.
Eve Babitz is another story altogether. Her Cool is the playful, flamboyant type. Her writing brims with intelligence and insight, but its lessons and insights focus on individual human foibles rather than macro concerns about society as a whole. She was an It Girl, a groupie, a hanger-on, and a legendary charmer. In her writing, which may not possess the same skill as Didion’s, we find a frank and guileless account of a generation from a unique perspective—one that’s usually overlooked, if not downright disdained. It’s most succinctly–albeit grossly–put by Julian Wasser, the photographer behind Didion’s iconic images. Wasser also shot an iconic image featuring Babitz: a photo of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve. Anolik adroitly uses Wasser’s characterisation of the two experiences to typify the contrast between Didion’s and Babitz’s reputations:
When I asked Wasser if he’d instructed Joan on how to dress or where to stand during their session, he replied, his tone reverent, “With a girl like Joan, you just don’t tell her what to do.” When I asked him why he’d chosen Eve for the Duchamp photo, he replied, his tone contemptuous, “She was a piece of ass.”
“A piece of ass” like Babitz, though, could gain access to areas even unassuming reporters like Didion could not. She didn’t hobnob with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities to get their stories; rather, she told stories about hobnobbing with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities because that’s how she lived. They were her stories.
Babitz had an enormous pool to draw from. Her mother was an artist, and her father was a studio violinist. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. As a child growing up in Hollywood (she would attend Hollywood High), she was exposed to the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bernard Herrmann, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bertrand Russell. In her early twenties, Babitz wrote, she was “alive with groupie fervour, wanting to fuck my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip.” She was, in Anolik’s wonderful phrasing, “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat.”
Babitz would go on to do things like design the album cover for Buffalo Springfield Again; introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí; appear as an extra in The Godfather Part II; and sleep with the likes of Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Jackson Browne, and Joseph Heller. She chronicled some of these scenes, in her best work, with stunning fluency, despite the fact that she “didn’t want to be a writer; it would scare men.” This line comes from the title story of her collection Black Swans, and she elaborates on her view of writers: “I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.” A bit of deflection, to be sure, as Babitz cared so deeply about but felt so inadequate for literary creation that minor discouragements delayed her apprenticeship. Her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t come out until 1974, even though she’d completed a draft of a novel “about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood” 10 years earlier, when she was 20.
Her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., is her best book, as it displays most fully the kind of uncomfortable truths Babitz could so casually wield. The whole book, a brief prefatory note explains, is essentially an attempt by Eve, the narrator, to “get this one I’m in love with” to read her writing by making it all about him. In reality, this was the artist Paul Ruscha; in the book, his name is Shawn. In Didion & Babitz, Anolik describes Slow Days as depicting Los Angeles with “a total lack of interest in approving or disapproving of its characters’ morals.” This, ultimately, is where the great value of Babitz’s work lies. Her stories and essays come without any moralising and without any attempts to mould reality into a recognizable shape. Yet so much of her writing has an air of truth to it, and an authority in its vision. Her assessments of herself and those in her orbit could be brutal, even unkind—but the truth is in the character Eve’s firm belief in them. Babitz’s devastatingly frank voice and savage wit, in life and in prose, still hit you with a pang of recognition, only she doesn’t instruct you what to do with the feeling. For instance, when Anolik’s Vanity Fair piece renewed interest in Babitz’s work, leading to reprints of her books, her line to Anolik was this: “It used to be only men who liked me. Now it’s only girls.”
In her final years (she died in 2021), Babitz veered into right-wing paranoia and delusion, ranting to Anolik on the phone about how she was having an affair with Donald Trump (which obviously wasn’t true). Anolik told me how she worried that Babitz would run into trouble on the streets of West Hollywood, where she lived. She wanted to don one of those bright red MAGA hats, “so I’d buy her Chinese MAGA hats—you know, MAGA in Chinese characters,” Anolik said, in order to obscure her rabid Trumpism without her knowing. “She loved those hats.” She lived in filth, the stench so bad Anolik could barely stand it. “I think there was a dead cat in her place,” she told me, “a dead something.” But despite the tragic nature of where she ended up, Babitz’s record of late-twentieth-century America is a gift from someone canny enough and charming enough to gain entry to its most rarefied spaces.
“If a man is looking for insights and angles into women,” Anolik told me, “I’d recommend Eve, if only because I believe that Eve, at her best—by which I mean, in Slow Days, Fast Company, her one masterpiece—was a better translator of female sensations and stratagems. In Slow Days, Eve offers to readers a study of feminine consciousness that has extraordinary charm and verve, not to mention expansiveness."
In her first book on Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, Anolik categorized the writer with the New Journalists, which struck me as arguable, perhaps, but not really accurate. When I asked her about it, she was quick to say that she no longer sees it this way. “I’m so glad I got a second crack at Eve,” she said, because for Anolik, Babitz now falls into the tradition of the “artist-adventuress,” an “American Colette.” I completely agree. Her antecedents were figures like the Russian writer Teffi and the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her contemporaries the art groupies Ultra Violet and Candy Darling, and her descendants Gawker’s Emily Gould and the poet/essayist Kim Addonizio. These writers were best in the short form, didn’t always produce large catalogues of work, and suffered, personally and professionally, from cultures dismissing them as “pieces of ass,” as gossips, as gushing TMI-coded dilettantes.
Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women.
Here, at last, is the most important lesson Babitz can teach men: Women who live unconventionally, women who drink and do drugs, women who fuck, women who talk, women who reject you at the bar, and women who make art out of all of those things—their inner lives are just as deep as yours, if not deeper. Their perspectives show them a side of society men rarely glimpse: the barrage of dismissal and obstruction and condemnation, and the constant threat of violence and subjugation. Babitz, who was as big a fan of feminism as Didion, was a victim of this herself. She internalized a belief that women shouldn’t write because it might put off men. Can you imagine if one of the twentieth century’s most lively and original chroniclers never wrote a word because of the insecurities of men?
I say these are the lessons from Didion and Babitz that men might learn, but after last week’s election results, I don’t have much faith in American men, no matter how many writers not like them we expose them to. Women have told men about the danger they regularly feel. They’ve written at length about sexism, chauvinism, the patriarchy; they’ve campaigned for suffrage, bodily autonomy, marital agency, sexual freedom, and financial equity. Men know these things. Have known these things. And yet here we are, with a nation of men for whom rampant misogyny and sexual predation are not disqualifying. Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women. In a 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, Didion remarked that Stewart’s success was not that of “a woman who made the best of traditional skills” but rather “the story that has historically encouraged women, even as it has threatened men.” For all the strides made by women in the past 60 years, we’re still living, sadly, in Norman Mailer’s America.
So men can go ahead and read Didion and Babitz as much as they want, but I can’t help recalling something Babitz, ever the cutting realist, said after she went through a horrifically painful fire accident in the late nineties: “People think this will make me a better person. It won’t.”
Originally published on Esquire US
Richard Ayoade’s arms are crossed. The faded sitcom star will remain in this quasi-foetal pose for the duration of our interview, an interview to which he has only agreed “under protest”. Supposedly, the panel show “regular” is meant to be talking to me about his book, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a somewhat breathless biography of the little-remembered dramatist. Does he appreciate the irony, I gently prod, that he is seeking to promote a biography of another man who is difficult to interview?
“Oh, Hughes wasn’t against interviews,” he says, the nasal bleat even more shrill without the compression of broadcast television. “Hughes would talk and talk. He just refused to explain himself.” Whereas Ayoade seems little more than an inconsequential collection of borrowed tics and insincere self-effacement, the playwright to whom he refers was all gravitas, depth and mystery. Hughes’s first play, Platform, a verbal dance between a beatnik and a bourgeois, debuted in 1960, but it was his television series The Harauld Hughes Half Hour Play (1965) that made him a household name.
I ask Ayoade if he has long been an admirer. “Well,” he says, managing to make even that single syllable a sedative, “since I was 14 or so.” Because I was clearly asking him whether he started engaging with absurdist post-modernism at primary school. In a sickening passage of auto-hagiography, Ayoade recalls his first encounter with the work of Hughes in the opening chapter of The Unfinished Harauld Hughes:
I was panning for classics in a second-hand bookshop when I looked up to see the stress-pinked eyes of the bookshop owner, Keith, a piece of white chocolate softening in his ghostly hands.
“You have a double,” he said.
This used to happen often. People would say I reminded them of someone they knew. What they tended to mean was that they had once met another person whom they couldn’t confidently categorise in terms of ethnicity—a variation on “Where are you from, originally?”
I said either “Oh” or “Huh?” or “Right”, one of those barely communicative cul-de-sacs designed to bring conversation to a close, but Keith persisted.
“Look under ‘H’,” he said. “‘H’ for Hughes.”
I held up a copy of “Birthday Letters”.
“Not that windswept bastard. Harauld. H. A. R. A. U. L. D. The mother was Welsh.”
I found the name on a spine. “Harauld Hughes: The Two-Hander Trilogy”.
“Look on the back,” Keith said.
I looked. I saw the author’s picture.
I had a double. Even in profile, the resemblance was remarkable. It was me.
Ayoade reaches for a reference, as if being a stammering quotebox of aphorisms amounts to a personality
It seems fitting that Ayoade’s biography, framed as a“quest” to discover the “real” Harauld Hughes (did anyone go on a quest to find the “unreal”?) reads less as inquiry, and more as a wallow in his own filth. Even a turgid would-be stylist like Ayoade (sleep easy, Nabakov, your crown is unclaimed) is unable to rob the story of Hughes of all readability, though. His is a fascinating tale. The child of an “oft-lapsed” nun and an unknown Nigerian, Harauld Hughes was raised in Elephant and Castle by Clifton “Monkey” Perch, a former flame of Hughes’s mother and father of their twin boys (and therefore Hughes’s half-brothers), Mickie and Colin. Hughes discovered his gift for dialogue and began to write a raft of potent, brutal plays in which wounded men prowl the stage, spouting invective and double talk. He should be remembered alongside Beckett, Pinter and Osborne. “Why isn’t he?” I ask.
When in doubt, Ayoade reaches for a reference, as if being a stammering quotebox for the aphorisms of others amounts to a personality. “Orson Welles said posterity is vulgar,” he screeches. “You never quite know who will be remembered by history.”
“Do you think you will be remembered by history?”I ask him.
“I hope not,” he lies. “In any case, I don’t think I need worry.” He’s right, it is we who need worry.
“So do you feel it’s just bad luck—that Hughes could have as easily entered the pantheon as—say—James Joyce or Virginia Woolf ?”
“I think Hughes may have been a victim of his own concision,” Ayoade offers.
Ah yes, how many brave men have we lost to concision? On he drizzles...
“Hughes only wrote one play, Dependence, that came anywhere close to being full-length.” Ayoade saying “full-length” causes me to dry heave. He doesn’t notice.
“Many of his other works are barely 15 minutes, especially if performed at a clip, so they’re hard to programme. I think that’s why they haven’t entered the repertoire.”
But surely, they could be bundled into one large piece—say an evening of three of his works.
“They used to do that more often. As I mentioned,” he says with the lack of grace that seems to be his stock in trade, “the first of his plays I read was a volume called The Two-Hander Trilogy.” If you want me to remember what you say, try being less forgettable.
“Did you change your views on Harauld Hughes during the writing of your book?”
“Well, I didn’t really have a view about him before...”
Oh. My. God.
“He’s a brilliant writer—he has his flaws of course—but I feel the real reason Hughes has disappeared is that he stopped publishing. His last play was in 1972, his last screenplay was only a few years after that, and that film fell apart.”
Ayoade slows, sensing difficult territory, or perhaps he’s having a sugar crash after his second hot chocolate
The face of whoever will hire him is talking about the film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, one of the more notorious “lost” films in British cinema history, and a central strand in Ayoade’s book. Bedlam was to be directed by Leslie Francis, the man behind the film And...?! (1969), which won the award for most innovatively punctuated film at the Berlinale. The shoot apparently ended in a full physical fight between Hughes and his half-brother Mickie Perch (its producer), culminating in an escape by helicopter.
“And of course, Hughes met Lady Virginia...”
Ayoade slows, sensing difficult territory, or perhaps he’s having a sugar crash after his second hot chocolate. “I think he didn’t feel the same need for global validation.” Maybe next time, Ayoade, counterfeiting balance, could write something similarly patronising about the countless women artists made mute by egomaniacal husbands.
Hughes’s widow, Lady Virginia Lovilocke, has not responded with what could be called enthusiasm to Ayoade’s biography, terming it “the worst kind of populist drivel”.
Does her assessment sting?
“I’m just pleased she thinks it could be popular,” Ayoade quips. Perhaps, one day, history will prove them both wrong, vulgar as that verdict might seem.
THE EARLY ONE: PLATFORM (1960)
An actress, on a railway platform at night, sees her bourgeois assumptions shattered when she encounters a straight-talking rocker.
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE LATE WORK: DEPENDENCE (1972)
In a post-apocalyptic world, only publishers remain. But what is there to publish? Wins the Evening Standard Award for the Year’s Longest Play in Proportion to Its Script. The Times describes it as“more pause than play” and “spectacularly hermetic”.
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE EARLY ONE:
THE ESPECIALLY WAYWARD GIRL (1967)
A rebellious girl is sent to a reform school that has a hidden secret: the pupils are addicted to human blood (otherwise it’sa relatively good school)! Find it in “The Models Trilogy” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE LATE MASTERPIECE: THE DEADLY GUST (1973)When a glamorous female novelist travels to a notoriously windy island, she finds herself battling gusts both external and internal. Find it in “Four Films” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
“THE BREAKDOWN”
With its haunting opening couplet:
Have you broken down?
(I have broken down.)
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
Hughes’s legendary acceptance address on receiving the 1986 Euripides Prize for Short Form Drama, in which he tells us, during a speech, that his plays must speak for themselves. Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber ○
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade is out now.
Originally published on Esquire UK
Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she starred as Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see: human) woman, bumbling and grasping through midlife while single-parenting her teenage son, Otis. But even though the role was pure fiction, something about Milburn’s funny, loving energy made people want to talk to Anderson about sex. For years, her literary agent received inquiries from publishers and editors about interviews she might do, confessions she might write. For a long time, she put them off. But then her editor suggested something more communal: other people, submitting anonymously. Anderson was finally convinced by the idea of a large and varied group. “We had many different versions,” she says. “And then I realised what would be most beautiful and affecting was to hear from as many different women as we could.”
Last year, Anderson’s publisher, Bloomsbury, set up an online portal. The actress posted a call: “Whatever your background, whomever you do or don’t sleep with, whether you’re eighteen or eighty: if you identify as a woman, I want to hear from you.” Eight thousand women started to transcribe their fantasies, each beginning with “Dear Gillian.” Eight hundred pressed submit. The result is Want: 350 pages of anonymous sex fantasies selected and ordered by Anderson.
At 56, Anderson has the ease and grace of a woman who has always been beautiful, used to being wanted, but now she’s perhaps more comfortable than ever in the particularity of her own skin—perhaps, too, her own wants. Her hair pulled back loosely on our Zoom call, she talks emphatically, thoughtfully, leans forward, back, runs her hands wantonly over her face and hair. I ask her about how discussing this topic as a public person who would also like to keep a good amount of her life private could get prickly. “I’m trying for cryptically but honestly,” she says.
Anderson has made a career out of playing women who inhabit adjectives that might make people wince or cringe, that would almost certainly make a particular type of suitor swipe left instead of right: tough and cold and hard and sharp. Except, on Anderson, they’re hot.
For nine years, starting in her early 20s, she played The X-Files’ Agent Scully. Bristly and cerebral, Scully was the antithesis of her giggly, often teenage female counterparts on other early nineties shows—she hardly ever smiled. In 2000, Anderson portrayed (desperate, angling) Lily Bart in a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. In 2005, Bleak House’s (proud and furtive) Lady Dedlock, then A Doll's House’s (wily and determined) Nora in London’s West End in 2009. Later, Miss Havisham, Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt. A master of a certain type of subtlety—an eyebrow raise, a shifted lip—Anderson can appear blank and placid on the surface while somehow brimming with life underneath.
In 2013, Anderson took on the role of detective Stella Gibson on The Fall. Steely and brazen, Stella propositions a new coworker and near stranger in the first episode. In Want, Anderson writes about this role as pivotal: “Stella was effortlessly confident physically, intellectually, and sexually.” It felt, she writes, like “stepping into my sexual power in my 40s.”
Want, Anderson says, is all about women stepping into their sexual power. Much like inhabiting a made-up role, the book is filled not with aberrant acts these women are confessing but with imaginings they’ve conjured and have now written down and shared. With the added fact of anonymity, each contribution functions as an opportunity to stretch, play, explore, and create, without the threat or pressure of real-life consequences. “This is fantasy’s ultimate offering,” Anderson writes in the book’s introduction. “The chance to live momentarily outside of reality, where rules and expectations don’t exist, where we can indulge our deepest desires and submit absolutely with unreserved abandon.”
The results, some spanning pages and some a single sentence, are both what you’d expect and not: fingers, fists, cunts, clit, anal. Anderson reports that “threesomes, moresomes and thensomes” were the most prevalent fantasies she received. She says she thought there’d be more violence. But then, she adds, “Who knows what that says about me?”
One woman in Want fantasises about her husband’s brother; another, a colleague, a married man who laid bricks next to her house for months and, on his last day, gave her his sweatshirt; another, a beautiful woman she saw once and never again. Many—often women who are contentedly ensconced in heterosexual marriages or so they say—have fantasies about their female friends.
There are bondage and entrapment fantasies, fantasies of submission, of role-swapping, of risky, public sex. “I am a pleasure station!” one woman writes, ecstatic. Some are particularly invested in setting: “I often imagine it happening near a waterfall in a lush forest,” another writes. One wants to be laid out naked in a medical theatre, to have her vagina examined by a crowd of students. “They are allowed to look and touch whatever they like, all for the purposes of studying the female body,” she writes. ”I reach orgasm with them all watching professionally and taking notes.”
There’s a delight in reading these pages. It’s a woman, many, none of whom you know well, sitting a little bit too close to you. You can smell their sweat, the specific sour of their breath. You want to move away but can’t. Maybe one grabs hold of your upper arm, and then she says something to you, not about her kids, her job, whatever other obligation might prove to you that she’s worthy, prove to you she’s a woman in the way everything in life has told you that she should be, but instead: She tells you what she wants.
The book is broken into twelve sections, including “Rough and Raw,” “The Captive,” “Strangers,” and “Power and Submission.” Anderson introduces each new section and writes at the beginning of “The Watcher and The Watched,” “If I had my druthers, I would move about the world invisibly. And, indeed, at the very heart of all my fantasies, I am the watcher not the watched, or sometimes, I switch between watcher and participant, but I am most definitely the director.” This is what fantasy offers each of these women, what it offers all of us: a chance to completely control both how and who you want, the terms, the setting, the conditions, and also, their willingness to want you back. This feels particularly rich for women, as our yearnings—in sex, but in plenty of other settings as well—have often been contingent on whether we might be wanted first. We are, historically, the objects, not the subjects—desperate to be wanted, often quick to forget that we can (or not) want back.
Halfway through our conversation, Anderson tells me a perfect (awful) story about this: As part of Want’s promotional tour, her team is setting up pink “vox boxes” where women can enter and listen to some of the fantasies from Want, then share their own. One day, a man approached and asked about these boxes. “I’ve never thought about women’s pleasure before,” the man said.
What men—many of them kind and loving partners in other aspects of their lives—haven’t thought about, have failed to ask about, have just never been told, is everywhere inside this book. “My husband isn’t attracted to me sexually,” one woman writes. “Most of the time sex for me is trying to please him with oral and then when he is done, he leaves the room and I finish myself off with a vibrator.” Another says, “I grew up in a sex-positive household, nothing was taboo. But now I’m almost 30 and I cannot seem to express my secret desires to my husband. It feels… embarrassing and scary.”
Anderson made her own anonymous contribution to Want, but she’s mum even on which section it belongs to. She wanted to be wholly folded into what she describes as the “melody” of how each of these contributions moves from one to the next. “I think I did assume so many different things about the act of writing down my own fantasy, how easy it would be, based on how easy I find it to speak about things,” she says, “but the act of writing felt like it was drawing something out, not just the truth of something, but something even more intimate than I’m used to revealing on a daily basis.”
This made her feel that much more impressed by the “courageous act” of these women who shared their fantasies. To have sat down, pulled out something truer maybe than they even knew or could access in their actual lives, and sent it to her: “You felt honoured,” she says, “to read some of these outpourings, and amazed at the level of thought and elegance, and, you know, rawness, not just in terms of close to the skin, close to the surface, but raw in terms of just an outpouring of one’s truth or experience.”
She keeps using the word courage, and it seems clear that the opposite of this word is fear and shame. Those feelings are also everywhere in these letters: women writing anonymously, writing for and to themselves but still couching these outpourings in apology (“it’s embarrassing to admit”; “I’m ashamed to say”; “I can hardly believe I’m writing this”).
“What is very revealing,” says Anderson, “are the areas that we are the same. Where, no matter the fantasy, the takeaway is the need for intimacy, the need to be desired, to be seen, a desire to be held, to be comforted, to be safe.” What felt equally, almost stunningly true, she says, was the prevalence of shame.
In the final section, “gently, gently,” Anderson writes, “we also received a number of letters that spoke of just wanting to feel seen, expressing a desire for romance, affection, and softness, and a longing for a strong connection to another person.”
“Is it crazy that my wildest sexual fantasy is to feel safe?” one woman writes. “I’m almost too scared to write this,” writes another. “An articulation of a need that fills me with embarrassment. An inadequate fantasy. So small and insignificant, pathetic almost, yet writing it down in black and white fills me with terror…I want to be kissed.” It was this section, I told Anderson, that I found the most moving, not only because of how straightforward each fantasy felt but also because it further amplified that one need not have lurid orgiastic desires, to feel shame and terror for wanting at all.
One of the biggest questions Anderson says she had, reading through the 800,000 words of submissions she and her editors received for the project, was why more of these women haven’t shared their fantasies with their partners. And why did so many of those 8,000 women who started their submissions fail to press send? “It’s obvious these women are incredibly powerful, articulate, and capable, but they wouldn’t dream of sharing their fantasies with their long-term partner,” she tells me. She says at those same pink boxes they set up for women to talk about their fantasies, in private if they chose, what most surprised her was “the amount of people who just won’t talk.”
The seed text for Want was Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Gardens, a similar compilation of women’s deepest fantasies about sex and bodies and want. Of course, 1973 was also the year Roe v Wade was decided, while 2022 was the year it was overturned. As Anderson speaks more, both about the power of women sharing their stories and about so many women’s reticence, I can’t help but think of this. Many of us, as women, don’t speak our wants because we have clear memories in our bodies of all those other times when we have stood up and tried to want, when we have perhaps briefly gotten, but then someone has told us never mind, someone has told us to sit the fuck back down.
Anderson talks about how she thinks the collective force of this book is a sort of primal scream of female yearning. But, I ask her, isn’t one of the problems with us screaming just how few people seem willing to listen when we do? In her introduction to “gently, gently,” she quotes her fictional Sex Education son, Otis. “It’s time to stop passively hearing and start actively listening,” Otis said on the show. How, I wonder, does a person actively listen to a woman’s primal screams?
“There is an active platform right now,” she says, “to tell it like it is.”
For years before My Secret Gardens landed in 1973, one of the foundational aspects of the women’s movement was Consciousness Raising meetings: women in groups who got together in living rooms, kitchens, and apartments and talked to one another about their lives and fears and wants. As in all movements, there were different factions and battles, and sometimes these groups broke up. But also, women got together, and for the first time, many began to realise that what felt like their own individual problem, shame, or secret was actually much more widely felt, much more commonly seen and understood. Often, they began to see how their individual shame, secret, or problem was not due to their own shameful failings but was instead a product of the systems under which they lived.
“The act of creating,” says Anderson, “the act of writing these things down, is birthing something. It’s strange and beautiful and wonderful and dark and light and sensuous and dangerous. It’s awakening these things which you can store away and keep to yourself, and not necessarily think of as a creative act until someone hands you the key, and asks you to write it down, be a part of this.”
Often, when women scream, no one listens. Often, people hear but do not listen actively enough to change or give or shift. Want is one of many contributions to the roiling, rumbling primal scream that so many women attempt, then shy away from, then disavow, then, in desperation, return to and try again. It’s a reminder that there’s a different power in screaming that is communal. That in listening actively to what we want ourselves, giving brief private allowance to conjure what might be our most shameful yearnings, collecting and offering them to one another, we might find new ways to seek more control and power in the world.
Originally published on Esquire US
A new Tana French novel is an event, as it has been since her debut In the Woods (2007) established her astonishing command of the crime genre, specifically the police procedural. Five more novels in the Dublin Murder Squad series followed, cementing and extending French’s formidable reputation for literary-minded crime.
As good as those books are, French’s most recent efforts are of even greater interest to me, as they experiment with different genre forms. The Witch Elm (2018) was a psychological thriller with a wholly unreliable narrator, while The Searcher (2020) was, in her words, “mystery software running on Western hardware.” French isn’t one to rest on laurels when she could be challenging herself.
So it was a surprise and a delight to discover that her new novel, The Hunter, is a follow-up to The Searcher—one that takes some narrative cues from the Dublin Murder Squad books but from the inside out. Two years have passed since the events of The Searcher, and now, retired Chicago PD detective Cal Hooper has eased into small-town West Ireland life, taking comfort in his growing relationship with local widow Lena Dunne and his mentorship of Trey Reddy, now 15 and coming into her own. Then Trey’s father, Johnny Reddy, returns to summer-sweltering Ardnakelty after years away in London, bringing with him a moneyed stranger and talk of a gold rush. That stirring up the town with the prospect of unexpected riches leads to murder is inevitable but it’s the way French unspools that inevitability—languidly, until it’s almost too late—that makes The Hunter so memorable.
French and I spoke over Zoom about writing an unexpected follow-up, why The Hunter is a climate novel, surprising connections to the earlier Dublin Murder Squad books, and looking for “gold in them thar hills.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: After finishing The Searcher, did you know that you would be writing a sequel? Was Cal Hooper intended to be a series character? Because I didn’t think so the first time I read The Searcher, but when I read it again in advance of our conversation, I started to think otherwise.
TANA FRENCH: You’re right, The Searcher was originally intended to be a standalone. I’d just handed [the novel] in when the pandemic hit. So there was a while in there where I wasn’t doing any writing because I had two little kids at home doing distance learning. And, like everybody else, my subconscious was basically a smoking crater while I tried to figure out what on earth was going on. And you kind of need your subconscious, if you're a writer—it does a lot of the work. So I didn't do anything for a while. And when I emerged from that and started thinking about the next book, I started realising that I wanted to do more with that place and that world I'd set up because The Searcher is a kind of mystery software running on Western hardware.
I like that phrase a lot.
It was playing with the resonances between the Western, which I had just discovered, and the West of Ireland—the things they have in common and the ways that the Western tropes map quite well onto that West of Ireland setting. In The Searcher, I was playing with things like the stranger in town who comes in, shifts things, and acts as a catalyst. I just felt like there were more Western tropes that would map really well onto that world.
A world like that, that little village of Ardnakelty—it's so packed with secrets and stories that it felt like there was more candy in the piñata, with more stories to tell. And you know the gold rush trope? It fits well with Ireland! Oddly enough, there is, in fact, a long history of very serious gold archaeological artefacts being found in Ireland. Clearly, there's been gold being dug up in Ireland for a long time. There have been little mini gold rushes over the centuries, and some fairly recent ones, too—people are still out there in the border mountains going, “I think there might be [some] gold here.” So, it doesn't actually seem too implausible for a character to suggest that there might be “gold in them thar hills.”
Another classic Western trope is revenge. Because it never turns out to be a simple thing. It's never, “You track down the building where you shoot him, you're done.” It's always morally ambiguous, morally complex, something that doesn't turn out exactly the way you plan. So I wanted to play a little bit with that. It seemed to me that Trey had every reason and every right to need some kind of revenge. It also seemed to me that Cal and Trey’s relationship had been left at kind of an interesting place where it was developing, but fragile. If somebody came in and shook it up, that balance would be disrupted. What would happen? The obvious person to shake it up was Trey’s absent dad, Johnny—he’s the kind of guy who if he came home, would bring with him a big “get rich quick” scheme.
I have so many follow-up questions about this. But the first thing I thought of was that with respect to the Gold Rush, you're also writing this in Ireland, which went through the Celtic Tiger. In a way, that was kind of a gold rush.
Yeah, it kind of was—it had the same almost hysterical fanatical passion involved in it. And also the sense of unpredictability: we were being told that this was all under control, that the housing boom was going to keep on going forever. So, you could absolutely pay top whack for something in the middle of nowhere that you were buying off plans, and it would all be fine because, in five years, you could turn ten times the price. So, it was presented as this very modern, very controlled economic phenomenon. But the mood around it wasn't like that at all. It was this frenzy, this absolute feeding frenzy. People queued for days to buy those houses off plans, with newspapers reporting on a 10 per cent increase overnight, practically. So, it had that gold rush feel. And when it all went wrong, it had that psychologically gutting feeling where people had the ground ripped out from under them. They were left with nothing because they had staked everything on their little gold rush. So, yeah, you're right. I hadn't actually thought about that.
Why set The Hunter two years after the end of The Searcher? To give Cal, Trey, and Lena some time and space to have some stable time together? You even have a line about how Cal and the town “have reached an equilibrium, amicable if not particularly trusting, maintained with care and a certain amount of caution on all sides.”
Two years felt about right. Partly for the relationships to have started to build solid foundations but they haven’t really had time to become concrete. So, it's still very disruptive. But it’s also about Cal's relationship with the town because this isn't like The Searcher, which was Cal’s story. This is a story about the relationship between three people: Cal, Trey and Lena. I wanted their relationships to have time to blossom and spread out and develop the intricacies that make them interesting. But I also wanted the relationship between Carl and the town to shift, too.
In The Searcher, he’s a newcomer. He's just wandered in here from America. Nobody knows him, which in a small town in Ireland is a huge thing. And he knows nobody. So he is the outsider coming into this closed community. But in The Hunter, Cal is in a kind of strange borderland where he's an accepted outsider; he knows the place and they have an established relationship. That gives a different kind of power. He has the power of knowing the town and knowing its dynamics, but he’s not bound by its rules in the same way as an insider.
There are so many evocative descriptions in The Hunter of the blistering summer heat and how it almost bends everyone (particularly everyone in Ardnakelty) to its will. As Cal says, “Whenever it stays hot too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.” Would you call The Hunter a climate novel?
Oh, god, yeah. Especially in a location like this, because I wanted a sense of some kind of unsettling, almost unnatural pressure on the characters. And around here, especially in the West [of Ireland], a heat wave does that. We're not used to them. The natural range for Ireland is from on the cold side to a bit warm. Once the temperature hit 25 degrees in 2016, people went nuts.
To the characters in this book—not the three main ones but to most of the rest of them—it's more than that. These are farmers. So this isn't just psychologically unsettling; this has a concrete effect on their livelihoods. This is something that's going to affect the whole lambing season. It's affecting their crops; it's affecting the feed they've got for their cattle over the winter. So that's one of the reasons why they're so susceptible to Johnny Reddy’s wonderful “get rich quick” scheme when he comes in with it because they're in a very vulnerable place. They're on the defensive and feeling under threat—not just psychologically but financially. So it does end up being a crucial factor in the way the plot unfolds, as well as the atmosphere.
Once there’s a murder, it’s almost as if The Hunter gets into a familiar Murder Squad-like gear, particularly in the interrogation scenes. Did it feel like slipping on an old pair of gloves to write these particular scenes or did they feel new because of different characters being involved?
The main thing that was interesting was that I was doing it from the reverse perspective from the Dublin Murder Squad. Here, it’s from the perspective of the people being interrogated, who go in there with their own agendas, each one of them different at different times and in different interrogations. So, it's not about the detectives trying to bring everything together, find the truth and make everything fit neatly into place. It's about the characters trying to manage the situation so that it goes in a direction that works for them—which, for all of them, oddly, has very little to do with the murder. And who did it? None of the three main characters actually care that much. They care much more about their relationships, their world and Trey ending up basically okay, as unscathed as possible by this whole situation. So the detective is not some crusader for truth and justice but just this obstacle that they have to get past and manoeuvre and navigate in a way that will let things come out okay.
The detective is not some crusader for truth and justice, but just this obstacle.
I mean, on the one hand, the cop is working the case but it's much more interesting that they are working the cop. They're also working on each other and themselves, to try to keep that equilibrium that they fought so hard to maintain for the last two years so that it doesn't literally and metaphorically blow up in their face.
They are just trying to deal more with what this means to everyone around the murder, rather than who’s done it. Murder has a huge impact. There are ripple effects on everyone who's touched by it, from the detective to the community, to the people who knew the victim and people who knew the murderer. Here they're trying to deal with that ripple effect, rather than with the murder itself.
A couple more questions before we sign off. First, are you still going to inhabit this world for your next book? Or are you going to give Cal, Trey and Lena a break?
It's early days because I'm just getting stuck into something new. But at the moment, what I'm getting stuck into is the third in what's turning out to be a trilogy, which I did not expect.
The Hunter definitely has the “second book in a trilogy” feel to it.
Yeah, I just feel like that arc needs completing somehow. All the characters have been moving on an arc in their relationships with each other and with the place, and that arc is not complete—one more should do it.
I’m obligated to ask: do you feel like, at some point, the Dublin Murder Squad is going to return in some capacity? Or is it just that these were the books of your earlier years, and now you have so many other stories to tell? I'm curious what your current relationship is with those earlier books.
I don't know—I don't rule it out, because I don't rule anything out. But I've come to realise that as a writer, I'm only happy when I'm a little bit outside my comfort zone. I like feeling that I've bitten off just a little more than I may be able to chew and that I'm not in any danger of falling into the trap of writing the same book over and over. Faithful Place has elements of noir and The Likeness has elements of the Gothic. But overall, the [Dublin Murder Squad] books were all from the same perspective of the detective undergoing an investigation and trying to reimpose order on the chaos that is murder. It was starting to feel, I mean, not easy. It's never easy but it was starting to feel like something I knew how to do.
It sounds like you prefer, as a writer, to live in the discomfort than to take on something that you're familiar with, even if you can push against those constraints.
Yeah. I need to feel like I'm learning a new skill as I do this every time. And unless I'm doing that, I'm worried that I'm somehow shortchanging people who aren't giving them what I gave them before.
But what about what you're giving yourself?
Oh, I just love doing this! [laughs]
Originally published on Esquire US
Pooja Nansi was appointed festival director for the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) in 2019. During her tenure, Nansi bolstered the outreach to a diverse demographic, which included young people and individuals with special needs. She has enriched the multilingual aspect of the SWF with literary groups dedicated to various mother tongues. When the pandemic hit, Nansi brought the festival to the digital space.
With 2023 being the final year for Nansi as festival director, we conducted an exit interview of sorts about her time at SWF, guilty pleasures and the challenges of parenthood.
(Note: This interview took place last year. Nansi was recently awarded the Knights of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture to celebrate their "significant impact on cultural cooperation" between Singapore and France.)
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: Was five years always on the plan for you?
POOJA NANSI: I think the typical tenure is four years but with the pandemic and because the festival moved from being housed within National Arts Council to the Art House Limited, I was asked to stay on, just to help stabilise things. That’s why five years. It’s much longer than I expected.
ESQ: What do you feel you have accomplished during your tenure?
PN: I mean, we can only do what we can do with the time that we have. There’s always more to do, right? I had two big goals I needed to see fulfilled because I knew this tenure was always limited. I wanted to increase the space to include a variety of participants and audiences. And to draw in young people who never came to the festival before. So I definitely think we have achieved that to the best of our capacity. If you ask me, there’s always more that can be done. But I am proud of what we’ve achieved in five years.
ESQ: What was the pandemic like for you?
PN: Can we not talk about the pandemic years? [laughs]
ESQ: Was anyone even in the mood for a lit fest?
PN: It was weird because there was very little time to be reflective, right? In the early days of the pandemic, we all thought that this was happening somewhere else. No one imagined that the whole world would shut down. Sometime in April, the decision was made to go digital. And I remembered the team and I going like, we have no idea what that means. A festival is a gathering of people, right? It’s a physical gathering of bodies. So, at the time, we were thrown in the deep end and there was a steep learning curve to overcome.
Whether everyone was in the mood is a good question. But I think it was sorely needed. Props to the Arts Council for realising that because people needed to hold on to something right and writers and thinkers of our time are what people would return to when things get difficult. People needed to connect with other people and the festival provided a space for that. It turned out to be quite a necessary space.
ESQ: Esquire used to work with Yong Shu Hoong and he’s the next director for SWF. Were you involved in the selection process?
PN: I’m not actually involved in the appointment so I can’t speak to that. That’s all done by Arts House Limited and the National Arts Council.
ESQ: Any advice for him?
PN: I’ve known Shu Hoong for a long time because we are both poets in the scene. And, of course, I’ve been to many of his SUBtext sessions as a young poet, he’s always been very generous to me. I don’t believe in giving advice. I think Shu Hoong is more than equipped to take this on and he’s going to give it his own stamp. So it’s not so much advice but I hope he enjoys his time as much as I did.
ESQ: So what will you do now?
PN: I’ve been working on my PhD, which had been on hold for a long time owing to the pandemic. And I had a baby two weeks before the festival during the pandemic. So that was an... interesting year... working everything out. I’m taking a bit of a break from that. So my immediate goal is to focus on the PhD and complete it.
And I would like to return to my writing. I really missed that and then going back to some level of teaching creative writing. I wanna spend time with my daughter and learn to perfect making my mother’s dal. Y’know, things that I haven’t had time to do before.
ESQ: Does having a kid change you as a person; as a writer? I have a child and now, at the movies, I can't bear to watch scenes of children getting hurt.
PN: Yeah, it's a biological thing.
ESQ: Yeah. Because we're hotwired now to protect our young, right?
PN: How old is your child?
ESQ: Four in two months.
PN: My daughter just turned three. So, how has she impacted me? Thanks for asking that. People always ask how being your mother made it more difficult, which carries a lot of presumptions. I'll be really honest, I had a lot of anxiety when I found out that I was pregnant. I was really concerned about how having a child would affect my ability and my freedom to work as a writer and a thinker. But I can honestly say it's just expanded me as a human being beyond my wildest imagining. The clichés are true. Being a parent is the hardest and best job in the world. Your capacity to love expands, your empathy swells. You've become invested in a world that your kid is gonna grow up in.
ESQ: Do you think that has something to do with your openness to provide a space for a younger crowd?
PN: I conceptualised the youth fringe in 2019 before I had my daughter. I think that comes from just being a teacher at heart. I used to teach full-time for 10 years in MOE. I've worked with teenagers for my whole working life; I love working with young people because they're going to take over the world.
ESQ: Do you feel that the younger crowd aren't given the credit they deserve?
PN: The "younger generation"... that's a huge demographic. Some people have far more resources than others. It's not a monolith of young people that we're talking about. Some young people go to certain kinds of schools or come from certain kinds of families and backgrounds and have a lot of access and exposure to the arts. And then there's an entire demographic that, people seem to think, does not need exposure to the arts. That has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Literature teaches you how to know things. It teaches you how to learn. And I feel that we all deserve to have those tools regardless of where we come from. The art scene is potentially, one of the most democratic spaces we can offer a young person, if we come at it correctly and with the right intentionality.
ESQ: Like the Youth Fringe segment for the Singapore Writer's Fest.
PN: It wasn’t about, oh, let’s have a programme for young people. Very early on, I was very clear with my programming team that we cannot presume what young people want. That happens a lot in schools, where we prescribe to young people what they should be reading, what they should want. But what I wanted to know from young people is, what do you want to see in a literary space? Why aren’t you coming and what would make you attend?
We did a bunch of focus groups where we went into schools and asked young people about what they are reading, what is exciting to you? We collected all those data points and gathered youth curators who suggested programmes for us. The trick with that was to trust them, even though the programmes seemed outlandish.
ESQ: What seemed outlandish at the time?
PN: Wattpad. A lot of us were like, what on earth is Wattpad? But that’s what young people are writing and reading on. Even though we didn’t have any idea what it was, we had to trust that this was what young people were excited about. It was kind of magical because they came in droves. Yesterday, I was at an event and we had to turn people away. I was really upset but the book signing was packed. A stampede of young kids ran down with their little origami hearts to give to the author. I see things like this so it’s absolutely untrue that young people are not excited or that they’re apathetic. It’s just that half of the time, we don’t listen and we don’t meet them at where they are. And by that, I mean the average 14-year-old today won’t pick up Great Expectations. They’re engaging in the digital book space, like Booktalk, BookTube... it’s changing the literary landscape for the better.
ESQ: I heard there was a complaint about the inclusion of AI.
PN: Oh yes. For the Opening Debate. [Editor’s note: The festival kickstarts with an Opening Debate with topics that are tongue-in-cheek. This year’s topic was, “This House Believes AI is the Better Writer”.]
ESQ: I understand that the debate is meant to be facetious but people took it the wrong way.
PN: I dunno if it’s taken the “wrong way”. I think those views are valid. But if I’m understanding you correctly, it was a kind of outrage about the fact that a literary festival would feature ChatGPT, right? Someone wrote that AI is unethical because it mines other people’s labour without compensation. That it’s exploitative and unethical. How can a literary scene for writers give space to ChatGPT?
So we responded that the entire premise of the debate and the concern of the debate is precisely that. And we always believe in letting writers have the last word. So we wanted to let writers speak on it. And the plot twist of the debate was that ChatGPT was operated by a writer. If people had come to the debate, they would have realised that the debate was really funny, really clever and actually really poignant.
To me, AI is inevitable. It’s going to be a part of our future. There is anxiety but I think it was a beautiful thing for us as a community of writers and readers to sit with that anxiety and it was comforting to hear writers say, how can we learn to coexist and still use this technology to make our lives better rather than be controlled by it? That was the entire ensuing conversation.
ESQ: I always look at it as a good jumping point for discussion. Instead of just-
PN: Shutting it down.
ESQ: Precisely. We can talk about it. Maybe set up parameters for the use of AI.
PN: How are we going to collectively as a species navigate issues if we don't allow ourselves to talk about it? Maybe I'm growing old. I think social media is important but I do find a lot of the conversations very oversimplified and binary. Like there's only one right thing to say and a few buzzwords that you need to use and if you don't see it exactly like that, then you're wrong. I think that's damaging. That's why a space like a lit fest is precious because it's one of the few spaces where we can listen to each other talk. I mean, how many spaces do we have that allow that?
ESQ: Speaker's Corner?
PN: Yeah suuure. I'm a fan of talking about it no matter how difficult it is. There's no point in shutting it down.
ESQ: What is your guilty pleasure?
PN: I have none any more because I’ve embraced all my trashy loves. They turned me into who I am today. But... when I was a kid, I used to read Sweet Valley High. Now when I look at it, it’s terrible. Francine Pascal created the series but now it’s produced by a team of ghostwriters. It was so formulaic and bad but I was hooked on it. In retrospect, it taught me so much.
I’ve also watched so much trash reality TV. I just finished the latest season of Selling Sunset. I’m very fascinated by the dynamics of that show and its weird feminism. I could write an entire essay for you about that.
ESQ: Is it your PhD?
PN: PhD is not about Selling Sunset, unfortunately. Yeah.
ESQ: What about music? What’s your guilty pleasure?
PN: Oh, this is a hard one to admit but I still listen to Kanye.
ESQ: Old Kanye?
PN: I listen to a lot of old Kanye because I miss the old Kanye. It troubles me. I didn’t get off the Kanye train for a long time. Even when a lot of people dropped off, I was still kinda hoping that Kanye would say something that would redeem himself, but yeah. It’s really hard to justify it but I believe in listening, reading and watching things in the context. So, I listen to old Kanye and I don’t feel guilty. I feel conflicted about who he’s become and what he’s saying, but old Kanye’s music came from such a pure place actually, like some of those songs are so pure, that sometimes I’d cry listening to “Hey Momma”... they pull at my heartstrings because you can hear his hope, naivety and his emotions.
I can’t listen to Justin Timberlake the same way any more either. Like after all of the things that have come out, you know. It’s really hard to listen to him in the same way as before.
ESQ: Does your daughter know what you do?
PN: She’s very recently figured it out. I told her that, oh, mama runs a festival and she came to the festival this weekend and really enjoyed it. I left her with Denise from Closet Full of Books for about 40 minutes. She reads every book that she comes across. Sometimes when I tell people that my daughter loves books, they’re like, oh, of course she’s your kid but I’ve never met a kid who doesn’t like books. Because children are born curious, right? If you present them with something and you let them explore, that love for it will grow.
ESQ: Can she read?
PN: My daughter loves being read to. Every night is a battle about how many books we're going to read before she sleeps. It's a bit of a negotiation because I have energy for two and then she'll come into the room with four books. If we go to a bookstore and she picks something, I will let her buy it. Even if it has too many words. Maybe she won't understand it but I'll let her buy it because she'll get into it.
ESQ: Do you control what she consumes?
PN: I think, there’s a difference between gently nudging her towards new things and saying no. It’s different for every child and every parent but for me—and I know this is going to be a controversial statement—I’d rather she engages with difficult things with my knowledge. So that we can have that conversation.
I’m not saying it’s easy; it’s really difficult, especially when explaining big concepts to kids. But I’d rather we try and grapple with the issue together. A good example is when she was missing her grandparents one weekend and—she has big feelings—burst into tears. I tried to compromise with her, it’s ok. You know, you are going to see your grandfather and grandma tomorrow. And then she asked me, do you miss your grandmother? It took me aback. I said, yeah, I missed her a lot. And she said, oh, but it’s ok mama because you can see her tomorrow.
That was the moment when I had to make a choice, right? Because the easy answer is to dismiss her and think she won’t know any better. But I said, I can’t see my grandmother tomorrow because she is gone. She’s gone up to the sky to be with God, you know? And my daughter looked terrified but I assured her that it’s not scary. I may miss my grandmother but she’s always in my heart.
ESQ: I had several deaths in the family this year and my kid was asking questions about it. Like you, I came to a crossroads about talking to him about death and dying. I told him that Grandma died and now she's in a better place and I thought that he understood. Then, a few months later, he started saying that he hoped I'd die.
PN: But he's hoping that you'll get to a better place.
ESQ: Yeah. It sounds flippant but, weirdly, it came from a good place. You'd want to protect them from all that.
PN: I did not come to this interview thinking that I was gonna cry with you, but yeah.
ESQ: I'm still not sure if talking about death is too early for him. I do want him to be emotionally secure if either of his parents dies.
PN: There is no correct way to parent. We do the best that we can. And it's not the exact quote but I go back to Philip Larkin-
ESQ: "This Be The Verse".
PN: Yeah, we're gonna do it. But we try our best not to.
ESQ: Speaking about death, can we talk about Adrian Tan? He sadly passed and this is the first year you’re doing the debate without him.
PN: For the festival’s Opening Debate, yes. It’s really one of those things that hit me harder than I thought. The reason for that is that I’ve never seen Adrian without a smile on his face. He has always been so kind, so supportive, so generous with his time and his energy.
Ever since I took over the festival and when I doubt myself for a decision that I’ve made, Adrian would be like, if people are a bit pissed off, you’re doing it right. And, this is kind of morbid but, he added, don’t worry, Pooja. No one’s gonna die. That’s Adrian. He never takes anything too seriously.
ESQ: Did you know about his illness?
PN: I knew he had been ill for a while but in true Adrian fashion, he never called attention to it. He never made anything about himself. I might get the timeline wrong but I think as early as February or March, when we had an online meeting, I saw him and I didn’t think he looked too well. But I wasn’t expecting that he would go so soon. That was hard.
We talked about how we wanted to celebrate him at the festival... and I intentionally used the word “celebrate” and not “memorialise him” or “eulogise him”; that’s just not in the spirit of who Adrian was. He always enlivened the party. We didn’t want to do a moment of silence because Adrian would have hated that. So, we decided to dedicate the debate to his memory.
ESQ: Given what you know, if you were asked to return to lead the Singapore Writers Fest’s programme, would you?
PN: Not immediately, I would like a little time away from it. I haven’t had time to reflect on what we’ve achieved and where it’s moved to. Some distance is important for reflection, right? But if I have the chance to work with these people again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s been a privilege of a lifetime to work with these people.
ESQ: Are we good? Is there anything else you want to talk about?
PN: No man. We already talked about kids and death and Kanye. I think we’re good.
Photography: Shawn Paul Tan
Styling: Asri Jasman
Photography Assistant: Xie Feng Mao
Hair and Makeup: Nicole Ang at THE SUBURBS STUDIO using DUNGÜD and DIOR BEAUTY