When I saw that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was turning 70, I bought myself a new copy. I hadn’t read it for a while—30 years, give or take—and I wondered what its effects would be now that I, unlike the book’s protagonists and most of us when we first read it, am a grown-up. I picked up a recent-ish paperback issued by Faber, the British publishing house that bought the manuscript from Golding in 1954, offering him an advance of £60 for his debut novel, after it had been rejected by at least six others.
The new cover was bright red and featured faux-naïf drawings of naked child warriors scattered at jaunty angles, and surrounded by butterflies, lizards and yellow tulips. Or no, perhaps those were flames. Regardless, it was a cheerier cover than the one I remembered from our bookshelf as a child, which was white and featured a grim image of a pig’s head impaled on a stick, painted in greys, blacks and, for the blood dripping from its eyes, red.
The pig’s head is important, as are the naked child warriors and the flames, as you probably remember if you studied Lord of the Flies at school, which is quite likely: it has consistently been selected as a set text in the UK—at A-level, O-level and GCSE—since its publication. The writer Ian McEwan, in an essay published in a 1986 collection celebrating Golding’s 75th birthday, recalled reading Lord of the Flies at boarding school when he was 13; he was surprised to discover that “Golding knew all about us”.
Nor is it just British children who have studied it: the book has been translated into more than 30 languages. When Golding was presented with the Nobel Prize in 1983 by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf told him: “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” (The cruelty of that “had to”!)
The book has had a long half-life in popular culture, too. It has been turned into one reasonably good film, Peter Brook’s starkly monochrome 1963 adaptation; one criminally cheesy one, Harry Hook’s 1990 take, starring Balthazar Getty; and has inspired numerous other works, from the recent TV drama Yellowjackets, which transposes the dynamic to an all-girls’ football team, to the long-running reality-TV show Survivor.
To celebrate its 70 years this autumn, Faber released a graphic-novel version and, as I write, a new four-part BBC adaptation is filming in Malaysia, written by the British screenwriter Jack Thorne. At the announcement, Thorne said that he’d read the book with his mother as a boy, and that it “left a scar on me like no other”.
In 2018, The Independent included Lord of the Flies in a list of “Seven books our English teachers tortured us with”, but for Golding’s book this was unusually and specifically true. As an English teacher himself, at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, a boys’ grammar in Salisbury—a job he stuck out to support his wife and two children, with undisguised reluctance—Golding often wrote during lessons. He would set work, then scribble away furtively in exercise books under his desk.
Nor was he afraid to experiment on his pupils: John Carey’s 2009 biography, William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, describes a school trip to a Neolithic earthworks during which “Scruff”—as Golding was known, owing to his dishevelled jackets and scraggly beard—divided his charges into two groups, one told to defend the earthworks, the other to attack it. “It occurred to more than one boy that Golding stirred up antagonism between them in order to observe their reactions,” Carey notes.
It seems perfectly reasonable that a book about children—or really, though it’s not fashionable to make the distinction, about boys—should be read at a time of life when their characteristics and behaviours, if not their particular circumstances, are most easily recognised in ourselves. Here, on page one, is handsome, fair-haired Ralph, who clambers out of the jungle after part of the plane in which he and other English schoolboys have been travelling—to an unknown destination, while being evacuated from a nuclear war—has crashed on a nameless desert island.
Before the end of this first page there’s another child, a “fat boy” whose grammar betrays the fact that he isn’t as posh as the others. He asks that Ralph does not reveal his hated nickname, “Piggy”, to the other survivors; Ralph immediately calls him Piggy, of course—but so too, with insidious callousness, does the omniscient narrator, making us immediate co-conspirators. (We never find out his real name.) Completing an uneasy triumvirate is haughty head chorister Jack.
The boys are separated from the adult world, though not, importantly, deprived of sustenance: they have fruit, water and as many pigs as they can catch and kill. Golding’s novel is resolutely not concerned with survival in its most basic terms. Rather, it is a thought experiment about how a society might function with, as Ralph enthusiastically observes, “No grown-ups!”
After he’s voted in as leader, Ralph, disdainful yet heedful of Piggy’s sensible counsel, attempts to implement a rules-based system to improve their chances of rescue. Authority is outsourced to a talismanic seashell, a conch, which Ralph uses to summon the other boys and which, it is mutually agreed, gives its bearer the licence to speak.
Jack, as the leader of a quasi-comic pack of choirboys, whom we first encounter staggering up the sun-baked beach in caps, capes and “hambone frills”, is at first compliant, though subservience makes him bristle. Later, as mania, or desperation—or perhaps it is a form of extreme boredom—sets in, Jack will lead a darker, wilder, breakaway faction and the choirboys will swap their hats and cloaks for warpaint and spears.
When we read Lord of the Flies at 12 or 13, we are told it is an allegory about power. If we want to put it bluntly—and we’re 12, so of course we do—we might say that Ralph represents democracy; Piggy is scientific rationalism; Jack, totalitarianism. I haven’t yet mentioned Simon, a small, mystical boy, prone to epileptic fits, whom you may remember (though I’ll admit I’d forgotten all about him). It is Simon who encounters the pig’s head mounted on a stick, which Jack’s choirboys-turned-hunters have left as an offering to a beast they imagine is lurking at the top of a mountain.
It is Simon, or his subconscious, who converses with the pig’s-head demon, whose name, a literal translation of the Hebrew-derived “Beelzebub”, also became that of the book itself (chosen not by Golding but by a canny editor at Faber: Golding’s submitted manuscript bore the far more humdrum title Strangers from Within). Simon, we could think, represents spirituality; naturally, and with Christ-like foresight, he meets a grisly end.
We might also have been asked, as students, to consider the biographical context, to think about how Golding’s life experiences lurk in the pages. The critic Harold Bloom, writing in 2008, called the book “essentially a period piece”, seeing it as a barely digested regurgitation of Golding’s time serving as a lieutenant in the British Navy in World War II, during which he hunted the Atlantic for the Bismarck and took part in the Normandy landings.
Golding himself connected his observations of fascism—that it is an internal force rather than an external one—to the depravities he portrayed in the book: “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature,” he once wrote. Though Bloom was dismissive of the book’s quality (“no Gulliver’s Travels”, he sniffed), he at least acknowledged its fabulistic power: “Any well-told tale of a reversion to barbarism is a warning against tendencies in many groups that may become violent, and such a warning remains sadly relevant in the early 21st century.”
It’s a revelation, when you’re young, to find out that a book might not be exactly about the thing that it’s about. Or at least, not only: that with the right set of contextual keys (and yes, that “right” is highly specious), a story can be further unlocked. But it can also be a thrill to read a book about children, when you are one, that treats their interactions, however extreme the setting, with the same seriousness you do.
“As far as I was concerned, the novel’s blaming finger was pointed at schoolboys like Jack, Piggy, Ralph and me,” wrote McEwan in 1986. “We were manifestly inadequate. We couldn’t think straight, and in sufficiently large groups we were capable of atrocities. In that I took it all so personally, I like to think that I was, in some sense, an ideal reader.” (I don’t have a son, but I gave my new copy to my 11-year-old daughter and, when she’d read it, asked her what she thought its message was. “Um,” she said, “that boys are idiots?”)
In some sense, yes, McEwan is right. In another sense, of course, he’s being facetious. (The same could be said, on both counts, of my daughter.) Describing the passage in which a forlorn Piggy, Ralph and Simon reflect on the mysterious sagacity of adults—“‘Grown-ups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark’”—McEwan writes: “At 13, I too had sufficient faith in adult life to be immune to Golding’s irony.” If you read Lord of the Flies again as an adult, however—and you must!—the irony, and its incumbent horror, are everything.
In his covering letter to the publisher Jonathan Cape, who expressed interest in taking on Lord of the Flies (though, like most of the others, went on to reject it), Golding referred to it as a book “for grown-ups”. This might have been worth stating explicitly, as he had conceived it as a response to a popular children’s book, The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne, in which the three child protagonists, Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (could Piggy be a secret Peterkin?), are also shipwrecked and alone.
This trio behaves in a civilised—or rather, civilising—manner: fending off cannibals and pirates and even spreading a bit of Christianity while they’re at it. Golding is said to have turned to his wife Ann after reading it as a bedtime story one evening, and asked: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?”
Reading Lord of the Flies when you’re younger, its essential truth is undisputed: as McEwan wrote, he knew all about us. But to an adult readership, “how children really would behave” becomes something of a debate. In 2015, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sought a peculiarly literal refutation of Golding’s supposition, unearthing a 1966 newspaper story about six Tongan boys who’d been shipwrecked on an islet in the Pacific for a year, but didn’t go mad and kill each other.
“Their days began and ended with song and prayer,” Bregman wrote in The Guardian. It’s a strangely joyless thing to do to a book: yes, yes, children might very well not descend into bloodlust, but the tension comes from our fear, our suspicion—or, if we excavate deep enough—our knowledge, that they could.
Since I’ve been a parent and have had cause to observe children more closely, I’ve seen many a boy—and, only proving the rule, the odd girl—happily thwacking the heads off daffodils or casually squashing ants. In an isolated scene in Lord of the Flies, another young boy, Henry, plays with tiny sea creatures he spots in the encroaching tide, making lines and channels with a stick to determine their route through the sand. “He became absorbed beyond mere happiness,” writes Golding, “as he felt himself exercising control over living things.” Who hasn’t seen, or can’t imagine, a child doing exactly that? What is the brutal conclusion of the book but this same impulse in extremis?
When I read Lord of the Flies this time, it was teeming with things I had been oblivious to, or at least less consciously aware of, as a child. First, the extent to which it simmers with a sublimated sexual energy. The boys are in prepubescence, or early puberty, and forces are operating on them that they do not yet fully understand (nor was this aspect emphasised to me or the rest of my class of equally bewildered pre-teen girls).
They study each other’s bodies, sometimes with a voyeuristic appetite, as when Ralph watches Jack: “His grey shorts were sticking to him with sweat. Ralph glanced at them admiringly.” Towards the end, Ralph thinks of Jack almost like a vengeful lover: “Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.”
In fact, the book is full of suggestive imagery, from the “great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly” on which Ralph builds the first meeting place, to the equally phallic “bold, pink bastion” upon which Jack builds his rival fort at the other end of the beach. The conch shell itself is… well, you decide: “In colour the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay 18 inches of shell…” Who can blame Piggy when, overcome, he “paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph’s hands”?
The whole island pulsates with the boys’ urges, like a kind of hormonally supercharged enactment of Gaia Theory (it was Golding, in fact, who suggested “Gaia”, the Greek goddess of the Earth, to his friend James Lovelock for the name of his scientific idea of organic unity, clearly having more of a knack for titles that were not his own). Oh! And yes, the Greeks. They’re easier to spot when you’re grown up too, and when you know Golding was a big fan, although the book’s stark structure, adhering to the convention of Greek tragedy by starting in media res, was not his idea at all.
In fact, it was among several improvements made by Golding’s editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, who encouraged the excision of the opening chapters that described the nuclear war from which the boys have escaped, as well as removing a whole heap of commas, “which,” as Monteith later recalled, “studded the pages as thickly as currants in a fruit loaf”. It was also Monteith who got the book published at all, having famously rescued it from the slush pile as a junior editor, after a first reader had already deemed it “rubbish and dull” and “pointless”, and marked it with a circled “R” for “reject”.
But back to those Greeks: Piggy wailing and ignored, is a chubby, doomed Cassandra, the prophetess fated not to be believed; or, as he grasps for his smashed spectacles, now reduced to a single lens, he’s the three Graeae, Gaia’s granddaughters, after Perseus steals their one shared eye. Or how about Jack’s tribe stealing fire from their rivals, like Prometheus; then being condemned, like him, to a rock in the sea?
And what do we make of the boys falling on a mother pig feeding her young and stabbing her with sharpened sticks—one up her anus (how is that explained to schoolkids?)—until she “collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her”? This has echoes of Circe turning Odysseus’s sailors into swine, or Oedipus having sex with his mother, and, reading it now, it’s the book’s most shocking scene.
Particularly shocking if you’re a mother, maybe. Mothers in Lord of the Flies are dispatched, like the sow, with savage coldness. Ralph emerges from the jungle’s “scar”—the gap in the jungle left by the aeroplane’s passenger compartment, which has been swept back out to sea—like a baby from a Caesarean section, “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” as Macduff had it. (If you’ve ever had the pleasure of having a baby extracted directly from your abdomen, “ripped” is very much the word.)
It’s only Piggy—the ill-fated Piggy—who displays any nascent paternal, or maternal, instincts, keeping track of the younger boys, the “littl’uns”, and thinking about their welfare. He is also the only one to refer to a woman, his aunt; one of Ralph’s first questions of him is, “What’s your father?” Naturally Piggy is ignored, causing him to wear “the martyred expression of a parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of children”. (Ah, I know it well!) In a 1985 interview with his biographer Carey, Golding said of his own mother, Mildred, “I gave her a hell of a time.” In what is perhaps the darkest of his sardonic riffs, he dedicated the book to his parents.
I’m not sure I remembered there being jokes in the book at all, to be honest. But Golding, who, despite pronounced depressive episodes, could also be something of a hoot—promoting her own memoir in 2010, his daughter Judy called him “a very warm person, and tremendously funny”—has put in plenty. There’s a peculiar outburst from Ralph about meetings that is painfully recognisable: “Don’t we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk,” he rants. “Someone would say we ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was over they’d work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting.” One can only be relieved that Golding, who died in 1993 aged 81, was spared the joys of Microsoft Teams.
In the novel, the character who is most obviously comic is Jack, the head chorister who challenges Ralph for authority (in Brook’s film it’s Piggy, played by 11-year-old Hugh Edwards, in his quite deservedly one and only film role, which he got by writing a letter to the director that started, “Dear Sir, I am fat and wear spectacles”). It is Jack who speaks the ingeniously daft line, “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything,” and is there not something inherently hilarious about him suggesting he be chief because he can “sing C sharp”?
But it is also Jack who gets seized with the urge to kill, who initiates the frenzies that lead to the deaths of Simon and Piggy, and nearly to Ralph’s, and proves, when in power, the most dangerous. (Entirely unrelated to Jack’s risibly self-important boast, Donald Trump claims to have won 18 golf-club championships, Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great and Kim Jong Il, as we all know, invented the hamburger.)
Which is how we get to the most frightening aspect of Lord of the Flies. At the end of the book, the boys are rescued by a British Navy cutter, which spots the smoke rising from the island that they have set on fire. At the sight of an adult, a smartly dressed naval officer, just as Golding himself once was, the survivors start to sob, and in Ralph’s case, to weep “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy”. In a kind of literary crash zoom, the reader is yanked out of the protagonists’ proximity, and they once again become “little boys”. We are back with the adults because this is, after all, “a book for grown-ups”. The naval officer is unable to deal with their outpouring and looks away.
And are we, his fellow grown-ups, any more equipped to make sense of it? Well, we know that there’s a nuclear war happening out beyond the island and that the adults have made no better a fist of things than the children. The stakes have only got higher, and the weapons more devastating. But we also know, from our own lived experience, that being an adult is as much of a construct as being a child; our psychology gets no more complex, our instincts no better. During the pandemic, as those in positions of authority sold contracts to their friends and partied through the funerals, I regularly found myself muttering, like a kind of deranged mantra, “Where are the grown-ups?” as though forgetting that, technically, I was one, too.
In 1974, Golding wrote an entry in his journal suggesting that, as the decades had passed, he’d come to see the book in even bleaker terms. “Twenty years after writing Lord of the Flies, I now see that Ralph who weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, was weeping for an age that is passing,” he wrote. “Seen from the other side, the heart of man is not dark, but flamelit and terrible. Perhaps then Jack and his hunters had the heart of the matter after all.”
The most devastating metaphor for this in the book comes in the form of the monster at the top of the mountain. The possibility of its existence has morphed from a folkloric fear into a mechanism with which Jack can ensure compliance from his subjects (weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). But the monster isn’t really a monster, but a man, or was once: it’s the rotting body of a parachutist who, like the boys, has fallen from the sky. They think he’s a living monster because the wind catches the dead man’s chute every so often, causing his head and torso to lift up and down, “so as the stars moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountain-top and bowed and sank and bowed again”.
Not only are adults not going to save you, the dead pilot’s terrible dance seems to say, but they’re all but useless, spending their time performing hollow, empty gestures, like brainless marionettes. As a parody of adult civility, it is chilling and grotesque. Perhaps, this is something that, when we’re young, we also fear, suspect, or—if we dare to excavate deep enough—know. But it’s not until later in life that we recognise it as a kind of dreadful truth. Adults, as we might once have imagined them, don’t really exist; we are all no more than scared, confused, vicious children of different sizes. No grown-ups.
Originally published on Esquire UK
Twenty years ago, I stumbled across a copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at a Barnes & Noble in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At first, I was only drawn to the cover, where lightning illuminated a distinctly Midwestern highway. But as I devoured the book over the next three nights, I knew I was reading an instant classic that people would be talking about for decades. I say all of this because since then, I've only felt this way about a handful of books—and Kelly Link’s first novel, The Book of Love, is one of them. I honestly think it’s a masterpiece.
Set in the fictional town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, where “toffee Victorians” and “single-family Capes” line the leafy streets alongside “chicken coops and soccer nets in the backyard, ”The Book of Love tells the story of four high school students investigating why three of them died, only to be resurrected nearly a year later by their music teacher, who may be more god than human. Over a few days, Lovesend becomes the battleground for a cold war between otherworldly deities, ghosts, witches, and creatures. Meanwhile, the human characters search for a way to avoid returning to the realm of the dead, where they only remember “a lot of trees,” the smell of roses, “and under the roses, something burning.” Along the way, Link interrogates the nature of love between friends, lovers, siblings, parents, grandparents, teenagers, and even animals.
The small-town world Link conjures in The Book of Love—one full of nuanced relationships between a large cast of characters, local history and cosmic mythology, and magic hiding in plain sight—is among the most detailed and immersive ever put to paper. It also makes for an extraordinary comfort read, and an emotional reminder of what we lose and gain as we age.
After establishing herself as a singular voice in science fiction and fantasy with five short story collections—including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble—Link’s 600-page novel is one of 2024’s biggest literary events. From Link's home in the hilltowns of Massachusetts where she and her husband run an independent bookstore, Book Moon Books, Link spoke with me over Zoom about whether she believes in ghosts or afterlives, nighttime logic in literature, adolescence as a liminal space, and what she’s writing next. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: When and where did this book begin for you?
KELLY LINK: I’m a writer who finds it very useful to have a deadline, so when I sold Get in Trouble to Random House, I sold them a novel as well, on the grounds that it would make me actually write one. My plan was to write a very short haunted house novel, but I just could not come up with the thing that gave that book a heart. So I fell back on [The Book of Love] because I had a sense of the characters, and unlike the haunted house project, I could see why it would be different from a short story. And then of course it took eight years from that point to turn it in.
Why did The Book of Love need to be a novel instead of a short story?
Honestly, it seemed like it could be a trilogy. But I like compression. Believe it or not, this is a very compressed story as a single novel as opposed to if it were a series of books. There is space to imagine what might happen to these characters at the end, but the only thing I removed when I cut it down to one book was a loving pastiche of Regency romance novels. I was going to move the characters into that space for a whole book, and it would have been fun, but I don't think it was necessary.
How important was it for you to capture a sense of place? How much of Lovesend was inspired by Northampton or real towns on the Massachusetts coast?
The setting is a combination of lived experience and wish fulfilment. Easthampton and Northampton and all of the hilltowns up here have a really distinct vibe and a strong commitment to supporting quirky local businesses. When you live in a town that isn’t too big, that place begins to feel as if it’s a distinct living organism. If you live somewhere long enough, you mourn the ways in which a community changes. But when you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don't in the real world. Lovesend is an idealised version of that. There are people who have lived there for a long time who can still afford to live there. Climate change is not yet impressing upon this place in the way that it will very soon.
Why set this story at Christmastime in 2014?
The question of where in the contemporary moment to set it was a real issue, both in terms of music—because these are all characters with strong feelings about music—but also in terms of how the real world impinges on the characters. 2014 is the period when I began thinking about this project. So part of the tonal quality of the novel comes directly from a particular historical moment which is receding swiftly from us. I did think about what setting it at Christmastime would do to the tone. It was fun to take a holiday that wasn't Halloween—my favourite—and try to Halloween-ify it a bit. I also hope it provides a certain amount of solace and comfort.
"When you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don't in the real world."
Why did you set the main characters in The Book of Love in high school? Why not a college or adulthood?
I did think about making them much older, but adolescence is a liminal space. It’s a period in which you’re experiencing enormous change. You’re figuring things out about yourself, but you’re also more likely to make leaps into the wild. For me, these characters needed to be people whose impulsivity or decision-making felt more unpredictable, with fewer guard rails.
The first half of the book is written in a maximalist style that zooms in on small moments, memories, and details. Why did you take that approach?
Since this is a book about people coming back from the dead, the granular aspects of life—both the things that are irritating but also the things that give us delight—seem important. Because those are the things that keep us alive, right? If you lose joy or interest in those things, it gets hard to keep on going.
These characters have to make a decision about how badly they want to stay alive. It seemed important to me that they have a hypersensitivity to pieces of their lives that feel very minor. Like the noise that somebody makes when they're vacuuming. Also, to quote a meme, like a “bitch eating crackers.” When you’re so irritated by every single thing that they do. That kind of intensity seemed true to the characters within this narrative space.
How do you get inside so many different fictional people's heads with that level of intimacy?
If I'm going to care about the things that happen to somebody, I need to care about how they see the world in granular detail. The job of the writer is to make those details as interesting as possible. Or as propulsive and connected to the events in the book as possible. I'm not going to succeed at doing that for every reader. But I have to feel I’ve at least made them connective and interesting to me. The readers are willing to go along with it.
You’ve spoken about “nighttime logic” in fantasy fiction before. What does that term mean to you and how did you use it in The Book of Love?
Nighttime logic versus daytime logic is a way of thinking that Howard Waldrop came up with to talk about how narrative logic holds together for the reader as much as for the writer. With daytime logic, there is an explanation for things that happen. Clocks tell time in the way you would expect. Even if strange or fantastical things happen, there's a rule book by which they work that will be explained to you. A lot of realistic fiction, science fiction and fantasy, rely on daytime logic. Here's something startling, but I'm going to explain how it functions in the world. Often rooted in the inexplicable, even ghost stories have a kind of daytime logic to them. Somebody did something wrong and the consequence is that they are haunted.
Nighttime logic is more like carnival logic. Normal roles are upended. In James Theraper's book, The 13 Clocks, things are happening which will not be explained. It signals that the world has become a very strange place. It's not quite the same as dream logic, where first you're in one setting and then you're in another. Or you’re holding a cup of tea and then suddenly it becomes something else. We know dream logic. But nighttime logic is when you have a sense that there is an organising principle behind the world that belongs to the writer. The writer may not explain it, but there is a kind of coherence to it, even if it feels unnerving.
David Lynch is a great example of nighttime logic—there's an estranging quality to his work. A lot of horror operates in nighttime logic. Frankly, a lot of realistic fiction does, too—Joy Williams is great at that, and Barbara Comyns.
Do you often write at night to help you get in the right mindset?
I do my best work between 3:00 pm and 1:00 am. My writing brain gets sharper the farther we get into the afternoon. If I could organize my life so that I push that window further, I would be quite happy! If I'm on a retreat, I can work until three or four o'clock in the morning. I can write pretty much anywhere. I have an office. But I like being closer to other people when I work, so mostly I write down in our dining room. Ideally, I work in a room with other writers. I’ve gotten more writing done if I can see other people engaged in the same work, either having a great time or floundering.
Death plays a large role in this novel, as it does in many of your short stories. Has writing about it so often changed your perspective on mortality?
I saw somebody—maybe Nick Harkaway?—say that writers are generally catastrophists. You get on a plane and if you're a writer, you immediately start thinking about what happens if the plane crashes. You think about the most dramatic possibilities.
I was always somebody who was drawn to ghost stories. And death is always going to be part of a ghost story. I was the child of a pastor who then became a psychologist. Those are the professions where you're dealing with heavy, confusing things. I don't know why writers end up with the material that they draw from over and over again. You end up with a range of interests that you have an emotional connection to as a writer that you’re going to explore. For me, it's the fantastic—and monsters, and loss, and death. It's also about how people see the world and what they celebrate.
I don't think writing about death has changed how I see the world, but I do think it gives me a framework for thinking about the way I want to live. The pandemic has been a hard thing to go through. We had to close the press that my husband and I have run for over 20 years because my husband has long COVID. We have to be very careful about going out into the world because of the chance of exposing him to something that could make his health even worse. When you write fiction, you’re in charge of the things that happen. But you also get to work through the emotional costs and realities of dealing with very heavy stuff.
"I collect other people's ghost stories."
Do you believe in ghosts?
A few years ago, a good friend of mine—Holly Black, the author of The Spiderwick Chronicles—got a letter from a kid that said, “Dear Miss Black, I need you to tell me if fairies are real, and don't lie to me like the other adults.” She wrote back, “I've never seen a fairy, but I know people who say that they have.” That's how I feel about ghosts. I collect other people's ghost stories. There are many that I find either persuasive or troubling. I've never seen one, but I fully believe that some people just don't have the antenna or the radar. I am bad at telling if somebody was drunk. So maybe I do see ghosts. We could be seeing ghosts all the time but we just don't know it.
Do you believe in an afterlife of some kind?
I think I do. A childhood spent in a lot of churches with a father who was a Presbyterian minister, maybe some of that is a holdover But I'm agnostic. I would very much like to believe that there is something after death. But I find the fact that I don't know kind of exhilarating—that there is a mystery to which we all either do or don't find out the answer. That seems kind of cool, that maybe there's something interesting aside from the process of dying. That maybe you get to find out.
I have a hard time at the moment with a lot of things that are happening in the world. Not knowing becomes troubling when you see so much suffering and so much needless cruelty and death. It seems wrong to think there's life after death. And maybe it will be better there because that's just a reason not to fix things. But at the same time, the idea that there's nothing past death makes watching suffering that you can't do anything about feel even harder.
If The Book of Love is a standalone novel, what are you writing next?
[Another] novel, which is a haunted house story. I want it to be economical. Small. More experimental. If a novel is a large boulder the size of a large boulder, the next thing I want to work on is a small boulder. The size of a large boulder—a classic 50,000-word ghost story novel that feels like a short story.
Originally published on Esquire US
Jake and I had done a bro-trip once before, driving from Lusaka, where he lives, down to the Luangwa Valley; but this was going to be very different. Instead of travelling cross-country, Mad Max-style, with driving beer and guns, we were going to be following the Lonesome Dove trail, from widescreen Texas all the way up the plains of Montana.
Jake has been obsessed with Larry McMurtry's Western novel – in which several Texas rangers drive a cattle herd north in the twilight years of the Old West – since it was first published in 1985, and for some years it has been his intention to drive the trail. As Jake is a former ranger and a bit of a cowboy himself, he originally wanted to do it all on horseback. When I told him I could spare five days and five days only, we opted for the next best thing. Which was a massive Ford Bronco Everglades, an SUV so large I suspect at some point it will be awarded its own zip code.
We picked it up in Austin, where we started the trip, poring over the route in the city's new Soho House. I felt so at home there I almost ordered a white-wine spritzer, but in the end opted for a margarita that was almost as big as the Bronco. Suitably fortified, we retired for the night, preparing ourselves for the next day's 10-hour, 600-mile drive to Dodge City.
Out soundtrack was obviously all-important, and we opted for traditional cassette-era rock, where you're never far away from a Bob Seger ballad or a Doobie Brothers singalong. Were Jack and I a cliché? Only completely.
By now we had bought cowboy hats – of course we had!
Kansas was far more rugged than Texas, a largely empty place that keeps its scenic charms so well hidden you might never find them. We certainly didn't. Our Best Western was misnamed. Hungry from having been in our designer tank all day, we wandered around half a dozen malls before finding an awful-looking Mexican restaurant with strip lighting, plastic chairs and worryingly cheap burritos. It was, of course, wonderful. Cheap Mexican food is always better than expensive Mexican food.
The following morning, following age-old advice, we got the hell out of Dodge.
And headed for Nebraska, which appeared to be Kansas squared. Sure, there was a lot of it, maybe slightly more than necessary. I felt as though I'd had enough of the place after an hour or so, so goodness knows what McMurtry's cowboys must have felt like as they ambled through.
By now we had bought cowboy hats – of course we had! Jake's was traditional, while mine looked like the kind Nick Cave might wear. Black. Svelte. Gentrified. Now we were getting to the heart of the matter, driving into Wyoming, the penultimate stop on our trip, and one of the most beautiful places on earth. This is real cowboy country, where the Rockies cast a shadow, both real and metaphorical, making you feel you could easily be steering a herd of unruly cattle across the Great Plains. Instead of Great Plains I had an irascible co-pilot with even lower blood-sugar levels issues than mine. We stopped for burritos almost as often as we stopped for gas.
Wyoming is Americana maximus, where every vista is lunar, and every backyard is full of discarded cars. I reckon Bruce Springsteen came here on vacation when he was 16 or so and inhaled enough cowboy/highway/blue-jean imagery to keep him going for an entire career. Honestly, after we'd been driving for three or four hours, I felt as though I could write a Springsteen song myself. Either that or a McMurtry novel.
Crossing into Montana makes you feel life's great achievements ought to be immediately downgraded
If Wyoming was our favourite state, Montana came a close second. Sure, every town looked like a larger version of Port Talbot, and yes, all its rivers had long since run dry, and yes, the mountains appeared to have been replaced by forests of grain silos, but there was no denying its beauty. Crossing the state line into Montana makes you feel as though life's great achievements ought to be immediately downgraded. It is so gargantuan, so preposterously epic that even our Bronco felt small.
On arrival at our Airbnb, Jake read me an email from the own: "I hope you boys have a great time in town. Just remember not to leave any trash outside. We have a rather cantankerous bear."
Being a cowboy, and the kind of chap who never goes anywhere without his Leatherman, Jake found this terribly amusing, whereas I immediately reverted to my default Reservoir Poodle disposition and started sulking. We never saw the bear, but this was only because we were distracted by the contents of our local liquor store. Having had dinner in the local tavern (yup, burritos again, and they were terrific), we decided we needed a couple of Northern Hospitality beers to take the edge off the night. As we walked in, wearing our cowboy hats, singing "Long Train Running" and swaying rather too enthusiastically for men who had only drunk two medium-sized margaritas, we saw a store-within-a-store full of firearms. And just as Jake was about to start fondling one of the assault rifles, the assistant stopped us in our tracks.
"Sorry boys, you can buy your beers and your whiskey but the gun shop's closed for the night. If you wanna buy a gun you'll have to come back at eight in the morning."
As I was flying out of Billings early the next day, I missed the concluding episode of our trip. But Jake's gone worryingly quiet and there have been no sightings of the bear since October.
Dylan Jones' latest book, Faster Than a Cannonball, is out now. This piece appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Esquire, out now
Originally published on Esquire UK
It wasn’t long ago that cigarettes were content with just slowly killing the people who smoked them 10 or 20 times a day. More recently, the tobacco industry wants to do away with itself, too. In an act of slow-burning suicide, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of cigarettes has chosen to quit smoking, stubbing out a multi-billion dollar business on the back of its own hand.
In the summer of 2021, Philip Morris International announced that it intended to “un-smoke the world”, including stopping the sale of Marlboro cigarettes in Britain within a decade. Audaciously, the tobacco giant also proposed the notion of “a world without cigarettes”. It called on the British government to actively ban the sale of its tobacco products, with Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak suggesting that the UK should start treating cigarettes like petrol-powered cars, the sale of which is due to be banned from 2030.
An interesting approach when one considers that, just two years ago, Philip Morris’s Marlboro brand was the world’s most valuable tobacco product. Estimated to be worth $33.6 billion, Marlboro’s value sat alongside brands like Nike and American Express.
And get this: with its marketing muscle now fully behind the IQOS e-cigarette, a device that heats tobacco to deliver nicotine without the smoke and tar that cause diseases, including cancer, Philip Morris planned to reposition itself as... wait for it... a “health and wellness” brand.
At epoch-defining, culturally seismic moments like this, it is, one feels, important to spare a thought for the cruelly victimised community who will be most acutely affected by such a game-changing decision: the supermodels.
Without Marlboro Golds (the cigarette formerly known as Marlboro Lights and still called that by, well, everyone) what on earth is Kate Moss going to do? What will the fashion industry X-rays in Paris, Milan and London do with their hands and mouths between shows, looks and shots? How will the stylists, photographers, PRs, party organisers and model -agency mavens get through the day without a draw on their cork-tipped cylinders of poisoned pleasure?
Hard to believe, now that smokers have become pariahs and outsiders (quite literally, dar-ling), but throughout the naughty 1990s and beyond, Marlboro Lights were everywhere, as ubiquitous as drop-waist Maharishi combat pants, Nike Air Max and “Wonderwall”. Back in those days, an old party-hard friend of mine would stop at his front door every time he ventured out for an evening — so that’s every single evening for a decade — taking a second to ensure that he had everything he required, in hand or pocket, for the next few hours’ carousing. He called it the “C-check”: cash (for cabs and cocaine), credit cards (for cocktails and champagne) and, most crucially, cigarettes. Marlboro Lights, of course. No other brand was acceptable.
At times it seemed as if the whole of Swinging London was bumming from the same pack
My pal knew, as we all did, that those perfectly formed paper tunnels, packed tight with heady brown leaves, were social mobility sold in crush-proof packs of 20. Mini chimeneas of glowing orange and sweetly intoxicating acridity that flirted and swaggered, even on the lips of dorks and in the hands of wallflowers. Simply everyone who smoked, smoked them.
In 2021, smokers are regarded as bad influencers, but in previous decades they were cover stars, rock stars, Soho blades, record-company tyros, movie directors, Primrose Hill yummy mummies. And, at times, it seemed as if the whole of Swinging London was bumming from the same pack.
Though truly a global product, Marlboro Lights seemed to flaunt a certain London look (the brand was named after a Philip Morris factory on Great Marlborough Street, W1), neatly and expensively and serendipitously positioned as the vogue cigarette long before Vogue cigarettes became a thing. More than just a smoke, they were a pop icon, with their architectural logo, its letters crenelated like the Manhattan skyline, pack graphics designed in geometric, constructivist style by Frank Gianninoto.
Launched in the 1920s, advertising for Marlboro was originally based on the cigarettes’ “lady-like” filter tip (big tough men obviously preferring their smokes full strength and unfiltered). Marlboro’s cork filter had a printed red band around it to hide lipstick stains. “Beauty Tips to Keep the Paper from Your Lips” went the sales blurb.
The Marlboro Lights’ foggy hegemony and swanky social mobility was baffling and frustrating for its rivals, who spent just as much on sponsoring F1 teams as they did but couldn’t quite get in the game. Indeed, so all-asphyxiating was the great American smoke in the Big Smoke during the last millennium that other brands were forced into guerilla marketing tactics in order to stay competitive.
At Oliver Peyton’s wildly fashionable Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly, cigarette girls would walk the floors brandishing trays of Camel Lights. If they spotted some hipster inhaler — Bono or Helena Christensen — with a pack of Marlboro Lights next to their Cosmopolitan cocktail, a Camel cutie would insert herself and offer a whole pack — gratis — so long as the celebrity smoker stubbed out his or her Marlboro Light and sparked up a Camel instead. It didn’t work. Marlboro Lights carried on being the default-setting smoke for bad-boy actors and 3am-eternal fashion mannequins; girls who lit boys who lit girls who lit boys, as the Blur song goes (nearly).
How much was Philip Morris paying Kate for this incredible PR? Zip. Zero pounds
But it was getting the supermodels on board that was Marlboro’s greatest, accidental coup. All the big girls knew that a pack of Marlboro Lights a day kept the hunger at bay. Especially when paired with copious sea breezes and the company of a lizardly rock star.
And then there was Kate Moss, perhaps the greatest smoker of all time. During the 1990s, Kate was said to be raking in around $10 million a year from contracts with Burberry, Chanel, Calvin Klein and more. But her most loyal and gilded partnership was surely with the Marlboro Lights flip-top pack, which she promoted with reliable and casually professional zeal. Pretty much every night, for around 20 years.
How much was Philip Morris paying Kate for this incredible PR? Zip. Zero pounds. Kate was Marlboro’s coolest and sexiest brand ambassador— and she did it for free. For the love of the warm glow of the yellow flame ignition, the long, noirish drag, the fuggy blast of sweetly noxious, bluey-grey cloud.
And now? Time for Kate — and the rest of us — to prepare for a world without the Marlboro Golds. Either that, or move to the developing world. No plans, so far, to stop selling the cancer sticks there.
Simon Mills is a contributing editor to Esquire. This piece appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Esquire UK.
Originally published on Esquire UK
An acquaintance asked me recently if I ever worried about getting another boyfriend. Surely, he said, my job would put potential suitors off? Later on, I tried to think of another trade men might say this about, and could only come up with sex work. I am not a sex worker, though I have something in common with escorts and cam girls. I too am engaged in the business of selling myself.
I am a writer who writes mostly about her own life. I sometimes pitch ideas about other subjects, but they rarely get picked up. In the past year, I have written nine articles. Seven of these could be classed as memoir. Three were about ex-boyfriends; relationships relayed in less than glowing terms. The men were disguised, though not so well that they wouldn’t recognise themselves.
This is another question that comes up a lot, when you write memoir: What happens if a man spots himself in your work? The answer is nothing, most of the time. Despite the fact we have some of the most stringent libel laws in the world, you have to be very rich, or inoperably maligned, to bring suit. If someone is telling the truth, you can’t sue for defamation; you’d have to try for invasion of privacy. And provided the writer has made an attempt to obfuscate your identity, that’s fairly hard to prove.
I can’t say when, exactly, it became my job, to write bitter essays about men
The ethics are less clear-cut. Unless you’re writing about your time as an anchorite, other people are going to feature in the story. As with most things, it’s easier to seek forgiveness than permission. People generally fall into one of two camps: those who love being written about and think the whole thing is a terrific wheeze, irrespective of what you actually say, and those who are horrified by the idea, and will consider even the most carefully rendered portrait to be a violation. There’s nothing you can do to please this second camp, short of leaving them off the page. I suppose you could always deploy that flimsy but time-honoured excuse: I was just doing my job.
I can’t say when, exactly, it became my job, to write bitter essays about men. Some time after my bitter memoir was published. The book was about an ill-fated affair I had with a married offshore worker. It contained the ghostly imprint of another book, the book it was meant to be: a piece of straight reportage about oil rigs. No one came out of it well: not me, or him, or the other men, or the oil industry itself.
Yet the only person who objected was a woman: my ex-boyfriend’s wife. Long before the book was published, she wrote to my editor, concerned I might smear her husband’s good name. When my editor asked me what I thought we should do, I suggested a tactic I’ve used all my life. You might say it’s the very principle b ywhich my existence is organised. It’s called: Let’s put our heads under the duvet, and hope it goes away. Curiously, my editor took my advice. More surprising still: it held good. Nothing came of it. The book enjoyed modest success. I got offers of other work. Over time, a new connection was soldered in my brain. Psychic pain means money.
The industry has an endless appetite for female self-disclosure. To the point that I no longer think of my life as a series of chapters, but as discrete episodes that can be turned into features and monetised. Editors like personal essays because they’re quick to turn around, compared with other types of journalism. There’s no research to undertake, no interviews to conduct, no travel to expense, no PRs to win over.
I tend to hoard certain conversations, noting the stupidest and most insulting things people say
Writers like them because they’re pretty straightforward to do. You just need to sit down at your desk, disinter some buried grievance, and transcribe it. When I was struggling with my book I often used to wonder if writing a novel wouldn’t be easier. Now I am writing a novel, I can say, with complete certainty, it is not. Of course, I already have a title in mind for the essay I will pitch, should I decide fiction is not my forte and junk the project altogether (“Couldn’t Make It Up”).
Admittedly, the work has left me with some weird habits. I tend to hoard certain conversations, making notes of the stupidest and most insulting things people say. If I have a fight with a man, I’ll write it up, while it’s still fresh in my mind. And I’m more sanguine about breakups, because part of me will be thinking: “Good. I can go off and convert this experience into cash now.” I’m not quite at Liz Jones’s level (yet). Her tales of marital woe and unhinged spending once made her one of the best-paid columnists on Fleet Street, but she said the job warped her behaviour. She used to find herself picking fights so she'd have material for her next piece. This is Nora Ephron's mandate, pushed to its furthest logical limit. If you truly believe that everything is copy, and allow these magpie instincts to rove unchecked, then pretty soon, your whole life will be plotted per the vectors of the market place. The more money you earn, the more convinced you'll be there was no other course.
As to whether it puts prospective boyfriends off, it's very hard to call. Men don't get in touch to tell you they're not going to ask you out, then list their reasons why. A more reliable metric might be to audit your old relationships, and see how often the issue came up. When my last boyfriend and I argued, he used to say I didn't care enough to write about him, which suggests that, far from being scared off, he quite fancied the role of muse. Personally, I think this is an insane complaint. But then, I would never want to go out with a writer. They might promise to respect your privacy while you're together. They very rarely honour that agreement in the end.
Tabitha Lasley is the author of the memoir Sea State. This piece appears in the Summer 2023 issue of Esquire UK.
Originally published on Esquire UK
