markinmanc
New Member
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2064808,00.html
Have to admit I've never heard of her, will have to check out her books.
Meeting Gwendoline Riley at midday on a Monday in a three-storey bar in Manchester, I find her on the top floor, sucking up a vodka and tomato juice, having her picture taken. As the photographer snaps away, I recognise Riley's expression from previous portraits, her pale Botticelli face dour, her mouth apparently harbouring a wasp. She looks entirely, wilfully defiant.
Later, as we talk, Riley turns out to be funny, friendly and gleefully intense. Her expression in photographs seems to stem not from frostiness, or even an unwillingness to compromise, but an inability to do so. Riley is a purist, incapable of the posing and gladhanding now expected of authors (especially young, attractive female authors). Ask her about her ambitions, and she doesn't cite winning prizes or selling a million copies or writing a 1,000-page novel that skewers the national mood. "I'm ambitious for my own brain, to feel interested and engaged and to enjoy good company," she says. "I do my best and work hard, so I don't know if it's up to me to write a great big sprawling novel. I might become a poet in 10 years' time, instead."
At 28, Riley has already carved out a place as one of the UK's most talented young authors - and, as her third novel, Joshua Spassky, is published, one of the most prolific too. She first edged into the spotlight aged 22, with the publication of Cold Water (named one of the five outstanding debut novels of 2002 by the Guardian Weekend magazine), before Sick Notes a few years later. Both featured a protagonist in her early 20s, rattling around a Manchester full of dive bars and dust, cleaving to friends for comfort and starting and ending relationships with unpromising men.
What distinguished these slight novels was their poetry and perfection - you could read them in a single sitting and never once snag on a wrong note. The setting and tone made it clear that Riley was a Smiths fan ("I must have seen Morrissey play a dozen, maybe 20 times"), but her books have none of the sentimentality and drama of her idol's songs, no girlfriends in comas or gang members dying. When her first protagonist, Carmel McKisco, is told, "You've got quite a downbeat disposition, haven't you?", it seemed an apt summation of her style.
Joshua Spassky is as short as Riley's other novels, but feels more expansive. The protagonist is Natalie, a British writer in her 20s, who travels to Asheville, North Carolina (the town where F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda are buried) to meet up with the title character, an American playwright, one of her former lovers.
Is the book's tone more optimistic because of the move away from Manchester? "Probably! Yeah, I think that was part of it. I don't know whether the book is optimistic, but it's pretty obvious that the two characters are in love. What is in doubt is: so what? What do you do when that happens? It's like that French film, L'Appartement, the original, where,at the end, once the two characters have decided they're in love, they both walk their separate ways. They know that now, so what else is there?"
In the past few years she's travelled to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Maryland ("or 'Merryland' as they kept telling me") and Indianapolis. What keeps pulling her back to the US? "I don't know. It makes me think better. I like being on a vast tectonic plate with no one else I know. It makes me feel less pressure."
It's often suggested that being a young, full-time writer is a romantic existence. "It's better than having to work in a call centre," notes Riley, "but then, well ... you really have to trawl the depths. To me it seems like the only way to live. The thing is, according to whatever inner orthodoxy I've created when I'm writing, I just want to get it right. So it's not as though there's any tremendous triumph or romance - I feel like I'm just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion."
She pauses, musing on romance, before mentioning that she recently visited Scott and Zelda's grave in Asheville. "And I did cry ... and fall to my knees, aware of the irony of it being Easter Sunday and there being a resurrection ceremony, or whatever it is that Catholics do, next door." Did she go with anyone? "No, it was just me."
She cites Fitzgerald as a favourite author, along with Salinger, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and William T Vollmann. Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is one of her favourite books. "I think there are certain people who know what's what in life, and [Fitzgerald] absolutely knew ... I've been in Rome before, and I've looked at the ruins, and you see all that human history and civilisation stretching back, and it gives you a sort of frisson. I felt that a thousand times when I was at his grave, and I'm not even mystical about relics."
Riley was born in London. Her parents split up when she was two, and she, her brother and mother went to live with her maternal grandparents in the Wirral. She stayed there until she was 18, when she left home to study English - briefly in London, and then in Manchester. "My personal life was pathetic at that time, but my course was heaven. It made me think I wanted to just go to prison and do degrees for ever and ever."
Does she find writing enjoyable? "Well, no, but I wouldn't want to do anything else ... It really is picking at scabs and lying awake and mulling over things that it would really be much more cheerful not to mull over ... But it's interesting, it's useful to the human race. As a general project it's pretty integral to the whole point of being alive."
Riley lives on her own and says that she doesn't really have boyfriends, although she always has a best friend that she can rely on. I wonder whether she finds writing an isolating experience. "Well, no. Of course not," she says. "If I had to go out and mix with people all day that would be really isolating. I stay in my room with my friends [the Salinger character] Seymour Glass and [the Fitzgerald character] Dick Diver, and the imaginary drunkards that are trapped inside my laptop. And William Vollmann. That's it."
She is writing her fourth book now, exploring the theme of misogyny. "I've always had misogynists in my books, because they irritate me, but I've always tried to sideline them, because it's all they deserve. But this time I thought I'm really going to take a look at one and see how they can affect someone else. I really hate writing about it, though - I think I might just cut him out of the book and write about the interesting characters. Intelligent people." How does the character's misogyny manifest itself? "Sly remarks, irritating emails, that dead-eyed look that morons get."
Does she ever just sit down and slacken her mind with some rubbish TV? "No. I turn the telly on on a Saturday at 7.30pm for about an hour." For what? Grease Is the Word? "Doctor Who!" The rest of the time, "I just like reading and sitting there completely motionless with terrible thoughts dancing around my brain."
"I think when people are past 27," she says, "they go into a world of horror, so that might be what I write about next. There was this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where they'd left this creature alone on a planet and Picard came across it 1,000 years later and it had just become a tar pit of hatred and loneliness. They beamed down to look at it and it was just this giant, bubbling, black, oily, steaming mass saying, 'Stay with me, stay with me' and wanting to keep everybody there on the planet to assuage its hideous 1,000-year loneliness. It kept rearing up and absorbing people. I think I'll just write about characters like that.
"Once I saw that episode late at night and it seemed so absolutely alive with everyone I knew and myself, I thought I must have made it up," she says. "But I looked it up, and it's true".
· Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley will be published by Jonathan Cape on May 10.
Have to admit I've never heard of her, will have to check out her books.
Meeting Gwendoline Riley at midday on a Monday in a three-storey bar in Manchester, I find her on the top floor, sucking up a vodka and tomato juice, having her picture taken. As the photographer snaps away, I recognise Riley's expression from previous portraits, her pale Botticelli face dour, her mouth apparently harbouring a wasp. She looks entirely, wilfully defiant.
Later, as we talk, Riley turns out to be funny, friendly and gleefully intense. Her expression in photographs seems to stem not from frostiness, or even an unwillingness to compromise, but an inability to do so. Riley is a purist, incapable of the posing and gladhanding now expected of authors (especially young, attractive female authors). Ask her about her ambitions, and she doesn't cite winning prizes or selling a million copies or writing a 1,000-page novel that skewers the national mood. "I'm ambitious for my own brain, to feel interested and engaged and to enjoy good company," she says. "I do my best and work hard, so I don't know if it's up to me to write a great big sprawling novel. I might become a poet in 10 years' time, instead."
At 28, Riley has already carved out a place as one of the UK's most talented young authors - and, as her third novel, Joshua Spassky, is published, one of the most prolific too. She first edged into the spotlight aged 22, with the publication of Cold Water (named one of the five outstanding debut novels of 2002 by the Guardian Weekend magazine), before Sick Notes a few years later. Both featured a protagonist in her early 20s, rattling around a Manchester full of dive bars and dust, cleaving to friends for comfort and starting and ending relationships with unpromising men.
What distinguished these slight novels was their poetry and perfection - you could read them in a single sitting and never once snag on a wrong note. The setting and tone made it clear that Riley was a Smiths fan ("I must have seen Morrissey play a dozen, maybe 20 times"), but her books have none of the sentimentality and drama of her idol's songs, no girlfriends in comas or gang members dying. When her first protagonist, Carmel McKisco, is told, "You've got quite a downbeat disposition, haven't you?", it seemed an apt summation of her style.
Joshua Spassky is as short as Riley's other novels, but feels more expansive. The protagonist is Natalie, a British writer in her 20s, who travels to Asheville, North Carolina (the town where F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda are buried) to meet up with the title character, an American playwright, one of her former lovers.
Is the book's tone more optimistic because of the move away from Manchester? "Probably! Yeah, I think that was part of it. I don't know whether the book is optimistic, but it's pretty obvious that the two characters are in love. What is in doubt is: so what? What do you do when that happens? It's like that French film, L'Appartement, the original, where,at the end, once the two characters have decided they're in love, they both walk their separate ways. They know that now, so what else is there?"
In the past few years she's travelled to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Maryland ("or 'Merryland' as they kept telling me") and Indianapolis. What keeps pulling her back to the US? "I don't know. It makes me think better. I like being on a vast tectonic plate with no one else I know. It makes me feel less pressure."
It's often suggested that being a young, full-time writer is a romantic existence. "It's better than having to work in a call centre," notes Riley, "but then, well ... you really have to trawl the depths. To me it seems like the only way to live. The thing is, according to whatever inner orthodoxy I've created when I'm writing, I just want to get it right. So it's not as though there's any tremendous triumph or romance - I feel like I'm just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion."
She pauses, musing on romance, before mentioning that she recently visited Scott and Zelda's grave in Asheville. "And I did cry ... and fall to my knees, aware of the irony of it being Easter Sunday and there being a resurrection ceremony, or whatever it is that Catholics do, next door." Did she go with anyone? "No, it was just me."
She cites Fitzgerald as a favourite author, along with Salinger, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and William T Vollmann. Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is one of her favourite books. "I think there are certain people who know what's what in life, and [Fitzgerald] absolutely knew ... I've been in Rome before, and I've looked at the ruins, and you see all that human history and civilisation stretching back, and it gives you a sort of frisson. I felt that a thousand times when I was at his grave, and I'm not even mystical about relics."
Riley was born in London. Her parents split up when she was two, and she, her brother and mother went to live with her maternal grandparents in the Wirral. She stayed there until she was 18, when she left home to study English - briefly in London, and then in Manchester. "My personal life was pathetic at that time, but my course was heaven. It made me think I wanted to just go to prison and do degrees for ever and ever."
Does she find writing enjoyable? "Well, no, but I wouldn't want to do anything else ... It really is picking at scabs and lying awake and mulling over things that it would really be much more cheerful not to mull over ... But it's interesting, it's useful to the human race. As a general project it's pretty integral to the whole point of being alive."
Riley lives on her own and says that she doesn't really have boyfriends, although she always has a best friend that she can rely on. I wonder whether she finds writing an isolating experience. "Well, no. Of course not," she says. "If I had to go out and mix with people all day that would be really isolating. I stay in my room with my friends [the Salinger character] Seymour Glass and [the Fitzgerald character] Dick Diver, and the imaginary drunkards that are trapped inside my laptop. And William Vollmann. That's it."
She is writing her fourth book now, exploring the theme of misogyny. "I've always had misogynists in my books, because they irritate me, but I've always tried to sideline them, because it's all they deserve. But this time I thought I'm really going to take a look at one and see how they can affect someone else. I really hate writing about it, though - I think I might just cut him out of the book and write about the interesting characters. Intelligent people." How does the character's misogyny manifest itself? "Sly remarks, irritating emails, that dead-eyed look that morons get."
Does she ever just sit down and slacken her mind with some rubbish TV? "No. I turn the telly on on a Saturday at 7.30pm for about an hour." For what? Grease Is the Word? "Doctor Who!" The rest of the time, "I just like reading and sitting there completely motionless with terrible thoughts dancing around my brain."
"I think when people are past 27," she says, "they go into a world of horror, so that might be what I write about next. There was this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where they'd left this creature alone on a planet and Picard came across it 1,000 years later and it had just become a tar pit of hatred and loneliness. They beamed down to look at it and it was just this giant, bubbling, black, oily, steaming mass saying, 'Stay with me, stay with me' and wanting to keep everybody there on the planet to assuage its hideous 1,000-year loneliness. It kept rearing up and absorbing people. I think I'll just write about characters like that.
"Once I saw that episode late at night and it seemed so absolutely alive with everyone I knew and myself, I thought I must have made it up," she says. "But I looked it up, and it's true".
· Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley will be published by Jonathan Cape on May 10.
