I'm here in Oxford to interview Daisy Johnson,
who was nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
She's the youngest person to have ever been nominated
and she's invited me to the Rusty Bicycle,
one of her favourite places to write in.
Even on the front of this book, it does say Man Booker prize.
How was it for you when you found out you were going to be nominated for this?
Like, how did you feel?
So, I was babysitting this little girl I look after
Actually both times when I heard about the longlist and shortlist,
I got this call and she's really into phones, so she was like, 'phone, phone!'
And I was like, 'no, get away!'
And it just completely blew my mind ...
Then we went to a playground and ran around screaming for a while.
How would you describe the book without giving too much away?
So I think it's probably, a quest narrative, you know?
It's about a young woman who hasn't seen her mother for a very long time
and she wants to find her,
and it's about her journey to find her and also about what comes back to her,
you know, the memories that return to her as she's going through this journey.
What inspired you to start with this book? It's your first novel …
So why did you decide to start with this story?
So, it's a retelling of a myth and we're not going to say what myth it is
but I love the idea of retelling, I love the idea of taking something ancient
and destroying it and rebuilding it,
and seeing what I could do with it, you know,
seeing if I can make it feminist and contemporary and wild.
What were the challenges that you faced trying to write this book?
I knew I had to write a novel, I'd written a short story collection
and I knew that a novel had to be next.
And I'd written other novels before but I'd never finished them
to get them to this point
and I didn't know if I could, you know, there was kind, in the back of my mind,
as I was working on it, I worked on it for four years,
there was always this, 'oh what if you can't actually write a novel?'
What if you're a short story writer only?
And that was really frightening and quite scary
but I think it did drive me on, you know?
There was a lot of kind of crying
in coffee shops but I think it was good, I think it was good to have that pressure.
And I think I needed that pressure to write it.
I mean, I noticed in the acknowledgments at the back,
you said that your partner had left you a message where you were working
which said … what was it exactly that the message said?
So, I was really despondent, I think I was really sad
about the writing which just wasn't going well
and then I had a really good week
and I said to him something like I think this book's gonna be fucking brilliant
and he was like, 'right, you're gonna remember that
when next time when you're crying on the sofa!'
So he made me this little sign
which I have on my desk and I think that's the thing about writing,
it's so up and down, you know, it's so exhausting.
It's enormous highs when it's going well
and then massive lows, like any creative thing.
I think just to remember that you did love it at one point
even if you don't now.
And what is it that draws you to horror?
That's a good question.
I'm a Halloween baby so I think that's probably part of it.
Born on Halloween?
I'm born on Halloween, yeah.
OK, wow, that's a sign.
So I grew up with The Shining and The Exorcist
and watching these films when I was far too young to watch them.
I think what I love about it is,
there's such an art to horror writing, I think, you know,
to building the tension and building the tension
until you, you know, you're at this kind of moment of catharsis.
Horror I think is also all about seeing only part of something
seeing half of something or seeing a flash of something
and I think that's a really wonderful thing to try and master as a writer, you know?
How little can you show the reader for them still to understand
and still to have a sense of what you're talking about.
I definitely think that's something that I felt in the book.
I couldn't put it down, I just I think the tension that you managed to build up
and all of the different threads that wove into one another,
I can definitely see why it was nominated for the Man Booker prize.
It's fantastic.
One of the things I find really interesting, is that even though
there's been really big focus on your age,
you don't write like a young person in a very stereotypical way, at all.
What was it that made you interested in writing about older women?
Yeah, that was something I was really worried about, actually.
Because obviously, yeah, I know how to write about what it's like to be 27,
or what it's like to be 14, but I didn't know what it was like to write about,
you know, about being 70 and the older character in the book
also has, you know, has Alzheimer's and I was frightened about writing this, you know?
I didn't want to be disrespectful, I didn't want to do it badly
so I did read a lot. Iris Murdoch's husband wrote a book
about what it was like living with her when she had Alzheimer's
and you know, what it's like watching someone you love
and know really well becoming this different person,
I think there's also, I guess, again I wanted to write about
women who we have kind of preconceptions about the way they should be
you know, what it means when you become an older woman,
and I wanted to explore that.
When I first started writing I was reacting to reading a lot of books where
women weren't protagonists, you know, and feeling quite angry about that,
feeling like I hadn't … there wasn't, you know, a space
where I could read people, you know, who were also women,
who weren't, you know, only mothers or only children
they were something more than their relationship to a man.
And I think that's probably where the main character
has come out of this, you know?
Not the main character, the mother in the book,
she's not a good mother and I wanted to write about that, you know?
I wanted you to explore what happens when a woman doesn't fit these boundaries
we try to put her in.
I also really like the way that you explore the idea of love in the book
because it wasn't your typical idea of how love works even between family members
and yeah, I just wanted to know what made you want to write about love in that way?
Yeah, I was really interested in love between a mother and a daughter,
I really interested in that, you know,
I have a really good relationship with my mother but that doesn't mean
it's not quite a tempestuous relationship, you know?
It's the person you spend the most time with when you're a child,
and I was really interested in looking at how the people we grow up with,
how the people we spend all of our time with,
change the people we are.
So in the book, the mother and daughter come up with this language
this new language that they create together
and I was really interested in looking at how the language we share
with the people we love changes the people we are, you know,
does it change our nature?
Was there anything in particular that gave you the confidence to be able to write?
Because I know lots of people who are dyslexic
and they really feel quite nervous about writing things
they kind of go, 'well that's not for me because I'm dyslexic.'
Yeah.
So, was there anything in particular that made you think, 'yeah, I can do this'?
I think just knowing that the first draft …
No one has to see the first draft, if you don't want them to.
You know, that's actually quite a good rule to have.
You know, once you've written the first, if you're writing a novel, 70,000 words,
put it in a drawer, go away for a month, come back,
and then you read it on your own, you know?
It doesn't matter if you've made spelling mistakes or punctuation mistakes
because no one else is going to read that, you know?
And then you go through it and you work out what's wrong with it.
I would also say I guess that it's a lot easier to be dyslexic now,
you know, having Word is a miracle.
The technology to kind of help out and correct things?
Gmail at the moment, it gives me all of these suggestions,
I'm like, 'you know what? I'm OK'
I like it.
I'm like, 'yes, that's a good one!'
I deliberately spelt it incorrectly.
Yeah, excuse me.
It was on purpose, definitely.
Thanks for watching the video, if you enjoyed it,
there are more which are part of the series called Fresh Voices.
You can click here and don't forget to like, comment and subscribe.
See you soon