there's a scene in the second novel
where a Connell one of the protagonists
goes to a literary reading and he feels
incredibly alienated from what he sees
he feels that writers turn up to events
full of people from a particular class
with a particular educational background
and essentially the writer sells them
the product which is culture and
existence in the form of a commodity and
the commodity is a book and people can
purchase this book and therefore
purchase their way into a seemingly
cultured class and that all of the money
that changes hands in the book industry
is actually just people people paying to
belong to a class of people who read
books and yeah and that is something
that I that I definitely worry about and
feel and implicated in because I do
think a huge amount of the cultural
world first of all that there is a large
extent to which it involves sealing off
the appointed cultural producers from
normal life by saying like by you know
festivals and events and like dinner
parties and book launches and that this
that this world that the economic and
cultural backing of this world as a way
of taking riders from their background
whatever it may be and and making them
part of a special class which is
somewhat fenced off from like normal
life as it proceeds it's in the outside
world
and I don't I am I'm very skeptical of
that process and I'm very skeptical of
the way in which books are marketed as
commodities like almost like accessories
which people can fill their homes with
like beautiful items that you can fill
your shelves with and therefore become a
sort of book person and I guess the
reason that I feel skeptical of all that
is because it makes me feel that books
have no potential to speak truth to
power they have no they have no
potential as political
because of the role they play in the in
the culture economy that's already
predetermined to how people are going to
read them so even if the book is full of
Marxist propaganda it's still sealed off
from any real political potential
because of its position as a commodity
in this in this market in my own life
and the way that I think about the world
that we live in is probably through
mostly through a sort of Marxist
framework and and I'm never quite sure
how to make that way of thinking sit
alongside the fiction that I write I
don't know what it means to write a
Marxist novel I don't know and I would
love to know and so even though that is
the that's the sort of analytical
structure that helps me to make sense of
the world around me
I can't necessarily always accommodate
that structure in the form of a novel
and so it's kind of something that I
that I struggle with and that I think
about a lot when I'm writing and one way
that it um that it influences my work
which obviously you know is that I
writes a lot about social class and but
I don't think there's a straightforward
way of doing that I mean I guess you
could say that that the idea of a
Marxist novel probably has to do with
writing about you know working-class
characters and certainly that is one
approach to the true socialist novel and
I think it's it's it's obviously it's
obviously very important but it also
raises important questions about what do
we understand the working-class to mean
the people that I write about and tend
to be kind of precariously situated in
the economy and like they're usually
college educated like I am and but that
doesn't necessarily mean that they are
financially stable or secure and and
again I mean that just goes back to
writing about the world that I
encountered when I came out of college
when I had enough of a developed brain
to notice what I was seeing around me
those were the only tools the only
material that I could drawn to make
sense of and to use in a in a book so
it's difficult for me to try and to try
and make sense of the way that I
approach social class in my
books and the way that I try to approach
it in my in my life like in my critical
or analytical life um but it is
something that's very important to me
and I think what's what's really
important and sort of the best I can do
is to try and observe how class as a
very broad social structure impacts our
personal and intimate lives like how do
we carry material realities and economic
realities into our interpersonal
relationships and one way is through
commodities I mean how important
commodities and items physical objects
become to us a sense of ownership over
objects a sense of possession also and
the transactional nature of
relationships how it's so difficult to
escape the transactional framework of
capitalism which dominates you know our
our whole existence how difficult it is
to escape that framework when it comes
to our personal lives how difficult it
is to get outside a transactional way of
thinking and try and build intimacy with
other people that isn't dependent on
sort of a notion of buying and selling
I came to politics as I as I think a lot
of young women do through feminism sort
of I'm seeing myself at the center of
the political world and believing
everything revolved around me and
therefore noticing that because I was a
woman gender was a very important
political phenomenon and I think and I
still think that it is and but through
that kind of shallow understanding of
feminism that I'm still very much
working on trying to deepen in some way
and seeing independence as sort of the
be-all and end-all see seeing em female
independence as being a very important
goal of the feminist movement and and
just on critically accepting that idea
and the female individual the
independent woman as being the sort of
political unit that we should strive to
emancipate in some sense and and now I
just don't believe that anymore I don't
I don't believe in the idea of an
independent people I don't I don't
believe that anyone is independent from
anyone because um the more that I think
about how our world is structured we all
rely on each other's labor all the time
I mean for the food we eat for the
clothes that we wear somebody has to
make them somebody has to farm the food
somebody has to you know pick the crops
and all of that is happening
so that we can have the lives that we
have so part of it is happening for me
on that structural level that it's
understanding that my life is sustained
by the work of other people all the time
so to to believe in myself as an
individual or as as an independent
person it just seems like delusional
like I'm not independent just
independent from wash I mean I my life
is only sustained by my position within
all these networks that I belong to you
know whether I like it or not and that's
human life it's not sustainable
otherwise we all rely on each other so
so I guess that that's happening on one
level which is the very big general
level and then to try and make that work
in a microscopic sense like it works in
novels is to try and observe just how
much one person can change one person
and to try and show that even on that
level the individual is never really the
individual it's always you're always a
culmination of the influence of others
and then I guess that's part of what a
novel can do is take an idea like that
which people might say okay sure yeah
people can change each other I mean
maybe I have no objection to is but
illustrating it and dramatizing is and
making it real so that at the end of the
book the person is saying oh okay yeah
this makes sense in a new way maybe and
it's not just that I know that it's
technically true or it's intellectually
true is I feel it to be like emotionally
true I've seen it happen because if from
the beginning of the book if you believe
that these people are real and at the
end of the book you still believe in
their reality whatever kind of reality
that is then you you've been made to go
with that idea in a different way and to
watch it actually happening and playing
out and so your belief in it has changed
by the end of the book I guess that's
kind of I don't know and I and that
isn't to say that I think the point of a
novel is to illustrate an idea or to
hammer home an idea certainly not in my
case an ideological idea because that's
not really what I do but I suppose I do
want to to allow people to see an idea
that maybe everyone believes to be true
anyway I mean everyone probably believes
we can change each other but to play it
out so that it doesn't just
seem real it actually feels real
you