SARAH WATERS INTERVIEW - DYKES ON MYKES

Sarah Waters Interview - Dykes on Mykes

Davina: She’s in Australia right now promoting her latest book release ‘The Little Stanger’, I’m talking to novelist Sarah Waters and I’d like to welcome her to the Dykes on Mykes.

Sarah: Thank you. Hi.

Davina: How you going?

Sarah: I’m good thanks, yeah very good.

Davina: I know you’ve been down in Adelaide and Melbourne…

Sarah: Yeah I started in Sydney last week, but that’s a bit of a blur I have to say, my jet lag was quite bad. But then I went on to Adelaide and now in Melbourne and I’m feeling a lot more human, it’s really nice to be here. It’s lovely.

Davina: Fabulous. So, I was preparing for this interview today and I was reading a whole heap of press on the visit and I’ve noticed a huge similarity between all the sort of press that comes out about you, and that is that every single one quotes your books as ‘lesbo-Victorian romps’ [Sarah laughs], now I know it’s just a few words but after five novels, all of them quite different, does it ever get really frustrating to have years and years of work referred to again and again as lesbo-Victorian romps?

Sarah: Yeah, it does a little bit, but you know it was me who originated that phrase, so I’ve only got myself to blame, I suppose. I mean, you know, I was a good phrase for “Tipping the velvet”, and it was kind of true for ‘Fingersmith” as well, but no, not even “Affinity” – I mean that was Victorian – but not even that one could be called a romp. So, it is a bit frustrating that that gets trotted out.

Davina: Yeah just so many years of writing to just be reduced down to 3 little words again and again. Look, our listeners are really familiar with your work, as we said Tipping The Velvet, Fingersmith, Affinity, The Night Watch and of course The Little Stranger is your latest one. All of them have got really distinct characters and very vivid storylines and structures, where do they start? How do you develop these stories?

Sarah: Well, you know, each has grown out of the previous one. So in Tipping The Velvet, that was my first novel, and that in itself actually grew out of some academic work I had been doing as I was interested in Victorian life and I wanted to write a lesbian historical novel as I’d been reading a lot of them. I went to the 1890’s and I could see that it has all this lesbian potential to it, and then, you know, having written that, the next two Victorian novels sort of followed suit and I guess the biggest leap for me was to the 40’s with the Night Watch but again, I was interested in a period that I knew a bit about, like women’s lives in the period, I knew that some women has really, quite exciting wars, exciting wartime lives, and then of course that had to go back to something a bit more domestic after the war and that was difficult for them. You know, so I guess it’s partly what I take to a period and partly what I find in the period when I do my research that somehow produces a novel that I hope tells us something about the past even while it’s speaking to us in our present day as well.

Davina: We had a listener actually who wrote you, because you know we got online and put it up there on Facebook, and her favourite character is Maud in Fingersmith, and she was saying that Maud is such a complex character. You have got such complex and full characters, where do they come from? How do they emerge out of that research and out of those stories?

Sarah:  You know, I’m often asked about characterisation, and I find it quite hard to talk about. It’s funny, I think it’s one of those things that just sort of happens. When I start thinking about my characters… I mean, your job as a novelist is to imagine yourself into somebody else’s life and I spend a lot of time just thinking about what it would really be like to be this character, you know, living with these sorts of issues around them and I think something happens for all writers around voice and there’s this marvellous point when you’re writing a novel when your characters almost start talking to each other and they develop their own distinct voices. For me, I think a dialogue is a great way of exploring and revealing a character because I think what we say and our exchanges with people, even very small ones, often reveal a lot about our personalities and the way we interact with other people, so I think that’s probably one of the ways I try to develop a character.

Davina: So, none of them are from real people or ex-girlfriends?

Sarah: [laughs] Ah, there’s a little bit of that in The Night Watch and that’s the only novel where I consciously drew on a bit more personal stuff, but even with that, you know, as soon as I start working on characters for a book, they develop personalities of their own so even if my own stuff it goes into the novels it ends up morphing into something else.

Davina: Each of these books that you’ve released has been nominated or has won a gazillion awards, and I think that’s a real feat for stories that have got very strong queer themes through them. What is it that makes your books so accessible to the mainstream public? What makes it digestible for them? 

Sarah: Well, you know, it’s certainly not something I ever set out to do. It wasn’t like I had this crusade to introduce lesbian fiction to a mainstream audience…

Davina: It’s a nice by-product though.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been delightful, but I think I’m a relatively traditional writer. I am interested in characters and plot and I’m quite big on plots and sort of an old fashioned story, really. It’s important to me. I like my books to feel kind of emotionally true. I write quite visually I think. So I think, in some ways, yes, the lesbian content might seem challenging to some straight people, but there’s nothing else about the books that is very challenging. They get a bit bleak, they’re a bit bleak at times but I hope they sort of invite people in by the strength of the storytelling.

Davina: Maybe the lesbianism, or those sort of themes, are quite incidental then, and the plot is actually the main…

Sarah: Yes. That’s true, that’s also true. I mean, you know what’s it like when you’re a lesbian – when you’re an out lesbian – and lesbianism is completely important in your life but it’s also just incidental, as you say, you just kind of take it for granted and I think I definitely set out to do that with the novels. You know, I’d read a lot of lesbian fiction, I was very confident that there were readers for lesbian fiction and it wasn’t a big deal for me, I suppose I’m saying. So, it’s not really a big deal for my characters, you know, they might discover their sexuality – that usually happens quite quickly – and then they get on with other things like desire and loss which are pretty universal things.

Davina: Absolutely. You’re in the country promoting The Little Stranger at the moment, you’re latest book, what can readers expect with this one?  I hear it’s a ghost story?

Sarah: Yeah, it’s kind of a haunted house story. It’s set just after the Second World War in Warwickshire in the UK and it centres on a kind of crumbling old country house called Hundreds Hall with a struggling gentry family living in it and it’s all narrated by a country doctor who gets to know them. During the course of the novel, strange and increasingly frightening things start happening at the house so it’s kind of a whodunit in a way but yeah, it’s kind of a ghost story too but, I have to say, before your readers get too excited, there aren’t any lesbians in it, which I’ve been apologising for to lesbian audiences even from when I was writing it, before it was published.

Davina: It’s quite funny when you need to apologise for there not being enough gayness in a book…

Sarah: [laughs] I know! What a topsy-turvy world.

Davina: Look, I’m a huge fan of queer literature and I’ve got bookshelves full of them at home, but my question is what does the lesbian author read? What are your favourite books? What is it that you would want to sit down and reads in a cosy armchair by the fire?

Sarah: Well, I read a lot for research, but that’s always pleasant reading, you know, I read a lot of 40’s fiction when I was writing The Little Stranger and The Night Watch, and really got into some of those writers, so like Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor and Graham Greene, I’m always happy to read them, or Daphne du Maurier, I’m a big Daphne du Maurier fan. But otherwise, you know, I’m really happy to read contemporary fiction and I know some authors don’t read other authors while they’re writing, but I don’t feel like that at all and I’m always desperate to try and read good fiction in the hope that it will inspire my own. I’ve just read a great book by Geoff Dyer ‘Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi’, that’s cool, that was a lot of fun and I’ve just re-read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde so you know, a bit of everything really.

Davina: So what’s next for you then? Where to after The Little Stranger? What are you looking to do?

Sarah: Well, I’m still a historical writer, but I’m thinking of moving back slightly towards the 20’s which I’m reading about now and finding really fascinating. There’s lots of similar issues to post Second World War life, women returning to domestic life and men returning from the services but just different enough because it’s that bit further back in time, so that’s where I’m heading and just to reassure lesbians who were disappointed that there weren’t any lesbians in The Little Stranger, I’m planning it to be a thoroughly lesbian story again.

Davina: [laughs] The lesbians around Australia rejoice. It’s interesting that we’re talking about lesbian stories and stuff because everyone that I’ve spoken to, that I’ve said ‘Look I’m going to have a chat to Sarah Waters’, all of them have just gone ‘Oh, I just love reading Tipping The Velvet and Fingersmith, and I came out reading these books’, and that was something that very much happened to me as well, you know, the first book that I ever read after Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was Tipping the Velvet…

Sarah: Well, that was a good antidote to Radcliffe Hall I hope.

Davina: It was absolutely a fabulous antidote to Radcliffe Hall. I’d like to say thank you so much for joining us today Sarah.

Sarah: It’s a great pleasure.