Book Club Meets: Grief, women in history, and Elizabethan magic, with Maggie O’Farrell

0:07Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. On her shoulder, a brush of fingers on her arm. Today, Hamnet by Maggie O 'Farrell. Of kindness, of fellow feeling. Her stepmother never comes near her. Her siblings paw and claw at her, but that doesn't count. She grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird And all the strength of the grip can be found there Or the power of the grasp A person's ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned

1:03the film version of maggie o farrell's outstanding novel hamlet came out last month which is why i wanted to celebrate the original book too by picking it as our january happy place book club read i'm still desperate to see the film i might try and go and see it next week i can't believe i haven't yet but i bloody love the book hamlet the book was first published in 2020 and breathes life into the story of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes when their 11 year old son Hamnet dies. You know why I love this book? Because I've always found Shakespeare quite intimidating really like maybe it's not for me but Maggie doesn't actually use Shakespeare's name in the book at all so he's just a man.

1:47He's a dad and a husband and it made me understand his whole world so much better. You guys have had big thoughts on this too. You've been sending messages into us on our Instagram account at happyplacebookclub. This is Lolly. I absolutely adored Hamnet. Not only was it beautifully written, but it was also emotionally devastating. I don't think I could read the book again and I definitely can't see the film, which of course means it's a five-star read for me. That is so interesting. Yeah, Lolly, you found it so emotionally devastating you couldn't possibly read it again. Claire has read it a number of times for precisely the same reason.

2:27So first off, I've read Hamlet four times and I've listened to the audiobook on a long journey once. No surprise to me that there's another inspiring female character from Maggie O 'Farrell, Agnes' The Beating Heart of the Novel. The father or Latin tutor, Shakespeare, by contrast, has very little direct speech, which really helps to make it so that there's no celebrity distraction. And the central theme of the book remains love, family, grief, loss in all its forms. It's a delight to read. The prose is exquisite, never laboured or mundane, and she paints a fully textured and layered sense of beautiful scenes of daily life with recognisable and really relatable characters.

3:08Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing your session with Maggie Affelt. Well, Claire, you're about to hear my chat with Maggie. It was one honour to chat to Maggie. It was so fun. We talked about Jesse Buckley's award-winning portrayal of Agnes in the film, how Maggie uses her intuition when she's writing, and some of the Elizabethan pursuits she took up during the research phase, including flying kestrels and making herbal cold remedies. All right, let's do it. Here's the show.

4:02Maggie, what an absolute honour to not only talk to you today, but also to be discussing your exceptional book, Hamnet, for our Happy Place book club pick of January. Can't believe it's by January. Maggie, how are you? You, I'm sure, are in a complete whirlwind with the ever-rolling success of this book, but also now the film being out too. Well, it's all quite exciting. I saw it on the side of a bus for the first time today, which is quite exciting. Yes. And I did have to take a photo of it. My teenage daughter was really embarrassed, but I said, nobody around us knows why I'm taking this photo of a bus.

4:39It's just only you and I know. It's so great. Oh, but it's so amazing. And the success of the film already. Jessie obviously got a Critics' Choice Award this week. Yes, she did. I mean, I can't even imagine having a book that you've poured your heart into. To see it brought to life in such a way must be extraordinary. Well, I was so thrilled that Jessie won the Critics' Circle Award for actress because she deserves it to the moon and back. It's just so wonderful to see her incredible work being recognised. but I am I think I might be the luckiest author in the world because not only is someone made a film of my book but I had it with an amazing director with Chloe Zhao and with an absolute dream cast you know you couldn't really ask for more than Jesse Buckley and Paul Meskel and the kids the three kids who play Susanna Hamnet and Judith are just jewel-droppingly brilliant so I have to keep pinching myself I'm going to be covered in bruises I think by the end of the week Oh, it's just, it's magical.

5:42I can't wait to watch a film. I've not seen it yet. But let's chat about the book because not only is the Happy Place community loving it and loving discussing it and favourite parts of the book, but I have just found it such a tonic and a balm. I think it came to me late considering it's been out for a few years now. And it just it came to me in the winter. So I was cozy, electric blanket on. And it's just the lovely sort of meditative cadence to it. And also, I must thank you because what you've personally done for me is make Shakespeare as a person not intimidating. I think I was always quite intimidated by the whole subject matter of Shakespeare.

6:27I'd seen one play, Macbeth, at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It was a few years ago, a couple of years ago now. And that was maybe my sort of introduction properly to Shakespeare, because they had a contemporary layout, sort of contemporary clothes. It was David Tennant, who was just phenomenal as Macbeth. And for the first time, I thought, oh, maybe this is for me. Maybe I'm allowed to sort of be in this world. And I think you've taken it one step further where obviously it's fiction, but you've got real people in this novel. And it just sent me down all of these Google rabbit holes wanting to know more about him as a person, because although his plays are ubiquitous and have been in our world since the 1500s, Shakespeare is a person much, much less so.

7:11Yeah, well, I'm really happy that you say that, Fern. That makes me really happy. I never, ever wanted to write the kind of novel that you need an A-level in English or even a degree in English literature to understand. I didn't want it to be like that. And whenever people say to me that Shakespeare is difficult or he's elitist or, you know, I always want to say, you know, Shakespeare left school when he was 15. His dad was a glover. You know, he didn't go to university. He's not like Ben Johnson or Christopher Marlowe's contemporaries. he wrote about people for the people you know the capacity of the globe theater was 3 000 people not all of those people were educated aristocrats up in up in the high seats most of them were what was called groundlings they were just people off the streets of london who went in and they recognized themselves and they recognized their language and their jokes and all this ribaldry and you know love arguments uh conflict it was all there so i always really pleased when i hear people say I didn't think I was going to like Shakespeare but I did you know and I think it's I really really wish that Shakespeare was more on the curriculum you know he used to be when I was at school I was at comprehensive school and in the 80s and we used to do a Shakespeare play every year from the age of 11 and I loved it it was so exciting because you knew that you'd go from Romeo and Juliet then you did Julius Caesar then you did and you know it's it's not kids fault but they don't have access to that unfortunately it's not teacher's fault either it's I just wish that because people if you don't get the chance to access his language and his world at that age you you do feel that it's elitist and you feel excluded from it but then you shouldn't be no I agree and that's why I just lapped it up and and it was just so exciting you know I I love Tudor slash Elizabethan Britain I you know I love visiting Hampton Court Palace and and diving into that era of history.

9:05And this just felt like, actually, rather than only concentrating on the royal and the upper classes that we hear about more commonly from that era, but actually to see everyday life in the 1500s and how you've described it, it was fascinating. And I mean, your research on that part of it was extensive. You even learned how to fly Kestrel at one point, I believe. I did, yeah. Well, obviously, there's no shortage of books about Shakespeare. So I really, I dived into those. And I love reading about that kind of thing. And there's lots of incredible works of scholarship and biography about Shakespeare.

9:41But especially in terms of the women of the book and the children, of course, there's very, very little written. It's very little we know about them, but very little written about the life of ordinary people. Like you say, you can find out all about what it was like living in a palace or wearing clothes that a queen would wear. but you don't really it's very hard to find out what ordinary people living you know on the streets of Structural One Avon would have been like so for that research I did do some kind of hands-on research for that and I did learn to fly a kestrel and I went to the Scottish borders and I lived like a kestrel and that was literally the most fun thing I've ever done in the name of work I loved it and I did come back and I said to my husband I really want to get a kestrel and he was kind of I've got a special Christmas.

10:25No, I don't think. Also, I've got lots of cats, so, you know, it could be quite ugly. Not great. And I learned how to make bread from a Tudor recipe. Wow. And I planted my own Elizabethan herb garden because I read that every house would have had a medicinal garden to kind of treat minor ailments. And it would have been the woman of the house's responsibility to know how to use them and to cure things like colds or bruises or sprains or whatever. my world is light years our world is light years away from the world of agnes shakespeare and hamlet and judith and susanna so in order to kind of inhabit their lives i really felt like i i needed to do what they did and understand what it felt like to be them so that's why i did these things and i went on a course to learn how to make medicines and i did make my tuda bread which wasn't wasn't delicious i have to say it didn't go down very well with my 21st century kids.

11:17No, I'm imagining hard. Is that right? A bit dry, yeah. Tough. And are you using these remedies now for colds? Has it become a new part of your life? Do you know, I do. I still make an elderberry syrup that I dose people up with if they are getting a cold, yeah. And Scott's Pine, very good for chest infections if anyone's worried this winter. You've literally turned into Agnes. It's gorgeous. I mean, let's talk about Agnes because she's a beautiful character and she she is also getting a lot of love within our Happy Place Book Club community, but obviously globally reaching. People are talking about this character so fondly and I guess also getting a sense that perhaps Shakespeare wouldn't have been able to do what he did and fulfil his dreams unless he'd had Agnes there as his, you know, the sail of his ship, the engine room of his family home.

12:11Well, I think for some strange reason, I don't really understand why, for hundreds of years now scholars and biographers and writers of other works of fiction and plays have wanted to give Shakespeare a kind of retrospective divorce they've wanted to really downplay his wife who's often known as Anne Hathaway which is mysterious in itself since her name was Shakespeare for most of her life um so they've just they wanted to kind of downplay his marriage and say it wasn't important and they've said things like you know he didn't love her, that he had to marry her, he regretted that he'd ever married, he ran away to London to get away from her.

12:47And there's literally no evidence at all, no documented evidence whatsoever that any of that is true. And I just got, I mean, you know, I originally conceived the book to be about fathers and sons, as the play Hamlet is, but I became really sidetracked, and actually really quite cross about how history has treated her. And the really crystallising moment for me was when I read her father's will. So her father, Richard Hathaway, was a very successful sheep farmer. And a year before Agnes married, or Anne married, William, he died and he left her quite a generous dowry in his will. And in the will, he refers to her as my daughter Agnes, or Agnes, as it might have been pronounced then.

13:26And that was a kind of lightning bolt moment for me because I thought, you know, on top of everything else, we've been calling her by the wrong name for all these years, you know, because surely if anyone knows her real name, it's going to be her dad. So that was a kind of, it felt like a gift as well for a novelist because I thought, okay, I'm going to ask readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway and I want them to meet Agnes Shakespeare. Yes. Oh, it's a gift for all of us. And I mean, I guess we can see this throughout history in so many ways that women are often vilified.

13:57I wrote a tiny section on a non-fiction that I'm releasing myself in March about how women are often either downplayed in history. Certainly, you know, we can see that in literature and art. You know, name a famous female painter, it's pretty bloody hard. But equally, even people that we all know, like Marie Antoinette or Mary I, they're sort of overly vilified more than their male counterparts. And I'm wondering if it's just, this is just history, guys, and the patriarchy. I don't know. I don't really know the reason why people have been so keen to sideline her. I mean, very, very little is known about her.

14:35We don't even have a record of her birth because she was born before records began in her particular village. But it's almost as if I don't know whether there's a really strong desire for our male artists to be footloose and fancy free. But, you know, for me, there are two really important documented things about Shakespeare. One that was all the money he earned in London, and he earned a lot. He was a very, very good businessman as well as being a pretty good playwright. He sent all of that money back to Stratford-upon-Avon and he lived in very modest lodgings in London while he was there. And also at the end of his career, he could have lived anywhere he wanted when he retired from the stage, but he chose to go back to Stratford-upon-Avon and live with his wife, which neither of those things speak to me as somebody who regretted his marriage or hated his wife.

15:20Yeah, completely. I mean, certainly some fury has fuelled your writing of this character in the most positive way. And I'm imagining with Agnes and Hamnet, you, well, I'm assuming you felt a sense of responsibility with these real people and turning them into fiction and how you might be moving them through that world. How heavily did that weigh on your mind during the writing process? It did, definitely. And I think if you are going to choose to write fiction about people who were real, even if they lived, you know, 500 years ago, you do have a responsibility to them. And you've got to remember that their bones are still in the churchyard.

15:59You know, they were real. These names are real. The scenario, the houses, the lives, as much as you can find out are real. So I absolutely made it a hard and fast rule that I needed to find out as much as I possibly could. And even if I found out something that didn't fit with the novel that I wanted to write, I had to, I had to, you know, I couldn't just pretend I hadn't read that book. I had to incorporate it in. And also, I knew that when I'd finished the book, I wanted to use some of the money I got for it for making a memorial for Hamlet because he doesn't have a gravestone and neither does Judith and there's no, I mean we know that they're buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon but there's no marker of their grave so that's what I did after Covid, after lockdown the church in Stratford-upon-Avon were brilliant and they said yes, we can't have a gravestone because we don't know where he is but there are now two rowan trees and two plaques one for Hamlet and one for Judith in the churchyard and that was really important to me to make a marker, a real marker of those two people.

16:56Oh, my God. I mean, I can't imagine. That must have been deeply emotional to go there and see the memorials. It really was. And the vicar of Holy Trinity gave a whole dedication and gave a whole kind of service for Hamlet and Judith. It was incredible. I mean, I was tearing up. And so many people turned up. And apparently now tour groups take them, people there. And, yeah, so it's fabulous. And I've got the brilliant Annie, who runs the literary festival there, occasionally sends me photographs and the trees are growing and they're thriving and they bring out beautiful berries. Jodas are pink and hamlets are red.

17:28That's breaking my heart. It's too gorgeous. What a beautiful thing to do. You write about grief, love, loss, everyday life in the most exceptional and beautiful way, the cadence of the book. As I said, I find it very meditative to read these often short, swift sentences. It's like you're there in real time. It's probably the closest I've felt to watching a film whilst reading because the pace is sort of constant and these beautiful little vignettes that you get because of that pace. How much was that thought out before you started writing? Or with your books, does the pace, the cadence, the style come with the story as you're writing it?

18:17I think it comes. I'm not much of a planner in writing or in life, actually. I don't know if that shocks you, Fern. But I do know that there are writers out there who will plan everything meticulously chapter by chapter before they even start to write the book. But I don't do that. I tend to kind of dive in and just write a scene here and a scene there and see how it feels. I always feel that I leave that kind of decision about style and grammar and voice up to what I think Rudyard Kipling called the other side of his head. I think the story will tell you what it needs. And there have been times when I've been writing a book and it's in kind of, I don't know, the first person.

18:57It's, you know, I said or I sat and then something will feel wrong. It's a bit like walking around in shoes that are too tight. And I will look at it and I'll think, actually, you know what? This is wrong. this needs to be past tense this needs to be third person so I did once actually there was a book I wrote called The Hand That First Tell Mine and I realized I'd done that so I had to spend a really boring fortnight changing every I to she and every yeah but I had to do it it was wrong so I think you need to I think I'm just one of those writers who just I need to be actually doing it before I know until that's the only way I find out what it is I need to get in there and I guess you know being intuitive and following your gut is imperative and I think that's really wonderful for people to hear keen writers out there that there isn't this sort of set of rules that you have to follow to write well it's going what feels good to you I mean there are rules obviously you have to be good at it but I mean if you're in the flow of it intuition is is really meaningful in in the writing process I think for me is and I think everybody does it differently every single writer I ever speak to everybody has their own process and every book I think is very different as well you know I think in a way you've got to let the book teach you what it's what it needs you know I think just because you've written one book doesn't mean actually that you know how to write the next book because you can know how to write that book the one you finish but the next one you've got to learn about it all over it's a bit like having children you know when I had one child I thought you learn so much in the second child I thought okay I know about this and I think oh wow it's a completely different human being that's a different person how does this work I've got to relearn it all the way so I think books are like that as well but I do think I think the thing that I really wish someone had said to me when I was starting out writing is that you don't have to begin at the beginning.

20:38You know, you don't have to set out your stall and establish your character and work it all out. And then, you know, you start to sing. You can just just give it a try. I think there's huge comfort in word count. And you can never, ever make a blank page into anything other than a blank page. But bad writing you can make into good writing. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's the first bit is moving past the fear of can I do this or not? Once you're in, you're in. I mean, I've written a lot more, well, a lot more nonfiction than I have fiction. I've written one novel and I'm in the middle of writing one at the moment.

21:14But I have probably more with my nonfiction learned a lot about myself through the process of writing. And I wonder what this particular fiction taught you about yourself. if there were any moments where scenes were playing out with characters where it led you to some sort of introspection? I think the vertigo I had before writing Hamlet was worse than for any other book that I've written, possibly. And actually I put off starting it for years, partly because I was really superstitious that I couldn't write it until my own son was past the age of 11. But also that I just kept thinking, I'd think I love this idea, I love it, I love it.

21:53and then I would think, oh my God, who writes a novel about Shakespeare? That's a terrible idea. So, you know, I would kind of come close and I'd think, no, no, I can't and then I'd have it again. And I actually wrote three other books so as not to write Hamlet. And then I look back when I kind of finished, I wrote a memoir and I finished my memoir and I sort of gave myself a talking tune and I said, you know, either you have to give this a go or you've just got to forget about it. You can't keep on buying more books about Shakespeare and then changing your mind. so I just thought I just need to plunge in I just need to do it and I knew that I had to start with Hamlet had to be putting the boy front and center and so I just wrote this thing one day it just said a boy's coming down a flight of stairs and somehow it was I don't know it was like a key turning in the lock it was the right time in my life and it was the right point in the story but it was like you know I did and that's partly why I don't name Shakespeare in the book just because I mean partly because I wanted people to see him as a human not as a literary icon but also because I literally could not write a sentence like William Shakespeare came down the stairs and had breakfast I just think oh my god what am I what am I doing so I just had to do away with the whole name but I think that's what for me made it not intimidating because you were seeing him as a son as a lover as a father and it was like oh yeah he was he was a human he isn't just this sort of you know we can all picture what he looks like that iconic image it gave me a completely new perspective on him as a person.

23:20And what I love about from the interviews I've watched with you talking about Hamnet is that this idea has actually been percolating a lot longer than three books written in between. This was something that was initiated in an English class at school where you learned about Hamnet from your brilliant English teacher and it stuck in your brain. I mean, that's extraordinary. No, it is. I had an extraordinary teacher at school, Mr Henderson, he was called. and I'm not saying that age 16 I heard about the existence of Hamlet and I thought one day I'm going to write a novel but I was just instantly fascinated by the similarity of the names and even though I was a really long way from being a writer and a mother I knew that it was significant.

24:04I knew that nobody would casually give the name of their dead son to a play and a prince and a ghost, that it had to mean something. Yeah, yeah. But my God, thank God it stayed with you and that it just slowly gained momentum and ended up as this book. I mean, if I had a week with you, I would read all the bits I've underlined. But one bit I wanted to read out is, this is the right page, yes, the sexiest paragraph ever written. Ready? Ready for this? Okay, why not? Let's go for it, Fern. I'm not going to read it in a sexy voice because that would be mega cringe. And now there is this, this fit.

24:49It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. I had to pause after reading that. I was like, how is an axe splitting a log sexy? I don't understand how you've done it. It's extraordinary. Depends who's wielding the axe. Well, quite, quite. We could all picture someone hunky, yielding the axe. But I'm wondering with, because I'm so obsessed with language and when people nail a feeling from words, it's just the best thing when you read something and it's visceral rather than just you're skimming through sentences.

25:33With moments like that, Yeah. Do you have these moments of sort of, I don't know, divine inspiration where it just lands, like you've downloaded it, it's coming out? Or is that a moment where you have to sit and think, what is the most unusual, off-sensile way of describing something that we've read in books for hundreds of years? I think it's a mixture of both. And I do think, I think sex scenes are tricky. They are hard because you don't want to make it cringy and you can't, I always think you can't be too medical about it, you know, and I don't believe in using kind of euphemisms like manhood or, you know, those are the worst and the most cringe things.

26:11So you've got to avoid that, but you've also got to avoid the kind of word that a doctor might use, you know, because that just. No one wants to hear vagina used or vulva in a sex scene. Yeah, it's just not quite there. So it's got to be, and you don't want to be too metaphorical and too kind of wimpish about it. So it's tricky. It's a fine line to read and you have to think about it really carefully. My son told me when he was a teenager, his friends used to, two of them would pin him down and another one of them would read aloud the sex scenes that I'd written to him. I mean, poor lad. I know.

26:44Isn't that just the worst thing you've ever heard? I said to him, I'm so sorry, so sorry that I feel like it's my fault that that's happened to you. Oh, that would be so great. As far as I know. The bit I've just read aloud out of context could be anything. I know, exactly. It could be. So, yeah, I hope. I hope I haven't damaged him for life. I don't think I have. Oh, it's so great. But it is just, it's so beautiful. It's like poetry and, you know, God, I can only hope that a sentence that amazing comes out of my brain one day. It's just I love how you use words. It's heaven. Absolute heaven. Thank you.

27:22I know that you are insanely busy with, you know, as I said, the continued success of the book and the film out. So you are now free to leave your screen, Maggie O 'Farrell. But thank you so much for talking to us today. and yeah, we just have loved having your book as our pick for this month. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast. Oh God, I love Maggie and finding out Maggie's got cats makes me love her Eve. I knew she was a cat person. I blimmin knew it. I just, I love her. What an exceptionally clever, brilliant, imaginative, wonderful human being. Thank you, Maggie.

28:01Okay, what are we reading in February? It's A Year of Nothing by Emma Gannon. So listen to this. Ironically, after years of writing about work, productivity and wellness, Emma found herself massively burnt out by it all. So A Year of Nothing follows her quiet rebellion against the cult of doing and striving and pushing. I am a big fan of that kind of rebellion. so over four seasons Emma steps away from the noise and rediscovers joy in life's simplest pleasures from dog borrowing and dopamine dressing to relearning how to swim and embracing a child free life I genuinely think this is the book so many of us could do with right now so I'd love if you read along with us this month this book honestly I took so much from it it changed me in so many ways.

28:53Once you've read it, we can chat about it over on at Happy Place Book Club. Emma came on the show a couple of years ago, actually, so I'm really looking forward to catching up with her. So we'll do that very soon. Until next time, a massive thank you again to Maggie, to the producer, Anushka Tate at Happy Place Studios and to you. I love you little bookworms.

29:22Thank you.