S17, Ep6 Diana Evans: the bestselling author on writing routines, dealing with her inner critic and living life to the fullest

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1:16Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Diana Evans is one of my favourite contemporary novelists, the award-winning, best-selling author of the novels Ordinary People, The Wonder, 26A, and A House for Alice, which was published in April.

2:01Her work is acutely observed, lyrically expressed, and threaded through with the kind of profound cleverness that also makes itself accessible. Her books are personal stories interwoven with political counterpoints, studied with occasional excursions into the supernatural. I love her writing with acute fervor. And you don't just need to take my word for it. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book Awards. Ordinary People received the South Bank Sky Arts Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Evans grew up in North West London, one of six sisters raised by a Nigerian mother and a Yorkshire-born father.

2:48After university, she became a dancer before choosing to pursue writing. She started out in magazine journalism and completed her debut 26A on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. I'm always hoping that I'll offer something that will help someone who is feeling lost or unseen or desperate, she has said. I think literature has a power. It can rescue people at the right time. Diana Evans, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you, Elizabeth. It's wonderful to be here. I actually can't believe you're sitting here in front of me because your words have taken me on such magnificent journeys and they are those rare novels I can always remember exactly where I was when I was reading them.

3:40And ordinary people accompanied me on a solo retreat to Mexico. I was writing a travel piece and I was at this yoga retreat with lots of very elderly people. And ordinary people, it was like you were my friend with me. And I just, if I haven't made it clear already in the introduction, I love your writing so much. I was so joyful when a proof of A House for Alice landed in my hands. And I suppose I wanted to start by asking you, just picking up on that quote that I ended on, whether literature rescued you at the right time. Literature always rescues me, actually. I think reading is an essential part of me.

4:19It's like food to me. If I'm not reading or if I don't have time to read of a day, I feel bereft or a sense of loss of a day. But there are certain books that have really helped me. When I was in my 20s, I read Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, which is a book about the death of his partner to HIV. And I read that at a time when I had lost somebody close to me. And there's such a beauty in his writing. And I really got lost in the beauty and found it very comforting that such beauty could come out of such pain. That was a really meaningful realisation to me. I think when I'm writing, I'm always trying to pull out, to create something beautiful in order to honour something painful.

5:07I think that's really at the heart of my writing. It's at the heart of this podcast too. So you're in the right place, that idea of beauty and learning and growth from pain. What's the first book you can ever remember reading as a child? I mean, were books part of your childhood? Were you in a house surrounded by books? I wasn't actually I mean we had the Britannica encyclopedias and my dad's DIY books and really boring we didn't really have literature in the house it wasn't a writerly household at all and I remember reading John Fowle's The Magus that was when I was I was a teenager I was about 13 or 14 and I was sitting on a beanbag I remember sitting there for the whole weekend and I couldn't put this book down and I would just get up to go to the loo or eat or something and but I was just amazed that I was just completely immersed in the world of this book and the mystery of it it was really magical and I think that feeling of being completely captured by a book that really stayed with me and that's something that I find so powerful about writing when you're actually writing you yourself are immersed in the world of it but to be able to to take somebody else away in that way.

6:27It feels like a very powerful act. There's this extraordinary rhythm to your writing that I feel sweeps me up as the reader. And you combine that with these acute observations and insights about what's going on in individual characters' minds. And you do it so fluidly. And I wanted to ask you, because I had no idea that you started out as a dancer. But whether you think that informs how you write, those sort of rhythms and that fluidity of dance, is that how your writing is also shaped? Yeah, I think that the dancer me is in the words as well. And when I was a dancer, I was in my early 20s. At that time, I was already writing poetry and I was trying to write fiction.

7:23and at some point I came to a decision that I had to basically make a decision about what I was going to do with my career, whether I was going to write or whether I was going to dance. And I decided that I had more to give to the world through words, through writing. But I think I've always been looking for the sense of movement that I've lost from dance in the work, in the writing. I think the poetry is very important in my prose because that to me is a form of dance because it's rhythm focused and pace focused. And so there is an element of, I think, choreography almost when I'm writing, not just within the sentences and the rhythm of the sentences, like one sentence leads on from another sentence.

8:04The rhythm is very important, but also the rhythm of the whole book, the pattern it makes, it's almost like you're positioning a series of elements into a pattern that works and is coherent. so I guess I am thinking in a danceily way when I'm writing it's almost like I'm I'm dancing with the pen oh that's so good so let's talk about A House for Alice because A House for Alice picks up on characters that we met in Ordinary People so Melissa and Michael who are no longer together who do have this yearning for what their relationship once was Michael's new partner Nicole, who's one of the best characters I've ever read on the page.

8:45Thank you. Oh my gosh, I'm obsessed with her. She's got such strength of character. And she's also got this feeling of just slight disappointment that she's not Beverly Knight. She's a singer. She's a sort of jobbing singer and she's sort of fabulous. But even as a reader, you get the impression life should be more for her because she is so fabulous. Yeah, I wanted more for her. Yes. I want a whole novel and Nicole but we'll come back to that I'd love to do that oh my gosh yeah I enjoyed her company so much and Alice the titular Alice is the matriarchal figure so she's Melissa's mother and she's also the mother to these other two women and the book opens with her ex-husband dying in a house fire and she is then presented with this opportunity of moving back to Nigeria she never feels like England's quite been home and you ask the question of what home really is and what it represents.

9:36And you do all of this against the backdrop of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. So Cornelius, Alice's ex-husband, dies in a house fire on the same night as Grenfell Tower goes up in flames. Why was that conjunction of events important for you? I wanted to try to write about Grenfell. I felt like I had a responsibility too. Just as a Londoner, as a writer, I do feel that writers have a call to record events, to remember, and to try and not let people who've been wronged be forgotten in people's hearts. So it was very important to me to kind of mark Grenfell in the same way that I'd marked the election of Obama in Ordinary People.

10:24But at the same time, I wanted to go into the novel on a kind of a personal, more almost microscopic level, as well in terms of Cornelius' situation. And I thought about placing the two fires at different times, like a week apart or something, but it didn't work. And I thought the extremity of having the two fires at the same time, the Cornelius fire is a few hours earlier on the same evening. It was a way of really highlighting the horror of Grenfell because it was set against this other smaller fire. and I found that it was a lot to handle the two fires but it also gave me lots of space to really explore the impact of it in terms of London, the city of London but also on a kind of a smaller more intimate level in the lives of this particular family.

11:21Yes well I think you do that very well because I think that the sad truth is that when there is a tragedy of such scale as Grenfell and lots of people die at once. And particularly if they're marginalised people in some way, there's a tendency to homogenise that story. And what you did very brilliantly was you depicted the horror of dying in a fire from an individual perspective. And so you brought that home to us. And it is one of those things that you do repeatedly in your novels. So Barack Obama and actually the death of Michael Jackson in Ordinary People, Princess Diana in 26A. You're a political writer.

12:04You've been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Is that something that you would label yourself as a political writer? My writing does have an enduring political backdrop. I mean, I'm most interested in the really personal psychologies and neuroses of my characters. That's what really interests me most. and the dynamics between them and those small moments of personal transformation and revelation. But I do love drama as well. And I like accentuating these smaller neuroses against the backdrop of these huge sweeping events. It's a kind of layering because it makes the closer angle more powerful.

12:54Somehow it accentuates it. and with Grenfell it was really important to me to name some of the people who'd died such as Khadija Say the artist and Zainab Shukar. I mean it's a way of marking someone's existence and I think the writing is political because it has a desire to give something to the world. I always feel like I want my writing to have some kind of social value, some kind of social purpose. that's always been really important to me and I think recording events recording people's lives at a particular historical moment that's really central and I mean I'm very much influenced by the Tolstoy project in war and peace and Anna Karenina actually but the recording of a particular group of society and in his case it was a Russian aristocracy in my case it's the black British middle class at particular historical moments.

13:52So I'm really driven by that premise. And it's a premise that has been shockingly underexplored, I would say, the black British middle class still. Yeah, definitely. I still think there's a real dearth of books, fiction, on screen material as well that is just about everyday life in black Britain. I mean, I think there are so many more books that need to be written. I always thought I would write maybe four books, but I feel now that I've got to the end of four books I feel like there's so many more stories that I need to tell that just aren't out there and there are so many more black writers now writing and being published which is wonderful but I think we have so much work to do in terms of balancing the playing fields and filling in the gaps.

14:36If you stop writing at four books I will take to the streets in protest. Okay I'll do it for you Elizabeth. thank you why did you decide to revisit your characters from ordinary people in a house Alice so I'm trying to work so ordinary people was 2018 wasn't it so it's been how many years is that five years five years yes okay yeah why did you decide to revisit them they were talking in my head and I was working on a children's novel and I wasn't really feeling it it wasn't working for me and there was all this Grenfell happened and Windrush scandal happened you know Grenfell has killed like 72 people Windrush has killed 26 people so far and the whole kind of dishonor and just political disgrace that we've been dealing with from the British government I was so appalled by everything and felt this desire to record it in the same way that I've recorded previous events and the characters were still there Nicole was actually quite loud in my head and I'd never kind of met her before and sometimes that happens a character will just appear on the strength of other characters that are already existing and Nicole just appeared she was just this firework and it occurred to me that Michael was married and that was who she was and when I realized that that was the spark where I thought okay I have another novel here so that's when I started working on it.

16:03You described them almost as ghosts characters which I find interesting because there are ghosts in your novel sometimes or supernatural elements but does it actually feel like that that someone just appears one day you're like oh nice to meet you Nicole. It is like being haunted yes. They don't talk to me they they talk to each other. I mean I don't really agree with this idea of characters doing things by themselves. I do think the author is very much in control of them but they do live in your own head but they're definitely alive and I I always find myself having to write things down that they're saying.

16:38I keep post-its with me wherever I go in the house. There's post-its and there's a notebook in my bag. Because when something is spoken in my head between characters, I have to record it because that is the book talking to me. You know, the author is in dialogue with their book constantly while I'm in the throats of a novel. It's almost like being possessed. Wow, the book is talking to you. I've never heard someone say that. And how do you then actually write? So you've got these post-it notes, this notebook, and you're being haunted by your characters. Your sentences are so exquisite that I just wonder how much work they take.

17:13It also reads as if it's just pouring out of you, that fluidity again. I want to know more. I want to drill down into how you actually write and how much of it is reworking or whether there is any reworking at all. Yeah, I'm quite a slow writer. It takes me a long time and I want it to feel like it's fluid. I wanted to have this natural feel to it, but it's really hard to achieve that. I remember when I was writing 26A and I had been working on it for a couple of years, it wasn't really working. I changed the structure, went back to the beginning of the story chronologically and wrote from beginning to end.

17:49But trying to write the beginning was so difficult, trying to get the sentences to work. I didn't know where I was going, so I let the sentences follow one another. So I write a sentence and it's the right sentence. and then the next sentence leads on naturally from it. But it's got to feel right. Each sentence has to feel right and the direction has to feel right. And I remember sitting for hours and days trying to get the first few paragraphs of 26A written. And it was so difficult. I think I got to about 300 words and thought, I just can't do this because it was like I'd started something and it was right, but I couldn't kind of sustain it.

18:29So it's really painful, actually, trying to get the rhythm right and trying to get the forward motion. And the sense of naturalness is difficult to achieve on a sustained kind of novel length basis. And I have found that the more books I write, I think the language has changed. I think there is slightly less emphasis on the language than there was in 26A. and I think I've surrendered a little bit to plot, whereas I used to think that you just didn't need a plot, you know, the language is enough, the language can be the story. I don't entirely believe that anymore. I mean, I'm always in conflict with plot, actually.

19:11I find it quite overbearing, the need to kind of have a narrative structure because I'm really interested in language, but you do need the plot. So the plot kind of facilitates the ability to have freedom with the language. It's a difficult balance. Yes. And that idea of getting the sentence right, do you find that if you haven't got the sentence right, then the next sentence doesn't follow and that's how you know? Okay. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Or the next sentence won't come if the sentence before isn't right. Wow. It's just riveting. I find it's so rare that you get the chance. I feel so lucky that I get the chance to interview one of my literary heroes and just be like, peer into your brain.

19:53Let me part the sides. You wouldn't want to be in my brain. I am very aware that 26A was based on a tragic personal experience. And I want to be respectful of your grief around that. But I also don't want to ignore it. And so I'm just going to ask you whether you feel comfortable telling us what that was. And then we can move on knowing that we've paid honour to it and it will inform our conversation but I don't want to make you talk about something that's too painful. No I'm fine with talking about it actually this month is the 25th anniversary of the death of my twin she died by suicide when we were 26 and that was the catalyst really for writing 26a I wanted to build a monument to the fact that she'd existed and to try and encapsulate what it felt like to be a twin and to lose a twin and to become a lone twin.

20:57And that's an ongoing journey, you know, 25 years later. It's still a shock to me that she is not here anymore. And I think almost as time goes on, maybe the loss increases because you've lost the potential for, I don't know, like she never knew my kids, they never met her, we didn't turn 50 together. the kind of loss increases in a way so there's more to regret I think when when it first happened I could think of it in a more positive way in terms of well we had a quarter of a century together and I'm grateful for that but now it's like we've lost a quarter of a century so you know it's tricky I still feel a sense of duality that she's somehow within me That's where the supernatural element in 26A came from.

21:47The feeling that I had that she was within me and existing and breathing inside me. I still have that feeling quite strongly. I'm so sorry for your loss. And thank you for talking about that so beautifully. You wrote an extraordinary piece for The Guardian about Paula, your sister. And I will link to it in the show notes for anyone who might have experienced a similar kind of loss. But yes, it strikes me very much that what you experienced, it makes sense that you feel there's that porous line between our physical avatars and the souls of your characters or your beloved sister still being within you.

22:32Yes, I mean, because I feel that I'm connected to something beyond reality because of my sister. In terms of storytelling as well, I've always been really fascinated by what may exist beyond us. And that element of the supernatural is a really important part of my writing because it gives me a space to play, really, and to really delve into psychologies and memory. There's the same element in science fiction, the idea that there's another world and there's another world of possibility and things can happen there that you can explore in a way that you can't in something that's fully realistic. It's like realism isn't enough for me.

23:18I love realism. I want my characters and the world of the book to feel real, which is partly why I use the political events as well to ground it in reality. but there also has to be a beyond that where the story can seep into. Yes, realism is not the full story. Yeah. Before we move on to your failures, there is a buried trauma at the heart of A House for Alice. And I think you write it very well because you don't write it in a way. So you write around it and you imply, and it's a bit like going to a fantastic horror movie where you don't ever see the monster. And was that a deliberate decision to not show too much?

24:02Yeah, it was. I wanted to focus more on the impact of it on a woman's life and to think about the way lots of women I know go through their lives with either memory or a possibility or fear of violence. We walk with this threat, and that's a very real aspect of being a woman. So that felt like it was important to Mark and to flag. Yes, even if it hasn't happened to us, we know so well that the possibility, the probability is that it will or might or is around every corner. Yeah, and that is terrifying and so unjust. Do you think, this is an inelegant question, but do you think you're more interested in writing women than writing men?

24:45No, I love writing men. You're very good at writing men, she said. I think it gives me a break from being a woman. I love being in a man's head. I love putting my own new roses into a man. That's really interesting. I've done that with Damien. Huh. Yeah, I love just swapping genders in my writing. Has your mother read the book? No, she hasn't. Will she? Yeah. Okay. Because you said that the character of Alice is slightly based on her. Yeah, it's drawn from her. She's the beginning of Alice. What do you think she'll think of it? I hope she'll like it. I don't know if she's read all of my books.

25:20She's not much of a reader. so she might read like a couple of chapters and I think it would take her many years to read it. I think of the whole book as Alice's voice. It's very much in dedication to my mum and to the generation of immigrants to this country who came in their 60s and 50s and didn't necessarily intend on staying but have found themselves here and faced with really difficult questions about where to be and where your family is is it here is over there where do you die you know and the impact that those questions have on on the entire family you know it's really profound and I think destabilizing as well so yeah I wanted to explore that you do sibling relationships very well as well that thing of sort of texting the other sibling behind the third siblings back being like what's she on about um and you are before you get onto your failures I just want to ask you about being one of six yeah and growing up and how difficult was it if it was to find your own voice within that to find your own identity within that it was really difficult actually I didn't really find my own identity until I left home I think that's often the case isn't it that the family shrouds who you are in a way I used to be called dandelion when I was a kid or I was called Dopey Diana because I was always a bit slow on the uptake with things and I was a bit weedy and runty and I was kind of like the weaker twin but in a kind of very jokey way we had lots of fun me and my sisters we were a whole house really we protected one another so I think growing up in that house of femaleness and womanhood has really impacted on who I am but at the same time I had to leave that house in order to kind of really discover myself.

27:15And I think that's why I liked books. I retreated into myself, into writing. I kept a journal and I think from when I was about 14. Same time when I really got into reading was when I was about 14. So, yeah, I think I did retreat a little bit into the world of words and language. But I didn't ever really think of myself as a writer until much later.

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28:59well that brings us on to your first failure which is becoming the writer you want to be yes tell us what kind of writer you want to be and why you think you're failing at it yeah it's tricky because I do feel like I'm at the beginning of something with my writing that there's so much more to discover and that I think it was Margaret Travel I remember her saying once in an interview that after four books she felt like that's when she really started writing well after she'd written three or four books and that really strikes a chord with me I feel like the the four novels has been a process of learning and also quite restricting I feel like maybe I'm more suited to short stories I don't know I do feel an element of being like a failed poet I want to write more poetry but I feel the need to go to through some process of learning where where I'm just really playing with stories and because I have started so many short stories that I can't finish and lots of my favorite writers are short story writers and I have this real desire to master the short story and I haven't been able to do that yet and I think it might be because I've been trapped in novels.

30:19So, yeah, I feel this sense of freedom now that I want to go off and explore and discover something in my writing. Interesting. I didn't think you were going to say that. I thought, you mentioned Tolstoy earlier, and I know that he's an influence for you. And the bookseller wrote accurately that A House of Alice does recall those sort of 19th century novels where there's this panoramic sweep of what is happening in wider society and then the personal story is set against that. And there is a slight sense of a narrator-type eye. I mean, I know there isn't one, but there's that kind of all-seeingness to your prose in this novel.

30:58And I thought that's what you were going to say, that you want to be Tolstoy. Oh, no, definitely not. Okay, good. Much to my relief. No, I feel like with this book, I did want a larger canvas and I wanted this big host of characters and I wanted it to be more expansive and I feel like I achieved that but I feel like there's something that I haven't achieved and it's something that requires kind of going back to the grindstone and really studying, spending lots of time reading and just trying ideas, taking risks with ideas and trying to work in another form. And are you that kind of person that when you feel you have acquired the necessary skill set whether it be writing a novel or executing a yoga pose or that you want to move on because you want the stimulation of learning something new and putting yourself in a slightly uncomfortable situation yeah I do feel that I you're a big weirdo yeah I feel like I'm being challenged and that I'm always growing okay always moving forward and I have this huge desire to achieve all the time, achieve, achieve, achieve.

32:07And that goes, you know, to every aspect of my life. So I guess with the writing, I feel like there's more novels to come, but I want to achieve in other areas of writing and to focus less on the finished product of a novel and have the courage to work on something that might bring less rewards, but something that really needs to be tried and to be kind of investigated. What do you mean by rewards? Do you mean literary prizes or do you mean the sense of achievement? Well I think there's a lot more commercial respect for novels. I don't think short stories are, well in this country anyway, I think in America they're celebrated a lot more but I think there's such beauty in the short story form and I think my love of poetry as well is connected to the desire to master the short story because you can do so much with it I think I find it so difficult because it's almost like you need to build the world of a novel in order to make a story work totally that's why I find them so hard and then you need to leave the novel off the page and just concentrate on the distillation the essence of the character in the story you mentioned that some of your favorite writers are short story writers who are they oh god so many grace paley i love her stories she's one of zadie smith's favorite writers as well yeah lucia berlin as well i love her stories raymond carver i'm reading sarah hall's stories at the moment i'm reading sudden traveler which is great james baldwin's short stories langston hughes i like zadie smith's short stories as well actually a jamaican american writer called Alexia Arthurs.