Julie Meyerson, the celebrated British novelist whose previous work was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Booker Prize, brings a new world to life in her latest novel, Nonfiction (Tin House Books, 2024).
Nonfiction brims with themes of motherhood, grief, addiction, temptation, love, and loss. It prompts the reader to confront what it means to be a mother and a writer, then how the two can be pursued in tandem. From the protagonist’s haunting recollections of her own estranged mother to her brutal introspection of her own parenting, the novel tackles issues of self-worth, parenting, and trauma across generations. The story portrays characters who come to understand that loss is embedded in love, and that, as humans, we must accept grief, pain, and vulnerability as a condition of love, especially the love a parent feels for a child.
Myerson admits that the title is “a bit of a tease,” given that the author in the novel consistently comes back to the question of “Can a writer or a person ever be trusted with their own story?” While the novel doesn’t allow the reader an easy answer to this question, it launches a conversation about the complicated relationship between truth and art.
Over the phone, Myerson is warm and kind, generous with her time and her willingness to explore her latest work and the process that went into creating it. Given that the media in Britain has been quite ruthless toward her in the past, I am struck by how open she was in our phone conversation.
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The Rumpus: What was it like to return to the theme of addiction?
Julie Myerson: I never plan on what my book is going to be. I didn’t expect to be writing about this again. It is obviously a novel. It’s very important to me that it’s a novel. But when I began writing this novel, I was writing all sorts of different things, and some of them were working and some of them weren’t. It took me a long time with this book to work out what I was trying to write about. When I started writing about a family and addiction, I was a little bit surprised. I had to sort of stop myself and say, “Hang on, is this a good idea?” But it was just what I wanted to write. It sounds a bit phony, but the way I write is that I literally just see what comes. I don’t make plans or notes or anything, so that’s what I started writing. My only hesitation, really, was that I knew that if I published it, everyone would mention The Lost Child in their reviews, but so be it, I was ready for that.
I never intended to go back to that subject today. What happened over here with The Lost Child was terrible. I was attacked for about six weeks by all the tabloid newspapers . . . it was awful, actually. So there’s no way I would ever have set out to return. It’s very different, though. The Lost Child was a memoir—it was true. To the very best of my ability, I was telling a true story. It wasn’t just about our family, it’s just as much about Mary Yelloly, more so, really, but of course what got the attention was the stuff about my family. I would never have gone back to that as a memoir or anything. It’s just that this novel, which is a novel, has the same themes.
Nonfiction is a novel, but it’s a novel I couldn’t have written had I not had that experience. The characters in it are not the real characters. The only character who is unashamedly based in real life is the mother, and actually, my mother died while I was writing it, which was kind of unexpected and very difficult. But I’m not sure if I could have published, had she been alive, so I don’t know what I was going to do. That’s the only character—every other character is not my family, which is important. I do have a daughter. She’s a rather brilliant writer, [but] she’s nothing like the girl in the book, obviously. If I hadn’t experienced heroin addiction with a family member firsthand, I couldn’t have written it, that’s true.
Rumpus: In Nonfiction, one of the lines I loved is “This is definitely not a ghost story,” and I don’t know if I believe the protagonist. Can you talk about the ways in which the characters and the themes are haunted?
Myerson: Quite a few of my novels are ghost stories. I always think “ghost story” is the wrong phrase in a way because I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, so I’m not sure I write about ghosts, but I certainly write about things that appear to happen that may not be happening, and that’s true of quite a lot of my novels. It is a ghost story to the extent that, like a lot of my novels, it’s about loss. I hope the reader, throughout the book, isn’t quite sure what that loss is or what has really happened. I wanted that sense of ambiguity.
We had a very, very difficult relationship in the sense that nothing that the mother says in this book is made up, actually. When I say that, I say that obviously it came out of my head. It’s my memory. Everything that I write about her is true. It upsets and moves me terribly, and I think it’s probably because what happened between us is so unresolved. I was perhaps trying a little bit in the book to kind of close the gap between us, to make some kind of acceptance.
I don’t think the book solves anything when it comes to me and my mother. But I would like to think it asks a lot of questions that other people might relate to. It’s funny—that part of the book [about the protagonist’s mother] is the only part of the book that when I talk about it, I start to feel a little bit emotional. None of the other stuff, but that part, yes. Which actually shows that it’s true. I was writing it as a person and not a novelist I think, which isn’t true of the rest of it.
Rumpus: How do you think generational motherhood shapes the arc of this story?
Myerson: I write really instinctively. I started by putting some words on a page, and I didn’t know what this novel was going to be about. I was trying to write this novel, and it wasn’t working, and it was about all sorts of other things, and then I wrote the beginning, which is “There’s a night when we lock you in the house,” and I thought, “Yes, I can write about this now. I put down the words, and if they work and if they excite me, and if they feel true in some way, I continue.” I almost don’t know what’s in my novels until I’ve finished them. Even then, sometimes it’s not until someone else explains them to me that I understand what I’ve written.
It comes from another part of me. Not the thinking brain part. I am a critic, I review books. The brain that I use to do that is a very different one than the brain that writes my novels. At the same time, I just found myself writing about my own mother. My mother hated all of my writing. The idea that I would ever write anything about her in a book would be terrible. I didn’t know that she was going to die, and it was slightly unexpected. We were quite estranged by that point.
People see it as a book about mothers, sure. It is, in a way, a book about mothers, but I didn’t set out to write a book about mothers. To me, an exciting aspect of this book is that I allowed myself to write about writing. I’ve never allowed myself to do that before, partly because I have a bit of a thing against writers writing about writing. It’s a little bit dull, isn’t it? Should we be doing that? I feel we should really be writing about real life, not writing. When I let myself write about writing, I began to find that very exciting. How exhilarating it is just to dive off into the darkness, to not know what you’re about to write—I did once, a long time ago.
I think it was my fourth novel—my husband, who teaches writing and is a writer as well, said, “You know, if you just planned your books, they wouldn’t take you so long.” So I made a plan for a book. I showed him the plan, and he said, “That’s absolutely brilliant—write it.” And then I went away and wrote a whole different novel. Why would I write something if I knew what it was about and how it was going to end? What is the point of that? I write in order to find out what I have to say, not because I have something to say.
Rumpus: How did it change throughout the years to become what it is today?
Myerson: It took me six years to find the book. That isn’t always the case. I think for a long time, I’d written quite a lot of my novels in about two years. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. I was very often ill, and then I got this diagnosis, which meant that I was very tired. I still have it, and I have to manage my energy. It affects my concentration a bit. For the first time ever, I wasn’t being productive in the way I normally am, and I found that very frustrating.
I never ever give up on books. Once I’ve started a book, I have to finish it. Simply, the book changed guises. It would have been the same book emotionally. It was written from a completely different angle. I went through lots and lots of drafts, and I wasn’t very well.
Then, there was the pandemic and lockdown, and then I got breast cancer, and I was finishing the book—it was more or less finished. I was doing the final edits just before a mastectomy. My god, it’s six years, but it’s been six really turbulent years. I think because it took me so long to find the book, what I’d written turned out to be the best thing I could possibly have written. It wasn’t six years of writing exactly what you’re reading now because it is quite a short book.
I go over every sentence. I’m in the middle of a novel right now, and this morning I was going backward rather than forward because I go over every sentence seventy to eighty times at least. Probably more than that. It just is how I do it. Sometimes, it comes quicker than that. Every word is definitely thought through. The kind of writing I like to read is written like that, and I couldn’t write any other way.
Rumpus: So often in this novel, there is a really wonderful description of natural brightness, the brightness of sun, almost like the brightness of pain. How did this theme emerge for you in your writing?
Myerson: I’m a very visual person and a very visual writer. Things like color are incredibly important to me. I notice the weather. Things like what kind of day it is and what the light is like is how I experience the world. You experience those things at the same time as pain and darkness. Just because dark things are happening doesn’t mean it’s dark outside. I wrote a ghost story—a ghost novel called The Quickening. It was quite a short novel—it was a real ghost story, but it was set on a Caribbean island. All I knew was that I wanted to write a ghost story set in bright sunshine. The lighter it was, the more frightening the book was. If you wrote a book about loss and the weather was always dark, that would be very dull. The fact is, we all experience life with all its brightness and beauty. I like to think that all my books are about beauty and love and the natural world. People don’t always see them like that. Critics say I write dark books, but actually, there’s a lot of lightness in my books, I would hope. I try for that. It’s a book about love more than anything, actually. Loss is only a thing because of love. When we love people, we stand to lose so much, don’t we? It’s one of the best things to write about.
Rumpus: That speaks to one of my favorite scenes in the novel. How did the conversation about love and loss and vulnerability between the mother and the daughter characters come about?
Myerson: It’s funny, a journalist said to me, “Presumably you had that conversation with your daughter,” and that conversation is entirely made up. I have a lot of conversations with my daughter, but not that one. People sort of assume it’s real, and obviously, I want it to feel as though it’s real. I hadn’t had that conversation with any of my children . . . it’s a sort of imagined mother’s dialogue. The gist of it is how you feel about your children. That conversation was very important to me, it’s about resilience and also about the fact that—and what the book is about—you have to let your children make their own way, and bad things are going to happen, and there’s nothing you can do about that as a parent. That’s, of course, what The Lost Child was about. There is beauty in that, too, I think, because it’s what life is. Life is uncontrollable, in good ways and bad ways.
Rumpus: I found it to be a really interesting choice to write about the main character’s affair with aspects of a love story as well.
Myerson: People don’t really like the lover character. That’s fair enough; he is actually a narcissist. There are indications throughout the book that this might be something that she’s writing or has written. It’s a basic law of writing novels, that you need your characters to be up against it. If the mother is only experiencing difficult problems with her teenager, you’re almost too much on her side. I wanted her to be doing other things, to be pulled in other directions. I think what that came out of—when life is very traumatic and difficult, and she and the husband are dealing with such difficult things—sometimes, if someone offers you a chance to reinvent yourself or to be someone different or to forget your responsibilities, it’s very tempting.
It’s supposed to be a book about guilt as well. I hope it’s quite ambiguous. I actually ended up not liking the male character very much. It’s good if you say you saw it as a love story too, because it needs to feel enticing enough that you don’t think, “Oh, why is she doing this?”
It needs to be confusing whether it really happened or whether it was something she wrote. Even I am not entirely sure I feel that both are sort of true in a way as they are with writers. It is about that thing they put on the cover—can a writer be trusted with their own story?
I think another thing I was trying to write about, which is something my mother would definitely have said, is that you can’t trust writers. They say they’ve written the truth to the best of their ability, but of course, it won’t be. It’ll be very subjective. I like that. To me, that’s one of the exhilarating things about writing. But I’m sure it’s very frustrating for the people who know and love them [the author].
In so many books, what you really want to know is what will happen between two people. I think those things are fascinating. I felt the book needed another strand, not just the family stuff.
Rumpus: So much of the novel focuses on the narrator being a mother and a daughter, and there’s womanhood embedded so deeply in those roles, but in seeing her with a lover, we see a completely different side of her. As a reader, it felt as though these different roles allowed us to see her explore womanhood through different lenses.
Myerson: I enjoyed writing the bits when she had people requiring her to be a certain way, either criticizing her or asking her about it in a way that showed they didn’t really understand. I think maybe I am talking personally here. I am all these things. I’m a mother, a wife, a writer, and a daughter . . . I don’t know which I am first. Sometimes, once you are a published writer, people have such expectations of you, about what you ought to be for them, depending on what they’ve read of yours. I think I was trying to write about that as much as anything, the fact that you are quite a fragmented person in some ways. I’m not complaining about being a writer, I love being a writer. It’s all I ever wanted to do. But it does come with that which people don’t really see. That’s one of the downsides. Things are demanded of you and expected of you that aren’t actually you or don’t feel like you, but you’ve created them by writing things that people have believed.
Something I really wanted to do with this book—and it gave me great pleasure to do this—but I worked hard on it. To a certain extent, the title is a bit of a tease. I wanted the book to read so credibly that anyone reading it would think, “Hold on this must be true, Julie Myerson must have experienced this.” They know that the bit about addiction was true, but I wanted them to assume that everything else in it is true. I don’t know why it was so important to me to pull that off. Because actually when I was interviewed over here (in Britain) when the book came out, some journalists were quite cross with me. They’d say to me, “This must be true.”
Sometimes you do an interview and later you think about what you should have said. They would say to me, “This must be true because you wrote about this,” and I wish I had said, “Everything about this—every answer, every question—is in the book. Everything about what is and isn’t true is actually in the novel.”’
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Author photograph by Chloe Myerson
