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Ep 3. Noreen Masud, A Flat Place
51 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, we read the start of chapter 4 of Noreen Masud's A Flat Place (2023), pages 98-9 in the UK paperback edition. Buy the book from a local independent bookshop, or via Bookshop.org.
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her academic monograph, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (Oxford University Press, 2022) won the MSA First Book Award 2023 and the University English Prize in 2024. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Books are my Bag Reader Awards.
Follow Noreen on Instagram (@NoreenMasud) and Bluesky (@noreenmasud.bsky.social).
Find the transcript, the extract we discuss, and more about the episode on Substack. Follow the podcast on Instagram.
Please leave feedback here.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close' and Noreen
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close to the Podcast. I'm Chris Lloyd, a writer and academic, and on this show I talk to other writers about their work and their practice. We also collaborate on a close reading of their writing, looking at a particular passage or a whole poem, and talk about its meanings, resonances, and the technicalities of language. This is a show for book nerds, aspiring and established authors, or anyone interested in how texts get made.
00:00:35
Speaker
is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir, Travelogue, Flat Place, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for nonfiction.
00:00:49
Speaker
Well, thank you for joining me, Noreen. It's such a pleasure to be here.
The Role of Close Reading in Literature and Teaching
00:00:53
Speaker
So today we are talking you about your book ah Flat Place and I wonder before we even get into the book whether you could talk to us about your feelings about close reading as an activity kind of in general. I know you teach literature but also how you're feeling about close reading yourself. Oh I mean I think close reading is the most fun anyone can have. I always think about how to date and I'm saying this on the 16th of January 2025
00:01:20
Speaker
By the time this comes out, this may be different, but at present, at the time of recording chat GPT, the software, which is the blight of many educators lives is not currently able to effectively close read. So close reading is something that at the moment we can do, but the machines can't. And so increasingly it feels to me as a kind of, I don't know a sort of guarantee of our humanity, a guarantee of a kind of actual thought and ability to extrapolate from the small to the big, to make connections, to, to see something as a whole.
00:01:50
Speaker
to think, I guess, in other words, it's something I really privilege in my teaching. I'm really lucky that I get to do a lot of teaching on a first year poetry, how to read poetry course, which is all about close reading. It's something, you know, it's something I spend a chunk of my time thinking about. How can I share the joy of this practice and help people to understand how to do it? It's something that students find really hard, because it is hard, because important things are hard.
00:02:16
Speaker
A, thank you for saying that about artificial intelligence. I feel like it is the thing I'm fighting on a daily basis in my job. But also to kind of add onto that, why do you think it can be so hard for people? Like what is it about close reading that people often stumble over, do you think? Despite our best efforts, I guess, as teachers of English literature, I think students often, students come in with this really powerful belief, and I don't know where it comes from. It may come from our school system, it may come from our broader culture.
00:02:45
Speaker
Their job is to make things simple. Their job is to decode and to and to tell us what we want to hear and to find a comfortable binary in in which they can securely situate a text. Whereas close reading is about finding ambiguity, about finding weirdness, about unpacking the ways in which poetry or literary language does something that other forms of language can't.
Noreen's Memoir: Landscapes and Identity
00:03:08
Speaker
And this is about how form communicates beyond literal meaning.
00:03:14
Speaker
That is something it is difficult to think about and talk about and absolutely runs counter to the ways, you know, just you cannot move on social media for advertisements promising to summarise a book for you in two sentences until you everything important about the book. Well, of course, as scholars of English literature, it is our stance that what is important about the book cannot be summarised, is ingrained in the reading of it, and ingrained in what happens as you read.
00:03:42
Speaker
that there is a kind of knowledge that is not summarisable in language. And that's the kind of um wilderness that close reading takes us into. It takes a lot of courage, it it takes a lot of openness to strangeness and to the unknown.
00:03:57
Speaker
And students are very frightened of that. Or rather, students think that that's what we don't want. or you know And I haven't yet found a way of telling them otherwise. I continue to struggle to do that. One of my hopes is that this podcast will reach both students and people who are not in education perhaps, or not in these classrooms that we're in.
00:04:16
Speaker
and kind of get to hear and listen in on some of the close readings that could possibly be done right with the text. I'm really excited to do it with the person who wrote the text as a way of finding out like how you see it and how I see it and where we can meet in the middle perhaps. Could you tell us a little bit about the text we're going to look at today if you want to frame the extract that you're going to read for us and just tell us about the book in general? Of course. So the book I'm going to talk about is called A Flat Place I published it in 2023. I usually describe it as a memoir travelogue. And it's about how flat landscapes, the flat landscapes of Britain specifically, um but also to an extent of Pakistan, where I was born and raised, how flat landscapes might make us. And my contention in this book, what I'm saying in this book is that we assume perhaps that flat landscapes might make us feel a certain kind of way. They might be boring. They might be scary. They might be bleak.
00:05:12
Speaker
There's nothing to look at, they're the spaces between other kinds of proper landscape with mountains and rivers and forests and things to look at. But actually, if we pay attention to flat landscapes, which is I suppose almost a kind of close reading, if we stay with them as they are and don't sort of project our preconceptions onto them, we might find they open up to us a sort of unexpected new way of of being, of relating to each other, of thinking, of existing in the world.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, so that's that's a flat place and it's um essentially how I use the flat landscapes that I visit. Each chapter is based around a different flat landscape of Britain. What have we got? We've got the Cambridge of Fens, we've got Orford Ness and Suffolk, we've got Morecambe in the northwest of England, we've got the Newcastle Moor in the northeast of England and Orkney in Scotland.
Complex PTSD and Metaphorical Landscapes
00:06:02
Speaker
All different kinds of flat landscape, all ones with different kinds of histories and associations around them.
00:06:09
Speaker
How the flat landscapes that I visit in this book helped me understand a strange childhood that I had in Pakistan. I was born and raised in Pakistan. I moved to the UK two weeks before I turned 16. But I continued to be haunted by that life, which didn't seem to offer me any sort of landmark, any sort of big event when I look back at it. It felt like nothing had happened to me.
00:06:34
Speaker
And yet I couldn't stop thinking about that nothingness. So in that sense, it was like a flat landscape with no landmark to orientate me, to help me understand what I was seeing. It was just a kind of blank space and yet I couldn't look away from it. It was mesmerizing, but also blank. And I later received a kind of working diagnosis of what's called complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And I have various feelings about the act of diagnosis and about that diagnosis in particular.
00:07:04
Speaker
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is different from straightforward post-traumatic stress disorder or or PTSD. One way of describing it is that PTSD describes a situation in which everything was sort of normal and then a catastrophic event happened after which nothing was ever the same again.
Emotional Journey of Writing a Memoir
00:07:20
Speaker
And you can't see what I'm doing with my hands here, but I'm tracing out amounts and things were normal. Then there was a catastrophe and then nothing was ever quite right again. In complex PTSD, it's a little bit different.
00:07:30
Speaker
Complex PTSD is a diagnosis often received by people for whom things started to go wrong when they were very young, when there were repeated events, when the events, you know, they could be large events, they could be small events, but they were sustained. They, in many cases, start before you know what counts as a a trauma or or something that's wrong. And they overwhelmingly take place in a context from which you feel that there is no escape. So a household in which things aren't working, kidnapping, imprisonment,
00:07:59
Speaker
Torture, those are all situations that can lead to a CPTSD a diagnosis. And if regular PTSD is a kind of mountain with a single event that you can focus on and point to, then complex PTSD is more like a flat landscape. You cannot pick out any singular event that is the cause of why you feel the way you do. So as I wrote the book, I began to find more and more dimensions in which flat landscapes provided a kind of language for my childhood, but also for my inner life.
00:08:28
Speaker
and the way that I related to other people and experienced the world. Yeah, so it was a very joyful experience writing the book. Thank you for that. I mean, I think you already know how much I love this book and read a huge chunk of it on a train across the country, across Norfolk in particular. So it kind of resonated as I was staring at these flat landscapes. I lived in Norwich for a while, so I was kind of familiar with that flatness in a way. Sure. How did it feel to you when you were there? Well, I'm i love hearing about yeah i'm from South Wales originally. Oh, wow. Okay.
00:09:04
Speaker
kind of not super hilly or mountainous but you drive for half an hour and suddenly you're in mountains right and you're right by the coast so I was kind of in this in between kind of landscape and then I moved to London so you don't see much landscape and then I moved to Norwich and it was probably the flattest vista I've ever seen before like driving anywhere was just you see as far as the eye can see and that was a real interesting thing for me because I love being outside I love going for walks I love being outdoors and it was just a totally different way of experiencing completely that makes total sense it could completely challenges I think the frameworks that we bring to outside experience or ideas of of nature and how we relate to nature and how we are in nature and what we need yeah yeah so it was really interesting to read lots of it while I was on that train so this little extract we're gonna talk about is from later on in the book I don't think there's anything particular we need to know before you start reading about where that comes but if there's anything you want to say about it before you read please do
00:10:02
Speaker
So the part that I'm going to read is from chapter four on Morecambe. It's the opening to that chapter. The flat place is the place of grief, but also the place of the real. It's real because of that grief. It displays itself starkly and you are beside yourself in the face of what can't be denied. But at least you are beside yourself. You have that consolation. You curl your fingers into a fist and pretend you are holding a hand.
00:10:33
Speaker
I've met people before in the flat place. Once in a while, I'll encounter someone. You can recognize them quite quickly. It spills out of their eyes and their closed mouths, even when they're smiling, whose world's been rolled out on the rack in the same way as mine. And I fall in love with them, usually, because they feel real to me in a way no one else does. In that flat place where no one else can come, we crouch together.
00:11:01
Speaker
holding each other tight, feeling what is real from underfoot and the sky run over our heads, and my blood beating in their head and the other way round. But always in the end we part, walking away over a landscape in which one is always alone. It's no good relating to someone else like that. The psychological term for it is merging. To me it feels like I don't exist anymore.
00:11:30
Speaker
I feel as though I become a room in which the other person lives. Thank you so much. It's always lovely to hear the author read that bit out loud. I have so many things I think about this extract and I want to hear your thoughts too.
Communication Challenges in Writing
00:11:44
Speaker
I want to get into grammar. I want i want to get into sentence structures. Sure. What I mentioned in that first paragraph, the flat place is the place of grief, but also the place of the real. It's real because of that grief.
00:11:59
Speaker
there's a real, at the level of the sentence, a kind of turning things around to me, like even at the level of the sentence, it's this thing and this thing, and let me turn that around and link those two things. And then even, but at least you're beside yourself, you have that consolation, the kind of repetitions and the turning around of the idea, that kind of recurs across the book, but I wonder how you were thinking about it as you were writing.
00:12:25
Speaker
So I, all throughout this book, you can see the kind of, um this is yeah know this everything in this book was something that I never thought was articulable, that I never thought would be um understandable. And this book is very concerned with the question of what we can and can't hear, what we can and can't know from each other. And I was very conscious, writing the book, of how I was liable to be misunderstood, how I was liable to be misheard,
00:12:54
Speaker
We are all liable to mishear each other right and to misunderstand each other. And that's the condition of being human. And I also do strongly feel, this comes through in the book, that part of coming to terms with life and enjoying other people is understanding that you will always be misunderstood and that that is survivable and that's okay. And that's inevitable and sometimes even fruitful. But I also felt as a queer Brown woman, I'm particularly susceptible to being misunderstood because I'm not the kind of person that people think is worth listening to very often and that had been the case throughout my life. And um particularly when I'm from a Muslim background and I knew that any kind of account I gave of a life growing up in an unusual and dysfunctional Muslim household, not the norm, a one that was broken in itself, was liable to be picked up and and used as a weapon against one of the most vulnerable groups of people in our in our deeply Islamophobic society.
00:13:52
Speaker
And so I felt that it was almost became an experiment how clearly and plainly and simply could I lay things out, lay things out, but also not make them not sort of minimize their complexity. I was so determined to make things as clear as they could possibly be made so that people, of people would still misunderstand me and they have, but there would be, but there would be no excuse for that. So there was a kind of play of,
00:14:21
Speaker
a kind of excessive or performative, like brick by brick simplicity i of it. And I'm sure deep down, I was thinking as he was speaking, I'm sure I'm also influenced by the punning turns of Sarah Ahmed, whose ideas are really key to this book. I haven't thought about that since he mentioned it, but I'm sure that's, you know, we're all just tissues of people we've read. And I'm certain Sarah Ahmed has a lovely trick in her writing of of, and I don't think I do it in quite the same way. I'm not punning.
00:14:49
Speaker
For me, my turnings around are about performances. Well, there's a few little puns in there. My turnings around are about performances of like, I know that it is difficult, guys, but sometimes two things are true at once. ah Yeah, I think this is the sort of feeling that I had in my head as I was writing, if that makes sense.
00:15:05
Speaker
It definitely does. I'm so glad you mentioned Arnaud's work because that was ah was my next comment. I was like so much what she does in there. But it is the the joy of language and also it's kind of obfuscating effects, right? That like you can pick up a word and turn it 12 times. And depending on who's holding that word, right, it can do different things. And we need to notice that it is, you know, every word means, as you say, 12 things. and And we take for granted that we all know what a word means, but like some some of the kind of apolitical
Creative Expression and Sentence Construction
00:15:33
Speaker
and ethical work is to notice when a word doesn't mean what you think it means. Yeah, the kind of thing that she calls sticky language, right? When words get stuck together through repetition. Yeah. And I really like the opening of this chapter for that reason, because we get place, grief, place, real, real, grief, place, like these repetitions really force us to think about what they mean in this particular context, in this particular. like And again, we've got Stein, Gertrude Stein there as an echo. Stein's also someone I work on
00:16:05
Speaker
famously, every time a word is, you know, Stein famously has rose as a rose as a rose and that sentence arranged in a circle on, on her note paper and her ceramics and so on. And the idea was that in every iteration, the word rose became different. Yeah. And I think words are always sort of on the brink of becoming objects to me and becoming odd objects that no longer, that whose meaning can no longer be taken for granted and become strange again. and repetition is part of the process by which we help other people notice that as well, I think. For sure. I love teaching that Stein poem, new, N-E-W, and the new becomes what you know, and it's just really fun and students always hate it. They're like, what are you doing to us? But I'm like, it's just so fun to me. anyway it
00:16:54
Speaker
Then from that colon, it displays itself starkly and you're beside yourself in the face of what can't be denied. I can't help but notice that sibilance, right? The runs from displays, self, starkly, beside, self, face. They become so soft in that line, even as you're describing the starkness of grief, right? You're describing something quite extreme and transformative, but the sound is much softer. And that really stood out to me as a kind of counterpoint or contrast, maybe.
00:17:22
Speaker
It's like Dickinson, isn't it? After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The overt triviality of the worst moments of your life, um or the the kind of failure of feeling to rise to that. And you know, like if, if something has been wrong all your life, um what is heightened heightened, heightenedness might look very different and in those moments.
00:17:44
Speaker
I'm just really interested in how these sentences do some of that, because you've got this really longish sentence with the really soft sounds and then, full stop, but at least you're beside yourself, full stop. You have a consolation, full stop, like these really short, more declarative, harder sentences that really kind of then take you aback again. Yeah. And again, these are kind of acts of despair, right? There's a sense in which the kind of short sentence I think often of, think of earlier, these fragments of I shored against my ruins, a little kind of crumb that's being picked up.
00:18:14
Speaker
And, you know, like as I love a short sentence. I have less than as simply as I get older with people who can't make their sentences short enough. A short sentence is a delight. A short sentence is the sexiest thing you can have. You know, just have have have the courage to let something stop and the relief of letting something stop. And knowing actually that things are often, I don't know, like the short so a short sentence of testifies to me that the that the most important things in life are actually very simple, you know, are actually very small and are actually things that you already know.
00:18:44
Speaker
A long sentence often seems to think that life is more complicated than it is, but the reason that life is difficult is because the simple things are hard and we don't want to do them.
Narrative Techniques and Reader Engagement
00:18:55
Speaker
And then after those hard stops, you have this turn of you curl your fingers into a fist and pretend you are holding a hand and you've got the F alliteration and the H alliteration, right? Fingers, fist, holding a hand, whether that's conscious or not when you're writing that, I don't know.
00:19:11
Speaker
Not at all conscious, not at all conscious. I'm really, really fussy about the sound of a sentence and about any words that isn't playing some role in the rhythm of a sentence, whether that's sort of throwing a spanner into the works of smoothness or making itself invisible. Yeah, either like nothing should ever jar without you meaning it to. Every jar I want to be intentional. And there were points in this book where I am agonized by the fact that I couldn't make it work.
00:19:40
Speaker
Or that there is a jar that I don't want to be there. But yeah. like no again So yeah, no, just completely inadvertent. But it works. I'm also interested in the you. like that turn of the you and I'm thinking about so many examples of this second person address that is both you as in one and one as in me but there's at a distance or the you of like the a reader or a person that's being addressed right and having all of those ah addresses at once whether how much of that is what you wanted in there I think I'm probably quite a quite a sort of accusatory and and coercive writer even I often find myself lapsing into the you
00:20:22
Speaker
And, you know, there were points in this book where my editor negotiated with me to maybe moderate that. I think that when I write, I feel, I feel two things when I write. I feel that I have been, that it is my responsibility to make an address and to, I feel both very aware of my audience and that my audience is completely irrelevant. I am writing wholly for myself.
00:20:44
Speaker
but there is a sort of like, mutilishness in me, I think, that is like, okay, right, you've asked me to come out of my own brain and address you, right? Okay, well, here you are. Well, here's what's in my brain. What are you gonna do with that? So there's something, and so I think, I've never thought about it before. This is just me sort of thinking aloud. But I would say about this passage though, I think why I was allowed to get away with the you. This is a passage about precisely that uncertainty about not knowing where the eye ends and the you begins.
00:21:14
Speaker
where about understanding how we relate to other people, what we have the right to ask of from other people in terms of being understood, being heard, being listened to. And what we can assume is the same as in us as in other people and what we have to guess is different. um And I'm always really interested in the decisions people make about that. I have one friend who fully believes everybody thinks in the same way as she does. And in some ways, that's a very beautiful thing. And it means that she approaches lots of people with this incredibly sort of clear-eyed, respectful sense of we are the same, which is very sincere. But at the same time, where it sort of maybe falls down is is where we have moments of cultural difference or where it cannot address the ways in which people are fundamentally different. And so, yeah, that movement between what we can claim for the you and what we can claim for the I
00:22:08
Speaker
And yeah, the risks that we take when addressing a you or inviting a you to feel something or attributing something to the you, that's really interesting to me always. Yeah, super interesting. and And there's part of the, I'm going to talk about this in a minute, the the kind of shifting in focus and also tone or or type of language, and I'll get to that in a second. The second paragraph you say, I've met people before in the flat place. Once in a while I'll encounter someone.
00:22:39
Speaker
I'm really interested in that shift I'm really terrible with grammatical terms but the kind of I have met people before like definitive people but then once in a while I'll encounter which is a bit more speculative or abstract I don't know what the term for that is and you can recognize them quite quickly it spills out of their eyes in their closed mouths and suddenly there's this rush of language right, as soon as you're imagining this kind of person that you meet, the person you might fall in love with, and then whose world's been rolled out on the rack. Again, that hard R, right, rolled out on the rack the same way as mine. So there's a real unfurling of this thought. I'm just interested in that split between like the, the, I have met real people and the kind of people who become fantastical performers. Yeah. And again, it's a kind of, this is a sort of terrible act of abuse that is happening in this sentence, I think. And
00:23:29
Speaker
This part of the book is always very interesting to me because these sort of the question of who one falls in love with and how is is one that I the keep quite submerged in the book for various reasons. I'm always interested when love is incidental or love is the smallest thing in a situation because so often it's the biggest thing.
00:23:49
Speaker
yeah and It's a terrible act of abuse to treat people as a type, isn't it? it's But it's um also an essential, and it's part of the kind of the book's broader concerns about how we talk about ourselves and about how other people, in all of my books, I'm interested in what happens when instead of interpreting, you simply describe what happens when you describe a text rather than immediately inviting it into a particular kind of critical framework. And for me, historically, like quite productive things have happened when I have paused to describe rather than immediately jumping to a conclusion. It's been very fruitful for me and for my thinking. But at the same time understanding that without a kind of act of categorization, without a final decision to make conclusions, we're kind of ethically hamstrung and there is no way of speaking to other people. So there is, I think there's a sort of like meanness in this piece, a sort of deliberate play with meanness.
00:24:46
Speaker
the and Yeah, it seems to me a very brutal sentence. I don't know if that really answers your your question and the kind of but kind of allowing things something to run on. I think Stevie Smith, the poet who whom my first book was on, she talks about allowing a thought to run on. And when a thought you allow a thought to run on, what it does is it it often falls into preset channels, the kind of desire lines that have been trodden again and again by society by the things you've read, by the things you've seen, the kind of unconscious runnels of thought. It falls without trouble into that. And that's always a risk when you let a thought run on that it will run into that runnel. I find myself interested reading the sentence back into that kind of consciousness and that act of stereotyping or lumping people together with that lengthening of a sentence, which comes concomitantly with an act of categorization.
00:25:38
Speaker
And then you do this and I kind of exclamation mark this bit, I fall in love with them, comma, usually, commer because they feel like that making that parenthetical that usually feels so profound to me. I don't know. There's something about that. I can't quite put my finger on it, but putting it in its own clothes rather than like, I usually fall in love with them or I fall in love with them usually because I think this is perhaps i'm one way of reading that for me. Would it be, it would be a counterpoint, a way of turning the meanness of the previous sentence back on itself immediately into the only person one should ever make fun of, which is oneself. The understanding that we are, if anybody else, can be sort of understood as a type. We are a type. Of course we are. We're utterly predictable. We're not nearly as special as we think we are. Again, the things that are true about us are the simple things. We're not special, we're predictable.
00:26:35
Speaker
You know, and that sort of little putting the usually as something parenthetical. If it was, I usually fall in love with them. That would have been to treat myself as something grand, to share with you intimately, something important about this important person that is me. To put the usually as parenthetical on its own is to say, I fall in love with them usually because I am a type, just like the types I have described. I love that. These are the kind of things I underline when I'm reading, but I say, what what just happened there?
00:27:05
Speaker
And that that's that's a moment, that's funny. I fall in love with them usually. Well, I can't say it's funny to anyone else, but it's funny to me. Whereas I usually fall in love with them. How unbearably like serious. ah Whereas we are absurd. And this is a book partly about my own absurdity, ah but as as well as allowing people, but we should allow ourselves to be absurd. You know, we're funny, we're stupid. Yeah, that's okay.
00:27:30
Speaker
And again, that's why I mentioned there are so many things happening in just this very tiny paragraph, tonally, emotionally. Because we then move on to, in that flat place where no one else can come, we crouch together, holding each other tight, feeling what is real, thrum under the foot and the sky run over our heads.
00:27:47
Speaker
A, firstly, the underfoot and sound kind of runs through that and really gets us under, the under and the thrum, like you feel the thrum through the sentence, right, is what I'm trying to say. And then, am my blood beating in their head? B, B, repetition, and the other way around. Again, you're going back to that turning things over, right? My blood beating in their head and the other way around.
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah, not knowing whose head is whose once you've repeated it enough. Yeah. Yeah. So they again, that they're kind of turning a thought around or or an idea around, but more ah sounds always in the end, we part those three commas really slowing us down in that sentence, right? As, as you're about to go separate ways. Enforcing partings, right? Yeah. And again, making what is, what could be presented as sententious, appropriately trivial, right?
00:28:39
Speaker
appropriately small, broken down, noted as an aside. Yeah. And that that is the kind of project of this book to allow, and all of the things I'm interested in, to allow things to be very, very serious and also predictable and trivial in good ways, because that is, you know, the struggle of being human is to take seriously the ah our triviality.
00:29:01
Speaker
And I think, I don't know, I feel like commas do a lot of that work. I think commas, the kind of when to pause, when to, look when to kind of accommodate a kind of a moment of the quizzical, a moment of not allowing things to get too weighty or breaking up the weight of something at the right minute. Whereas, again, we come back to the question of if we summarized it, you know, this would be a very different
Authenticity and Miscommunication in Writing
00:29:23
Speaker
sentiment. I think that, yeah.
00:29:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think that the commas and introduce lightness of a sort that is important, or just perhaps a little bit of lightness for me, enough to make it bearable for me to have written it.
00:29:38
Speaker
Right, like a breath at least for both you and the breath you're reading. And we need that breath because the next paragraph then to me hits in a different way. It's no good, comma relating to someone else like that. Like a real heartbreak of a sentence after after the the kind of little bit of lightness before And then the very next sentence, the psychological term for it is merging like a mixing of registers and the kind of the swerve from this really personal declarative, open hearted sentence to there is a like a psychological term for this. Yeah, yeah. Again, we are diagnosable. We are predictable. We are this experience written out of a place of and this particular part of the book, ah this is from a very, very early draft. This was written way before I knew what form this was going to take, written out of, well,
00:30:29
Speaker
In 2019, I became very unwell. I fell in love and I found myself completely stumped by my inability to give an account of myself. Now I'm paraphrasing Judith Butler, who's the the epigraph of the introduction. I couldn't give an account of myself to this girl that I'd fallen in love with. And I wrote a lot to, this is lifted from that very, very early iteration.
00:30:56
Speaker
And so yeah, eternally, I'm always interested in how it fits with the rest of it. I think it does in the end, because part of the point is the turn, right? Because, you know, I am laughing at myself or I am laughing at myself as too strong. I'm allowing that kind of light handling of very serious feelings. But at the same time, what I describe as absolutely sincerely felt, the running on, the lengthening, the blood shock language of of what it feels like to merge. I mean that completely sincerely. And yet at the same time, this experience, it feels like it feels like no one else has had that's utterly unique and probably one of the most intimate, exciting and life affirming things one can feel. A, it's no good. It is just, and no good is very deliberately chosen as well. It's just, that's what a child says or what a mother says to a child, that's no good. Or it's no good it's no good crying like that.
00:31:51
Speaker
It's, you know, it's absolutely, it's early language. Oh, it's no good. But also that not only has your mother or the mother's voice coming in there, something to say about it, but also the psychologist. You are utterly predictable and you'll know more than about five. nore I'm now more emotional than I expected. That line then follows, which kind of doubles down on this. Like to me, it feels like I don't exist anymore. Like real stripped back language, like you we were talking about earlier on, and right? how can How direct can language be?
00:32:21
Speaker
I feel as though I become a room in which the other person lives. And then you give us that that metaphorical kind of version of, to me, it feels like I don't exist anymore. But then here's this kind of literary figurative way of phrasing that. It's so interesting. And again, yeah, I'd never noticed that. For me, metaphor is not something I struggle for. For me, the simple language is the translation of the metaphor that comes first. You know, what I have in my head when I start to. And I think a lot of people are this way, right?
00:32:49
Speaker
that we start with the image there. And then of course not everybody, right? But like lots and lots of people, i'm not and what I'm saying here is I'm not special. You start with the kind of blistering image of being a room. And then you have to sort of decode what your brain is trying to say to you when it supplies you with that image. Again, a lot of the work that my editor does, I'm sure editors do for everybody. My editor will often say to me, well, you said that three times, just in three different ways. Do we need all three? I really like saying, again, perhaps it's what you describe as the turning over of words, or the kind of look at them from different angles. I love to say something in different ways and seeing see what happens when you offer all the options. Yeah, it doesn't seem redundant to me. Yeah. No, definitely not redundant. And the whole
00:33:34
Speaker
book to me is about like looking inwards and outwards at the same time, right? It's like how do I understand myself and these environments I'm in and how much of the environment's mirroring or reflecting or constructing that internal landscape and and back and forth. So that seems to me to necessitate a kind of constant shifting of linguistic perspective too.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, massively. Yeah, completely. Allowing things to blur together, allowing things to be different, and and also knowing how two things that are the same can also be massively different, right? Or that things are, again, the Stein, different every time you say them, or that sometimes you need to say something twice. I'm very interested in this book in the business of, oh, well, it prevents my first book on aphorism. Like my work on the aphorism and Stevie Smith is all about how aphorism provides marginalised with a way of saying something in such a way that it will never be heard. To have the pleasure of saying something but the security of remaining unheard and that's part of the the safety of the aphorism but also part of its tragedy right because on some level we do speak to what because we want to be heard and we say something clearly and beautifully and yet it will never be heard and so there's a kind of perverse
00:34:48
Speaker
like investigation, how many times and how clearly and how many different ways can I say something and people not understand or not hear me?
Noreen's Writing Practice and Literature Recommendations
00:34:55
Speaker
That's incredible. As a way to transition to the last part of the conversation, I want to ask you some questions about your own writing practice. You talked about writing this bit a bit later in the process. Sure. Do you have a particular writing practice? Like, is it in a place? Are there rituals? Are you, knew you know, are you drinking particular things? even Do you have a like a strict level?
00:35:18
Speaker
I would love to be. So my work does not get done unless I say to myself, you are going to write X bad words every day. That is really the place where the work gets done, where I sit down and grumble and write the bad words. And that can look like many, many things. What I find is that no way of making myself write those bad words is consistent from one day to the next. Sometimes it is in my pajamas cross-legged bed usually. Sometimes I have to carry my laptop out to a cafe or the library or the other side of my office or the floor. What writing feels like to me is constantly having to outwit the thing in myself that thinks I should be doing my emails or that wants to be on social media. You know, I can only really function if I'm playing truant and that's true in every part of my life. I'm very bad at doing things when I meant to be doing them
00:36:11
Speaker
in the place I'm meant to be doing them. So my writing practice I would say is absolutely defined by inconsistency and furtiveness. I love that answer. Are there any, I know you teach literature mainly, but are there creative writing techniques or tips that you give students or have given other people? Are there things that you would want to share here? Oh, I just shared this with a student recently actually. He was having difficulty writing about um a difficult part of her memories. And this is something I tried many times to write about my life. I tried once when I was 14 and the things that I, or the non-things, the non-events I described in this book were were happening. And then I tried again in 2019 when I was, when I just turned 30. And I also wrote a sort of a whole book of poems that will never be published around the same time in 2019 out of my acute despair. And what needed to happen
00:37:08
Speaker
in that second iteration of the memoir and in the poems, was that I couldn't be myself. I could not enter my past as I. I couldn't have that pronoun. I had to be third person. I had to be called X. I wanted to be almost invisible. I wanted to be a non-presence. And I became a fish. I became a little silver fish. And I'm sure that that was informed by, you know, the the fish in Wolf's The Roam of One's Own.
00:37:35
Speaker
the little fish that vanishes and re-emerges and vanishes again though though I wasn't thinking about it at the time. I thought the little fish might be able to move very fast and hide and slip out of people's grasps and get away when she needed to get away and be not seen in a way that I had not succeeded in not being seen or not being safe and not escaping. And as I wrote I was able to stop being X the little silver fish and I was able to come into the text as I But I could not have i had done that if I hadn't started out as ex the little fish. So if you can't, if it doesn't feel right to go to take yourself back to what happened, you know, maybe, maybe someone else would be able to do it better for now. And then you can come in later. If you want to, you never have to. That's wonderful. Thank you. Do you have any books that you might recommend to listeners? It could be an older book. It could be something you're currently reading.
00:38:31
Speaker
So I've got a few books I think are great. i um I think everybody, everybody should read Adania Shibley's minor detail. I think at 112 pages, it's it's just, it's a perfect book. It is, yeah, I can't think on so many fronts, on so many levels, it is an impeccable book. I'm also a tremendous admirer of Brandon Taylor's writing and like real life.
00:38:55
Speaker
Whenever I feel like I want to remind myself of the injustice of the literary establishment, I remind myself that real life didn't win any prizes. You don't get more broken than that. So big fan there. I also think that we would be happier if we spent more time reading 19th century literature. Every Christmas I have a treat. I listen to a Charles Dickens novella or short story on audiobook. And I'm currently listening to a House Follette and it's just, it does something different to your brain.
00:39:24
Speaker
It does, again, the kind of different texture of a sentence. It's like cold, cold water. Treat yourself. Read a 19th century novel today. I love these recommendations. I you mean i try and do two at least two Victorian novels a year. like explain that That's so good. What's the most recent one you've read? What did I read recently? oh I did The Mayor of Castorbridge recently. Oh, oh, bless. Which is a real banger. I haven't read that one before. It's such a we forget We forget that Victorian novels are a good bloody time. I read The Odd Women by George Gissing. Isn't that a great one? Like that's again, again, it's just yeah, genuinely about odd women and struggling to find a way of life. How do we live as
00:40:06
Speaker
as, as women in this world. It's great, very depressing, but you know, that's half the fun. And all three examples, very interested in form, right? All three of those authors really rigorous in terms of form that I think we've talked a bit about today, which I, which is the thing that makes me most excited. Yes. Yes. Nothing else is interesting. That seems like a perfect place to end the episode. Nothing else is interesting. Noreen, thank you so much for spending time with us. Oh, such a pleasure pleasure, Chris. Thanks so much for having me.
00:40:33
Speaker
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00:40:53
Speaker
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