When Eliza Clark’s debut novel, Boy Parts, came out in the summer of 2020, it almost slipped under the radar. But before long, the buzz on TikTok catapulted the book into cult status. Since then, there has been a one-woman stage adaptation at the Soho theatre and her follow-up, Penance, about a journalist investigating a gruesome true-crime story set on the date of the Brexit referendum, is being adapted by Juno Dawson for television. Now 30, last year she was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists.
Julia Armfield, 34, has attracted a devoted following with her gothic, horror-inflected books, lyrical language and aquatic imagery. Her 2019 debut short-story collection, Salt Slow, was as thrillingly macabre as you might expect from someone who wrote their MA dissertation on teeth, hair and nails in the Victorian imagination. Her haunting 2022 debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles fiction book of the year award and won the 2023 Polari book prize. Both authors are publishing their third books this year. Clark’s wide-ranging story collection, She’s Always Hungry, takes her back to her speculative fiction beginnings: readers may be surprised by the amount of spaceship content (it’s excellent). Armfield’s evocative second novel, Private Rites, reimagines King Lear in an apocalyptic future in which three sisters quarrel as the world is submerged.
The rapport and easy-flowing banter between the two is apparent when we meet in a cafe in south London, their mutual enthusiasm undimmed by the oppressive heat of the hottest day of the year. Armfield says of Clark: “Quite apart from how skilled she is, and how much variety and mastery there is in the voice, it’s always just funny. I’m so happy to see a joke.” Clark is full of praise for Armfield: “I was really impressed by Salt Slow, and The Great Awake, which won the White Review story prize – it makes sense why that would be a career-launching story.”
Their work draws not just on literature but also pop culture, classic cinema and the weirder sides of the internet (Clark is now obsessed with Japanese batsu, or punishment games usually based on endurance tests). Talking about their process, they both turn to different memes. For Armfield, it’s a two-part drawing of a horse in which one is beautifully realised, and the other is a child’s sketch. “It’s my idea of what I’m going to write, versus me when I’ve started writing it and ruined it by being myself.” Clark’s technique is closer to the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” meme: “It’s two years of sketching out these two circles, and then in about six weeks, I will draw the rest of the owl.” She wrote the final 10,000 words of both her novels in one day. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bragging point,” she says. “It does get a little bit ‘No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy.’”
How did you first meet?
Julia Armfield It was during lockdown, and I was asked to interview you for your Instagram Live book launch. It was extremely well attended given that a) it was Instagram and b) this was a debut novel. You had hot-rolled your hair and were wearing this pink outfit, and I was wearing dungarees.
Eliza Clark I was trying to do a “bit” about the fact that I was in my house. So I was wearing a nightgown and a sheer dressing gown with a marabou feather trim on the sleeves and I looked silly, but like I was having fun.
JA It was hard Jayne Mansfield. And then we became friends after that.
EC We hung out online a couple of times, with our partners, and we watched films together.
JA You made us watch Cats. I’m still not feeling good about it, honestly.
You both write short stories and novels. How do the two compare?
JA It’s really interesting because I started with short stories, and what happens when you do that is people will go: ‘That’s cute, though can you pitch us a novel as well?’ Now I’ve found that writing novels allows me to do what I want in a better and more complex way, but that was quite a journey. For me, short stories focus on a trick or a twist, whereas novels become very character- and mood-focused. They allow me to spend more time with people.
EC I have a lot of ideas, but then it’s about working out the size of an idea. I like writing both. You kind of can’t fail with a short story collection, because of the amount of anxiety around them commercially – they’re almost set up to fail. So anything positive that happens with it is a success, whereas with a novel – you can really fail with them.
JA There is space for you to go more hard-genre in short stories and still be considered literary. I think there is a lot of genre snobbery at play – in some ways, I will never be taken entirely seriously as a novelist, because there’s often a sea monster. And I do think that gives you freedom. It’s a different aspiration.
Are short stories and multivoiced narratives also a way to stop people assuming you are your characters?
JA They’ll still try. They’ll try to find one voice among the many and say ‘That is you’. It is an incredibly frustrating cliche to bring up to female novelists. But at the same time you are writing about reality, to some degree, so you are often writing your voice. In Our Wives Under the Sea, I found Miri a much more irritating voice to have to write than Leah, because she was much more me.
EC I had quite a bad faith review of Penance, where the person completely ignored that there was a narrator at play, and wrote about what her impression of my political beliefs were. I actually didn’t get a lot of that because it’s so extreme and clearly removed from my life, but someone still found a way.
Every few years someone will claim that the novel is dead. Is it?
JA It’s a bizarre claim to make, other than to say, ‘The version of the novel as I very, very personally enjoy and perceive it has probably gone out of fashion for a little while.’ I think that’s a much less hyperbolic and hysterical way of saying exactly the same thing.
EC I’ve expressed this anxiety to you before – sometimes I worry that I’m personally contributing to the decline in the quality of literature. You could reframe that in a more positive way: that I’m interested in pushing it in different places. Not that I’m some great experimental novelist – I’m not Rebecca Watson, who’s much better at that. I’m interested in experimenting with form. But then I do worry: ‘Oh, should I have read some Dostoevsky?’ I feel like when I’m 50, people will take me seriously.
Sometimes when you see people talk about their relationship with writing – strangers, not anybody I know – but you think, do you actually like writing, do you actually want to write? Or do you like the idea of writing? With some people, the point of a novel seems to be to extend their lifestyle brand. Nobody’s making you. You don’t have to write a novel. You can just read books, or you can find some other creative outlet. If you actually enjoy it, it feels less like you’re fighting other people for scraps.
JA And a vast majority of the time, you will probably also have to have an entire full-time job to support it, and therefore you are tired all the time. Ultimately, it is either worth it because you want to do it, or it’s not.
Do you work full-time?
JA Yes. I’m doing great! It is important to talk about, though. There is a real misunderstanding that the second you’ve sold a book, you’re set. And that makes people feel either extremely intimidated or like they’ve failed. But that’s the case for 80% of the writers I know. A vast majority of the time, [when people write full-time] either they have been exceptionally successful in ways that cannot easily be replicated, or they have private means.
EC I don’t have a day job – I did until August 2022. But even among full-time writers, a lot of us have a matrix of freelance work as well. Mostly teaching, manuscript assessment, copywriting, working in publishing in some capacity. There’s definitely sometimes a perception of, ‘If I didn’t get a seven-figure advance, I’ve fucked this up.’ But when somebody does become successful, it’s really the exception and not the rule, and that’s miserable.
Compared with somewhere like Scandinavia or Ireland, there doesn’t seem to be as much government support for writers.
JA It’s a real failing of this country overall – it’s terrible, and so evident. It is simply not respected as a profession or a culture. The idea that places like the White Review have to shut down, which is where so many people got an incredibly important start, because they don’t have any funding, it’s an absolute travesty.
EC Especially because the UK has such a strong literary tradition, but it’s been sidelined.
JA We both should have gone into Stem.
EC No, I have a C in GCSE maths. You know those interviews where writers are asked, what would you do if you weren’t a writer? And there’s usually some quite romantic response. But I think I’d probably still work in digital marketing for nonprofit, and that’s not a fun answer.
What are you reading at the moment?
JA I enjoyed Henry Henry by Allen Bratton, which was fascinating. Coming off the back of doing press for Private Rites, it made me think of a lot of the same things – it’s doing Shakespeare to a degree, and it’s about abusive parents, and coming to terms with what one is, when one hasn’t been taught to be anything well. I thought that was really good.
EC At the minute I’m listening to Drawing Blood by William Joseph Martin, formerly Poppy Z Brite, because your wife recommended it. I really enjoyed Exquisite Corpse and Lost Souls. This was considered to be his worst, but it’s still really good. In Australia I recently did a panel with Patrick DeWitt and Jonathan Lethem, so I read The Sisters Brothers and Motherless Brooklyn, and I loved both.
• She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark is published by Faber on 7 November
• Private Rites by Julia Armfield is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
