Jo Hamya’s debut novel, Three Rooms, was a state-of-the-nation polemic about “generation rent” that saw her likened to Virginia Woolf and Deborah Levy. Her second, The Hypocrite, is powered by a sustained conflict between Sophia, a young playwright, and her father, a famous author. Witty and devastatingly acute, it shifts between a Sicilian summer 10 years ago, when a rift opened up between them as she typed up his novel on sex and gender, and present-day London, where he’s watching the play she’s written about that same holiday. Hamya, 26, also co-hosts the Booker prize podcast and is midway through a PhD on literary criticism in the 21st-century’s digitised landscape.
Second books can be notoriously difficult, especially after a well-received debut. Did you find it so?
It got difficult the moment readers came into my mind. I got some great advice from Ben Okri at that stage. He told me just to find joy in it and have fun, and to not think of it as a second novel, to think of it as something you can work at and do better on. I think it’s very possible that I won’t really hit my stride for another couple of books.
How did The Hypocrite begin?
I’d been doomscrolling on Twitter one evening in lockdown and there was some sort of argument happening on my timeline. It sounds ridiculous but I had a clear image suddenly of a man in a theatre, watching a play of his life, and I knew that he would disagree with everything that was happening on stage, but he couldn’t leave. I thought about it for hours that night because it was a really interesting formal challenge. Could I write something where both parties were wrong and they were both utterly sympathetic, but the reader would still – especially if they spend time on the internet – feel conscious of wanting to take sides? And could I write in a way that made them interrogate that need? Could I just write one massive grey area?
Was it a struggle to make both father and daughter sympathetic?
When I started I put myself on a crash course of reading a lot of the kind of books that I thought he might have written. I came out of them an enraged feminist, but at a certain point in my first draft, I just started crying with him. Even if you do have questionable views, the world’s changed so fast; I find it heart-wrenching to think that you could have lived half your life and then within a decade, strangers you’ve never met hate you. With Sophia, I felt an extraordinary amount of sympathy for her inability to express herself. That is as much familial as it is down to her status as a young woman.
Did her voice come more easily?
It was the opposite, which was a really interesting reversal of what I had expected. I think it’s that I’ve been hearing a voice like his for most of my literary education, whereas I had to struggle a lot more to find hers. I always imagined him to be easier to have a pint with than Sophia because I don’t think he’s had to nurture very many resentments in his life, whereas she has, rather unfairly.
Both characters are upper middle class and white. As a mixed-race author, have you ever felt hemmed in by an expectation that you’ll make race central to your work?
As it happens, the next book I’m writing is about race, but my first book was interpreted as a race novel when it really wasn’t, and I do feel that sometimes I’ll be asked to do a book review that I’m fairly convinced no one who didn’t look like me would be asked to write. I also think there is a nuance to mixed-race blackness that is usually lost when publishing asks me to write about race.
Have you always wanted to write?
Up until I was 16, I was very convinced that it was my destiny in life to be the creative director of a fashion house, but I knew I could write better than I could sketch. I took a creative writing class in high school [Hamya spent some of her childhood in the US] and we had a very interesting teacher who’s actually in jail now [he was convicted of having sex with an underage student]. For a good 10 weeks, we were only allowed to write sestinas or sonnets or haiku, and it genuinely was incredible advice to hammer out a form before you did anything else. It’s the only formal training that I’ve had as a writer, but it’s been supremely useful, and when I started writing my first novel, the first thing I turned to was poetry.
What art forms did you turn to when writing The Hypocrite?
Sofia Coppola’s film On the Rocks, where she’s got Rashida Jones and Bill Murray having this weird, prolonged, very quiet argument, was very useful to watch in the beginning, and for a few weeks I had a postcard of The Healer, a painting by Guillermo Lorca, nearby. I was so convinced that he’d painted my novel! For the characters themselves I had a few artists who I thought they might listen to: Leonard Cohen, Captain Beefheart and Nick Cave for the father; Fiona Apple and Laura Marling for Sophia; and for both of them, Kendrick Lamar’s N95 with the line, “What the fuck is cancel culture, dawg?” Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood was a really nice way to end a writing session and remind myself not to take sides.
Who are your literary influences?
Rachel Cusk has been most formative for me in terms of style. I love what Percival Everett and Paul Beatty are doing, offering a sense of joy and comedy while writing about race. Anne Enright as well, partly for the sheer brilliance of writing but also she is so considerate and considered and open in the way that she thinks. And the poet Jack Underwood writes in this incredibly humane, touching way – I pick up A Year in the New Life when I’m feeling stuck.
You also work for the Booker Prize Foundation. Does it ever leave you feeling inhibited as a writer?
Revival efforts for writers like Keri Hulme or Anita Brookner are a huge part of the job, and I suppose it inspires a sense of humility. Even a Booker prize doesn’t necessarily guarantee you lifelong fame or even faint recognition.
The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya is published by Orion (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
