A little way into our conversation, author Naomi Alderman says: “At some point in your career, you go: What can I do that other people are not doing?”
And what’s that, for you?
“I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,” she says. “If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?”
The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how “the capacity to do violence” gives an advantage in society. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. And then she explored what that might mean. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took.
The Power is wild and gripping, but it’s a dark book. “I don’t blame myself for that,” says Alderman. “I’m just writing about the world.” Her mentor is Margaret Atwood, who has also mirrored real-life atrocities in her writing, particularly in The Handmaid’s Tale; plus, Alderman has had some traumatic – and, be warned, potentially triggering – experiences of her own, which we’ll get to later. She herself can cope with most things in fiction, “though I tried reading [Ian McGuire’s] The North Water, a beautifully written book, but it’s got lots of cruelty towards animals and I had to stop”.
Anyhow, she’s aware that her book’s darkness is seductive (that’s the point). If you’re a woman, you find yourself checking your body to see if, perhaps, you might have that thrilling electric gift. Imagine how you would move through the world! The main characters have their lives upturned through acquiring it: American Allie, an abused foster child, becomes a cult leader, with working-class Londoner Roxy her violent second-in-command; Margot, a middle-aged American mayor, finds it gives her more political power; Tatiana, wife of the president of Moldova, takes over the country; and Tunde, a Nigerian journalist, has his life enhanced through his reporting of the new phenomenon, but eventually severely reduced.
And now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon. It’s why we’re talking. The TV version is a nine-parter that highlights how young women react to acquiring their power. It only gets about a third of the way through the novel, stopping before the really disturbing scenarios (there’s talk of another couple of series).
There’s a lot of humour and delight in the series, and Alderman herself is a sunny presence when we meet. Sparkly in a camera-friendly gold-spotted dress and showstopper earrings, she’s excellent company: welcoming, entertaining, smiley, interesting. We’re in an empty restaurant, close to where she’s just had her photo taken. She tells me she has a special for-the-camera smile, to make photo sessions less stressful: “You just practise in the mirror until you find a smile you like, and then you remember how it feels, so you can recreate it.” She demonstrates. It’s full beam. Alderman is clever, and she applies her sharp mind to problems large and small.
The series is very far from four people in a room; it spans the globe. She wrote the opening episode (there was an all-woman writing team) and has been involved throughout, as a producer and story consultant. My favourite character is Roxy Monke, the foul-mouthed, vengeful London Jewish girl, played by Ria Zmitrowicz. Alderman loves her too, and enjoyed rewriting her – and her terrifying dad, Bernie, played by Eddie Marsan – for TV.
“TV’s all about character,” she says. “I’d been a bit hand-wavy [vague] about some of Roxy’s background, but they sit you down and go: ‘OK, exactly what is Bernie Monke’s business? How does it work day to day? What do you think his grandparents were like?’ None of that necessarily appears on screen. But it’s underlying everything.” (Another writer, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, helped ensure that Allie, a black woman from America’s south, was convincing too.)
Marsan asked for photos of Alderman’s real-life family, to get to know where some of her characterisation was coming from. “Nobody in my family is a criminal! But as ever, and I think this is true for most novelists, all the characters have got a little shard of me in them. There’s a small part of me that is… demanding.”
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Alderman’s shards can come from anywhere in her life, though her books have become less obviously personal as her writing career has blossomed. Her first novel, 2006’s Disobedience, was set in a north London Orthodox Jewish community like the one she grew up in; her second, The Lessons, at Oxford University (she studied PPE at Lincoln College); her third, The Liars’ Gospel, imagined four new gospels telling the story of Yehoshuah (the Jewish name for Jesus); and her fourth was The Power.
A gradual expansion from a confined world to a big wide one, then; via education, religion, philosophical and societal questioning. This mirrors her personal development. The elder of two siblings, she is the child of Marion, an art teacher, and Geoffrey, a Jewish historian, who treated her as an intellectual equal from a young age. The family were Modern Orthodox, so she was educated. But still, at her school, “every morning, everybody said: ‘Thank you, God, for not making me a slave.’ And then the boys said: ‘Thank you, God, for not making me a woman.’ And the girls said: ‘Thank you, God, for making me according to your will.’” She looks at me. “Yeah, it’s fucking nuts. I remain in dialogue with the religion of my growing up years.”
When she was 30, partly because of writing Disobedience, Alderman stopped being an Orthodox Jew. But she retains a strong Jewish identity, and refuses to dismiss all of her upbringing. She appreciates the seriousness of the moral discussions, the duties of care expected of people in the community towards one another: “These are not things that the secular world has a lot of space for.” If she were to dismiss all of her religion, she says, “a crack would open up in my life that would be unclosable. Like a crack down the centre of my body.”
Visceral words; Alderman has had a complicated relationship with her physical self. It’s partly, she says, because she grew up in the heroin chic 90s, “when we were all supposed to look like Kate Moss”. Alderman did not. “I felt the fact that I was a fat teenage girl was something I was supposed to somehow conceal,” she says. “God knows how you would conceal that! But I was supposed to pretend that it was not going on, and not talk about it.”
This affected her, as did her uncle’s death by suicide, when she was 14. “My dad had a tough time with his mental health because of it, which was traumatic. Also, I was groomed and abused by a paedophile, Sidney Greenbaum. Put his name in, because he’s been dead since 1996. And it was the best thing he ever did for me, to die. The fucker.”
Alderman says this, not casually, but unexpectedly, without fanfare. I hadn’t known, though when I search later, she has mentioned it before, in a book review and a Twitter exchange. Greenbaum, who in 1990 pleaded guilty to three charges of indecent assault on young boys, was a highly respected academic and member of the Jewish community, which meant his crimes were, if not covered up, then minimised (his obituary in the Independent didn’t even mention his conviction).
Alderman tells me that Greenbaum worked with her dad, helped him professionally, and charmed her parents, so that by the time she encountered him, it was “unthinkable” that he would do her any harm. “Classic predator behaviour. It was a traumatic situation for a long time… And at such a point, if you’re a clever girl, then you go: Right, what I’ve got to do is get my good GCSEs, get my A-levels, and get out.”
So she did, working hard to get to Oxford and, after that, New York, to work in law (she hated it). But one of the results of her past was that she had a tendency to divorce herself from her body. In New York, aged 26, she found herself in love with a gay man, whom she thought she might marry. “I just dialled down my sexual feelings because it all seemed much too complicated to have to deal with,” she says. “And I was very good at Latin and philosophy, and so I thought maybe I could get through my life just doing Latin and philosophy.”
Perhaps Alderman’s big brain means that she intellectualises her way out of difficult emotions?
“I would say you are completely correct,” she says. “When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence, according to my therapist. Though in many cases, particularly online arguments, it’s a really good thing to be able to do. I mean, the ability to switch off your emotions can be a sort of superpower. But it’s a job of work to be able to regain the full gamut of human emotion. That has been a journey of my life, actually, to learn to feel, really fully feel. And to leave space for feeling before I do anything else.”
She started therapy while in New York and has continued for 20 years. She believes it has given her more than sexuality and self-knowledge – an insight into others, her interest in big systems. “From therapy, you learn that everybody’s acting out of whatever they believe to be the right thing. When things go wrong, it’s often because of the structures that we live in.”
Now, having had enjoyable relationships with both men and women, she’s in a settled one with a man. They live together, and managed to get through lockdown, even though they argued a bit (“we threw the laundry down the stairs”), and their guinea pig died (“tragic”).
Alderman’s experiences, her therapy and her wide education (maths, politics, philosophy, economics, English, Latin, Hebrew – plus she’s designed video games) means not only that she’s great at questioning established ways of thinking, but also that she’s curious, readily excited by the new. When we’re discussing The Power, I say that I enjoy how it gives teenage girls proper power, the kind they believe they have in real life but are denied.
“One of the things that the book and the show are about is how, if you allow yourself to be inspired by young women, how much strength that gives to all of us,” she says. “They enter the adult world and they can see all the problems with it. There are young women who write about bodies in such a different way than when I was young. Young fat women who are just going out, living their beautiful lives, taking beautiful sexy selfies of themselves, and I feel they helped me view myself differently.”
Along with her delight in the new, she is good at acceptance; she’s a trans-inclusive feminist who manages not to annoy those who disagree with her. (She blames a lot of hardline stances on online harassment, which she sees as a separate problem.) When it comes to prisons, she says, “if a person has raped a woman using their penis, and they still have that penis, then we should probably look extremely hard at any claims they have to now be a woman. But that’s very different to a trans woman who’s been living as a woman for 20 years being imprisoned for, I don’t know, tax fraud.”
And we have an interesting discussion about sport. In Alderman’s opinion, we should remember that the Olympics were invented by the ancient Greeks, who hated women. “Their view was that women’s bodies are faulty and men’s bodies are good.” And this has led to today’s sports being designed to showcase what men’s bodies do best.
“How do you make a woman win at any sport?” she asks. “You make it go on longer. Because women tend to have much more stamina. My great fact about this is there’s a swimming race around Manhattan Island. Men and women, if they swim round once, are about equal. Twice around, women come out very much better.”
I check this later, and she’s right – the fastest time twice round has been held more often by women than men, and the first person to swim four times round was a woman, Jaime Monahan, who also holds the Guinness World Record for most Manhattan-circling swims ever (29).
We only talk for 45 minutes (Alderman has a family lunch to get to), but every moment is interesting. Alderman likes to unpick, dissect, move from micro to macro, use history to help pull arguments apart, to discuss and think properly – widely, deeply – about a subject. Especially the large ones. The big ideas.
Her next book, The Future, will be out in the autumn. What’s it about?
“Well, we’ve allowed a world to arise where a few technology billionaires are incredibly wealthy and powerful,” she says. “And we haven’t interrogated really how that’s happened, whether we think that’s just, and whether we want those people in charge of the amount of the world that they’re in charge of.
“So the book is about tech billionaires, and their assistants and ex-wives,” she says, cheerfully. “Who decide they’re going to have to destroy them.”
