Yara Rodrigues Fowler, 29, is a Brazilian-British novelist and activist from London. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times young writer of the year award for her debut, Stubborn Archivist, cited as “a formally inventive novel of growing up between cultures”. That same year, the Financial Times named her one of “the planet’s 30 most exciting young people” after she was credited with boosting youth turnout in the 2017 general election, when she co-created a bot that encouraged Tinder users to register to vote. Fowler’s new novel, there are more things, turns on the political awakening of Melissa and Catarina, two London flatmates with roots in Brazil.
What drew you to write about millennials in the period around the Brexit vote?
I was thinking about what happens if you’re born just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In England, when I grew up, everyone was like, things can only get better; there was a Labour government, people were becoming less poor, and it was similar in Brazil when the Workers’ party came to power, the first leftwing government ever, really. What happens when you grow up believing everything’s going to be all right, only to see how that period of neoliberalism has actually taken us to a time where fascism is rising and the planet’s burning?
It’s sometimes said that politics and fiction don’t mix…
I wasn’t worried about writing a political novel – every novel is political – but I was asking myself how I could really agitate the reader. I heard a podcast with Sebastian Faulks talking about this fan letter he got from a woman who said: “I read Birdsong and the sex scenes made me realise I’d never known true love or sexual pleasure and so I left my husband of 20 years.” He was like, whoa. It made me wonder what it would be like if you wrote a piece of fiction that made people feel so full of revolutionary possibility and desire that they want to take to the streets, not necessarily for what might be achieved in their own lifetime, but for generations to come.
How conscious were you of other novels about millennial experience?
I think we’re all saying that life right now is shit. Every book I read about someone my age includes someone having a panic attack: Good Intentions, Milk Teeth, Queenie. When you have a book about how difficult life is, sometimes people say, yeah, I hear you: life is shit, look at house prices, look at the cost of living, no one has a proper job, you’re scared to have kids because you’re worried your house’ll be underwater. But sometimes the books just wallow [in it all]. I wanted [to write] a novel that asks, why is the world like this? How do I intervene? It’s not just: “I’m a millennial who can’t afford a deposit and I voted for Corbyn and don’t like Trump.”
A note at the start of the book asks the reader to speak aloud with Melissa and Catarina when they chant at activists’ meetings.
I wanted to make it as difficult as possible for the reader to pick up this book, say “that was really educational” and then just put it back down again. When Melissa and Catarina have to chant with other activists [for the first time], and Melissa’s thinking, this is so cringey, she pushes through and is like, wow. I wanted the reader to go through that as well – to feel embarrassed by the earnestness of believing we can have a world where everyone is safe, where we don’t have prisons and where there are no borders, but ideally to finish the book by asking if we can create a radically different world.
The novel suggests sex plays a part in that journey, too.
I didn’t want to elevate sex and romantic relationships – they’re just one of a number of types of relationship in the novel – but it’s gesturing in a very gentle way towards a world where who you have sex with, or whether you do it in a relationship, isn’t super-important but just a part of how we live; if Melissa enjoys having sex casually, great, if Catarina wants to be with her boyfriend for ever, great.
The writer Claire-Louise Bennett has called your storytelling “distinctly unhampered”.
I do find normal prose conventions cluttering. I grew up on MSN Messenger: you don’t need a full stop, you do a line-break: that’s how you know a new person is speaking. My dad’s the only person I know who puts a full stop at the end of texts and it feels really aggressive to me! I wanted a book that formally disrupts what you expect from a novel, but I didn’t want to make it difficult to read; maybe if you like poetry, or you don’t read a lot, you can feel welcomed by it, despite the fact that it looks a bit weird.
What have you been reading lately?
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel is wicked. It’s not as grim as the title sounds: it’s a novel about multi-parent families, and mothering as something a community of women can share. I’m also reading a bunch of what there is by way of British abolitionist books: there’s one called Brick By Brick, with Hajar Press, by Cradle, a group working for prison abolition in the UK.
What did you read growing up?
I was raised on Zadie Smith. NW’s my absolute favourite of her books. I love her even though her books show the political limitations of the imagination in that period. She talks about the London I grew up in – at my school, 10 kids went to medical school and two kids went to prison, that’s the kind of school it was. What’s brilliant about her books is that she shows us that [world], but [the problem for me] is that she never takes us to a place of thinking, OK, let’s have a revolution so it’s not like this. I suppose that’s what I’m hungry for.
• there are more things is published by Fleet on 28 April (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
