Lara Williams’ Shelf Life
Lara Williams is the author of Treats, Supper Club and The Odyssey. Her fiction has won the Guardian 'Not the Booker' Prize and been nominated for the BBC National Short Story Award, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award, the Saboteur Awards and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Lara Williams lives in Manchester and is a contributor to the Guardian, Independent, Times Literary Supplement, Vice, Dazed and others.
How and where are you?
My son was up a few times last night, so I would say I am a normal amount of exhausted.
What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, which is obviously brilliant. It feels like a stretched out short story (in a good way) — there’s such a rhythm to it, every line feels absolutely necessary. Each character is so richly observed, and she’s so brilliant at making something entirely mundane and ordinary feel so tense you feel like you’re reading about people being hunted for game. The book I read before that was The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, which is exactly the kind of forensic unpacking of a family that I adore.
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
I’ve been writing an essay about hair, specifically about hair as indicator of nervous breakdown. I’ve been revisiting some of my favourite female nervous breakdown films: Possession, The Piano Teacher, Antichrist. I’ve just finished watching the miniseries Dead Ringers, a sort of inverted remake of the Cronenberg film, written by Alice Birch. It’s gorgeously shot, hovering around the edges of sci-fi, with lots of little narrative side roads and decadent details. I loved it. I’ve also been deadening my brain with lots of shit, as is my inclination.
I'm listening to a lot of Lana Del Rey and Morrissey. I've been enjoying the album Girl With Fish by feeble little horse. I was going to say I'd just gotten into Laurie Anderson, and, also, BC Camplight, but my boyfriend (and previous bandmate) just told me BC Camplight apparently cut our band from his Manchester show, so now I hate him and renounce any nice thing I have said about him previously.
What did you read as a child?
I did read a lot as a child. I dabbled with precocity, reading, like, The Idiot when I was ten (definitely barely understood a word), but my favourites were big, silly YA series like Scrambled Legs and Babysitters Club. I got into the Brontes when I was an early teen, then a lot of the usual mopey, introspective teenage stuff, like On the Road, The Bell Jar, Catcher In the Rye. A book that was weirdly impactful on me was a book called Eating the Cheshire Cat by Helen Ellis. I don’t think it was a very well known book, a vaguely literary Southern Gothic, very dark, quite weird and thoughtful. I think my mum picked itup at the supermarket, and then I inherited it. It was really my first exposure to contemporary fiction
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you?
A lot of female short story writers, like Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill, Zsuzsi Gardner. More recently, I feel I’m influenced by writers who are interested in peeling back the layers of a character, like AM Homes and Anne Enright.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
One recently said (about The Odyssey) that they wanted every character in the book and me, the author, to drown.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I generally have an overarching idea, and a sense of the beats I need to hit, but the bits in between all come through in the writing. I like to chew on an idea for a little while before actually writing anything.
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
I’ve had quite a wide experience, as I was published by a small independent first, then by a Penguin imprint. I will diplomatically say it has been a mixed experience, but that my publishers, Hamish Hamilton, are an absolute dream. I feel like I have my editor’s voice in my head now, sort of like a super-ego, stopping me from making bad writing decisions.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
A designer I once worked with at a graduate job in this very weird media sales company, in which I was given bits and bobs of writing along the way, told me to “start with simplicity, then work elegance into it”. That has really stayed with me
What are you working on right now?
I’m in what I might optimistically term the end stages of a first draft of a new novel. It is set in a fictionalised version of the American town Leavenworth — which is a town just outside of Seattle that remade itself as a German-themed town, to bring in tourists after an economic collapse. I would say it is more of a character-driven novel than my previous novels. I’m having a brilliant time writing it.