A Writer's Duties - Naomi Alderman

 Naomi Alderman: ‘A writer’s job is courage. You’ve got to be as honest as you can” has interesting points for both writers and readers. I have not read her, although I have seen mos of a movie made from one of her novel, Disobedience. Now, I wish I had more time to read her.

“Go big or go home,” one of the characters says early on in The Future, which might be Alderman’s motto. And the new novel is about nothing less than the end of civilisation. She doesn’t do small-scale domestic fiction: “Woman picks up a teacup. Turns it over. Realises her marriage is lost,” she croons wistfully. Alderman’s women just smash all the crockery. While her first three novels – Disobedience, The Lessons, The Liars’ Gospel – were more personal, they still tackled big questions of religion and sexuality; The Liar’s Gospel stars Jesus as “an inconsequential preacher”.

But it was her fourth, The Power, published when she was 42 and dedicated to Atwood, that set her career alight. A dazzling work of speculative fiction in which teenage girls are suddenly able to electrocute people at will, it won the Women’s prize in 2017, topped Barack Obama’s list of favourite books and was streamed as a TV series earlier this year, for which Alderman was one of the screenwriters.

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If the question at the centre of The Power is, what if women were physically stronger than men? The Future asks, is there a way out of today’s omnicrisis, Alderman says, listing off the climate emergency, online abuse, increasing inequality and wealth disparity, national identity crises around the world, technology revolutions and the threat of AI. “Have I forgotten anything?”

In fact, when she began writing in 2017, the disaster scenario at the heart of the novel was a global pandemic. “I thought, we haven’t had one of those in a while.” By 2020 she had a first draft. “I was having fun with it. It was too glib. So I dumped it.” Alderman has form here, having trashed 200,000 words of what would become The Power, and a hunk of her second novel The Lessons. “I now feel like every first draft is potentially just something I’m going to junk and then find some new way through.”

On the second run, she set out to write a novel about the future that was hopeful: “I thought, God, nobody wants a pessimistic novel now and I don’t want to write one. I would like to try and use my magical powers for good and write something where we can go, ‘Look, there are ways out of all of this, things do not need to go from bad to worse. We have all of the resources, technological and economic and even social to fix it, if we just have the will to do it.’”

Alderman grew up in Hendon, north London, in the 80s and 90s. For an Orthodox Jewish girl who knew the names of all the Doctor Who companions off by heart, and studied English, maths and Latin A-levels (as well as learning Esperanto via a correspondence course), it wasn’t always easy, she says, especially at a time when teenage girls were expected to look like Kate Moss. “There isn’t anybody who was more uncool than me.” Her father was a leading expert on Anglo-Jewish history, her mother an artist and graphic designer (her paintings hang in the hall), and Alderman was raised in an environment that was at once “very intellectually open and pretty fundamentalist”, which is “very complicated”.

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But Disobedience was not so much a coming out novel as a breakup book. It marked the beginning of her literary career and the end of her faith. The minute she finished the novel, she thought: “‘Oh, I think that’s done now’, in the way that you might about a relationship – like the woman with the teacup.” While the realisation was sudden, the process of “unravelling and reknitting the self” was not. “It was the big event of my 30s.” It has taken 20 years of therapy “to figure out how to put myself together again”

 It took me too long to get to such a point. I have said for more than a decade, the federal government saved me from killing myself. I had destroyed what I had been, was so very close to getting what I desired most earnestly - my own exit. Instead, I found myself having to live, to wait on my COPD to finish me off. I recommend you do not follow my path. Follow Ms. Alderman. You do not want to live as you are, change.

 I also like her credo her. I am trying to do this, too. It echoes and makes sense of Hemingway's one true sentence. It is not easy. For me, part of the problem is distaste for talking about myself that is bred in the bone. I do not think you are interested in my feelings, and probably not many of my ideas. Except for a story to work, the reader needs a connection with the character's emotions and/or thoughts. I need to put out what motions and/or thoughts I share with my characters. Such is my thinking.

She believes it is a writer’s duty to speak out. “The job is courage. The job can also be entertainment and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you are writing about real things, you’ve got to be as honest as you possibly can.” Years ago, after seeing a performance of Noël Coward’s Design for Living, she wrote down a quote and has pinned it above every desk she has worked at since. “If you are a writer you must write what you think otherwise you are a liar and a hypocrite,” she recites from memory. She is infuriated by writers claiming they are being “silenced”; she continues: “If you have the luck to be a writer in a country where nobody gets imprisoned or tortured or murdered for their writing, it’s an insult to the people who are suffering. And it is an insult not to use your ability to speak and say the things that might be difficult to say in other places.”

 sc4 11/5