The Booker-shortlisted author is known for her sharp focus on wild landscapes and the natural world, winning fans with The Electric Michelangelo and The Wolf Border. But her latest collection of short stories, Madame Zero, is full of characters coping with altered states and fresh challenges.
Do the troubled identities in this book indicate changes in your own life?
There are people who believe you are the same person once you have had a baby, but that’s rubbish. I’ve had a turbulent two years because, as well as giving birth, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. So I had a double whack to deal with, exacerbated probably by being a single parent since separating from my daughter’s father. Having said that, I actually don’t know which of the stories I wrote before I had her and which after. She is still only two, so I have to find moments to work and it is still quite intense.
You grew up in Cumbria and have written about animals and wildernesses. Is it odd to be living in urban Norwich?
I do like open landscapes, although I tend to write about them when I am not actually there. I need a little distance. I would love my daughter to have a pet, but looking at dog owners carrying their little bags, I am not sure it is right in a city. We had pets when I was young. It was rural and there were horses around. I do swim a lot and think wild swimming is great. As long as the water looks fairly clean, I might well get in and swim.
Your stories frequently pivot on a single strong idea. Is this how they come to you?
I do like short stories to be a powerful distilling. It is a place for dark psychology and a potent literary dosage. When I start out it usually stems from a thought, or something I heard in the news that gives me a shape. I like reading stories that give you a huge wallop, one you don’t see on the surface. I don’t like squibs.
Arresting images loom large in your work, particularly in the award-winning opening story in this collection, Mrs Fox, about a wife’s physical transformation. Are you inspired by dreams?
I have a degree in art history, so maybe that’s part of it. There is a fever-dream feeling to some of my stories, but it comes from sensing moments when there is a reversal of current, and something has gone a bit wrong, rather than from an actual dream.
Is a short story a way to simplify an idea, or set a puzzle?
A short story collection is a companionable thing because they seem to understand somehow that life is difficult to get to grips with. Short stories don’t take their eye off the fact we are mortal. They are not imposing order, although, conversely, they are harder to write. When you are limited to that kind of word count, it can be very hard. I want to just raise enough of the questions. You are not answering anything.
Is your writing about sex a feminist statement?
I like writing about sex because it is such a complicated subject, as well as being familiar. It is a shared thing yet also a space in your own head. Men might say it is a more simple bodily act for them. I don’t know. Certainly women have centuries of social discrepancies feeding into it for them. My problem with sex as the place for women’s liberation is with situating everything in our bodies, because liberation is about more than that.
Has success made you self-critical as you write?
With a short story, the calibration has to be right in the first draft. I am performing as if up against the clock and I really have to concentrate. Whereas in a novel, it is bound to be off kilter at some point. So, yes, the “editor” part of my brain is further forward now, to the extent that I sometimes do not write a sentence down at all.
Your written dialogue is spare and heavily freighted. Do you do small talk?
I stop to talk to people in Norwich because it is a really friendly place, but I wouldn’t be regarded as the most sparkling person at a dinner party, or as being marvellously funny. I would much rather do it on the page than in life: it seems the best place to express something. Perhaps it is to do with having been wandering around on the moors as a kid and not being brought up in a rowdy household. I had an elder brother who was always climbing up trees.
