Author Chat: Polly Barton author of What Am I, A Deer?
Prior to reading What Am I, A Deer? for the first time, I had the pleasure of seeing Polly talk about the book at Books Upstairs, and I left the talk with an inkling that this book would become one of my treasured texts. You know that thrill when you recognize an idea or line of thought or particular lens that runs in-sync with your own brain? So I'm of the belief that listening to Polly talk about her work is one of the best ways into it.
If you're unfamiliar with the book, I'll leave my review for you here, where I go into much more detail about the specifics of the novel itself. It was amazing to chat to Polly about her writing process, how she only publishes what terrifies her, obsession, and getting past the niggling writing rules that find their way into the back of every writers' minds.
(Also, apologies for the annoying censoring of Polly's second book title. It is not my choice but in fact Blogger's poor ability to properly moderate content that has necessitated this)
You’ve discussed in the past how your process for What Am I involved drafting quickly, using momentum to help locate unexpected discoveries and then editing much more slowly. I’m curious about your approach to editing a first draft. Are you always attuned to honing the language, or do you do multiple passes looking at a different aspect each time?
I always find it hard not to look at the language to a certain degree, but I definitely do have passes where I'm attempting to prioritize thinking about the structure, say. I didn't write this book in anything like chronological order (to the extent that it even makes sense to talk about chronological order with this) and the software that I use for writing meant I had a lot of different chunks, in some cases numerous versions of the same or similar scenes, some of which I had no recollection of writing. So there was definitely one point at which I went through and attempted to combine those into some kind of arc, and later drafts focussed on rejigging that. And then towards the end I definitely did a couple of lyrics passes.
There is such an incredible intimacy that is formed between the main character and the reader in this novel, one that I typically associate with first person, but you’ve done it here in third. How do you approach considering point of view in your writing?
It's interesting for me to recall this now, but at the time that I was writing Deer I was having a long-running debate with an editor and a couple of other people about a translation of mine, and whether it should be in the third or first person. I wanted it in the third (because the Japanese is), but the thing that kept getting said was that the first person felt 'more intimate'. And then alongside this, I was writing this novel in the (unnamed) third person, which was something that had come to me quite intuitively (just as how writing the prelude in the second person was also very intuitive). And that was working, so I wasn't challenging it. But at some point, I suppose all that talk of 'intimacy' got to me, and I started thinking to myself, if I want to write this book as something incredibly intimate, which I do, why am I writing it in third person? And so I experimented with switching it over. And it was fascinating because it just didn't work! I came to understand through that that, paradoxically, the third person was allowing me recourse to a kind of directness that the first didn't: as soon as I started trying to write in first I felt the prose demanded all these caveats which detracted from the intimacy. That feels like an example of writing - and the momentum, I guess, too - teaching me something that I didn't know before. So both the translation and the novel ended up in a very, very close third. Which I find very exciting as a mode of writing, I have to say.
At the event at Books Upstairs, you said, “I only really want to publish stuff I feel terrified about… that felt important.” There was this general idea that the things that bring up a feeling of shame or exposure is where the good stuff happens. Has this always been your outlook on writing, or is this a realization that you’ve eased into over the course of your career?
I think it's something I've found out through experience, probably. It's funny because I suppose when I look back at the things that I've written so far, although they're all different in many ways, one of the common threads is that not only did they make me feel terrified but they are also all, to a large extent, thematically circling around the issue of shame, I think. In other words there are numerous ways that shame is very central and I wonder if I will ever graduate from writing about shame... And then I wonder if actually, it's okay not to, because it takes myriad forms, and has been a big theme of my life?! But I do generally feel so much less of it in my daily life than I used to (partly thanks to writing?) and I occasionally worry that a life of less shame is a life of less writing. Seriously, though: I do think that what I respond to most in other people's writing is a kind of urgency or intensity of feeling, and I understand too that that is what has driven my best work. So even leaving the shame aside, I think that's indispensable, and I think that as long as that's there, there will likely be some terror.
Much of What Am I centers around obsession, both with another person and with things like karaoke. I’ve always found that I’m the kind of person who has a higher tendency to let the things that I love or that interest me entirely consume me, and I found it interesting to see those tendencies reflected in a novel. What is your relationship with obsession, and did writing the novel shift your conception of this at all?
I think in some way I thought about this book as 'coming out' as an obsessive person, both to myself and to other people, but then I look back at Fifty Sounds and it's already very clear from that point that I am easily consumed... 'Obsessive' as descriptor is a weird one, right, because it's ultimately a comparative judgement, and I think I probably surround myself with quite intense people and so a lot of that becomes normalised, but then sometimes I realise that I'm probably to one side of a spectrum. I remember talking to someone about rediscovering 21 Seconds by So Solid Crew and casually mentioning that I'd listened to it twenty times in a day, and their face was just priceless, and I think that stuff makes me realise that maybe my gauge is skewed. But then throughout my life but particularly since entering the romantic arena I've brushed up against people who are obsessive in a way that has been upsetting and harmful, too, and I think part of this book was sort of reckoning with that: the harmfulness of obsession (to yourself and to others) as balanced with the joy and the highs. I don't know if writing this has shifted my conception, but I definitely have had many discussions with people on the back of it about their tendencies to limerence and obsession, and that makes me understand that there are lots of us out there...
I told a friend I was reading your book P*rn: An Oral History, and he wanted to know what your stance on the issue was, and I tried to explain to him that wasn’t really the point of the book. I’ve seen you talk about the reader and US publisher reaction of wanting more of a didactic answer and the place of uncertainty around a question unsettling people. I think that is also at the root of what gives people an aversion to taking crushes or romantic feelings seriously—how that extreme level of openness required has to be trivialized to neutralize it. As a writer, how do you approach wading into either age old or much discussed topics with a new angle? Is the reader in your mind as you work, or does that only come in later or not at all?
One of the things that I love most is that What Am I has this rambling, breathless, bursting quality to it that mirrors such complicated feelings so well but is also written with such a clear precision in the word choice and in the sentence construction. I’m curious if this voice arrived naturally with the genesis of the project or if it’s something you developed over time?
It arrived relatively naturally, I think. There was a book that I was translating with very long, breathless sentences - Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai - and I think that was a good primer, both in convincing me of its appeal, and in giving me the technical training needed to do it. I definitely think that was a big influence, but then when I go back and look at that, my translation reads very differently from Deer, stylistically. It feels in a way that that breathlessness was a sort of key that unlocked something that was ready to come out. Which was possibly just - my subconscious?! But I'm interested in writing that manages to do that, to reach beyond the conscious layers, to where the weirder, richer, dreamier stuff lies. I'm aware this sounds quite Lynchian, but I do believe it to be true.
Beyond personally resonating with the subject matter of the book, I felt like the biggest gift that I got out of reading What Am I was a reminder that writing is fun and expressive and open. I read it just as I was coming out of my Creative Writing master’s program, and I hadn’t been able to write for a while because I felt so constricted by all these “rules” that had been thrown my way. Your book reminded me that as writers, to make brilliant things, we have to write our own rules. I’m curious if you ever found yourself at any point caught up in a kind of “should” or convention you had to work your way past or if things like that were ever in the back of your head?
Firstly, thank you, this is so nice to hear. And secondly, are you crazy, yes all the time. I spent most of my twenties writing lots of bad novels, and the reason that they were bad was because I was so wrapped up in these kinds of conventions, without realising that that was what I was doing. Certainly with all three books I've written I think there's been at least one, and sometimes several, moments which I think about as 'permissive moments': turning points where I understood somehow that I could shed a constraint I'd been carrying with me, which suddenly made the writing of the book possible where it hadn't been before. I think it's often about finding the thing to unlock that within yourself - whether it's an encounter with a particular book or other work of art, or a conversation with someone else, or just a big talking-to with yourself. In the case of Deer, I think I had a lot of nonsense about What a Novel Had to Be, particularly in terms of the chronology and arc, that I didn't seek at all from the novels I was reading (in fact, sought the opposite) but still needed to explicitly let go of when it came to my own work. (This is making me think of beauty standards... That it's so much easier to feel generosity towards other people than to yourself.) It's interesting that you bring up your masters course, because I think about this issue a lot within the context of teaching as well. I don't teach that much creative writing but I do teach a fair bit of translation, and the same goes, really: so often the role of the teacher is (or should be!) to give permission to use their own capacities of judgment, their own standards. To induct people in the techniques and help them understand the mechanisms by which things are assessed, but also, when it's appropriate, to connect people up with the more intuitive parts inside of themselves that do, by now, know how to do it, and are just waiting to be let out of the room.
About Polly Barton: Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. She has published two works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds, for which she won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and P*rn: An Oral History. What Am I, A Deer? is her debut novel.
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