An interview with Emily Mackie
Emily Mackie sits in the Bookhugger hot-seat to talk about her forthcoming debut novel, And This Is True, the book she wishes she had written and her cunning plan to avoid writing postmodern twaddle.
Describe your writing in ten words
Character driven. Taboo riddled. Juicy themes. Daring? Raw? Compelling?
Describe yourself in ten words
Serious about writing. Smiley about life.
Tell us about your latest book, And This Is True.
It’s about a fifteen-year-old boy, called Nevis, who feels as though he’s in love with his father. This seems less odd (I think) when you realise his upbringing. Eleven years living in a van, travelling from town to town with only his father for company. The psychology of Nevis is very different from that of a normal teenage boy.
The father, Marshall, finds out about his son’s infatuation and attempts to ‘normalise’ Nevis’s life by moving to a remote Highland farm and creating a more settled lifestyle. Although in many respects life remains equally strange if not more so.
But forget about what’s inside the book, have you seen the cover? It’s amazing! Superb artwork by Nigel Peake and nifty little foldy-outy bits that turn into a sort of blueprint of the van, the farm and the surrounding area. Absolutely awesome. Even if you hate the sound of the book you should consider buying it for the cover. No joke.
What was the inspiration behind it?
The cover I tragically can’t take credit for. I wasn’t the mastermind behind that. As for the book I guess it was just a colliding of interests alongside what I thought I was capable of writing at the time. This book and its characters have been with me since I was seventeen. First I created Nevis and Marshall and had them moving to a farm in Scotland. Then later I stuck them in a van (namely because at the age of nineteen I wanted to live in a van myself). As for the whole ‘infatuation with the father’ thing, well… what can I say? My father is a very loveable guy. No, not really (at least not in that way). I’ve just always been interested in the weirder and darker elements of life and the human psyche, plus in my early twenties I was getting ever more interested in psychology, sociology and philosophy so I whacked a bit of everything in there for a laugh.
What can you tell us about your next project?
I’m trying to be more ambitious with the next one. I’m loving metafiction at the moment and want to play around with mixed media and different styles with lots of layering and a more complicated structure. However, I’m nervous it may very well end up as experimental postmodern twaddle, so we’ll just have to see. Needless to say there will be more juicy themes and taboos and strange characters doing strange things.
Tell us the book you most wish you had written?
Off the top of my head I’d say Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum. I remember reading it when I was backpacking around Germany and it proper knocked my cotton socks off.
Which books are you reading at the moment?
Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, Peter Bowle’s The Sheltering Sky and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (in the hopes it will teach me how not to write twaddle).
Do you plan your plots, or fly by the seat of your pants?
A bit of both. I have a small selection of major plot points that I want to happen and the rest is just chaotic unpredictable madness that often takes me by surprise.
Do your characters take on a life of their own?
On the one hand yes – if I just start writing in my character’s voice without any preconceptions of what I want to happen then I’m often surprised by what eventually does happen. But on the other hand, no, because after I’ve written a passage or chapter or event I go back and edit, edit, edit and rewrite making sure everything my character does is consistent and believable according to how I’ve imagined them. So to conclude, I think I have a healthy balance between being in control and not having a clue.
June 29th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
[...] Interview with Emily Mackie (Bookhugger.co.uk) Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)The month in reading: March 2010Tom Connolly, The [...]
January 4th, 2011 at 5:23 pm
Dear Emily,
I am truly happy for you. I know this wont mean much from a novice, but what an exciting and unique story. Thank you for passing through.