Lies, Damned Lies & Iphgenia Baal
Full Interview: The visionary author on her latest book, Man Hating Psycho
Welcome to the first Infinite Thought! We’ll be bringing a new interview to you every month. Our first edition welcomes author Iphgenia Baal to talk about her new book, Man Hating Psycho, an eclectic and entertaining collection of darkly comic, possibly confessional, and deliciously cutting short stories.
It’s a collection that brings together urban folk tales half echoed through the party chatter of the capital, amalgamated apocryphal anecdotes, and other new concoctions taken from group chats, threads of the authors own life, and, one can only hope, the nightmare butchery of fox cubs.
Together it hangs as something almost archetypal. Glimpses into a life, all the lovings and fallings out, growing up through a city. And it is our city too, the streets, people, scenes and encounters related are all so familiar. By one remove or another almost all of these things happened to us or our friends. From threads of her own story, Baal’s Man Hating Psycho weaves London life in all its gritty, divided, bravura, soaked in disappointment, inequality and ravenously hilarious fun. Here’s a reading she gave from ‘Pain in the Neck’ from the book, up on Influx Press’ Instagram.
This is Baal’s fourth book, after The Hardy Tree (2011), Gentle Art (2012) and Merced Es Benz (2017). The last of which, a tale of doomed love told almost exclusively through the couple’s emails, SMS and social posts to each other, I wrote at length about for Real Review. You can read that here.
We caught up last week, Iphgenia almost having lost her voice recording ‘hopefully the best literary promo video of all time’ the day before: a rollerblading reading in Hyde Park, which she rather mockingly billed to me as, ‘Watch the most important British author of her generation being very very bad at rollerblading’. Something to watch out for1.
We spoke about plagiarising the online, how her fiction started out as lies, and why nobody thinks Bret Easton Ellis is a psycho. Hope you enjoy, and remember, sharing is caring.
Thank you for sending me the book, I really enjoyed it. It’s humorous, gripping, there’s a seriousness to it but then also it’s not taking itself or yourself too seriously. How did the collection come together?
Well after Merced Es Benz I sort of decided to give up. I think most writers give up after a book. But then Kit from Influx approached me at one point, ‘We want to do some with you.’ I went to meet him for a drink, said, ‘Yeah, cool let’s do something,’ then he never emailed me again. Maybe a year later I was like, ‘Mm, I should do something, I should do something,’ and got in touch with Kit. And he was like, ‘Oh, I was really up for it but the way you were talking, you were just like, you’re never going to write again, it’s all over. So I just thought it was too late.’ I was like, ‘No man, don’t take me so seriously, that’s just the way I talk.’
From that we decided to do a collection of shorts first. Most of the texts in the book, about 50 percent of them, exist in another form. I self-publish a lot of things in pamphlet form and shit like that, so some of them went in. I sent him everything, he chose some, some got re-written and a few of them are completely new. It just formed in the pressure of deadlines somehow.
The first piece in Man Hating Psycho, ‘Change :)’, features the same style of presentation as Merced Es Benz2. Where did ‘Change :)’ come from? Was it drawing on existing material, or was that something created from scratch?
They’re [almost the] opposite even though they read the same. Merced Es Benz was a hellish year trawling and scrolling back through people’s Facebook feeds for hours, and hours, and hours, to find some little snippet. It was much more fictionalised in how it was put together.
But ‘Change :)’ was just delivered to me from the Gods. I was sitting in Berlin, I picked up my phone – I don’t even really know who the person [who started the group chat] is, I’ve no idea — and it was [all] coming through. It was hilarious. I was like, ‘This is a short story!’
I like the way you can do that; with online it’s the only thing you’re allowed to steal completely because it hasn’t quite got to the form of publishing.
I always liked the idea of going into bookshops, scratching out authors names and just writing my own. If I can read it, then I can write it, I can have it. I like the fact that you can completely take all these words that other people have written, and be like, ‘Yeah, copyright Iphgenia Baal, ha-ha, fuck-off!’
It’s like a readymade; taking something, shifting its context, and changing the meaning of how you read it, and how you understand it. What’s your writing process? Is there a place that you like to sit down and write, do you have to carve out a particular point in the day, or is it organically finding things, making notes in your phone?
When I’m writing properly, I get up at five in the morning, I sit down and I write. And I write until the rest of the world wakes up, eight, nine. As soon as other people are awake, I don’t know, it’s not the noise, you can just feel them all thinking. I find it very difficult to write, so I edit in the day and go back over things. Almost all of my writing is done in the dawn hours. It’s really unpleasant, it’s horrible. I love it, the way time disappears, but I hate doing it and I find it an incredibly painful process and get incredibly stressed out by it, and drive everyone crazy and don’t sleep at all. Which is why I have to take very long breaks from writing [laughs].
“As soon as other people are awake… it’s not the noise, you can just feel them all thinking”
When you wanted to stop writing after Merced Es Benz, what was the reason? Was it just because of the nature of the material, the response to the book or just a tiredness with the process?
No, it was the state of publishing, simple. It’s such a set-up, it’s such a fix. It’s so boring, it’s so humiliating. I understand that if you write something, any opportunity to publish it appears to be good, but if you look at who owns the main big five publishers… I know the word ‘Nazi’ is banded around a lot these days and everyone’s a ‘Nazi’, but you have Rupert Murdoch behind Harper Collins, Harper Collins with all its imprints putting out all this leftie nonsense, they publish Guardian writers for instance…
Most of the ways that you could publish successfully requires some form of corruption, and acceptance of corruption. Publishing with indies avoids that but then you’re on the losing end of someone else’s book. Penguin come in, ‘Right, ten grand and we’ll have our book in the whole front of this Waterstone’s. Everyone else can just go in the back’. It makes it really boring. Then obviously the majority of readers don’t think about how these industries work, or care at the end of the day.
I just find it really difficult to find a place for what I do that by publishing it doesn’t completely undermine what I’m saying. I got really sick of it. Also, with a lot of the indies, because they’re defensive about how small they are, they often fall into this trap of being quite elitist. You don’t have trashy indies who [publish] pulp, or bad-good books. It’s all-academic and really high-brow, ‘We’re cleverer than you, and that’s why you don’t like us’. And that’s not how I write.
Looking at the writers that I’ve always been inspired by, that pulp space, low-brow, trashy, fun, psychedelic stuff, that’s where the vibrancy has always been, because there’s a direct opposition within the margins. Do you think independent publishing is still a space outside the mainstream that has the potential to nurture other ways of thinking, or writing?
It does, but it’s hard to find anyone doing it. The big problem is the Arts Council gravy train, they shape things in a certain form. In the UK we’re lucky to have it, but it does make everything pretty boujie. Quoting my old friend Mike Lesser, ‘The problem of manufacture has been solved, the problem of distribution has not.’ Of course, you can put stuff on Instagram and it’s theoretically global, but the internet already hasn’t been like that for ages; you can see it’s the same thing as in shops, people who pay have the most muscle.
It’s also something to do with the people who want to publish, because kids have been alienated from reading for so long. The kind of kids who turn into grown-ups who are like, ‘I’m going to start an imprint,’ it’s not the same kids who grow up and be like, ‘I’m going to start a grime label,’ or something. Actually, these days maybe it is! [Laughs] But you know what I’m saying, it’s got this very good girl – good boy, ‘I did my homework and…’
Public school prefects, ultimately. I totally get it. Who were writers and authors that first inspired you to think, ‘Actually, this is something that I want to do’?
Right at the beginning one of the books that stands out, well it wasn’t even a book. Remember when Penguin (yuk!) used to do those little Penguin 60s things, for 60p and it was a single story. It was by a writer called Sara Paretsky, who writes gruesome crime. I got it, I must have been a young teenager, and it was about a fat girl with a really bitchy skinny mum. The fat girl finally got a boyfriend, and the mum stole the boyfriend. It ends up with the fat girl killing and eating her mum. It’s brilliant!
But it took me years to read it, because I started reading it, and I was like, ‘Ah, this is the best thing I’ve ever read.’ Then my mum found out I was reading it and took it off me. She was like, ‘You can’t read that, you’re too young for it,’ which is the only time she’s ever done that, but I think she knew what happened [in it]. So yeah, I can’t remember the name of it [Ed: A Taste of Life], but that piece of writing stayed with me for ages. It was one of the first things I read that was really fun and wild.
Anna Kavan is a massive deal for me, but she came a lot later, when I was already writing myself. I know it sounds really stupid, but I don’t really associate my writing with other writers. It’s weird, apart from that Sara Paretsky thing. But I’m sure it is influenced.
“Most of the ways that you could publish successfully requires some form of corruption, and acceptance of corruption”
In ‘Married to the Streets’ and some of the other stories in the collection you’re recounting aspects of the life stories of a writer — which may or may not be your own story. How did you start writing and publishing your work?
Well, I got fired from Dazed&Confused, I just went around getting wasted for a bit, and then I remember running into Jefferson [Ed: Hack, Dazed founder] who always acted like he was scared of me, but he also managed to always be rude. Sort of a strange combination.
But I remember running into him at something a few months after I’d been fired. He was really condescending, ‘So what are you up to now?’ kind of thing. I was like, ‘I’m gonna write a book,’ and he was like, ‘Oh, is it going to be an expose on everything, that goes down at Dazed?’ I was like, ‘Whatever!‘
So I decided I would do the exact opposite of that, which is where The Hardy Tree came from. The Hardy Tree was such a weird book, scraps of research and very unformed little, short stories. But then when I was writing it, Gigi Giannuzzi from Trolley got on my case, just calling me all the time going, ‘What are you writing? What are you writing? Iph, what are you writing? We’ll publish it’, and I was just like, ‘God, fuck off!’ But in the end, he pestered me so much, and I think for him it was less the fact that he published my first book that got him going, and more the fact that he was just insanely convinced that I should be published and doing things, that I sort of believed him.
I only met him a couple of times, but I remember I going shows at Trolley, and I know Hannah [Ed: Watson, Director of TJ Boulting Gallery, founded with Gigi] much better because she shows a friend of mine, Juliana [Ed: Cerqueira Leite, artist] at the gallery. He seems to have been one of these people whose enthusiasm for life was infectious…
Yeah, it’s also what killed him, enthusiasm [laughs].
I remember The Hardy Tree as being a bit feverish, so much is going on. It had this energy to the whole thing. And in the back of my mind, it feels a little hallucinatory. With Merced Es Benz there’s a flip in style, toward a stripped back approach to the story and telling it through a kind of non-writing. It’s more like an archaeology.How did that change come about?
Well, there was a little book right in the middle of the two called Gentle Art, and that came out I think a month before Gigi died, on Trolley as well. Because he was dying, it just happened at a weird time. It’s also a really tiny book. That book is a missing link, it was much more modern than The Hardy Tree.
To me The Hardy Tree and Merced Es Benz are actually quite similar. They’re each in three parts, and each as a theme show the impact of progress, and the impact of a certain environment on individuals.
Because it’s set mostly in the 1840s, ‘50s, ‘60s, I consider [The Hardy Tree] an incredibly modern book, modern writing. I know what you mean by hallucinatory, it’s like, ‘What the fuck is it, is that even a thing?’ It’s so odd. But because that 1840s, ‘50s, ‘60s, era is so dominant in literature, it’s almost like that ‘Olden days’-iness overtakes and overshadows how modern the book is. I think if it had all been set in modern times, if I’d made it all about the Eurostar being built, it would be different. I was trying to show the chapters and repetitions and the sameness that goes on.
With Merced Es Benz it just happened to coincide, that all that stuff happened at the moment when Facebook was completely undoubted by everyone, and it was also at a time when everyone was still writing on social media rather than using images so much.
When I started going through and finding [the material for the book], it just struck me how revealing it really is what people say [on social media]. And they don’t realise what they’re saying at all. And it’s nothing to do with what they’re writing … like publish and be damned has never been truer – you can see exactly who I am in those posts, and exactly who Ben Thomas3 is in his posts, even though both of us are kind of lying throughout!
That’s really interesting to me, because especially now in this age where we’re all supposed to self-identify, ‘I’m this’ and, ‘I’m that’, most of what people say, the truth of it isn’t what they’re actually saying, it’s what you can see between the gaps.
Has your own attitude towards social media changed from that time? Your writing has always been very critical of these things, and so I’m curious as to how you see them as places to engage with people, but also what your reservations are about the technology, and how it operates?
Well, I deleted my Facebook the day Merced Es Benz was published. That was my personal PR campaign! Everyone has opinions on this. On the one hand it’s all very natural and fine. I’ve always thought of it a bit like evolution, people talk about collective consciousness and the internet is like someone said, ‘Oh, let’s build a model of collective consciousness’. And it acts like that in its most optimistic form. Obviously, the huge problem is that, doing Merced Es Benz, you realise quite how much data there is out there, and also, again, the inaccuracy of it all.
I don’t use any social media. I think it’s important to keep an eye on it. I look at it, and I look at people I know on it, check-in what they’re doing. And every time I do it I’m like, ‘They’re completely insane! Look at them, they’re mad!’ But I would never take part in it again in a real way. I was saying this to somebody the other day, we live in this world where all markets are completely saturated, everyone’s already got all the pie and one market that isn’t [saturated] is data. Everything is about finding all this data, data, data, data!! And it freaks me out. I try and skip out of it as much as possible.
“Most of what people say, the truth of it isn’t in what they’re actually saying, it’s what you can see between the gaps”
The way that Merced Es Benz was written and presented strips out all of the exterior, so the reader can see the technology or the infrastructure that framed this doomed relationship as we’re watching it unfold. By just showing the bare bones, it becomes a portrait of the technology that’s framing them as much as it is of them as a couple or as people4. It made me think of this line, I can’t remember where it’s from, that writing is inherently an expression of the technologies, or the techniques of its inscription. I wondered where you see the future of writing being. What is the future of the novel, of stories? Certainly, when we’re looking at the world and so much of what’s happening culturally is visual.
I have friends who are refuseniks, proper won’t do anything. I’ve observed that what happens [with them] is [that] they become very conspiracy-theory led and right-wing. Which is funny because it’s what the internet is supposed to do to you. But actually, I find that people who don’t know how to use the internet properly come across this weird content, and I can discern just from looking at the design of a website if it’s kosher or not, you just know. But they, those people who don’t get it, are like: ‘Oh, I’ve found this website and it said… da-da-da, the Queen’s a lizard and it gave loads of proof’. So, I think it’s a bit stupid to stay completely outside.
With Merced Es Benz our relationship wouldn’t have been what it was if it wasn’t for the medium of Facebook. A lot of that stuff potentially would never have happened. It’s only when you go over it and realise that, because so much of it is done on the fly and no-one ever looks back, [that] you realise it’s a very-very sad thing. It’s a very-very sad thing especially if someone ends up dead. You just think, ‘Oh fuck’.
As a writer of stories I think… [pause] I don’t know, I think the type of writing that goes into books will always remain in books. But what I would like is there to be a way to remind people who don’t read books, which is almost everybody actually these days – a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I don’t read,’ — and to remind them they’re just reading all the time and it’s not so difficult. I guess it’s what I try to do, use the modes in which they communicate, and which feels familiar, and feels like something they would read effortlessly, could be taken from online and put into offline. I think that would be a good thing.
I think also people who are writing books now, they fall into the refusenik category, even though they’re on Twitter being like, ‘I like your book,’ ‘I like my book,’ ‘I like everyone’s book,’ ‘Like my book’. There’s a temptation, like what I was saying with the 1850’s stuff and The Hardy Tree, there’s always a temptation to write Dostoyevsky, or ‘Yeah, the potato fields that I was born in…,’ kind of shit. And it’s like they want to stay in that place. It’s the same in films. If you look at movies now, when they try to do text messaging, you look at a man in a car and a big green box comes up on screen with the text. Don’t we have a better way of integrating something that’s so integrated [in our lives]? Reading words in films, they never let you… it’s always three words on a screen. People sit there, and they read for fucking hours on their phones.
That brings me round to the style and the way that you write, it’s not an overly aesthetic high-brow approach. There’s a realness and an immediacy that is very directed and focused. Within Man Hating a Psycho, in particular the bowling alley scene in ‘Pro Life’, you’ve got great dialogue, it’s building up, and then there’s a little aside where you feel you’re there alongside the narrator with your popcorn watching enthralled as a teenage love triangle explodes, and it’s this perfect moment. The whole thing picks you up and carries you along, you’re gripped.
The style in which I write is a combination of two things. So, you know those friends you have, when you see them, you have to tell them everything, and with other people you would never bother? So it’s like that. I write things that my best friend who I haven’t seen in six months, we go to the pub, and she gets barrage of two hours of pointless shit that she just has to know. So trying to take that. Then also it’s very much how I remember and imagine things.
I’m like an ADHD person who happens to be able to concentrate, so I can sit, and I can do it, but I remember things as all these little glimpses. Also if you’re going to write a scene in a bowling alley, it’s quite a nice place to describe with weird neon lights and all this stuff, but I went to that place so much, it’s like you wouldn’t bother to describe your own room to yourself, you wouldn’t be there saying, ‘Oh yeah my blue cushion with the coffee stain on it… la-la-la’. I think some writers really like that because, ‘The coffee stain is so revealing! It means that someone had a coffee and split it…’ Yeah, the stuff I wouldn’t bother to explain to myself or my friend I just leave out.
There are plenty of writers out there who are world-building, who are starting fresh with a blank page and constructing a new world fresh out of it, but everything of yours I’ve read is in our world already, do you know what I mean?
Mm-Mm
There isn’t that jump to make, and I think it’s very revealing that you say that it’s like debriefing your friend after you’ve not seen them for six months or something. I guess this brings us round to the relation of reality and fiction in the stories, the extent to which elements of them come from real life, elements of them are imagined, constructed, re-engineered. There’s also this sense that you’re the protagonist in the stories, and I wondered how you saw that, how you see the stories relating between reality and fiction, and relating back to yourself? And the distance between yourself as the author, and the protagonists that you’re presenting?
When I was a little kid, I used to tell lies all the time, and because I was a kid I wasn’t very good at lies so I used to get caught all the time. But my lies weren’t lies to make me look cool, or make someone look bad, it was almost like a game to see how many lies I could remember! It gets quite stressful when you’re with five people and you can’t remember who you told different things to. A lot of kids do that. After I’ve been writing for a while, I look back at that and can see it as the same thing, it’s like a game, a puzzle.
People get very angry when they know that you’ve lied to them. And it’s like the lying is pointless, it’s like, ‘I told you a car was blue, and it’s red!’ But it’s like, ‘Whoa!!’ They feel really offended, and there’s something interesting in that. I just try to take that mode of reality which is everywhere and put it on the page. I think everything everyone says is a lie to some degree, so why not carry on lying?
I just write how I write, it’s become more of a post-rationalisation of it, because when I’m doing it I don’t think, I just do whatever I want. It’s also a good reason not to publish with a mainstream publisher because as soon as you start having someone heaping thousands and thousands of pounds into your work, that’s where people start caring about libel and shit like that. If you publish on something small, the worst that can happen is they shut down and open up as something else, so it’s quite freeing.
It’s quite interesting, on the one hand, the privacy of not being on social media, and a withdrawal from things being public. And on the other, stories that draw heavily from elements of your own life. There’s both a privacy and an openness at the same time. I wonder whether you felt any trepidation in publishing some of these stories? ‘Victim Blaming’, for example, talks about domestic violence, referencing real people, whether that’s friends, family…
‘Victim Blaming’ is the only thing that I’ve ever been concerned about publishing. I actually ran it by my parents before I published it and did it very last minute because I was so scared of what they would say. From that point I did actually pull it back a bit, my dad was, ‘Oh dear, it’s not very good,’ but he was basically cool. The thing is my dad doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks of him and never has. My mum, I think it upset her a lot more and she is a much more public facing person than him. So I did pull some stuff back from that, but anyone else, nah fuck ‘em. My parents are the only people I really have a debt to in any way. The only ones.
How much of these stories owe the seeds of them to real events in your own life, versus things that are concocted, or elements that are drawn from other places as well? There are episodes in some of the stories that I’ve heard third-hand from somebody else!
[Laughs] Great.
I’m reading a page and I’m like, ‘I know somebody who went to that party, I’ve heard that story before!’ To the point where you’re reading it and asking yourself, ‘Okay is there a truth in here? Did this really happen?’ Is this writing that draws in influences from left, right, and centre? An anecdote here, something overheard on the tube there, three stories from youth tied in together. Or are these largely self-contained episodes that you’ve then added flourishes to?
No, they’re very much… this is, like I said, when I was a little kid liar, this is being a professional liar. I steal like a magpie from everything and everywhere, sometimes I change details or whatever. It comes in two stages I guess, I steal all the stuff that people have told me, put it all together, but then after that I’m a massive re-writer. That’s the difficult bit really. But in that stage things can shift around again, that’s where there’s an extra layer… I mean I wouldn’t say my writing is perfect because it’s actually really messy, but it’s like if you gave a five-year-old 20 years to come up with a good lie about why they haven’t done their homework, it would probably read something like this! [Laughs]
What you were saying about, ‘I heard about that party, I think X went to it,’ when people talk about folk stories that’s what they are. There’re so many people who will know – ‘I just want to pull down your panties and fuck you’ – they’ll know who that’s about in a second, and they’ll also already know that he’s like that, other things that he’s done, da-de-da, but there’s a consensus that nobody says it. And that’s how I think a lot of people who are bastards get away with things, by compartmentalising, and they use people’s negative thoughts of them to create a mythos around them, which enables them to get away with it even further. So there’s something very satisfying to me about putting something in print which also allows other people to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember.’
“It’s like you wouldn’t bother to describe your own room to yourself”
While the narrator/protagonist isn’t self-aggrandising, there’s a lot of self-criticism and self-awareness, at the same time I wondered if there’s an element of rewriting your own story or your own history through the book?
Thinking about members of my family that I haven’t ever met, you get these impressions of people and they’re like, ‘Oh, he was a sailor,’ ‘Oh, okay, a sailor.’ But then you think of your own life and you think of a multitude of things that even if someone wrote an incredibly well-researched biography of you, with all the social media and everything else, just misses… [pause] I like being able to provide first person accounts of glimpses of some of those things.
But also, on the whole, I tend to be quite an outward-looking person. I know I’m an idiot, I’m quite fond of my brand of idiocy. And so that’s why the running theme that ties all this book together is a Rumpelstiltskin-like glee/rage that you can put me in lots of different situations and there’ll be some kind of similarity to my take on it, which is, ‘This is bad, but it’s also funny!’
A lot of the stories deal with the nature of love in some way. Whether in ‘Change :)’ which addresses toxic-masculinity, or the various failed relationships in others, falling out with friends in ‘Pain In The Neck’, a lot of the stories are looking at relationships and exploring how they don’t work. Was that was something deliberate, or if it emerged as the collection was put together?
It’s just all bubbled-up because it’s quite true of this moment in time. If I think of the huge groups of friends where we now officially hate each other, and it’s like, ‘Okay, we hate each other [now],’ but we really loved each other for 10 years. The truth of it is that even when you’re fighting with someone, or you’re pissed-off with someone, there’s a huge amount of care there.
We know each other vaguely from a long time ago, and you think of the circle of people who would have been in that friendship. Some of them still know each other, a lot of people are gone, they’re done. Our generation, maybe not every generation, but I think our generation find it hard to deal with each other. They put it down to, ‘I’m not good friends with that person anymore,’ but I think in reality all the people that you’ve ever cared about in your life you’ll always care about, even if they were a motherfucker, even if they turned into the worst… even when people do turn into fucking cunts, like someone becomes the head of some advertising agency or something, underneath that is also the same very sweet person that you used to smoke weed with, and played PlayStation, and was really funny, would talk to you for hours and hours.
Yeah, it’s just trying to remind people that liking and not liking is the same. It’s quite obvious when you think about it.
Do you think it’s inherently the internet or social media that this has changed how we relate to people? That maybe we can’t let people go in the same way because they’re always there. Even if you unfriend somebody there’s still the webs of connection that keep people in place.
This is one of the few things that you can’t blame social media for entirely. Social media makes that stuff more annoying. Someone disappears [and] you don’t stop how you cared about them; they might not be as prevalent in your mind. The internet just works as a sort of nudge-prompt reminder that they’re still there, when in fact, in reality, they’re there whether you can see their profile or not.
I think that the reason relationships and friendships are becoming increasingly difficult is because of the huge inequalities in society. The people that I hung around with when I was in my late teens and early 20s, some of them just had nothing, no money, a shit house, no job, and others were members of the landed gentry, but no-one brought it up or cared. Then as everyone got older you started to see these inequalities, you’d start to see the rich ones getting the poor ones hooked on drugs, and then fucking off to Brazil to their spa to sort themselves out, while their friend became a street junky, whatever.
That’s the most extreme, there’s also less extreme examples: people who had a baby and could buy a flat, and people who couldn’t. It’s those divisions which are becoming worse and worse. It’s very hard to maintain friendship, respect even. I’ve rented rooms off people whose parents had bought them a house, it’s like wait a second, we’re friends and I’m giving you £800 quid a month and you’re fucking loaded. That’s not a friendship.
“When I was a little kid, I used to tell lies all the time”
There’s a politics in the book but it’s not shouted out. Where a political or an ideological position with regards class, wealth, capital, comes up it’s often through the protagonist calling out someone else’s compromised position. Throughout there’s a refusal to let people get away with their own hypocrisies.
It’s weirdly on-theme again, what people say isn’t what they mean. Very often in activism or politics, everyone knows the truth of it, everyone knows. The people who get really het-up about a certain [issue]… ‘It’s got to be like this, and this will make it better…’ they all know they don’t know what they’re talking about. You walk past a homeless guy who shat himself on the street and you know it’s not right, you know it’s partly your fault but not your fault also, but you also know you can’t take responsibility because you can’t have a homeless guy covered in poo in your house. But everyone knows, and most of the people who shout and push their politics hard are doing so because they’re lying, and they know it. This is my only non-lie! The stories are lies, and the politics are truth.
Is there something that you want your readers to get out of the collection, out of the stories?
I don’t know about that. The only thing that makes me happy as a response to publishing is when people are like, ‘Your book is the only book that I managed to finish/I’ve read in years,’ and I love it because it’s so honest and it just shows that people are trying to read, but the conditions aren’t right. I would like people who don’t read to be like, ‘I fucking read that.’ I love that feeling myself, you know, when you finish a book. You’re kind of pleased with yourself and it makes you happy. That’s what I like, and that’s why I try to make it easy and light, light-ish.
What’s next in terms of writing? You finished this, do you feel like you need a break, like after Merced Es Benz? Do you have other pieces in mind, rather than a collection of individual stories, something that’s one longer piece instead?
Yes, I’m writing a book about a band, I’m not going to say who they are yet because it’s too early. They’re my favourite band5. It’s not about them necessarily, it’s about me, why I love them, and how I discovered them, all the different associations made with them. In the same way that The Hardy Tree was a lot of research, and Merced Es Benz was a lot of research, it’s the same but it’s going to be me writing the research as I find stuff. It’s going to be I guess longer. My ideas of longer are probably different from… as a reader if you put a title, a heading halfway through two bits of text, the readers are, ‘Ah this bit’s new,’ but actually it’s just some words, the words are small words.
I’ve always had this fantasy that when I die someone will get all the books that I ever wrote together and publish it as one big fat book that starts at the beginning and ends at the end! Yes, so longer, I don’t know, it’s going to be on one theme/topic, but probably written in little pieces again. But this is also to do with people reading, you present them with a big fuck-off book, they’re not going to pick it up, you break something down into little chunks, and they will.
Something about what you said there about your relationship with the subject matter, strikes me as coming to the crux of the realism that’s within your stories, where it’s a very recognisable London that comes across. It makes me think of this idea that you can only really reach other people through talking through yourself; not necessarily about yourself, but you’ve got to start with you and then you can find your way to other people. I wondered if that was something that you are conscious of in your writing, that to engage with the reader you have to give them something of yourself?
Yeah I think that’s very much where academia fails, because when academia writes, it writes with the supposition that what they’re writing about is somehow important. People miss the reason often if it’s not clear. I think if you want to obscure yourself you have to do so much work, not to obscure yourself but to give a meaning to what you’re saying.
Also I think any writing is revelatory. I was thinking about this, because people have been responding to the title, ‘Man Hating Psycho,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re the man hating psycho,’ and I was like, ‘Well Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho, and not everyone thinks that he’s an American psycho’. Maybe that’s because it’s more fictionalised. I don’t know if you have to get famous and respected before people just don’t assume that everything you write is about you, and true. Or maybe it’s just this current moment where everyone’s so used to confessional writing online that they assume that no-one can do anything other than that.
Maybe what you need to do is have a fake profile that’s all Laura Ashley dresses and pictures of buttercups…
I thought I would do one of those disgusting sex ones, you know those women with the big fake asses, and just do a weird-ass ‘Iphgenia Baal’ with butterfly emojis around my head, butt in the air shaking around! But I didn’t.
It’s an Only Fans, but you’re just reading the stories?
Yeah, ‘Just trying to sell a book!’
Man Hating Psycho is out now from Influx Press.
All images courtesy of Iphgenia Baal and Influx Press.
We’ll update this page with a link as soon as it surfaces.
‘Change :)’ documents the life cycle of a WhatsApp-style group chat full of random strangers and launched to promote activism with an election looming that rapidly and comically spirals out of control when its creator is accused of various sexual misdemeanours. It’s presented as expropriated text, listing random mobile numbers, highlighting who was added, joined or left, to mimic group chat interface.
Ben Thomas was the other half of the relationship and conversations presented in Merced Es Benz; he tragically died of an overdose.
Readers can get a sense of the style and layout of Merced Es Benz on the Book Works site, see pages here and here.
FWTW my ‘Who was Iphgenia Baal’s all-time favourite band? Wrong answers only.’ deadpan first guess was: Klaxons… To which she replied: ‘omg that would be the most amazing book.’ Answers on a postcard to Influx Press ;)