Samantha Harvey, THE SHAPELESS UNEASE
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[1:22]Samantha Harvey is the author of Four Novels, The Wilderness, All A Song, Deer Thieves,
[1:28]and The Western Wind. And she is written a memoir which we'll talk about today called
[1:32]The Shapeless Uneves. Her novels have been shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction,
[1:36]The Guardian First Book Award, The Walter Scott Prize, and The James Tate Black Prize,
[1:41]and longlisted for The Man Booker Prize, The Bailey's Prize, The Sherwood Fiction Uncovered
[1:45]Prize, and The H.W.A. Gold Crown Award. The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award,
[1:50]and The Betty Trask Prize, and The Western Wind won the 2019 staunch book prize.
[1:55]She lives in Bath in the UK and is a reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University.
[2:01]Welcome Sam, thanks so much for coming on mom's. Don't have time to read books.
[2:06]Thank you for having me here. I'm very honored.
[2:08]Oh, and you're in the UK now, is that right?
[2:11]Yep, I'm just outside Bath in the southwest of the UK.
[2:16]Interesting. We're doing this via Skype and for people not watching. I feel like you have such
[2:21]a perfect British wallpaper behind you. You just, it's just like, and this like old bookcase,
[2:27]it's perfect. It's exactly how I would imagine where you would be outside of Bath.
[2:33]Actually, I have a house that's in desperate need of renovation. That's the old-fashioned wallpaper,
[2:38]but it does have a kind of charm about it. I don't know. I didn't mean to suggest it was old-fashioned.
[2:43]It was super charming. It's fantastic. I can't wait to hear about if you're sleeping any
[2:49]better these days, but I love your book. Can you please tell listeners from your perspective,
[2:55]give them the little two-minute wrap-up of what your book is about if you don't mind?
[3:00]Your most recent book. Okay, I'll try. Okay, so I back in 2016, I quite abruptly stopped sleeping
[3:09]away from being a really good sleeper to just having very severe insomnia in a matter of weeks,
[3:17]pretty much. And I couldn't write, I'm a novelist, but my career has been as a novelist,
[3:23]and I couldn't write another novel. I didn't really have an idea and the most need to
[3:28]private. I got the less bandwidth I had to sort of put together the architecture of a novel
[3:35]in my mind on the page. So I just started writing whatever came to me. I felt a really strong need
[3:44]to write because it's the thing that I do that anchors me and makes me feel like grounded
[3:50]and quite peaceful. So I started to write without any idea of what I was writing. I certainly had
[3:56]no idea that I would be writing a book. I just wrote whatever came to me. And I sometimes wrote
[4:03]at night, but that was quite rare. It was more in the day when I was very steeped to write,
[4:07]and I would write whatever surface I'd tried not to put too much design on that or influence it
[4:13]too much just whatever came up. And what came up was all sorts of stuff, you know, fragments of
[4:22]memories and things from my own childhood, thoughts that I was having about, well, there's a sort of
[4:29]a kind of essay in there about a tribal people of the Brazilian Amazon. They're a short story
[4:36]ended up being in there, sort of reflections on being awake and on in some of yourself,
[4:42]all kinds of things, you know, different types of writing in different registers,
[4:48]different tones. And in the end, it amassed to something that was roughly book length.
[4:56]And my agent said, what have you been writing? And I said, you know, nothing, I can't write a novel,
[5:00]you know, I've just been writing while sleep deprived. And she said, well, let me see it. So I gave
[5:05]it to her and she gave it to my editor and they decided to publish it as a book. But I was,
[5:11]you know, more surprised than anyone that that was the outcome, because I told my intention
[5:16]actually, I've never written all to biographical before. So how do you feel now that this is out
[5:21]in the world? Do you feel self-conscious that it's your innermost sort of stream of consciousness
[5:28]dialogue with yourself? And now there it is, or do you feel comfortable with it being out there?
[5:34]I think it's a mix and it depends on the day, but obviously once I knew it was going to be
[5:39]published and when I agreed to it being published, I had to reconcile myself to this knowledge
[5:46]that it would be exposing for me. And I kind of made peace with that. I thought, well, this is what
[5:52]I've written. I'm not ashamed of anything I've written. Obviously, I needed to write it for some reason.
[5:57]If my publisher thinks there's a readership for it and that might be interesting to other people,
[6:03]then so be it. I'm going to go with it. So most of the time, that's how I feel. There are days
[6:08]where I think, what have I done? But on the whole, I feel, you know, I reconcile myself to it and
[6:15]I feel like it was a very honest, raw expression of where I was in my life. And I hope that some of
[6:22]that honesty and that ruinous reaches people because it's honest and because it connects to
[6:28]something in them. I loved that part about it. I loved the stream of consciousness
[6:32]I loved how you experimented. As you said, with all the different forms, how some of it seemed like
[6:37]you were talking to a doctor having, you know, a diagnosis of yourself in a situation and then
[6:42]the next would be it's almost like a script and then a letter. Like you just were all, it was
[6:47]so great. And then little snippets of diary entry is almost for someone who reads a lot of books.
[6:53]It was such a nice change because you were constantly keeping the reader engaged and shifting gears
[7:01]and sort of in the chaos of what it feels like to not get a lot of sleep, which everybody
[7:07]has felt at one time or another. So it was almost like your form, the form you took, the form you
[7:13]used reflected so well, the experience you were actually going through. So which I'm sure was your
[7:19]intention in some way subconsciously or something. Yeah, I think it was and I think I sort of see
[7:26]it now as a kind of simulation of sleep deprivation. It's not so much about being sleep deprived,
[7:33]but it is sort of a written simulation of what that's like. And that wasn't ever my intention,
[7:38]but I think that was just the inevitable outcome of writing from that place.
[7:42]I think that's what my outbox looks like. All my emails are an example of a sleep
[7:46]deprivation writing at work. Except mine's not going to be a book. It's just how I get through
[7:53]you know, one of the things you mentioned in your book that sort of set off perhaps you thought
[7:58]this year of not sleeping very well was the death suddenly of your cousin, which I'm so sorry about.
[8:05]And the fact that not only did he die suddenly, but it it took some time for him to be discovered
[8:11]as such. Can you talk a little about that? And if you think looking back that that did have a
[8:17]fair bit to do with what ended up happening to you as a response? Yeah, so I started to get
[8:24]insomnia in the autumn of 2016. And at the same time, it coincided with that. I'm like,
[8:32]that my cousin died in very suddenly he was epileptic and he died of an epileptic fit. And
[8:38]as you say, he wasn't discovered until a few days later. And I don't know how much of a causal
[8:44]relationship there is between the two things my insomnia and that death. That was one of quite
[8:49]a few things that were going on at the time in my own life. It was quite problematic. Not not
[8:56]huge things, but but things that were troubling. And I don't know if the relationship between the
[9:03]two is causal if it was more just a correlation that they kind of happened at the same time. So
[9:09]they became very much bound up in one another. So I because I was awake a lot, I began to think a
[9:15]lot about my cousin and I was very troubled by the fact that he had died and that we you know,
[9:22]he was a contemporary, you know, as I wasn't that close to him, but in a way we've been
[9:27]close as children, but not as adults. But it was something about the loss of someone who was my own
[9:32]age and from my own childhood. And and the fact that he died so suddenly and I just became very
[9:40]troubled by it because I was awake so much. So I was thinking about things too much. And this is
[9:46]you know, one of the real problems within insomnia that you're not only are you awake, you're also
[9:51]in it gives you so many more hours in the day to think about things and to brood
[9:57]over things and to worry. So I think the two thing just
[10:00]can break bound up in one another, more than it being cause of thing.
[10:04]And you also started going back to an incident that happened way back in your past when you were
[10:11]randomly attacked which I was and it came pretty far into the book where you started thinking
[10:18]about this again and perhaps that's where it was like in your consciousness of coming back to it.
[10:22]But tell me about that because that sounded horrific to me and you were somewhat,
[10:28]no I wouldn't say blase but you were somewhat matter-of-fact about it and just sort of presented it
[10:34]as if it was another thing that had happened as opposed to something that was a central thing in
[10:39]your life. Can you just talk a little about the effect it had and did you and how you handled it
[10:44]then versus how you handle it now? You know it's a really interesting thing because I have not had
[10:50]a terrible life by any stretch it's been you know it's had its troubles but it's been a
[10:55]blessed life as well. So maybe that's I don't know I when I when I started writing and
[11:01]inevitably all of this stuff came up that was was part of the trouble of life and I and that was
[11:08]one of the one of the things that came up and I was quite interested that it came up really
[11:14]because I was digging around searching for things that might be the cause of my insomnia and
[11:20]whenever the relationship I have now to that attack is a really strange one because I don't
[11:27]feel that I have any trauma from it you know at the time it was a really it was quite a
[11:34]distressing and brutal thing you know and I ended up in hospital for a few days and I you know
[11:40]I still don't I have you know metal skeleton in my hand where it was broken and you know so I
[11:47]do have it obviously made an impact on my life but one of the things that has always been strange
[11:54]to me is that it hasn't had as much of an impact as I would have thought and so I've always
[11:58]wondered is that because I really did at the time sort of face it and and to go through what I had
[12:06]to go through in it or is it because I've pressed something am I failing to deal with it and you know
[12:12]could that be could that sort of residual trauma be something that is feeding my insomnia now
[12:18]and so that's why it made its way into the book because it's one of those things that I was digging
[12:24]out of you know out of the suitcase thinking it could this be the thing that stopping this
[12:30]leaving and it's never felt that it I've never felt that it was and I don't know why I feel
[12:37]so little trauma around it I haven't really worked that out and I had to I had to identify
[12:44]the the man who who did it and he went to prison and I think maybe because there was that sort of
[12:51]closure on it yet but even then I even then I felt quite ambivalent about that process about
[12:58]him going to prison there was there was something about it that I really just could never quite
[13:04]get two groups with so it's left me with this big question mark in my life of how affected
[13:10]am I by this am I really as I'm affected as I feel I am it's probably sounds like a strange answer
[13:18]but it's always had this very strange face in my life interesting I feel like that would be a good
[13:23]book in and of itself maybe you should turn that into fiction because I did this actually what
[13:27]started my my writing career from Linda because I I had been living in Japan for a couple of years
[13:33]and I was writing a started writing while I was there and then I went to Australia when I left
[13:38]Japan before I went home I just went through a three weeks and that's where it happened so when I
[13:45]got home I couldn't go find work because I had two broken hands and head injuries and so I started
[13:52]writing a novel and that novel was never published but I did finish it and once I'd written that
[13:58]I realized that's what I wanted to do with my life it was a very clear thing and that novel was
[14:04]a fictionalized version of that attack and a sort of fictionalized account of all the things that
[14:10]had led up to it so it's actually had an incredibly impactful place in my life and maybe that's
[14:18]because I worked it out through fiction that it now hasn't sort of doesn't have these
[14:22]some traumatic reverberations maybe I don't know well I think you should dig that one out of the
[14:28]closet and go back to that one spare time in the middle of the night you know next time
[14:35]I just wanted to read a couple of the the sentences and the way you wrote about writing because
[14:40]I loved how you wrote about it you said I look at what I write and it's like being introduced to
[14:45]my soul every time for the first time not always liking what I see writing is dreaming not all dreams
[14:52]can be interpreted in any way not all interpretations are right and anyway not all interpretations are
[14:57]interesting and anyway the dream is the thing unto itself writing is dreaming I only discovered that
[15:04]a couple of years ago it is lucid dreaming the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the
[15:09]conscious just enough and then finally you said writing has saved my life in the last year writing
[15:16]has been the next best thing to sleep sometimes a better thing than sleep I am sane when I write
[15:21]my nerve settle I am sane sane I become happy nothing else matters when I write even if what I
[15:26]write turns out to be bad and that's it well that's that's most of what I wanted to read
[15:32]which is beautiful and such a great reflection on how writing can help and how
[15:39]writing interacts with the brain I mean it's such a unique thing really how writing even works
[15:45]can you talk about that just for a minute all writing works well just you know it's writing as
[15:51]dreaming because I hear that quite a bit sometimes how do you come up with ideas I don't know how do
[15:56]I you know some writers say it's like a dream how do you come up with the dream it just happens so
[16:01]right yeah yeah and it feels but it's the same when you can let go and start writing instinctively
[16:09]and I think that happens when you get past the phase of wanting to understand what the rules are
[16:17]for writing you know and and what the really it is and what you are allowed to do what you're not
[16:21]what works what doesn't you have to kind of go through that phases of writing I think
[16:26]it's part of the learning but when you come through that and that's not to say you have nothing
[16:31]left to learn but you've absorbed and internalized enough you can start getting to something
[16:37]really instinctive and that's where I think writing becomes more like dreaming then then like
[16:44]a sort of a technical craft because it's really it's always calling them the subconscious
[16:52]and then coming from the subconscious and the less you get in the way of it more you find that
[16:58]to be true and so the things that end up on the page you need you may have gone to great lengths
[17:03]to create a fictional world and a character who is adamantly not yourself but in the end what
[17:10]you have on the page is your own life your own preoccupations your own self in all sorts of
[17:20]guises and disguises in the way that you do in a dream you know you find me if you remember a dream
[17:25]you look at it and you see it's just all of your desires and fears all dressed up in different
[17:31]costumes and it's just the same as writing and I find that really fascinating and I think that
[17:36]maybe one reason that writing has been such a salvation to me through insomnia is because
[17:45]when you're not sleeping you're not dreaming so all of working out that you do through dreams
[17:51]isn't happening so I think I did that working out through writing so it was a sort of
[17:58]a surrogate way of dreaming and I hadn't really realized that at the time it only occurred to me
[18:04]a few months ago and I thought yeah I can see why that was such a necessary thing for me to do
[18:09]because I didn't have any other way of processing my subconscious so it really it was an incredibly
[18:18]powerful realization and this book if nothing else has absolutely restored my faith in writing which
[18:27]was flagging a little bit it was a bit sort of you know what's the point of writing
[18:33]in novels and you know there was the world is going to hell what's the point and I now think
[18:38]that's sort of answered that question for me. Good. How are you sleeping now? Better than I was when
[18:44]I wrote the book but still I'm still definitely an insomniac and I and I don't know how to
[18:51]resolve that you know I think the thing that whatever the triggers were that instigated it have gone
[18:59]to an extent you know but it's now being fueled by its own internal processes as insomniac
[19:05]you know the triggers might go away but you're left with this kind of really intractable habit
[19:11]with body and mind and I'm struggling to to break that so it's still an ongoing struggle but it's
[19:19]not anything like a severe as it was. Well I'm glad at least it's getting better although I don't
[19:25]know I mean another book like this would be great too. Are you working on another book now or?
[19:31]I am just beginning to research a new novel you know it's been three years nearly since I
[19:40]since I finished my last novel and that's you know I've never had a gap of anything like that
[19:45]length between novels before so it's been a really big absence in my life so I wrote the
[19:51]shape of Sunnies in between but in terms of a novel and that that kind of world building of a novel
[19:58]and the research.
[20:00]and it's entirely absorbing lengthy process of it.
[20:04]That's been absent and that's a really strange thing for me.
[20:07]So I am now beginning to research.
[20:11]I haven't started writing it,
[20:12]but I'm researching something new.
[20:14]And I feel kind of excited by it at the moment.
[20:17]So that's good.
[20:18]Good.
[20:19]I feel like I do have most days the capacity to write it.
[20:23]So yeah, but it's been a very long process to get here.
[20:28]Very strange, very strange one of I've always had an idea
[20:32]for another queued up before I finished the last.
[20:35]So to have had no idea for three years has been really unnerving.
[20:40]That's nice to know they came back.
[20:42]Yeah, I mean maybe it's just a necessary part of the process.
[20:46]I feel like you've given so much advice
[20:49]through your vantage point on writing.
[20:52]But if you had to give one piece of advice
[20:55]to somebody who is trying to struggle through writing
[20:59]or attack a new book or anything, what advice would you give?
[21:02]This is such a difficult question.
[21:04]You don't have to answer it.
[21:05]I'll do my best.
[21:06]OK.
[21:07]I think that writing, this is going to sound
[21:09]like incredibly nebulous abstract answer.
[21:12]But I think that writing is a sort of expression of love
[21:17]in a way.
[21:18]It's a very expansive thing to do.
[21:21]It asks a lot of you.
[21:22]It asks you to open your heart.
[21:24]And I think if you're going to write a novel or anything,
[21:29]write it from that kind of expanded, generous place in yourself.
[21:34]And you can sort of feel for that.
[21:36]And write for no other reason.
[21:38]Because I think for myself and it's why my faith was
[21:43]flagging a bit, the world doesn't need another novel.
[21:48]There are so many novels in the world.
[21:50]But that's not to say that if you write something that's
[21:53]absolutely from the heart and feels like it needs to be written,
[21:58]there will be a place for it in the world.
[22:00]So I think that's the only reason to write
[22:02]and it's the only place to write from in any case.
[22:06]That's how it is for me.
[22:07]That's great advice.
[22:08]So you do great.
[22:12]I'm glad I asked.
[22:14]It doesn't feel that practical somehow.
[22:16]It still helps.
[22:17]It all helps.
[22:17]It all helps.
[22:20]Well, thank you so much for coming.
[22:21]On mom's don't have time to read books.
[22:23]And thank you for sharing your experience, not just with me
[22:26]today, but also through your book.
[22:27]I'm glad it didn't just stay in a journal on your desk
[22:31]or whatever, and that it became something
[22:32]that the world could share because I found it very helpful
[22:35]and interesting and thought-provoking and different
[22:38]and a joy to read.
[22:40]So thank you.
[22:41]Thank you, Zippy.
[22:42]OK.
[22:42]Take care.
[22:43]Bye-bye.
[22:45]Bye-bye.
[22:46]Thanks again for listening to my podcast.
[22:48]Mom's don't have time to read books.
[22:49]If you liked this episode, please follow me on Instagram
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