If Julie Myerson says that all of her novels carry an element of her state of mind at the time of writing them, then it suddenly becomes easier to understand the devastating mental landscape that takes shape in Then.
Even preceding the actual publication of her previous book The Lost Child – in which Myerson writes in detail about real life rows she had with her son and how she eventually kicked him out of the house because of his alleged addiction to “skunk” cannabis – the author found herself in the centre of a massive media controversy, being accused of betraying her son and the institution of motherhood by some and of being “insane” and “obscene” by her own son Jake.
The public onslaught that Myerson endured was brutal, and chatting over the phone from the Open Book festival in Cape Town, she confesses that it has taken her two and half years to get her confidence back.
“I was in a very dark place, and I was full of anxiety,” she explains. “That maternal responsibility and sense of guilt coming through is not a coincidence.”
Considering the criticism she received from publishing The Lost Child and her latest novel putting forward a protagonist that has a rather disturbing take on maternal love (without giving away too much, the results of this at the end are absolutely devastating to read), releasing Then seems like rather a brave move.
“I could never not write, I have been writing since I was a little girl,” she says.
“I write because I have to, whether it’s going to be published or not. But having said that, Then was difficult to write. It is a dark novel, and although I didn’t know the ending when I first started writing the book – I start all of my novels in the same way, with an idea or a feeling – I think that if I knew how most of my novels would end, I probably would not have written them.”
When the reader is first introduced to the protagonist Izzy, London is a frozen post-apocalyptic wasteland. For the first third of the novel, at least, the foggy haze of snapshots and memories that are as unpredictable as the weather have the reader frantically (and quite frustratingly) trying to figure out who this woman is, what has happened and who the various characters are floating in and out of her consciousness.
The more the reader learns, the less they want to know however. A devastatingly sad love story comes to the fore, and suddenly a literal reading of the story becomes too much to bear. A metaphorical of London and Izzy’s life as an emotional and mental devastation seems easier to bear, especially as the end of the book dawns near and Izzy’s action take a tormenting turn.
Largely inspired by Ian Currie’s book Frosts, Friezes and Fairs – Chronicles Of The Frozen Thames And Harsh Winters In Britain, Myerson started out writing Then as quite a literal story. While she quickly concedes a more metaphorical reading is possible, it was that feeling of anxiety and uncertainty that she says drove her plot forward.
“It’s not set in the future, it’s set tomorrow,” she explains. “I liked the idea of how life can be one thing one day, and then change so drastically the next day. In real life I am quite fearful, but as I writer and in my imagination, I am fearless. It’s liberating to be able to go anywhere and do anything in your imagination; there you can confront troubling things.”
This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Thursday 6 October 2011.
Julie Myerson’s Then (ISBN: 9780224096171) is available now.
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