John Purcell Blog

What is Literature? - an excerpt from The Girl on the Page

19/11/2024

What follows is a spoiler free excerpt from my 2018 novel The Girl on the Page. One of main characters, a writer called Malcolm, is on a panel at a literary festival and the topic under discussion is 'What is Literature?' Here's what he had to say on the matter...

Malcolm:
‘I used to teach writing. I failed most of my students because the one thing I wanted them to learn was the one thing hardest to teach. I wanted them to see the world as it is. It’s harder to do than it sounds. We’re all encased in stories – those told to us and those we tell ourselves. I would say to them, in the safety of that classroom, that most novelists write by dipping their ladle into the great vat of past fictions. In that vat, stewing for centuries, are all the plots, clichés, tropes, themes, character types and common phrases ever used in fiction. Novels written using this method are usually quite successful because they ask nothing of the reader. The reader reads in a pleasant stupor of familiarity. A publisher might describe this kind of fiction as commercial fiction.

‘The fiction I was trying to encourage my students to write was fiction written from direct experience of life. This kind of fiction is much harder to write and is, in turn, sometimes taxing to read. But often only at first. As readers we navigate by signpost, but in this kind of fiction the signposts are unfamiliar to us, almost as though written in another language. We stumble around, we get lost, we might even get frustrated, but there comes a time, if we’re patient, when we learn to see the world anew, as the writer has learnt to see it, and suddenly all of the signposts become clear. And if we’re very lucky, life itself becomes clearer.

‘No one writes exclusively from the vat, just as no one writes exclusively from life. Writing is a series of compromises. Writers from life need to be understood, so they borrow from the vat. Writers from the vat need to be new, so they take from life.’

Malcolm stopped speaking.

‘We’re all here because we love reading. Especially novels,’ Malcolm continued. ‘To be honest, I’ve never particularly liked the idea of literature. I’m still suspicious of the word. When I was growing up in London’s East End, it always seemed to be a stick with which to beat the lower classes. As a teen I resented those who read and enjoyed the classics, who went to see Shakespeare at the theatre, who could drop quotes into their conversation. And I was right to. Many people did use literature as a weapon. And they still do. And I would hate for anyone to think that I thought of literature that way. To me, literature is the fastest and surest route to understanding something of this life. At eighty-one, I know how brief our lives are. Mine has flashed by. And any help making sense of the world is still most welcome. The quicker the better. What is literature? Literature is life’s cheat sheet.'

About the author
John Purcell is the author of five published works of fiction. The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy published by Penguin Random House and The Lessons and The Girl on the Page published by 4th Estate.

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New Short Story - Rainier

13/11/2024

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I apologise, I have written another short story, Rainier. I don't know what has come over me. No short stories for decades and now two in the space of a month? And this one is quite odd. I feel as though my twenty year old self wrote it through me. And he appears to have been drunk on Rhys, Camus, Simenon and Sartre. I suppose there are worse poisons.

Rainier
by John Purcell (5000 words. A 15-30min read)

There was at that time a man who many people knew by sight, but few knew by name. That year he was a frequent visitor to the bars and cafés we found ourselves in after the cinemas had closed. We’d see him once or twice a week. He was almost always accompanied by a woman. Sometimes the same woman for weeks at a time. One woman was on his arm for some months. She was known to us. A lecturer at the university. Some of us were students and made up stories about her. She was very attractive. Dark hair and skin. Lean. But more than that. Fiercely intelligent. She frightened many of us. But it did not stop us making up stories about her and telling them to each other as if they were true. We were young and penniless and too slow to keep the attention of a woman like that. So, we told stories to make her more like us. But she too went the way of so many other women who accompanied this man.

Rainier. I overheard a woman calling him Rainier, so that’s what I called him.

I never saw him alone.

Before what happened.

Which is what I am beginning to tell you. Before what happened, Rainier was only to be seen with a woman on his arm. Not always as beautiful or as desirable to us as the lecturer, we did not make up stories about them, but they all held him the same way. And they talked together with an intensity that drew our eyes to the couple often throughout the night. They would leave abruptly, most often an hour or so before the town revived itself under a breaking dawn. We stayed on. We were young and had no reason to leave before the workmen arrived for their morning coffee. But it was always dark when Rainier left, arm in arm with a woman.

By some chance one night I found myself on the street heading home earlier than was my custom and fell in behind Rainier and his companion. I was walking fast and caught them up. Then I lingered behind, catching their conversation in pieces and trying to fit the parts to make sense of it. This is what I heard.

‘But you don’t need to be like that,’ she said.

‘What does it matter in the end?’ said he.

Laughter and mumbling. They were walking wrapped in each other’s arms. Stumbling. Pressed against one another. She kissed his cheek.

‘It was a circus.’

‘It always is. But he had no right to take it.’

A couple walking in the opposite direction along the narrow pavement disturbed them. We all stepped out of the way.

‘Was that couple us?’

I didn’t hear her reply.

But he said, ‘You read that in a book.’

She laughed. They slowed their steps so they could kiss. I slowed, too.

‘You’re a monster.’

‘Probably. I have no control over myself. Who keeps my heart beating, not I.’

They crossed the street. I was going that way, too.

‘That boy is following us.’

I passed by quickly, reaching the curb opposite before them and went on. But it was true. I was following them. I waited at the end of the street, in the shadows and watched them pass. She was not beautiful. But I knew why he held onto her so tightly. I would have done the same. I followed them across the river and all the way to a four storey building. They both entered. I did not know if it was her address or his. I waited across the street and looked up at the windows. No lights went on. I waited. There was movement on the second floor. Shadow within shadow. I left my hiding spot to get a better look and stared into the darkness. Then a flash of light. He was at the window lighting her cigarette as they both stared directly at me. I jumped and scampered away like the rat that I was.

When next I saw Rainier, he glanced briefly in my direction. Enough to mark me out among my friends. Enough to warn me. The woman on his arm only had eyes for him. She was the same woman. They sat side by side in a booth with their backs to me. Much later I realised that he could see me in the reflection of the brass casement of the coffee machine. He would catch my reflected eye from time to time, as if to remind me of the threat.

But I was young and had never had any real experience. Not of the ways of men. I felt brave with my friends. We students would fling out our fists in a rage over some small matter. We would knock each other about, grow fierce in our minds, and butt heads. But it was the stuff of puppies and lion cubs.

I stared back angrily.

That’s how these things start. From nothing. There were seven of us and one of him. He wasn’t particularly big. He wasn’t particularly threatening. But he was a man, and we were boys really. So, there was that between us. A barrier and a challenge.

From that day on, everything he did nettled me. There was no getting around this growing antipathy in me towards him. He seemed to be haunting me in those days, too. We never organised our nights out. The cafés and bars we frequented varied. Though we preferred those open all night. And yet he kept crossing our path. Three times a week, sometimes more. It was unusual, unlikely, impossible.

I started to ask around about him. I wanted to know who he was, what he did, where he was from. No one knew anything. I followed him, but he had a habit of disappearing. Like it was a game. Like he knew more about me than I knew about him, and he was teasing me.

In these unsettling weeks, he was never with the same woman more than a couple of nights. But the same intensity was there between them. They clung to one another like lovers. Like they were the only ones capable of such love, such desire. I didn’t understand it. There was nothing special about Rainier. Not that I could see. Yet he was dating two or more women a week. That lecturer. Doctor of philosophy. She had adored him. You could see. She was magnificent. In all ways. But he was just some guy. Not well dressed. Not rich. Not memorable in any way other than the way the women were with him.

Then one night something strange happened. He abandoned his date at the table and left the café. She was an attractive woman and well-dressed. Professional. Probably in her late thirties. Similar age to Rainier. She was drinking white wine. Her face was untroubled. She glanced around the room as though seeing it for the first time. But that was how it was with Rainier and his partners, intense, narrow, focussed. They saw nothing but themselves. A couple alone in the world.

She caught me staring at her and looked away. I saw a cloud on her brow for the first time that evening. And it was this cloud that lifted me from my seat and had me crossing the distance between us.

I was seated opposite her before I knew what had happened. That self-possession returned to her.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

‘Tell me about the man you are with.’

‘You’re the man I am with,’ she said smiling. She raised the glass to her lips and drank more than a sip.

‘Who is he? What does he do? Where does he come from?’

She was smiling and was suddenly beautiful. Her eyebrow lifted, questioning, and she laughed again.

‘You tell me, Rainier.’

‘What!?’

She leaned forward and placed her hand over mine. It was cold and pale with nails painted a red a few shades from black. She was wearing a gold wedding ring and an engagement ring with a large diamond.

‘I want to know. Everyone wants to know. Who are you Rainier?’

I stood up. Her smile vanished.

‘Rainier?’ I asked.

‘Who owns your heart if not yourself?’

I turned, and feeling lightheaded, nearly fell, but managed to stumble back to my chair where my friends were laughing at me for being a drunken fool.

At that moment, Rainier entered the café and took his seat across from the woman, his back to me.

I was being slapped on the back by my best friend for my bravery - he thought I had propositioned the woman - when Rainier and his date burst out laughing.

My heart thumped heavily in my chest as I left the café, their mocking laughter in my ears, and stumbled back to my room. I could do nothing to slow my heart. I spent the night in a sweaty fever dream wishing I was dead.

The university year was over, and my family expected me home for the summer.

But I lingered on in the city as one by one my friends retreated to the provinces or abroad and I was left to haunt the cinemas and cafés alone.

But I was not alone. Rainier was still in the city. And his laughter rang in my ears.

I was very conspicuous on my own in the cafés and bars. But my growing anger made me bold. Sometimes I would catch Rainier spotting me through a window and he and his partner would pass on to the next café. I would curse him for a coward.

Other times he would walk right in, heading directly at me and take a table just behind me or beside me and I would hear nothing but whispers and murmurs which my addled mind eagerly translated into slights.

One long night I had sat alone and in silence drinking. When I stood to leave the world swayed. I pushed through the doors and onto the street and found myself tripping on the legs of someone sitting in the warm night air at a table on the pavement. I only just managed to keep myself upright.

When I turned to apologise, I saw it was him. The woman I did not recognise, but she clutched his arm like all the rest.

‘You tripped me on purpose,’ I said.

‘He did, I saw him,’ said the woman.

‘A damned lie,’ he said, and kissed her. Not a peck on the cheek or on the lips but a full bodied kiss with an open mouth, her palm against his face and I was instantly forgotten.

She too wore a wedding ring. He was a scoundrel.

I kicked out at him, the toe of my boot connecting with his shin.

He cried out and stood up. I stepped forward, my fist raised. I was not afraid of him.

He slapped me.

I staggered back. There were tears in my eyes. When I straightened and stepped forward, he slapped me again. The first stung, the second was heavier and my head throbbed. I could not prevent or hide my tears.

I stared at him.

‘Go back to your people. You’re not ready,’ he said, dismissively before sitting back down.

I was dazed and slow. My heart was racing again. I backed onto the street, wiping my face. I couldn’t make sense of what happened.

The couple had turned back to themselves and were quickly forgetting me.

I returned to my room. Packed my things and reached the station an hour before the first train home.

My father wouldn’t speak to me on my arrival. My mother told me he had gone to a great deal of trouble to secure me a summer job. But because I had not returned the job had gone to someone else. I was glad, I had no intention of wasting my summer working as a clerk for some solicitor. If I had to work, it would be outside, picking fruit or labouring on a building site. I had enough of words and books and ink and ideas.

My uncle had the contract for fixing the surface of the town’s high street. All the cobblestones had to be taken up, cleaned, shaped and re-laid. My mother arranged for me to start at once.

It was hard work, and I was a poor specimen of a man. The seasoned workmen showed me no respect, which was only right. I kept to myself and worked as hard as my body would allow. I was exhausted every evening and in bed by nine, sleeping through like the dead.

As the summer warmed up, I grew accustomed to the work and shirt off like the other men, browned in the sun. No longer exhausted every evening, I took my free meal waiting for me at home and joined the younger workmen in the town’s bars until they closed at midnight.

Weeks passed and I could feel myself changing. My body was no longer that of a boy, my mind was growing restless with the monotony of my working days so in the bars and cafés I sought out the town’s artists and thinkers, such as they were.

In that poor company a student of philosophy from the capital could show off if he were that way inclined. They soon nicknamed me Sartre which I accepted as my due. And it was around that time a local actress, long resigned to playing matronly roles, took me in hand and made me a man.

Of course, it wasn’t long before all of this went to my head. As a result, I spoke disrespectfully one too many times to one of the seasoned workmen and on the high street, at the busiest hour, in front of a crowd of onlookers, I was deservedly beaten. Chastened, humiliated and bleeding I returned home for my meal only to be given a further beating by my father while my mother beseeched me to change my ways.

Needless to say, I was not seen in the cafés and bars after this. Instead, I did my labouring work conscientiously, eventually winning a good word from my uncle, then returned home to my parents and did my reading for the next semester.

Summer over, I was back in the capital and there I continued to keep time to my parent’s wishes. I no longer wasted my evenings in bars and cafés with my friends but remained behind with my books and studied. I proudly sent home my results and was rewarded with a larger allowance.

My summer of hard labour had changed my appearance, I was bulkier, squarer in the face and shoulders and before I left my mother had seen that my new attire suited the man who had taken the place of her son.

Without really knowing how, that semester saw me thrown more and more into the company of women. It began in the library, where I went to study in peace, but I got no peace, the library was overrun by women all intent on bothering me. I welcomed the attention, but I did not seek it. Then one of my lecturers asked me to take over one of his first year tutorials. It was an honour which only served to mark me out among my peers. To bolster my allowance, I took on private tutoring work also at this time.

Again, by no effort of my own, I was soon dating a fellow tutor, Susan, who was doing her doctorate, and three years older than me. It just seemed to happen. Not long after this, encouraged by Susan, I began to write short fiction as a pastime. It was she who found a magazine willing to publish one of them. I was barely twenty when I first saw myself in print. Soon after this Susan’s father died, and she left university to help her mother run the family business. She broke off the relationship by letter, urging me to keep writing.

A different kind of woman took hold of me then. Alex. She was a writer, an actor, and a singer. She was never my girlfriend, or lover, she was nearly thirty, but she had me dancing to every one of her tunes. She took me to plays, readings, concerts. We spent hours together in cafés deep in discussion. I would escort her home, to dinner parties, to gatherings. She treated my apartment as her own. But our relationship was strictly platonic. I finished my degree in thrall of her, blind to the attentions of any other woman.

She had encouraged me to work hard, and I finished near the top of my year. She wanted me to write, I wrote stories and plays and songs and poems for her, which she critiqued and kept, locking them away. Unlike Susan who rushed me into print, Alex always said I was not ready and too young to publish. But always told me that I had the makings of a great writer.

With Alex’s help I was given the editorship of a literary magazine. It brought me more prestige than money but introduced me to the writers of the city. Publishers were chasing me for work, but I declined on Alex’s advice. I wasn’t ready, she repeated. I felt ready. My writing had come a long way since that first story was published. Be patient, she said, assuring me that my time would come.

It was around this time while out with Alex that I first saw Rainier again. He was, as always, entwined with a woman. He looked no different from the man I once followed home. But this time I recognised the woman. And so did Alex. It was, Jeanette, the wife of a publisher friend of ours, Milo. I let Alex be the first to mention her. I didn’t want her to know of my obsession with the man she was with. That I had been watching them intently the whole evening.

I can’t describe the feeling of seeing him again after so long. I had barely given him a thought in the meantime, but on seeing him, my anger returned as though his slaps had happened the night before.

I felt wretched and drinking too much too quickly did something I had never done before, I made a clumsy pass at Alex and she slapped me and abandoned me there in the bar. Alex wasn’t a shrinking violet, she let me have it in word and action and I sat alone under the gaze of all deeply ashamed and increasingly angry.

Rainier was the only person in the bar who paid no attention to the scene or Alex’s exit. But Jeanette coloured when our eyes met, and she encouraged Rainier to leave and leave they did.

That night, alone in my room I started writing my first novel. At the top of the page, I wrote and underlined the word Rainier.

By day I worked at the offices of the literary magazine, by night I wrote my novel. Weeks went by in this way. I saw no one outside work. I lived on canned food and cheap wine and coffee. I was inspired as I had never been inspired before. The words flowed, the pages filled. Each day on my return from the office I would correct the previous day’s work then I would write until one or two, sometimes through the night, then wake at eight and be in the office by nine. I was elated, exhausted, delirious and unrecognisable to myself.

We were all in the pages of my novel. Rainier, of course, and Alex, my parents, the workmen, my student friends, and Rainier’s women. It was a novel of extremes, all life distorted, all emotion heightened. In it my true feelings for Alex were acknowledged and then exaggerated, my hatred of Rainier amplified. We were caught in some tragic love triangle. I loved Alex but Alex loved Rainer and Rainer, well Rainer loved nothing, not even himself.

I was so caught up in my creation that on writing the death of Rainier I wept and then relented letting him live, but later hardened again and killed him a second time. Ending the novel as it needed to be ended with only one of us left alive. I added THE END. It was over.

I left my apartment and looked for familiar faces in every bar I passed. I wanted to celebrate with friends. It was two in the morning and most decent people were asleep. My student days were behind me, but I managed to find faces I knew in a boisterous table of students. I had tutored some of them and joined their table and told them what I had done and they congratulated me and bought me drinks and slapped me on the back and one very beautiful young woman kissed me and sat close beside me, entwining her slender legs with mine under the table and clutching my arm in the very way women were always doing with poor departed Rainier.

I woke up in that woman’s bed and didn’t leave for three days. When I returned to my apartment, I found a note where I had left my manuscript.

You’re probably still not ready, it said.

Alex! I hadn’t seen or heard from her in weeks.

I called her number but there was no answer. I went to her apartment block and buzzed but there was no answer. I loitered by the street door until I could follow someone in then made my way up the stairs to the sixth floor. As I reached the top, I saw Alex inviting Rainier into her apartment. I was stunned. The door closed and I was left on the stairs not quite believing what I had just seen.

Alex had my manuscript and Rainier in her apartment, but I didn’t have the courage to knock and ask for my Rainier back.

I made my way back down the stairs. On my walk back to my apartment I happened to find myself passing the building I had once followed Rainier back to all that time ago. I crossed the street and read the names in the buzzers. There were two apartments on the second floor. One was R. Laurent. Rainier Laurent? I buzzed knowing he wouldn’t be home because I had just seen him enter Alex’s apartment. The street door opened. Curious, I climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached the door with R. Laurent on a brass plate and knocked.

A woman opened.

‘Yes?’

‘Does Rainier live here?’

‘Who?’

‘Rainier, at least I think that was his name. I once saw you both in a bar and followed you home. I apologise, I was… well, I have no excuse for my behaviour. I was not quite myself back then.’

She stared at me. It was clear she had no recollection of the event and thought I might be mad.

‘You said, I think that boy is following us.’

‘Was his real name Rainier? He was a big nothing. Not a man. A walking talking mirror. I only saw my reflection. I suspect all women do. It was a trick. We saw what we wanted to see. Which made him fascinating for a moment, until you realise your mistake.’

Here I interrupted her, predicting what she was about to say. We both said, ‘More dangerous for the narcissists who will stare and stare at themselves enthralled.’

She stopped speaking as I continued, ‘But it was nice to be seen.’

She finished off with, ‘Even if it was only to be seen by myself.’

She was quoting my manuscript word for word. In my story the young student had been braver and more inquisitive than I had been and returned to this apartment days after following them both home. In the story the woman answers and says, what she had just said now.

But it wasn’t possible.

‘I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

I ran down the stairs and onto the street. Back at my apartment I called Alex. She answered, heard my voice and hung up on me.

I called again.

‘I’m reading. Stop interrupting. I’ll come over when I’m finished.’

Click.

I called again.

‘But he’s there with you now. I saw him with you.’

‘Who is here?’

‘Rainier!’

‘Of course he is. What do you think I am talking about?’

The call ended and I left it at that. What else was there for me to do?

I went out to the bar where my young friends met and got outrageously drunk. Waking in the beautiful woman’s bed again the following morning, I cursed myself for a fool, then left, dragging my hungover body back to my apartment where I found another note.

This time the note was pinned on my front door. It was a question mark. I unlocked the door and went in. My manuscript was in a neat pile on the floor just inside the door. I picked it up and flicked through the pages. In the past Alex would leave notes in fine red pencil in the margins. There wasn’t a single note.

I flipped the manuscript over. There, in the tiniest handwriting, she wrote - I doubt you’ll ever be ready.

Alex was casting me out. She had sided with Rainier. It was as though Rainier had slapped me again. I felt humiliated.

I went to my small kitchen and drank two glasses of water. My hands were shaking. My head was throbbing. My heart, again, was beating at a rate that frightened me. My strength was draining away.

I made my way to my bedroom. I had to have more sleep. I would call Alex when I woke up. I would face Rainier. I would have it out with them both. But I needed rest.

As I passed the main room, I noticed a strange shadow running across the wooden floor. I pushed open the door further and entered. Alex was hanging by the neck between me and the windows. I carefully lifted her down, but there was no life left in her. It was just as I had written it. I lay her on the sofa. In my novel she had left a note. Rainier had broken her heart, it explained, and she had no further reason to live. I searched the apartment but could find no note. Her keys were in her bag, however, and Rainier was at her apartment. Or had been. And might still be.

I took one last long look at Alex then covered her with a blanket. I was in tears when I did this in my novel, but in life my eyes were dry. I went back to the kitchen, pulled a bottle of vodka from my freezer and drank. My body reacted badly to this, and I was violently ill in the kitchen sink. But I felt a lot better. I drank a bit more. Nothing happened. I cleaned my face up then dragged myself to Alex’s apartment.

I used her key on the street door. I climbed to the sixth floor in stages as though it was Everest. My hands were shaking again when I reached the top. I felt bloodless, cold and slow.

I let myself in and stood by the door and listened.

‘Is that you?’

He was there.

I entered the apartment knowing what he would say, knowing what I would do. It had been written.

‘Where have you been?’

‘She’s dead.’

Rainier emerged from the bedroom. He had obviously just showered and gotten dressed. The only things missing were his shoes and his jacket.

‘What did you say?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘You can come and see for yourself.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m the writer.’

‘Ahh you’re the writer. She spent all night reading that thing. I fell asleep waiting for her to come to bed.’

‘You killed her.’

‘What are you talking about? She’s not dead. Come in and sit down, she’ll be back in a moment. She’s probably just gone down for pastries or bread or something.’

‘You’ve done this before. Alex wasn’t the first. You were always seeking out lonely women. It didn’t matter to you if they were married of single. These were vulnerable woman. You had no right.’

‘Listen kid, I don’t know what Alex told you, but I barely know the girl.’

I pushed him. But my strength having left me, he barely moved.

‘You didn’t deserve her love.’

‘You don’t know me. Whatever is going on in your head, it isn’t real.’

‘I know you.’

‘How?’

‘We’ve spoken before.’

‘I think I’d remember you.’

I stepped up to him and kicked him as hard as I could in the shin. He screamed in pain, and when he bent over to rub his leg, I pushed him.

He almost fell over but didn’t. He straightened and looked me in the eye.

‘You’re that psycho kid.’

I slapped him.

He grinned.

I slapped him again.

‘Are you happy now?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Are you happy? Slap for a slap, and eye for an eye and all that?’

He wasn’t reacting the way I expected him to react. It was as though he were writing his own lines.

‘Who keeps my heart beating, not I,’ he said. ‘You remember that? You had me say that. Absolved me of guilt by removing my agency. But I got thinking...’

‘Stop!’ I said. He was ruining everything.

Rainier stood rubbing the cheek I had slapped. He was still grinning, but the mischief had gone out of his eyes.

‘You came here to kill me. It’s what you wrote. We were laughing about it last night.’

‘Stop it!’ I screamed.

‘You never knew me. I am not yours to direct. You are not God. People are far more complicated than you make out.’

I reached out to grab him. He was not doing anything right. He needed to be silenced.

He shrugged off my attempts and stepped to the side as I lunged at him.

‘This is not what you imagined.’

It definitely wasn’t what I imagined. I felt lightheaded. He was grabbing me. Pulling me to him.

Where had all my strength gone? I was not a boy anymore. I was bigger and stronger than him. Where was my fight?

‘You’re not ready, kid.’

‘I am ready!’

His arm wrapped around my neck. He was squeezing me.

I could not speak. I could not move. I could not escape.

His grip tightened. My breath was stopped. My eyes still sought the light. I reached out for something. For what? Then it was black.
I had to begin again.

I was startled awake by a noise. Keys rattling and shoes on a hardwood floor. Then a heavy door shutting. I was stretched out on a bed fully clothed. I must have been dozing.

The room was not mine. I got off the bed. There were photos of Alex with different people on the dresser. I was in Alex’s room.

I looked around for my shoes. There was a mirror on the wardrobe. Rainier was looking back at me.

The sound of shoes being kicked off reached me.

‘Is that you?’ I called out, as he had done.

I went out to the hall.

‘Where have you been?’

‘You’re still here. That’s a nice surprise,’ said Alex, her eyes bright and very much alive.

‘You didn’t think I would wait for you to return?’ I asked.

‘I hoped you would. But last night you were talking about being a monster and that your heart is not yours to control. And the tighter I held you, the more you pulled away.’

‘Is that why you thought I wouldn’t be here?’

‘Yes, and because you’re a writer and all writers are like teenagers, always seeking out something new.’

‘Believe me, that part of me is dead.’

She eyed me suspiciously and I felt ashamed.

‘But,’ she said, ‘you’ve showered and dressed. Are you sure you weren’t about to leave?’

‘I like to look respectable. You were gone so long I even dozed off waiting for you.’

She smiled but her eyes betrayed her doubts.

‘You still don’t think I’m ready?’

‘I didn’t say you weren’t ready. That was you.’

She looked lovely as she carried her shopping through to the kitchen.

‘I bought you some pastries and got milk so we can have coffee and talk about your brilliant novel. I finished reading last night after you fell asleep.’

‘Who cares about that. Do you really want me to stay?

‘Of course.’

I kissed her.

‘Unless you think you’re still not ready.’

I kissed her again.

‘I am ready.’

About the author
John Purcell is the author of five published works of fiction. The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy published by Penguin Random House and The Lessons and The Girl on the Page published by 4th Estate.

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New Short Story - The Collaborators

15/10/2024

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After writing four novels between 2020-22, only one of which finding a publisher, I stopped. I have not written any fiction for over two years. The short story below is my first attempt at finding a path back to writing. If you find it interesting please let me know in the comments below. If you think others would like to read it, please share it on your socials. (If you hate it, fight me.)

The Collaborators
by John Purcell (5000 words. A 15-30min read)

Oh, shit. I can’t afford this room.
These were his first rational thoughts on waking. His dreams had been especially fraught. The reality of his situation played itself out in ridiculous scenarios, keeping his anxiety on the boil while he slept.

The room was very dark. He wasn’t sure if it was the result of blackout blinds or whether he was awake before dawn. He could just about hear traffic noises from the street below. Was London stirring?

He remembered layout of the room. He would never forget the room. He would never forget the night. Or the past six weeks in the studio. Or the three months communicating by letter.

But last night it had all gone to his head.

Without moving he scanned what he could see of the room. His clothes were the darker lumps scattered across the lighter carpet between the bed and the ensuite. His phone was not on the bedside table which meant it was in the pocket of his trousers. Out of reach. He shifted slightly to see if he could reach but he was too afraid to wake her, so gave up.

They had been drunk. But not on booze. They had been caught up in their own genius. They had consummated their collaboration, something that was clearly forbidden. And he was ashamed and afraid.

There was no hiding it, either. It had all happened out in the open. He had been obsessed with her from the moment he received her first handwritten letter. Obsessed, but not like this. He hadn’t been interested in her sexually. Someone famous, someone undeniably cool had noticed him, was interested in him. He had shared all her letters with his wife. They had both been excited by her attention.

Before the letters he had only had a passing interest in her. Among a collection of five hundred CDs were two of her albums from the late nineties. Boxed up and not played since the noughties when he got his iPod. None of her work was in his Spotify library. He had always admired her; she was an enduring artist in an age of one hit wonders, but she had dropped off his radar.

He had been surprised and delighted by her initial letter. She told him they shared the same publisher and that’s how she got his home address. He’d never considered her part of his world. The literary world. He hadn’t known she had published books of poetry. But then lyrics were poems of a kind. Hers certainly were. But not good poems, he had his publisher send him copies of her books. She wasn’t someone anyone he knew took seriously as a poet, though she was the kind of musician they would listen to.

She stirred in the bed beside him. Even though his back was to her, he closed his eyes. Not really sure why it would matter if she found him awake.

That first letter reached him when his most recent book was being described by his own readers as impossible to understand. But her letter praised the book effusively and showed that she understood what he had been doing. Their correspondence was largely the meeting of two great readers. They shared quotes and recommended books and enthused over authors they both admired.

That’s where it should have stayed. On paper.

She was ten years older than he was, he discovered when he googled her. Twelve years older than his wife, Lucy. Forty-five years older than his son, Aaron.

He needed to pee. He couldn’t lie in bed. He needed to get home.

He felt sure Lucy would understand. They were both literary people, who knew nothing was black and white, that human relations lived in greyscale. She would see that it was a stupid mistake, the result of an infatuation, a frail ego. Or at least pretend to. If he told her the truth, that is.

Lucy had known the risks involved. She had even revealed her trajectory of her thoughts a week before when she tried to clear the air, referring to George Clooney facetiously as her ‘hall pass’.

She could plainly see the power this famous woman had over her husband. The need to get the album done had been all consuming. He was ordered down to the estate in Cornwall at a moment’s notice. And he dropped everything and went. He was bewitched by the project and by the artist. And Lucy knew how it was done. She knew because she had been caught up in it when she went down to the estate in Cornwall herself and watched the band in the studio. For two nights Lucy had been the centre of attention. An honoured guest. The wife of the writer. Her eyes had widened, she had gotten drunk on it all, too.

Lucy knew how easily it could happen. She would forgive him. Their love was bigger than this hiccup. It wasn’t real. Their marriage was real. This wasn’t.

But he knew it wasn’t pretend. Those were his trousers on the floor. That was her breathing he could hear. She was not his ‘hall pass’. This was adultery. He couldn’t run from it. He couldn’t hide it.

The evidence was mounting as he lay inert. Too frightened to move.

He would have to pay the bill for the room, for one. A large, unexpected sum would upset their well-regulated monthly spend. Everything had always been tightly budgeted. Every penny counted. You don’t live as they have lived without being thrifty. Their entire twenties were spent studying in different institutions living like paupers while racking up huge student debts.

He hated to think how much the room cost. What had he been thinking?

But he hadn’t been. Not with the frugal part of the brain that got him through university, then later, her PhD, then belatedly, while Lucy was pregnant, his own PhD. And through Aaron’s first year when they were both writing and neither of them were earning a thing.

He had been using the part of his brain that had written the four short books that had made his name. Confident works by an artist in full command of language and his art, said The Guardian. The books that the rock star lying naked beside him had read, and written to him about, one of which, Gambit, had inspired the album she had just wrapped up. The album they had celebrated in style last night. The celebrated author and the rock star. He was in his predicament because of that part of his brain, the artist part, which was most susceptible to flattery.

And last night over dinner in front of her people she had spoken of turning his latest and least successful novel, Yodel, into an opera. An opera.

That’s who booked them into the very expensive, very exclusive boutique hotel on a whim, the artist. Taking the only available room, a suite, with the nonchalance of a commercially successful writer, which he knew he wasn’t and would never be, no matter what was whispered into his ear late last night in the middle of their indulgent erotic encounter.

His successes were of that ethereal kind, praise, respect, the adulation of a select, tiny portion of the reading public. And a few prizes. Not the big ones, with life changing prize money, but the smaller more prestigious ones, with none. On debut he enjoyed two-page spreads in nearly all the papers (even those he despised) and was universally hailed as the genius of the age (Lucy said it was because his first book was very short - meaning it went to the top of every literary editor’s pile and was actually read - cover to cover). Invitations to all the literary festivals around the world followed.

After the publication of his second book, Gambit, a love story - which briefly touched the firmament with a strong first week of sales, before plummeting out of sight - he toured for a year. His sales continued to be slow, but his reputation saw exponential growth. He had gone from panel member to the keynote speaker at literary festivals. But for a year he barely wrote a word.

Even after four well received books, the financial rewards were moderate. After adding up all the speaker’s fees, the odd paid article, advances, library monies and festival fees he made as much annually as a barista in Waterstones, which is slightly more than their booksellers make.

The hotel’s double-glazed windows couldn’t block out the increasing volume of London getting on with its day. He guessed it was seven am. He had to go home. He had to face Lucy.

He pushed his head further into the decadent pillow and ran his hand slowly across the linen sheet. He wasn’t new to luxury. Some of the far-flung festivals he had attended put him up in accommodation he didn’t feel he warranted. For the last five years, while on tour, he had been in and out of four- and five-star hotels and luxury B&Bs. He’d also spent months at writers’ retreats in the US, Italy and Australia. But he had never had to pay for any of them. There had always been someone who took care of all that. His publisher appointed publicist, or the festival author liaison, or the wealthy benefactor who liked the company of writers. When it was over all he had had to do was pack and stroll through the lobby into the waiting car.

That might be a way out, he thought, rising slowly from the bed, naked. A sound behind him caused him to turn. She had rolled over, away from him. He crept to the bathroom and while he relieved himself, he thought of his publicist. She had been instrumental in bringing the rock star and author together. He would ask her to pay for the room until he could find a way to pay the publisher back.

He went in search of his phone. There were unread messages from Lucy. They always messaged before either went to bed. It wasn’t always possible but nine times out of ten it was. And he was only in London. Same time zone. No excuse. It was actually after eight, not seven. Which was worse.

He messaged his publicist, careful to use a different message app, he didn’t want his wife to see him as active yet.

In those first two or three years he and his publicist had spent more time on the road together than he had spent at home and there were few secrets between them. While he spent his time away from Lucy living like a monk, ignoring the very rare promise, real or imagined, of a no strings attached fling, his publicist hadn’t.

Her fiancé, completely oblivious to the repeated betrayals, waited out large chunks of the year alone in their studio apartment in Docklands playing video games and masturbating with her on facetime when she wasn’t otherwise detained.

Lucy had waited out the time with Aaron and her parents while fitting in freelance editing work for pennies and trying to find a publisher for her own experimental novels. There hadn’t been any facetime sex for them. It wasn’t how their relationship worked. They shared essays, sending links to each other to articles they admired, or derided, not photos of sex organs. All that longing and frustration they did actually feel was expressed in the first week of his short-lived return to base. Theirs was a passionate but intensely private relationship. Few public declarations, even their wedding was by the book, and certainly no public displays of affection. She was just as bad as he was. After spending much of their shared university life in an intense sexual relationship even their closest friends were surprised when on leaving university they moved in together. No one had known they even liked each other.

A message came back from his publicist. Done. But now I own you.

He stifled a laugh. Then a wave of relief swept over him. One obstacle removed. Only a million more to overcome.

He knew the best thing to do was to come clean and tell Lucy everything. If she left him, he would have deserved it. Their son, Aaron would do as he and Lucy had done when each of their parents had divorced, be torn in two and never feel completely safe or loved again. It hadn’t been that difficult.

He smiled grimly at the thought and then realised he was still naked and standing in the middle of the room, face lit by his phone, and she was awake and looking at him, her face lit by her phone.

Without a word she swept out of bed and into the bathroom. The light flicked on. Moments later he heard the shower, then her stream of pee hitting the waiting water below. He went to the open door of the bathroom as she flushed the toilet. She glanced at him then stepped into the shower and closed the glass door. He watched as she washed last night off her.

He supposed she was used to being watched. Lucy hated it. Would tell him off for observing her every move as she washed up or dressed. He liked to watch, to listen, to record everything. The door opened but she didn’t step out. Her hand extended towards him. He wasn’t drunk on anything, but he took her hand, and it began again.

***

He hadn’t smoked a cigarette in years, but here he was on the narrow hotel balcony with her feet in his lap, smoking and talking as if what had just happened, again, wasn’t the greatest betrayal of all. Just sitting with her on the balcony with her feet on his lap was a betrayal. Every intimacy he shared with her was.

He had only ever loved one person. Lucy. She had been all he had ever wanted. Was still all he would ever want. And yet here he was in a bathrobe with her feet in his lap and their occasional movements causing a stir which foreshadowed further betrayals ahead.

What the fuck was going on? Who was he? How rotten everything was. How rotten he was.

‘I am going to have to tell her, you know.’

‘Why would you tell her? Or anyone for that matter? If it comes up, lie. Lie boldly, lie well. Kill it dead before it festers.’

He stared at the roof of the building across the street. What she said was so rough and crude. Ugly, really. They really were from different worlds.

‘But the book is about trust, the whole album is about faith in that.’

‘It’s about truth more than trust. Truth of expression, not the mundane truths of cock and cunt. Man and wife. Up and down. Higher truth.’

‘Bullshit. We fucked up. We broke trust. We failed ourselves and our art. And we failed those we love and those who love us.’

‘Get over yourself.’ She lifted her feet off his lap and placed them on the ground. ‘Better to lie and get on with your life than blow it to bits which is what you would do by telling her. I have never thanked anyone for telling me.’

‘Who would cheat on you?’

‘I love that you mean that. But I have been cheated on all throughout my life. Artists are fuckers, musicians the worst of all. Lucy will suspect. That’s all. Deny, deny, deny. If it comes up. It most likely won’t. She, like me, is probably more afraid of the truth and will stay silent on the subject, happy to continue on in ignorance.’

He had nothing to say to that. He had walked open eyed into this situation, betrayed his wife’s trust and there was no honourable way out. The truth was a burden he didn’t want. But he had no right to offload it onto Lucy’s shoulders.

He stared at that famous face. It wasn’t the face from the album covers or the magazines. But it was unmistakably her. She pretended to be more interested in the ash that had fallen on her dressing gown. Or maybe she was more interested in the ash than the conundrum that he was facing.

How dull he must appear to her. How disappointing he must be the morning after with his anxieties and humdrum cares. For the past six weeks he had moved between the studio on her estate in Cornwall and the studio two blocks from where they were seated. With brief stints back at home. Her world was far from mundane. An album was the work of dozens of people. Most of them were artists in their own right. Fascinating people, reckless people, interesting people. But the album was finished. It was all over.

Even though his book was the source material, and it was going to be called Gambit after his book and marketed as a collaborative project between him, the darling of the literary world and her, independent music’s most awarded, innovative and enduring singer songwriter. His work was barely recognisable. A phrase or two of his had made it through the exhausting process unscathed. It was largely her creation though her partner had co-written most of the lyrics with her. Sometimes right in front of him. With no request for his input. Two or three phrases from a book of just under 50,000 words.

Her production team owned the rights to the film, too. And he had only recently discovered that his script had been rejected and another was being written independently of him.

And yet last night when they played the finished album end to end in the London studio to an audience of executives, he was exhilarated. Somehow, she had captured the book without direct references. It was a masterpiece. But her masterpiece.

In the bar afterwards, her hand had clasped his and hadn’t let go. As everything was breaking up and people were saying their goodbyes she had held him back. They had found another bar, and over unfinished drinks had spoken to each other about the work they had just listened to, about what they wanted to do in the future and what they wanted to do to each other.

Being the focus of her attention had flattered him. It was the first time in the six weeks that he hadn’t felt like a third wheel. Under her undivided gaze he had been knocked off his centre. She had even said, I did it all for you.

Throughout the nineties she had been an indie rock god, always evolving, winning and losing audiences with her constant changes. Then in the noughties she had burst into the mainstream briefly with an accessible radio friendly rock album, showing everyone that she could do anything. She sensibly bought lots of property on the proceeds, then retreated back and lost the wider audience with an album that cemented her position as an artist. Then came the albums of her maturity, deep reflective albums reaching far beyond her contemporary experience for which she was awarded prize after prize.

He hadn’t sold out with this collaboration as some of his peers had suggested. She was the greater artist. He had seen that in the studio. Her medium was just more accessible than his. Reading a book takes more time and attention than putting on an album. But a book is rarely read more than once, and in his medium an artist can get away with murder. An album will be listened to again and again and again. Repeated listening will discover all the faults. Somehow the artist has to make art that remains new and perfect for eternity.

He had to admit he had been listening to her music on Spotify on the long train journeys to and from Cornwall. He had gone through her whole backlist dozens of times. Three of her albums were regularly played on repeat. Since being thrown into her orbit even the albums he had once owned were different. More her, somehow. The lyrics had been popping into his head in her presence. Especially last night as she held his hand. And then afterwards. He couldn’t stop them if he had tried.

They weren’t great on their own, but combined with the heavy bass, driving rhythm, the tone of her voice, and the emphasis she put on them, then they were better than any poetry he had read. He felt them in him as they fucked. Like the music was essentially sex itself.

She got up and went inside. He could hear her ordering breakfast. More expense. Hopefully the publicist would take care of that, as well. He swivelled in his seat to watch her. After calling down she had picked up her phone and was scrolling. He honestly had no idea what was going on in her head. No clue.

After nearly fifteen years with Lucy, he felt he had some idea. Not enough. He always wanted more. But some. And it bound him more tightly to her. There was nothing here in this hotel room to bind him. But he liked the otherness of the woman on the bed. The strangeness of her. That ten years between them was observed on her skin, but also in the way she moved and thought. She gave no fucks. He was filled with nervous energy. She was herself, out and proud.

He lingered on the hotel because he knew this would never be repeated. He was only there because she had wanted him last night. He had served a purpose this morning and if anything else happened it would be because she initiated it. Why, he would never really know. Then she would go and that would be that. There would be no further invitations. That was something he knew about her at least. This was it. For her. A one-time thing.

They would be thrown together a lot in the next few months. They would be interviewed together. He would go to her London concerts. That had been arranged. He would read from the book on stage in front of thousands of confused people while she accompanied him on guitar.

Then there was the film. If it ever progressed beyond the script. So, he wouldn’t be out of her life, but he would be out of her bed. And it wouldn’t matter to her. And, he hoped, it wouldn’t matter to him.
So why do it at all? What was it all for? And why stay? Was her approval worth so much?

The doorbell buzzed. He went over and took hold of the large tray and brought it to the table. He was hoping for a fry up, but she had ordered pastries and coffee. She started to talk about Thomas Hardy. She had read an interview with him where he talked about the influence of Hardy’s poetry on his first book. That was what had first drawn her to his work. Then she told him something he had known months ago, that Hardy’s novels had been a big influence on her work. Though, having listened repeatedly to her albums since, he only caught slight echoes here and there.

He was famished and drank and ate his fair share and watched the remaining pastries until he felt that she had had enough time, then ate those, too.

She was saying how disappointing a recent re-read of Return of the Native had been. It had been her favourite. She had been put off re-reading any of the others, preferring to keep the fond memories of the novels. The poetry stood up. She had never stopped re-reading that.

He once again felt pushed back out of the way. Her personality overwhelmed his own. She was a force. Not loud or obnoxious but insistent. She took her place in the centre as a given. Not that she wasn’t curious. Her talk on Hardy wasn’t a lecture, she coaxed responses out of him. It was a discussion, but not in the manner he was used to taking part in. He realised he was taking more care than he would normally take. His friends were drenched in literature, were comfortable with their knowledge, sure of their interpretations, but he sensed she was not as comfortable. So, he pulled his punches.

If Lucy had been there, she would have kept quiet, too, he thought, but how she would laughed once they were alone. Lucy. There were unanswered messages from Lucy on his phone. The knowledge pressed against him. Had been pressing against him all morning.

He knew he would confess. It was a rotten thing to do. But for him the only thing to do. Their life together had been built on trust. It had been the guiding light of their art. Both their childhoods had been fractured and their relationship had given them back their faith in people.

Being honest would smash all that, but not being honest would, too. Sooner or later. It was inevitable. Theirs was a finely tuned partnership. The smallest changes were registered. Honesty was the only possible way forward. She may understand, like he hoped he would understand if she cheated. He’d always been liberal minded in theory. But would he understand though? In reality.

Lucy had worked as a publicist the first year out of university. She had been thrown together with many famous men. Often arriving home in the early hours of the morning. These were charismatic men, too, and she had been in her early twenties. Of course, he had been jealous. How would he feel if Lucy had come home to him saying, I’m not sure how it happened, it was the last thing I ever expected to do but somehow, I ended up sleeping with Boris Johnson. And I’m pregnant and I’m keeping it.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘I was thinking about Boris Johnson fucking my wife.’

‘That’s an unpleasant thought.’

‘I know you’re right about all this. I should lie. But I can’t.’

‘More fool you.’

‘So, you’ll just waltz in and take up where you left off?’

‘No. It isn’t easy. Sometimes I feel like I will combust in the heat of the shame I feel. But it passes. What we share is greater than this sort of thing.’

‘This sort of thing.’

‘Yes. A sordid one-night stand with a near stranger.’

‘Sounds like you’re quite used to this sort of thing.’

‘Did you just slut shame me?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

She laughed.

‘I am away for months at a time. Sometimes these things just happen. I deny myself ninety out of hundred opportunities. Occasionally I give in.’

He took comfort from this. That he was one of many. It lessened the burden on him. Took some of the responsibility from him. It was not actually true though.

‘I’m surprised this is your first. It is, isn’t it?’

He nodded.

‘You’ve been at this a while now. You get around. Lonely nights in hotels. Waking up and having to check your itinerary to work out where you are. Everyone is looking at you. Everyone wants to talk to you. You’re being pulled this way and that. No one has broken through and tempted you up to their room?’

‘None of that sounds like my experience. Being lonely, certainly, but not the rest. The literary world is not a sexy place.’

‘What about other writers? I can think a few I’d like to fuck. You’d go up to Zadie Smith’s room if asked, surely.’

Her phone rang. She answered it. It was her partner. She told him where she was, not who she was with. Then she proceeded to have an ordinary conversation with him, moving to the bed to get more comfortable.

The call lasted an hour. In that time, he had showered and dressed. He had plugged in his phone which was nearly dead and found the book he had been reading - he never went anywhere without a book - and took it into the balcony to read in the pale sunlight.

He wasn’t reading, though. He was listening. He stayed because he wasn’t meant to be there. He was firmly placed inside her private world. This was her unfiltered. When would an opportunity like this come again?

She and her partner discussed an upcoming family dinner, picking up her prescription, his new bicycle, the neighbour trimming their hedges for them, cleaning out the chicken coop, the email they both got from the studio bosses, and she read out an unfinished poem she had written which sounded a lot like a pen portrait of him and discussed what time her train would arrive in Cornwall.

What would he say if Lucy called? Could he pull all that off? Could he be nonchalant? No chance. If his phone rang and it was Lucy, he’d sooner throw himself off the balcony than face that test.

Coward. Swine. Adulterer. Liar. He would never write another true word. How could he? Liar. Liar. Not yet though. He hadn’t lied yet. He had put that off. It was eleven. Eleven. This was unprecedented behaviour. He knew the silence was speaking for him. But he couldn’t face the messages on his phone.

Her conversation ended. He went in and she ignored him, tapping something into her phone. Her robe had dropped open. Her breasts were partly exposed. He picked up his phone. There was a new message from Lucy. He had counted four. But to find out if there were more, he would have to look and by looking she would know and that would be that. He sat on the bed and then lay down. She had been sitting cross legged but now she lifted her bare legs and lay them over him.

‘You’re very dressed.’

‘I have to go.’

‘So go.’

Her brutality shocked him. He closed his eyes.

‘I don’t think you want to go.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘I think I was the fuck off your life, and you will follow me to the ends of the earth. Cuntstruck.’

He remained silent.

‘I think everything up until now is meaningless. I think you’re wondering how you used to get on without me. I think you’ve forgotten how to be you.’

He laughed.

‘You might be right.’

‘I usually am. So, what will you do? Go and try to remember how to be you? Or stay and find out who you could be?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I can’t leave here in the clothes I walked in wearing. I have arranged to have some clothes sent. They’ll be here in a couple of hours. I am saying stay and see what happens.’

He raised his hands to his face.

‘We could stay another night. Another two nights. We could stay the week in this room. Be rock’n’roll. Or we could go to Paris. Be poets. We could spend a month together. Be lovers. That would make everything worthwhile.’

‘Everything?’

‘Well, if you tell her what we’ve done your marriage is over and for what? A one-night stand? If you’re gonna fuck up your life, you might as well stay and fuck me until you die of exhaustion. Don’t you think?’

‘I have to go.’

Without another word he gathered his things and left. She was laughing as he went.

‘I’ll still be here when you come back,’ she said, through the closing door.

When he checked out it was explained that the room had been paid for. He told them his partner had a later train and would check out by two. He almost ran to the tube station. No phone coverage under the ground. He had time to come to a decision. He had to take a step. To lie or not to lie. It was only once he was on the high street of the satellite town where his parents-in-law lived, where he had lived with Lucy and Aaron since the pandemic, that he felt brave enough to open her messages.

First one:
When will you be home?

Second one:
?

Third one:
I hope you’re alright.

The first three had all been sent last night.

The fourth one:
It doesn’t take a genius to work out what happened last night. I am far from surprised. But even so, I thought we meant more to you than that. Don’t bother coming home. I’ll have your things boxed and ready to send to you once you’ve worked out what you’re doing. It’s not the great wrench it might have been. Since Gambit was published you haven’t been the same. You’ve barely been here and when you have been here you were always writing, which means long absences even when you’re standing right in front of us. So, no, it won’t be that difficult. Not for Aaron either. We’ve been just fine without you before; we’ll be fine when you’re gone more permanently. As you see I’ve given this a lot of thought. I’m surprised you held out this long. I am disappointed I held out. I love you, you are probably, annoyingly, the love of my life, but I won’t sacrifice myself to that love and I certainly won’t sacrifice Aaron. Go be brilliant elsewhere, we’ll be fine.’

He took no further steps.

About the author
John Purcell is the author of five published works of fiction. The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy published by Penguin Random House and The Lessons and The Girl on the Page published by 4th Estate.

1 Comment

Why are so many authors making less than the minimum wage?

11/8/2022

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Is there a way to change the system in Australia so more published authors make a comfortable living from their writing?

Keeping in mind the odds against them:

The huge number of books already available to readers - in libraries, on the shelves at home, borrowed from friends etc, and that book sales in 2020, a good year in sales, hit 67 million books, which is only 2.6 books for each Australian (and the vast proportion of those are old titles).

The competition. Hundreds (thousands?) of authors get published every year in Australia, most sell below a thousand copies each (at best a few thousand dollars for six months to X number of year's work) and these authors must fight each other for the marketing dollar and the ever shrinking book coverage in the shrinking traditional media.

The drift to online bookshops. Before the internet the range of books available to the reader was finite, because bookshops were finite. So at any given moment there might be between 10,000 & 100,000 titles available to buy. Since the advent of online shops, there are millions.

The influence of social media. Recent trends have been drawing readers to backlist titles (titles published more than a year ago) which is great for the chosen few but has played havoc with new book sales drivers like the bestseller lists.

And then there is the media obsession with the debut. A debut is a story. Rags to riches, overcoming adversity etc. Plus, a debut is new. Shiny. It's an understandable obsession. And publishers have to feed this need, dragging marketing spend (thus potential sales) from mid career authors to do so.

The publishing model itself. Jackie French once told me an author's viability is in their backlist. The same goes for publishers. The more they publish the greater chance of striking publishing gold - a perennial bestseller. The more of these they have the better for their bottom line.

So publishing is a numbers game, and the more they publish the greater their chance of winning. Most authors just make up the numbers. On occasion, a book secured for a paltry advance becomes a bestseller. These outliers are like crack cocaine for publishers.

Publishers can't count on the outliers though, so they try to manufacture bestsellers. They might throw a quarter of a million dollars at a couple of celebrities and a sportsperson, or an retiring politician - blowing their yearly budget - ensuring their other authors get greatly reduced advances.

Back to Jackie French's point. Backlist being the revenue engine for an author. But how do you develop a backlist in an industry obsessed with the new? Getting your second or third or fourth book published is just as difficult as the first, if your first didn't break sales records.

Having kept all of this in mind, is there a way to change the system in Australia so more published authors make a comfortable living from their writing?

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That time I lost my faith in humanity

10/7/2022

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I can’t say I’ve ever been described as an optimist. Curmudgeon, yes, but optimist, no. Which surprises me as I have always harboured a faith in human progress. Living to eighty is better than living to forty. Surfing the internet is better than sitting through a Latin mass. Flying around the globe is better than trying to walk it. Democracy is better than all other forms of government. I suppose this made me some kind of humanist. Things always appeared to be getting better in the greatest happiness for the greatest number kind of way. Until Trump, whose ascendency seriously shook and weakened the foundations of my poorly built edifice. I’m not entirely sure when it collapsed but I can tell you about the day I noticed my faith in humanity was gone.

March 2020. I was in my parents-in-laws’ house in Kent staring out a window at sheep scattered across green hills when I concluded the most likely place I’d find a gun was in the cluster of farm buildings down the lane. Farmers were always shooting something, I told myself. The hills were alive with the sound of slaughter. A gun would mean we’d be safe. That was the same day I googled - How do you butcher a sheep? How do you preserve meat? And later found myself browsing machetes online. Guns run out of ammunition, I recalled from some movie, but a blade is forever. I even wondered if my tennis strokes might make me quite a proficient killer if ‘worst comes to worst’. Not realising if I was thinking such thoughts, they already had.

I moved to the UK from Australia at the end of 2019. Partly because my English wife Tamsin wanted to move home, partly because Escape to the Country’s Jules and Alistair had seduced me with their promises of a thatched cottage in a gorgeous garden settled amidst green rolling hills only a short walk from the friendliest pub in the kingdom. However, those charming fellows neglected to mention that Britain was quickly becoming a basket case. Buyer beware I suppose.

Over the years everything everybody said couldn’t happen in Britain had happened culminating in Boris Johnson winning a thumping majority soon after I arrived, quickly followed by the signing of a Brexit deal. I might as well have moved to Trump’s America.

When a virus some said was like the flu and others said was like the plague jumped from far away China to nearby Italy. I took it personally. I’d been had.

The Chinese government was nailing people into their apartments and Italy was running out of coffins and The World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic, and what were the leaders of my adopted country doing to prepare? They were celebrating the return of a blue passport. I felt as confused as those who had voted for Brexit only to discover they had scuppered their dreams of retiring in Spain. Then, as if to cut off my escape route home, Australia appeared to implode. My compatriots were filmed punching each other in supermarket aisles over packets of toilet paper. The world chuckled one last time as I lost my mind.

I am sure I would have acted more reasonably if the world’s leaders had been more inspiring. It is hard to have faith in humanity when people in democracies willingly elect the kind of leaders those with no vote have forced upon them. From Trump to Modi, from Morrison to Bolsonaro, from Putin to Xi to Johnson, we were being led by men who were more like Bond villains than statesmen, skilled at dividing people not uniting them.

Then, as predicted by the government who signed the deal no less, Brexit began disrupting supply chains. Those fights over toilet paper everyone had been laughing at only a few days before, were suddenly happening in supermarkets in Britain. Was it because of Brexit or Covid? Didn’t matter. Empty supermarket shelves had fools like me panic buying non-perishable food and carrying out rice by the sack.

A sense of impending doom spread through the UK faster than the virus. I don’t think it was fear of the virus though, I think it was fear of other people. Those idiots will empty the supermarket shelves if I don’t empty them first. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my reasoning. It wasn’t a time for critical thinking. If all those zombie films had taught me anything it was that zombies are the least of your worries. Other people are the real danger.

In those early days of the pandemic everything was so obviously wrong, but Boris Johnson kept assuring the public that it was business as usual. I think my near hysteria had something to do with living in the incredibly beautiful and serene English countryside. I was living in a cosy crime novel. It was all so pleasantly sinister.

No that’s wrong, it was more like living in the opening chapters of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds after the Martians have arrived and the hero has witnessed them incinerate forty people but still goes back home for supper as he would on any other day. Some of his neighbours have heard about the arrival of the Martians and some haven’t, some laugh at him when he brings it up. The following day he tells us, ‘I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning.’

I was living one long unexceptional morning, and in the circumstances it seemed rude to harp on and on about the end of the world. So I prepped in silence, noting the comings and goings on the farm, Googled tips for salting meat and drew up plans for my bunker convinced I would end up saving my wife and her parents, and anyone else who sought refuge with us.

But I was a fool listening to fools. Governments and filmmakers around the world had convinced many of us that other people were the problem. That we should fear ourselves and each other. That an unprecedented event like a global pandemic would end in riots, anarchy and martial law.

But they were wrong. I was wrong. People weren’t the problem. In fact, here in the UK many people had already been wearing masks and had placed themselves under lockdown long before the government got around to doing so.

The pandemic tested governments and the people in ways that revealed the character of both. On the whole, the people did a damn fine job. More often than not it was governments who let us down.

Navigating the pandemic seems to have given people the confidence to demand better leaders. The US turfed out Trump, Australia has just given Morrison the boot and Johnson teeters on the brink. Could this new found confidence herald a new age? I’m optimistic.

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John Hughes, Plagiarism and a Literary Award Gone to The Dogs

23/6/2022

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I tried to explain Australia’s latest literary scandal to my family. It all seemed so simple before I opened my mouth. But in moments I had tied myself in knots and my family were smiling politely and edging away from me as though I had lost my mind. So, if I am going to try to explain the scandal now, it's probably best if I start from a place of ignorance, which is easy for me as I live there.

This is a story about an author called John Hughes. (Not to be confused with the director of The Breakfast Club.) Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him. I hadn’t either and I probably should have, especially since Hughes is an award winning Australian writer whose latest novel, The Dogs, was recently longlisted for The Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The Dogs was published by a very small independent publisher, Upswell Publishing. One of those publishers who pride themselves on taking risks on books they know have little commercial appeal but great literary merit. Having one of their books longlisted for the Miles Franklin would have been validating, and possibly lucrative.

Over the years The Miles Franklin Literary Award, in its longlists and shortlists, has championed the work of writers published by small and micro publishers and even a few writers who couldn’t find a publisher for their work and chose to self-publish. Some have gone on to win. The judges of the award, to the despair of some booksellers who would prefer more commercially viable winners, have a reputation for lifting very literary writers out of obscurity and onto the podium. Confirming a prejudice among some literary types that only small publishers are brave enough to publish real literature and the big guys only publish literary sell-outs.

This is where I got into trouble when trying to explain all this to my family. And I still feel tempted to go on a lengthy digression into the literary/commercial divide within the Australian literary world, but will not give into temptation, except to say there are deep and long lived resentments on both sides (and I once wrote a book about them).

So The Dogs has been longlisted and we were creeping ever closer to the date they announce the shortlist and then the winner. Still with me? Then an article by Anna Verney appeared in The Guardian Australia claiming that sections of The Dogs had been lifted from the Nobel Prize winning author Svetlana Alexievich’s non-fiction book The Unwomanly Face of War. (Just nod along as though you know who Alexievich is and murmur, love her work.)

Hughes responded quickly to these accusations and explained that the book took over ten years to write and somehow his original notes got mixed with his research notes and unbeknownst to him, some of Alexievich’s work made its way into his. Hughes' publisher, the highly respected Terri-ann White, stood by him and they both apologised. White then asks the Miles Franklin Literary Award to remove the novel from the longlist, which they promptly did. On Twitter a number of Australian writers expressed horror at such a mistake happening and mumbled ‘but for the grace of god go I’ and that was that.

But Anna Verney was not done; in subsequent articles, aided by literary sleuths and academics, more examples of literary theft were revealed. Not only has Hughes accidentally ‘borrowed’ from Alexievich, but there are slightly altered passages from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in the text, too.

Now Hughes comes out with a very different explanation in an op-ed. It is all part of his process, writers have long stood on the shoulders of giants, borrowing bits from here and there isn’t as uncommon as it would appear, if T.S. Eliot can do it, so can he. That sort of thing. His publisher distances herself from him. And I learned a new word, bricolage. Look it up, I had to.

On Twitter, the gloves come off and he is openly declared a plagiarist. There is a great deal of anger and resentment. Some claim that only a privileged old white male would ever think he could get away with such a thing. Others are angry that his publisher hadn’t spotted the stolen passages, that the Miles Franklin judges hadn’t, that well-known reviewers missed it. Some readers expressed embarrassment for championing the novel. Others said the fact no one picked up on the plagiarised passages was proof that literary types didn’t even read the boring literary books they were always making others feel stupid for not having read. And that the whole literary world was an emperor with no clothes, etc.

But we’re still not done. For a while now I have been following the Lecturer in Literary Cultures at the University of Tasmania, Emmett Stinson on Twitter. He always has fascinating and complex things to say about literature. Well, he and other academics have been reading The Dogs closely and discovering more and more examples of Hughes’ light-fingered approach to literature. (But Stinson probably wouldn’t appreciate my use of the phrase light-fingered. Too emotive.)

And if you thought things were complicated before, hold onto your hat.

Stinson and other academics swerve away from accusations of plagiarism. They are interested in the text and Hughes as an artist. As more and more examples are discovered, and the number of writers involved grows, it becomes clear that Hughes was up to something and working out what that was becomes interesting in itself.

Which makes me and others wonder if plagiarism on this scale is art. If a novel made up of passages from dozens of other people’s writing works as a novel and, as it was longlisted for The Miles Franklin Literary Prize, it would appear it does, is that something new and innovative? Or just something deeply cynical? The key element in all of this is attribution. If Hughes had a page at the back of the novel listing all of the authors he had borrowed from, would he still be on the longlist? Does a novelist, a writer of self-evident untruths, need to list sources? What if Hughes had only used passages from books long out of copyright? I don’t think Jane Austen gave anyone permission to insert zombies into Pride and Prejudice.

Other interpretations question whether Hughes expected readers to recognise the sometimes quite famous passages immediately and when none did, found himself in a tight spot. Wandering down this path we could even speculate that it was Hughes himself who tipped off the journalist who broke the story. Unlikely as that sounds.

If we set aside these more generous attempts at explanation and see it as so many see it, as a clear case of plagiarism, then we must look at the question of motive. If you’re writing literary fiction in Australia you learn very early on that there is no money in it. Grants, residencies, writers retreats are your reward (but only if you’ve learned how to fill out those interminable forms), and if you’re extremely lucky you win a prize or two. Stealing the work of other literary writers and passing it off as your own, is not a fast track to financial security. You’d be better off trying to write a crime novel set in the outback, like everyone else. So let’s cross financial reward off the list of motives.

There are other possible motives. He did it to win The Miles Franklin Award. But why would a plagiarist head towards greater scrutiny? Besides, winning the Miles is a one in a billion shot whether you’ve borrowed from Proust or not.

Maybe Hughes is thumbing his nose at the pretentious literary snobs who salivate over this sort of thing if they're let in on the joke. The adolescent in me favours this motive.

As Hughes has shown himself willing to lie about his work, first stating that his borrowing was an accident, then saying it was intentional, could we trust him if he came clean about his motives? Nup. So we may never know.

One benefit of all this is that The Miles Franklin Literary Award is being talked about again. Probably not in the way it had hoped for. In recent years, longlist and shortlist announcements have barely registered in the media. Even the announcement of the winner can be overlooked. (Name the last five winners without Googling them.)

Slightly salty writers like myself tend to believe that for the most part you can have integrity or you can be popular, but it’s nearly impossible to enjoy both. The Miles reconfirmed its path when it resisted the urge to give the award to Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows the Universe which would have been a very popular and newsworthy choice. And a few years later its principles are rewarded with a literary scandal. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Just with my attempt to explain this sorry saga to my family, I have ended up only scratching the surface. But you get the gist. Needless to say, all of Hughes’ other work is now being placed under the microscope. This is far from over. Oh goodie.

John Purcell is the author of the novels, The Girl on the Page and The Lessons.

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Short Interview for HarperCollins

13/5/2022

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The Girl on the Page is set in the publishing world. Jane Curtis, one of the main characters in your new book The Lessons, is a novelist. What draws you to writers in your fiction?

I recently unpacked over a hundred boxes of books. Putting them up on the shelves in our new house, it became clear that my main obsession was fiction. But a close second was the lives of writers. I have more biographies of novelists than any other subject. And memoirs and diaries, too. When I first started to write, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I bought such books because I was devouring fiction and always wondering – how did they do that? But you learn fairly quickly there is no easy answer to that. Biographies ceased to be learning tools and became a source of consolation and encouragement. All novelists are fascinating to me - whether literary or commercial, hugely successful or loved by a select few. No writing life is like another. I write about writers because writers can be anything, they can know anything, and their histories can be whatever I want them to be because a writer can emerge from any environment. This brings me a great freedom when writing about writers. But the main thing, the reason I am endlessly fascinated by writers, is they often exist in moral void, they are both in life and outside of it at the same time. Any kind of odd behavior can be explained away by the designation, writer. You can’t entirely trust them because you never quite know what they believe, what they know, or what they are capable of doing. And that makes for great fiction.
At heart, The Lessons is a love story, but you don’t strike me as a romantic, how did the story of Harry and Daisy relationship come about?

I have always loved a good romance. One of my favourite novels is Austen’s Persuasion, another is Forster’s A Room with a View, a novel I have read more times than any other. In both of these books the heroine is convinced by well-meaning friends that her love for the hero is a passing fancy, something to be outgrown. Anne Elliot from Persuasion renounces all hope of love and devotes herself to others. Lucy Honeychurch from A Room with a View gets engaged to a man who can’t love. They don’t know it yet, but their rejection of love has made their lives meaningless. Sometimes we are too young to appreciate how rare love is. So when I brought Harry and Daisy together in The Lessons, I knew I would tear them apart as Austen and Forster had done. I wanted them to learn what a life without love was like. I wanted them to learn how lucky they were to find love at all.
There are four first person narrators in The Lessons, three narrating events in the sixties and one in the early eighties. Tell my why you decided to write the story in this manner.

Harry came first. I once wrote a story about an old man with a secret returning to the village of his birth in the hope of finding peace, redemption or revenge? I don’t know which, I never finished the story. When I moved to the UK and found myself living in the gorgeous countryside of the Kent Downs, the old man returned, but he was no longer old, he was young and he had a story to tell me. The secret he hadn’t been able to share. That’s when he first told me about Daisy. Then came Simon. He wasn’t that interested in Harry, but he had a story to tell, and that story also involved Daisy. Of course, Daisy wasn’t going to let two men tell her story. Besides, what could a man ever know about the heart of a woman? So Daisy started to tell the story from the beginning, setting things straight. Trouble was, Daisy’s aunt Jane Curtis was not very happy about how she was being portrayed in all of these narratives, so she turned up when I thought the whole story had been told and began telling it her way. So that’s how things happened. I wrote each narrative separately. I gave them each free reign then plaited the book together with the separate strands. The hope was that by giving them each space, the truth of the matter would emerge whether they liked it or not.
Jane Curtis is a character readers will love to hate, or hate to love, was she based on real life writer? Edna O’Brien, perhaps?

Jane Curtis isn’t based on any writer. Or more to correctly, Jane Curtis is based on dozens of writers. Like many writers she is an uneasy mix of raw talent and self-doubt, of daring and cowardice, of honesty and deception. Having long been a fan of women writers of the period, I found researching women and women writers of the sixties fascinating. As a woman Jane’s wins are belittled and her mistakes are judged more harshly. But she manages to produce work that is admired in the face of unwavering opposition. In this respect, she is like Edna O’Brien, but also a dozen other writers of that period. As women they had to forge a place in the literary world that did not want to admit them with nothing more than bloody-mindedness. All while living in an era of great social change, in which the role of women seemed to change day by day. As to whether one should love or hate her, I hope I’ve shown her to be human, which is to say we should try to love her as we would hope to be ourselves regardless of our flaws.
You recently left Australia to live in the UK and were writing The Lessons throughout the pandemic, what influence did the tragic loss of life in the UK and the various lockdowns have upon your writing?

I know some writers found the restrictions of lockdowns left them barren. That the horrid state of the world left them too anxious to write. A fate I might so easily have shared. The state of the world makes me very anxious but I was contracted to write another book and I was already late by the time Covid struck. So lockdown actually worked in my favour. I know how horrible that sounds. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t do anything. I had no excuse not to write. And thank god I did, I don’t think I would have made it through these awful months, now years, if I didn’t have my writing to disappear into.

Order your copy of The Lessons here.

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My Obsession with Writing about Writers

13/5/2022

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I’ve been reading a lot of biographies and memoirs of novelists. They don’t make for uplifting reading. I mean honestly, what a miserable bunch writers are. Moan moan, drink drink, write write. Never satisfied. Always seeking out greener pastures. Boring everyone to death with their thoughts, boring them even deader with their silence. Their interminable reading. And that tap, tap, tap, or scribble, scribble, scribble and shouts for silence echoing down the hall. All the while torn between incompatible futures – that of austere artistic merit and the esteem of the few or the abuse of talent and shameless wealth and lonely fame. Both futures lined with the same milestones – divorce, financial disaster, anxiety over legacy, obscurity, addiction, illness, despair – leading to the same place, the grave.

Of course it isn’t all doom and gloom. Some get cut down in their prime. Like that newly published writer who was killed by a falling branch while walking down the Champs Elysees. I don’t recall his name.

No, you’re right, maybe I am choosing the wrong writers. I am a miserable bastard myself. It’s probably just unconscious bias. I’m drawn to the worst of them. There are probably hundreds of happy writers and as many biographies of them. Case in point, there’s a biography of Henry Miller on my shelf called The Happiest Man Alive. He’s dead now, too.

Even though I know how it always goes, I can’t help reading about them. There is just something fascinating about writers. At least to me. They are such odd bods. Walking contradictions. Brilliant and stupid. Exciting and dull. Observant and yet so blind. Especially to their own faults and their own talents.

I am talking of a certain subset of novelists. I can admit it. Not all writers wrestle with their own devils. Not all are artists. Some start out with no integrity so don’t live in fear of losing it. In fact the vast majority do their best, succeed or fail, potter about, develop a small following, get bored of financial insecurity and go back to the work they did before. Those few who succeed beyond their own expectations and actually make some money from their work try very hard not to disappoint their readership and present them each year with the same novel in different guises.
My 2018 novel, The Girl on the Page, dealt with all this – miserable writers, artistic integrity, the lure of commercial success, the publishing machine and literary prizes. So you would expect I was done with writers in my novels. But you’d be wrong.

Just as I can’t stop reading about writers, I can’t stop writing about them either.

When I wasn’t looking, a novelist snuck in the back door of my new novel The Lessons and proceeded to take over. Her name is Jane Curtis and she is a piece of work. But I kind of like her. The novel centres on the love affair of two young people, Daisy and Harry. It was almost a romance novel before Jane Curtis turned up and did what all novelists do, stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and brought pain and misery to everyone she claimed to love. But she does all this with such flair that we can almost forgive her.

The truth is, the novel just didn’t work until Jane turned up.

I have always been fascinated by stories that seem to be aware they are stories. The multiple endings to John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman, Kurt Vonnegut inserting himself into the narrative of Breakfast of Champions so he can be there when his two main characters finally meet, that sort of thing. Jane gave me the opportunity to play in my own small way.

The bulk of The Lessons is set in the 1960s, Jane’s first person narrative is set in the 1980s and interrupts the main narrative from time to time. A novelist in a novel will always bring an element of self-consciousness to a narrative. Throughout the 1960s storyline Jane is writing novels based on the events we are reading about. The reader is invited to reflect on what they are being told in light of this.

I feel I must have been influenced by E.M. Forster’s use of novelist Eleanor Lavish in A Room with View. As witness to events in the first half of the novel, Lavish is able to effect change, albeit unwittingly, in the second half of the novel, even though she herself doesn’t appear, because her much disparaged novel is read aloud to the main characters, and that novel contains a description of a kiss everyone has been trying very hard to pretend never happened.
The reading aloud of Lavish’s novel forces Forster’s characters to interrogate the stories they have been telling themselves. Stories within stories. We are all novelists. Some are just better than others.

Throughout The Lessons, with each of Jane’s interruptions, I hope the reader will become more and more conscious of her attempts to control the narrative. I found her voice irresistible. I gave way to her more times than I’m ready to admit. I ask the reader to keep their wits about them. But then, to my mind, there is no better narrator than a novelist. Who better to tell us the whole truth than a professional liar?

--The Lessons by John Purcell (HarperCollins Australia) is out now.

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My Life in Books

13/5/2022

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On Writing Women

13/5/2022

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I find it funny when someone asks me how I write female characters. As though women were some foreign entity only ever glimpsed by the fortunate. Rare and unknowable. But they aren’t rare, are they? Women are everywhere. My mother is a woman. So are my sisters. Come to think of it, so is my wife. And my step-daughter. My publisher is a woman, too.

The question isn’t as simple as it seems either. How do you, a man, write female characters? It’s a bit of a trap. It kind of implies that not only would it be too difficult, if not impossible, for a man to write a female character, convincing or not, but that a man really shouldn’t be writing women period. On the other hand, I may be over analysing it. Sometimes we ask a question because we don’t know the answer. I’m sure there are men out there who see women as completely alien and can’t imagine what they’re thinking at any given moment. I think the accepted collective noun for such a group of men is a Morrison. A murder of crows. A Morrison of unimaginative men.

Both my recent books, The Girl on the Page and my new book, The Lessons, centre on the lives of female characters. This wasn’t my plan. I didn’t set out to write about women. I wish I had that much say in what I write. I write what bubbles up from within me. One of the narrators of The Lessons, Jane Curtis, a novelist, wasn’t part of the original concept of the novel. Her character’s role expanded as I wrote. Her voice was the clearest in my head. It was like meeting an interesting person at a party and getting to know them over subsequent accidental meetings, until a friendship develops and you find you’re arranging to meet up regularly. I came to know Jane Curtis over time.

But she isn’t real, you made her up, shouts a heckler from the back.

As I said, my mother is a woman. A very intelligent, strong willed woman with feminist principles. And I mentioned my sisters – both a little bit older than me, both big influences on me as a teen. The eldest was heavily involved with politics as a young woman, the other sister was very interested in having a lot of fun. Each liked dragging their younger but taller brother here and there, as protection. I was jammed into the backseat of cars full of young women and taken to parties, nightclubs and bars. I listened to their stories. I was trained to see the world through their eyes. My sisters told me what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to watch and, somewhat disastrously, what to wear. And all the while their friends taught me other memorable lessons.

As a result I was never one of the boys. I sought out the company of women. Still do. The better question to ask me would be, how do I write men?

I’ll admit, writing female characters does hold certain advantages for the novelist. The inequalities in society means there is conflict in every aspect of their lives. A necessary element of drama. In this life there is still so much for women to overcome, from the mundane to the monumental. In my first few novels, my protagonist Emma Benson battles against the suffocating sexual mores of modern suburban life. In The Girl on the Page, Helen Owen hits out against ageism in the arts, while editor Amy tries to find something to value in herself. In my new novel, The Lessons, Daisy Richmond is told she doesn’t know her own heart and is forced by her mother and aunt to give up on her first love.

An early draft of The Lessons was in the voice of a male character. But it was too like being in my own head. Artistically, I prefer to see life through the eyes of women. In The Lessons the reader gets to do both.

But that damnable question won’t go away. How do I write female characters? I don’t know. My wife is my muse. I read novels by women. Memoirs and histories, too. Writing The Lessons I discovered Cat Power and obsessed over her music. I have many female friends, I take an interest in their lives, and I listen to them.

How do I write female characters? Women are half of all life. How could I not?

Learn more about The Lessons here.

The Lessons by John Purcell

What if your first love was your one and only chance of happiness? In our lives, some promises are easily forgotten, while others come to haunt us with tragic results. From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page comes The Lessons, a compelling novel about love and betrayal.

1961: When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but in 1960s England everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. When Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her second book, she is confronted by adult truths and suffers a loss of innocence that flings her far from the one good thing in her life, Harry.

1983: Jane Curtis, now a famous novelist, is at a prestigious book event in New York, being interviewed about her life and work, including a novel about the traumatic coming of age of a young woman. But she won’t answer the interviewer’s probing questions. What is she trying to hide?

This is a novel about the painful lessons life has to teach us, about ourselves, about love, honesty and morality. Echoing novels such as Persuasion and A Room with a View and the memoir An Education, The Lessons is a striking and powerful story about the loss of innocence and betrayal and how much we can forgive – if we forgive.

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What is Literature? - an excerpt from The Girl on the Page

New Short Story - Rainier

New Short Story - The Collaborators

Why are so many authors making less than the minimum wage?

That time I lost my faith in humanity

John Hughes, Plagiarism and a Literary Award Gone to The Dogs

Short Interview for HarperCollins

My Obsession with Writing about Writers

My Life in Books

On Writing Women

The Lessons by John Purcell

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​The Lessons by John Purcell

Bio

Media

Novels

Author Interviews

Book Reviews

Blog

The Lessons by John Purcell