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Overview
In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, a woman mourns the loss of her husband and son at the hands of one of history’s most notorious criminals. And in appealing to their executioner, she reveals the desperate sadness of a broken heart and a working-class life blown apart.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781451635768 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2010 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Spring
Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn't know about that I mean rock 'n' roll didn't stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse. Next thing you know there was Sonny & Cher and Dexy's Midnight Runners. I'll come to them later. My point is it's easier to start these things than to finish them. I suppose you thought of that did you?
There's a reward of 25 million dollars on your head but don't lose sleep on my account Osama. I have no information leading to your arrest or capture. I have no information full effing stop. I'm what you'd call an infidel and my husband called working class. There is a difference you know. But just supposing I did clap eyes on you. Supposing I saw you driving a Nissan Primera down towards Shoreditch and grassed you to the old bill. Well. I wouldn't know how to spend 25 million dollars. It's not as if I've got anyone to spend it on since you blew up my husband and my boy.
That's my whole point you see. I don't want 25 million dollars Osama I just want you to give it a rest. AM I ALONE? I want to be the last mother in the world who ever has to write you a letter like this. Who ever has to write to you Osama about her dead boy.
Now about the writing. The last thing I wrote was N/A on an income support form that wanted NAME OF SPOUSE OR PARTNER. So you see I'll do my best but you'll have to bear with me because I'm not a big writer. I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges. I am a mother Osama I just want you to love my son. What could be more natural?
I know you can love my boy Osama. The Sun says you are an EVIL MONSTER but I don't believe in evil I know it takes 2 to tango. I know you're vexed at the leaders of Western imperialism. Well I'll be writing to them too.
As for you I know you'd stop the bombs in a second if I could make you see my boy with all your heart for just one moment. I know you would stop making boy shaped holes in the world. It would just make you too sad. So I will do my best with these words Osama. I suppose you can see they don't come natural to me but I hope this letter reaches you anyway. I hope it finds you before the Americans do otherwise I'm going to wish I hadn't bothered aren't I?
Well Osama if I'm going to show you my boy I have to start with where he lived and I still do. I live in London England which I agree with you is a bad place in lots of ways but I was born here so what can you do? London looks like a rich place from the outside but we are most of us very poor here. I saw the video you made Osama where you said the West was decadent. Maybe you meant the West End? We aren't all like that. London is a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking.
My family was never rotten poor we were hard up there's a difference. We were respectable we kept ourselves presentable but it was a struggle I don't mind telling you. We were not the nice front teeth or the rotten back teeth of London and there are millions of us just like that. The middle classes put up web sites about us. If you're interested Osama just put down that Kalashnikov for a second and look up chav pikey ned or townie in Google. Like I say there are millions of us but now there's a lot less than there were of course. I miss them so bad my husband and my boy especially.
My husband and my boy and me lived on Barnet Grove which is a road that goes from Bethnal Green to Shoreditch. There are 2 kinds of places on Barnet Grove. The first kind are very pricey old terraced houses. The estate agents call them Georgian Gems With Extensive Potential For Conversion To Fully Appointed Executive Flats With Easy Access To The City Of London And Within A Stone's Throw Of The Prestigious Colombia Road Flower Market. The second kind of places are places like ours. They are flats in dirty brick tower blocks they smell of chip fat inside. All the flats in each block are the same except that the front doors don't match on account of they get kicked in as often as they get opened nicely. They built our tower blocks in the Fifties. They built them in the gaps where the Georgian Gems had incendiaries dropped on them by Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was the last chap who hated London as much as you do Osama. The Sun called him the MOST EVIL MAN IN HISTORY and he made the gaping hole in Barnet Grove that they built our tower block in. I suppose it was thanks to him we could afford to live Within A Stone's Throw Of The Prestigious Colombia Road Flower Market so maybe Adolf Hitler was not all bad in the long run.
Like I say our flat was in one of those tower blocks. It was a small flat and you could hear the upstairs neighbours on the job. They used to start uh uh uh very soft at first and then louder and louder uh uh oh my god UH and after a bit you could listen as hard as you liked and still not know if you were hearing love or murder. It used to drive my husband crazy but at least our flat was warm and clean and it was ours. It was an ex-council flat which is to say we owned it. Which is to say we didn't have to struggle to pay the rent. We struggled to pay the mortgage each month instead there is a difference and that difference is called EMPOWERMENT.
I didn't work I looked after our boy. My husband's wages paid the mortgage and not much else so by the end of the month things were always a bit wobbly. My husband was a copper and he wasn't just any old copper he was in bomb disposal. You might reckon bomb disposal wages would of stretched a bit further Osama but you'd reckon wrong if you didn't reckon with the horses the dogs the cock fights in the back room of the Nelson's Head and whether it was going to be a white Christmas. My husband was the sort of bloke who'd take a punt on anything so thank god he had a better track record with bombs than the 11.31 at Doncaster. When we were behind on the bills I used to get teeth chattering scared of the bailiffs Osama. Whenever I could squeeze a fiver out of the shopping money I used to stash it under the carpet just in case my husband blew everything one day and they chucked us out on our ear. There was never more than a month of mortgage under the rug so we were always less than 31 days away from the street or only 28 days if my husband blew the lot in February which sod's law he would wouldn't he? But I couldn't hold his flutters against him on account of he needed a thing to take his mind off the nerves and his thing was no worse than mine Osama I'll tell you about my thing in a minute.
In bomb disposal the call can come at any time of the day or night and for my husband it often did. If the call came in the evening we would be sitting in front of the telly. Not saying much. Just sitting there with plates on our knees eating chicken kievs. I didn't make them myself I wouldn't know how. They were Findus they were more or less okay they were always his favourite.
Anyway the telly would be on and we'd probably be watching Top Gear. My husband knew a lot about motors. We never could afford a new motor ourselves but my husband knew how to pick a good second hand one. We mostly had Vauhxall Astras they never let us down. They used to sell off the old police Astras you see. They'd give them a respray but if the light was right you could always see POLICE showing out from under the paint job. I suppose a thing can never really change its nature Osama.
Anyway we'd be watching Top Gear and the phone would go and my husband would put his plate down on the sofa and take the phone next door. He wasn't supposed to tell me anything about the job but when he came back through the lounge there was one sure way to tell if it was serious. They always knew which were the real bombs and which were most probably just hoaxes. If it was a hoax my husband would sit back down on the sofa and gobble the rest of his chicken kiev before he left the flat. It only took him 30 secs but he never did that if it was serious. When it was serious he just picked up his jacket and walked straight out.
When it was serious I used to wait up for him. Our boy would be asleep so there was only the telly to take my mind off things. Not that it ever would of course. After Top Gear there was Holby City and then it would be Newsnight. Holby made you nervous about death and chip pan fires and Newsnight made you nervous about life and money so between the both of them they could get you in a right state and leave you wondering why you bothered with the licence fee. But I had to keep the telly on in case anything happened and there was a news flash.
So I used to just sit there Osama watching the telly and hoping it would stay boring. When your husband works in bomb disposal you want the whole world to stay that way. Nothing ever happening. Trust me you want a world run by Richard & Judy. At night I always watched the BBC. I never watched the other side because I couldn't stand the adverts. A woman with nice hair telling how this or that shampoo stops split ends. Well. It made me feel a bit funny when I was waiting to see if my husband had got himself blown up. It made me feel quite poorly actually.
There's a lot of bombs in London these days Osama on account of if you've got a message for the nation then it's actually quite hard to get on Richard & Judy so it's easier just to stick a few old nails and bolts into a Nike bag of fertiliser. Half the poor lonely sods in town are making a bomb these days Osama I hope you're proud of yourself. The coppers make 4 or 5 of them safe every week and another 1 or 2 go off and make holes in people and often as not it's the coppers on the scene who get the holes put in them. They don't show it on the news any more on account of it would give people the screaming abdabs. I'm not big on numbers Osama but once late at night I worked out the odds on my husband getting blown up one day and ever since then I had the screaming abdabs all on my own. It was practically a dead cert I swear not even Ladbrokes would of taken your money.
Sometimes the sun would be up before my husband came home. The breakfast show would be on the telly and there'd be a girl doing the weather or the Dow Jones. It was all a bit pointless if you ask me. I mean if you wanted to know what the weather was doing you only had to look out the window and as for the Dow Jones well you could look out of the window or you could not. You could please yourself because it's not as if there was anything you could do about the Dow Jones either way. My whole point is I never gave a monkey's about any of it. I just wanted my husband home safe.
When he finally came in it was such a relief. He never said much because he was so tired. I would ask him how did it go? And he would look at me and say I'm still here ain't I? My husband was what the Sun would call a QUIET HERO it's funny how none of them are NOISY I suppose that wouldn't be very British. Anyway my husband would drink a Famous Grouse and go to bed without taking his clothes off or brushing his teeth because as well as being QUIET he sometimes COULDN'T BE ARSED and who could blame him? When he was safe asleep I would go to look in on our boy.
Our boy had his own room it was cracking we were proud of it. My husband built his bed in the shape of Bob the Builder's dump truck and I sewed the curtains and we did the painting together. In the night my boy's room smelled of boy. Boy is a good smell it is a cross between angels and tigers. My boy slept on his side sucking Mr Rabbit's paws. I sewed Mr Rabbit myself he was purple with green ears. He went everywhere my boy went. Or else there was trouble. My boy was so peaceful it was lovely to watch him sleep so still with his lovely ginger hair glowing from the sunrise outside his curtains. The curtains made the light all pink. They slept very quiet in the pink light the 2 of them him and Mr Rabbit. Sometimes my boy was so still I had to check he was breathing. I would put my face close to his face and blow a little bit on his cheek. He would snuffle and frown and fidget for a while then go all soft and still again. I would smile and tiptoe backwards out of his room and close his door very quiet.
Mr Rabbit survived. I still have him. His green ears are black with blood and one of his paws is missing.
Now I've told you where my boy came from Osama I suppose I ought to tell you a bit more about his mum before you get the idea I was some sort of saint who just sewed fluffy toys and waited up for her husband. I wish I was a saint because it was what my boy deserved but it wasn't what he got. I wasn't a perfect wife and mum in fact I wasn't even an average one I was what the Sun would call a DIRTY LOVE CHEAT.
My husband and my boy never found out oh thank you god. But I can say it now they're both dead and I don't care who reads it. It can't hurt them anymore. I loved my boy and I loved my husband but sometimes I saw other men too. Or rather they saw me and I didn't make much of an effort to put them off and one thing sometimes led to another. You know what men are like Osama you trained half a million of them yourself they are RAVENOUS LOVE RATS.
Sex is not a beautiful and lovely thing for me Osama it is a condition caused by nerves. Ever since I was a young girl I get so anxious. It only needs a little thing to get me started. Your Twin Towers attack or just 2 blokes arguing over a cab fare it's all the same. All the violence in the world is connected it's just like the sea. When I see a woman shouting at her kid in Asda car park I see bulldozers flattening refugee camps. I see those little African boys with scars across the tops of their skulls like headphones. I see all the lost tempers of the world I see HELL ON EARTH. It's all the same it all makes me twitchy.
And when I get nervous about all the horrible things in the world I just need something very soft and secret and warm to make me forget it for a bit. I didn't even know what it was till I was 14. It was one of our mum's boyfriends who showed me but I won't write his name or he'll get in trouble. I suppose he was a SICK CHILD PREDATOR but I still remember how lovely it felt. Afterwards he took me for a drive through town and I just smiled and looked out at all the hard faces and the homeless drifting past the car windows and they didn't bother me for the moment. I was just smiling and thinking nothing much.
Ever since then whenever I get nervous I'll go with anyone so long as they're gentle. I'm not proud I know it's not an excuse and I've tried so hard to change but I can't. It's deep under my skin like a tat they can never quite remove. It's like you can never stop our Astra saying POLICE down the side. The letters bulge up under the paint job and anyone who's really looking can read them. Oh sometimes I feel so tired.
I'll tell you about one night in particular Osama. You'll see it isn't true I always used to wait up for my husband. One night last spring he got called out on a job and while I was waiting up for him the telly made me very anxious. It was one of those politics talk shows and everyone was trying to talk at once. It was like they were on a sinking ship fighting over the last life jacket and I couldn't stand it. I ran into the kitchen and started tidying to take my mind off things only the problem was it was already tidy. The trouble is when I get nervous I always tidy and I get nervous a lot and there's only so much tidying a small flat can take. I looked around the kitchen I was hopping from foot to foot I was getting desperate. The oven was clean the chip pan was sparkling and all the tins in the cupboards were in alphabetical order with their labels facing outwards. Apple slices Baked beans Custard and so on it was a real problem it was effing perfect I didn't know what to do with myself so I started biting my nails. I can bite till my fingers bleed when I get like that but very luckily just then I had a flash of genius I realized I never had alphabetised the freezer had I? I'm good like that Osama sometimes things just come to me. So I opened up the freezer and dumped out all the food onto the floor and put it back in its right order from top to bottom. Alphabites Burgers Chips Drumsticks Eclairs Fish fingers I could go on but the point is all the time I was doing this I was very happy and I never once imagined my husband cutting the wrong wire on a home made nail bomb and being blown into chunks about the size of your thumb. The trouble was as soon as all the packets were back in the freezer that's exactly what I started seeing. So then I did what anyone would do in my situation Osama I went down the pub.
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for Incendiary includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Chris Cleave. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
INTRODUCTION
A distraught woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden after her four-year-old son and her husband are killed in a massive suicide bomb attack at a soccer match in London. In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, she tries to convince Osama to abandon his terror campaign by revealing to him the desperate sadness and the broken heart of a working-class life blown apart. But the bombing is only the beginning. While security measures transform London into a virtual occupied territory, the unnamed narrator, too, finds herself under siege. At first she gains strength by fighting back, taking a civilian job with the police to aid the antiterrorist effort. But when she becomes involved with an upper-class couple, she is drawn into a psychological maelstrom of guilt, ambition, and cynicism that erodes her faith in the society she’s working to defend. And when a new bomb threat sends the city into a deadly panic, she is pushed to acts of unfathomable desperation—perhaps her only chance for survival.
TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Incendiary opens with “Dear Osama,” and is framed as a novel-length letter from a devastated mother of a terror-attack victim to Osama bin Laden. How does the epistolary structure impact your appreciation of the narrator’s plight? Is the narrator’s run-on narrative style intended to be indicative of a semi-literate upbringing, or to convey the urgency of her situation, or to suggest that she is psychologically unbalanced?
2. “And when I get nervous about all the horrible things in the world I just need something very soft and secret and warm to make me forget it for a bit.” (p. 9) How is the narrator’s sexual promiscuity connected to her anxiety? To what extent does her sexual encounter with Jasper Black on the day of the stadium attack seem reprehensible?
3. How does their shared awareness of class differences establish an immediate boundary between the narrator and Jasper Black? What is it about their social and cultural differences that makes them especially attractive to each other?
4. How does the setting of Incendiary in London resonate for you as a reader? Does London function as a character of sorts in the novel, as it undergoes changes as a result of the attacks?
5. “Well Osama I sometimes think we deserve whatever you do to us. Maybe you are right maybe we are infidels. Even when you blow us into chunks we don’t stop fighting each other.” (p. 50) How does the narrator’s disgust with some of the Arsenal and Chelsea bombing victims reveal her own awareness of her society’s failings? Why does the author choose to include details from the attack and its aftermath that are unflattering to the victims?
6. How did you interpret the narrator’s interactions with her deceased son? To what extent do you think the author intended these glimpses of the boy as evidence of the narrator’s post-traumatic mental condition? How might they also function as a kind of magical realism?
7. “I am someone who is having a surreal day,” she said. “This afternoon I had a light lunch with Salman Rushdie. We drank Côte de Léchet. We discussed V.S. Naipaul and long hair on men.” (p. 107) To what extent is Petra Sutherland a caricature of a self-involved snob? Does she transcend that characterization through her involvement with the narrator? What does her behavior in light of the narrator’s discoveries about the May Day attack suggest about her true character?
8. In the text of her letter to Osama, the narrator imagines newspaper headlines that comment directly on her experiences. How is this propensity connected with the narrator’s sense that her life offers the kind of spectacle that others only read about? How does it relate to her relationships with the journalists Jasper Black and Petra Sutherland?
9. “Yes,” she said. “We have better sex when I look like you.” (p. 163) How is Jasper Black’s love triangle with the narrator and his girlfriend, Petra Sutherland, complicated by their similar appearances? How does Petra’s pregnancy change the narrator’s relationship with her? Does Jasper Black’s staging of a dirty bomb in Parliament Square reveal his social conscience or his stupidity?
10. How does Terence Butcher’s revelation about the truth behind the May Day attack impact his relationship with the narrator? What does his decision to tell the narrator the truth suggest about his feelings for her? To what extent do you feel his behavior before and after the attack is justifiable?
11. “A thousand City suits die and it’s good-bye global economy. A thousand blokes in Gunners T-shirts die and you just sell a bit less lager.” (p. 188) How do the social concerns introduced in Incendiary hint at the tensions between working class and middle class London in the twenty-first century?
12. Why doesn’t author Chris Cleave give his narrator a name? To what extent does her anonymity impact your ability to identify with her as a reader?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Did you know that Chris Cleave’s novel, Incendiary, was made into a feature film starring Michelle Williams as the young mother and Ewan McGregor as Jasper Black? At the next meeting of your book club, after everyone has had an opportunity to read the novel, hold a movie night. You might want to jump-start discussion of the novel by comparing the book to the film. Which characters are left out of the cinematic version, and why?
2. Are you interested in reading more by Chris Cleave? In addition to his book, Little Bee, Cleave’s parenting column for The Guardian, “Down with the Kids,” is still available on the newspaper’s website. Click this link to read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/down-with-the-kids
“Down with the Kids” offers an intimate view into Cleave’s personal parenting style, and his unique perspective on raising three kids in a turbulent time in our world’s history. Your book club members may want to share their favorite anecdotes from the column.
3. All of the events in Incendiary take place in London, a city with its own remarkable history and culture. Book club members might have their own ideas of what the city looks like, based on the author’s descriptions, but how do they match up with reality? What is the Eye, the tourist attraction where Terence Butcher reveals the truth about May Day to the narrator? What does the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square, where Jasper Black stages a fake attack on the city, look like? Where is Bethnal Green, home of the narrator of Incendiary, located with respect to Emirates Stadium, where the fictional attacks take place? To explore some of the fascinating details from the setting of the novel, or to view the city in greater detail, go to www.visitlondon.com
A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS CLEAVE
You drafted Incendiary “during six insomniac weeks” after the birth of your first child. To what extent is this kind of creative torrent typical of your literary output? Why did this book come to you so quickly, do you think?
I work pretty fast when I’m fired up about an issue, and then I repent – or edit – at leisure. For ‘Incendiary’ I worked quickly because the world was in crisis and it precipitated a crisis in me, in my susceptible state of new parenthood. I was writing in the spring of 2004, in the immediate aftermath of the Al Qaeda-inspired bombings in Madrid— in which over 200 people died—and during the period when details were emerging about the horror of the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. I was thus writing at a period when atrocities were being committed by people on both sides of what was then being called the “War Against Terror”. I became interested by the notion that when the civilized nations declare war on a noun, writers become combatants whether they like it or not. I believe in the effectiveness of persuasion rather than coercion, so I felt that it ought to be possible to use words, rather than heavy ordnance, to effect attitude change on both sides of a war that seemed insane to me, both in its conception and in its execution. ‘Incendiary’ was my attempt at that persuasion. My objective was to prove, giving examples and showing my working, the sanctity of human life on both sides of the conflict. Maybe it was a naive aim, and certainly my execution was imperfect. All I can say is that it seemed extremely urgent to me, so I didn’t spare myself until it was done. I probably pushed myself too hard—I had some health problems afterwards – but I’m still proud of the book and the intent behind it. I’m glad I managed to raise my hand at the time the War Against Terror was being waged and to say: “Excuse me, but this is insane.”
The publication of Incendiary in Britain on July 7, 2005, coincided with a series of coordinated terrorist attacks on mass transportation in London. How did this eerie accident of timing impact you personally and professionally?
I still think about the coincidence but I no longer comment on it, for the simple reason that 56 people died on that day and hundreds more were injured, which means that 7/7 is their day and not mine.
How did the pandemonium you envisioned in Incendiary (mass panic, public curfews, racial discrimination backlash, etc.) compare to the aftermath of the actual July 7, 2005, bombings in London?
Despite the difference of two orders of magnitude between the scale of my imagined attack and the scale of the real attacks of 7/7, people are fond of telling me that I wrongly predicted Britain’s reaction to a terrorist atrocity. The prevalent view now is that Britain’s response to 7/7 was stoical and reminiscent of the spirit of the Blitz, during which a shell-shocked London refused to buckle under the Luftwaffe’s nightly bombing raids. After 7/7, the very strong position of my nation’s leaders was that “these people will not change our way of life.” At the same time that this rhetorical line was being held, our way of life was of course changing rapidly. Civil liberties were curtailed, the British Muslim community was ostracized, and Britain redoubled its incomprehensible military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan on the false premise that our armed engagement there made London’s streets safer. The cost of that sustained and still-ongoing military engagement is a major reason why we in Britain can no longer afford a free university education for our children, for example. So I tend to give a wry smile when I’m told that 7/7 did not change Britain, and that the sentiments in my novel were false.
What were some of the challenges you encountered as a male author, narrating a novel from the perspective of a woman?
I like writing female characters—it forces me to think more deeply about my protagonist and to work harder at my research, rather than simply recycling autobiographical elements from my own life. In any case when I write a character I’m not particularly aware of writing from a “male” or a “female” point of view, whatever that might involve. Instead I ask four questions of my characters:
- What was the best day of your life?
- What was the worst day of your life?
- What do you hope for?
- What are you afraid of?
You worked as a columnist for The Guardian in London. In your skewering of journalists Jasper Black and Petra Sutherland, were you at all concerned that you might be ‘poisoning the well,’ so to speak, by exposing your profession to ridicule?
I feel that you have to write it how you see it, and to hell with the consequences. In any case I don’t think it’s news to journalists that a great many fellow journalists are insincere and self-serving, just as there are a great many fellow journalists who work diligently to serve their readers and to print only the truth. Like politics, it’s a profession that’s split right down the middle with regard to its practitioners’ positions on truth and integrity. I liked working for The Guardian because I felt they made a particular effort to employ the good guys.
How would you characterize your everyday experience of the differences between the upper classes and working classes in London?
Well, I’m writing this sentence in a small attic room of a rural farmhouse where I’ve come to spend some time working quietly on my own, if that answers your question. I don’t really have everyday experience at the moment. I’m either on tour with work, embedded in some situation that I’m researching, or writing in seclusion. I spent many years living and working in central London, and my feelings about the class differences there found a focus in ‘Incendiary’. I don’t think I belong to a particular social class anymore, in the sense that I now feel clumsy in all of them.
How did the idea of an epistolary novel first come to you? Is it a genre you particularly admire?
The epistolary form is interesting because the first-person narrator is not directly addressing the reader. Instead, they are addressing an absent third person, while the reader is a fly-on-the-wall and can choose to sympathize with the narrator or not. There is none of the sense of obligation toward the narrator that comes when the reader is being appealed to directly. In this way the epistolary form respects the reader and allows them to come to their own conclusions. It’s the difference between having someone talk directly at you while looking into your eyes across the small table of a claustrophobic meeting room, and being an invisible ghost going for a country walk with that person while they talk to the fields and the sky. By being less direct, the form is more intimate.
Incendiary was made into a major motion picture. What was that experience like for you as its progenitor?
It was fun. I’m always happy when someone takes a piece of my writing to another level, whether that be through art, or on the stage, or in this case in a movie. I’ve always wanted to start conversations through my work, rather than to have the last word. Often people will surprise you by seeing your work more clearly than you did, or by bringing new elements to it that make it much better. I was mesmerized by Michelle Williams’ interpretation of the female narrator of ‘Incendiary’. She was unbelievably good in the movie.
While many of your readers in America are familiar with your novel, Little Bee, Incendiary was your literary debut. How would you compare the experience of writing both books?
They were very different books to write. Incendiary drew deeply on my personal experience of living and working in London and featured a narrator whose thought processes were close to mine, while Little Bee required a huge amount of research and had two narrators whose lives and voices were worlds apart from my own. I had to raise my game to write Little Bee. It took much longer, too—two years compared with six weeks. I had to learn the skill of working alone for periods of months and years. Two years is long enough for self-doubt to become your greatest enemy, and the psychological knots you get yourself into can sometimes work themselves so tight that you basically have to give up unpicking them and use scissors on them instead. When I wrote Incendiary I naively imagined that my writing would change the world, but when I had written Little Bee I realized that what had actually happened was that writing had changed me.
You recently concluded your parenting column for The Guardian. What are you doing with your time these days?
Writing a novel that I hope will justify my readers’ kindness and patience, trying to be a help to my family, and attempting to not appear weird in social situations.