Last month, a friend texted me to recommend Penance by Eliza Clark. As luck would have it, I’d already put it on hold at the library and my copy came in shortly afterward, so when I picked the novel up, my friend’s jokey mention that I might find it a little, uh, uncomfortably relatable was still at the forefront of my mind.
And she was right. Oh boy, was she right.
Penance takes the form of a true crime narrative written by an opportunistic journalist. The crime is the murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson in 2016, on the night of the Brexit referendum; the narrative is told through a mixture of journalistic reportage, the diaries of Joan’s killers – three other teenage girls – and interviews with friends and family. The girls in the novel are a generation younger than me. They’re immersed in fandoms or other obsessions, as well as the painful social dynamics of teenagerhood, and the way the novel expresses those is things is incredibly 2010s. The girls’ lives and interests are documented intensively on Tumblr and their relationship dramas play out via Instagram messages.
But I still felt it. Oof. Perceived. I’ve read that fanfic. I had a friend like that. I know that social dynamic and how it feels to inhabit it. I’ve never been a true crime girlie, but the mental gymnastics the girls perform to justify their serial killer fandom aren’t a million miles from those I've done myself in the past to explain my fondness for a fictional murderer or two. I’m not romanticising them like those other fans, the bad ones. I’m just interested in the psychology!
Of course, the flattening of distinctions between reality and fiction that happens in both those fan spaces and the true crime narratives the book satirises – the way they encourage us to consume real-world horrors like thrillers and sanitise fiction as though doing so might fix a broken society – is one of the things Penance so smartly teases out. But that’s a whole other essay.
The point is, yeah, it was relatable. And for me, that gave the novel an extra punch.
But in general, I have a problem with the book world’s relentless pushing of relatability – as obligation, as selling point. Patrick Nathan’s recent Substack essay, Faithless Reading, nails it pretty well, I think, when he says “most literary discourse has become fetishistic discourse, and most books are discussed in terms of how readers (buyers) relate to or identify with them”. I read a book because it’s the sort of thing a person like me is supposed to read. Look, this marketing graphic says Disaster Bi MC!! I’m reminded of a post by a former goth blogger (alas, now lost to the mists of the internet) which I read some years ago, but which has stuck with me ever since. The blogger wrote about how a subculture and style she’d initially found freeing came to feel like a straitjacket as she tried to fit herself into a narrow image of what ‘a goth’ was supposed to be, do, and like, to the extent that she only read books with main characters who dressed in goth fashion. This isn’t just the book as commodity to shore up the self; it’s the self as commodity in turn.
This version of relatability, where literature becomes mirror rather than doorway, relates to the double-sided coin of representation, which can be either the vital lightning-bolt of recognition that makes a text come alive, or a demand for lowest-common-denominator palatability that’s disproportionately aimed at marginalised authors.
So why, then, did Penance’s relatability hit so hard for me? The book never shies away from specificity. My first reaction to it was to say that it summed up two particular hells: that of post-2016 Britain and that of being a teenage girl. Some of its reference points (Tumblr culture, Brexit-voting provincial towns) felt intimately familiar to me. Others did not (I’ve been with my partner since 2006, so flirting via Instagram DMs makes about as much sense to me as Klingon). But its specifics never turn into empty signifiers, because they’re not the point. They’re means to explore relationships, social dynamics, habits of thought. Crow-on-Sea doesn’t need to be a real place to say something about the UK in the 2010s, and the individual reader doesn’t need to have been embroiled in serial-killer fandom to recognise how the dynamic of a small, aggrieved group of people can turn toxic and cultish.
For me, I think that’s where the difference is. The novel doesn’t simply offer itself up as an accessory through which a discerning reader can mark herself out. It’s not content with a wry wink and a nod and an in-jokey ‘Fandom, amirite?’ It’s not interested in making itself palatable – it’s too intimately immersed in the cringe-making, disturbing aspects of teen friendships and fandoms to simply let the reader take a step back and point and laugh at the weirdos. Instead it makes us complicit, whether because we recognise bits of ourselves in those teenage killers or because we’ve positioned ourselves as distant readers, consuming at the remove of entertainment and thrilling at the blurring of fiction and reality. It’s too gross and creepy to be a badge of belonging, and that’s what makes it work.
In conclusion:
Penance
is good. Read it, even if it doesn’t sound relatable.
One other thing I want to point to in this newsletter is this opinion piece in Modron by fellow Hay Writers at Work alumna Suzanne Iuppa. It’s a gracious and measured response to the frankly hysterical tone of some of the media coverage of Fossil Free Books and the Hay Festival’s decision to pause its sponsorship arrangements with Baillie Gifford.
As this row rumbled on over the early part of the summer, Fossil Free Books and anyone who spoke up in support of their open letter were routinely painted as irresponsible, at best patronised as children and at worst derided as cultural vandals, for pointing our Baillie Gifford’s investments in fossil fuels and in companies that profit from the war in Gaza. At a time when Welsh literature is reeling from the real cultural vandalism of huge funding cuts, leading to the loss of Wales Arts Review and Planet, the tenor of the coverage seems particularly brazen. If even a cultural monolith like Hay would collapse without questionable sponsorship, surely this is a sign that we need robust public funding for the arts, not that anyone with the temerity to suggest our literary festivals shouldn’t support climate collapse and violence ought to sit down and shut up.
Suzanne expresses herself with much more composure than I have above, pointing out that it is not harm to start a conversation, and I’ll give her the last word: “Do we want to ‘other’ cultural workers and audiences? What is surprising to me is that Fossil Free Books have been described as ‘campaigners’ or a ‘climate divestment activists group’ and not authors, booksellers, freelance and employed book workers, which is exactly who they are and why they have been challenging the literary festivals. Fossil Free Books are peers supplying the labour which makes Hay happen. They are crew. .... We can take collective action. We can take personal action. We can empathise, reflect and start conversation, though our art.”
Writing News
Three new stories out this month! The first, at the start of July, was
, a story about privatised public space and intrusive ads thoughtlessly combining to enable abuse, in
Neon Dystopia
. CW for intimate partner violence.
Next came the release of the BSFA anthology
, which includes "Digital Hell is Cold". This is also a pretty dark story, focusing on a controlling relationship made worse by tech-obsession and self-optimisation rhetoric.
Finally, out today in
(and slightly lighter in tone!) is "Between Worlds, A Garden," a story about two escapees from a destroyed world gradually building a new home. It's available now for subscribers, or will be free to read later in the year.
What I've been reading
I seem to be on a bit of a litfic streak recently, and the latest book I've picked up is Brandon Taylor's collection,
Filthy Animals
. Though sold as a book of short stories, it seems as much a novel as
The Late Americans
, with characters making multiple appearances. The precision of Taylor's prose and his eye for uncomfortable social interactions and anxieties is, as always, stunning.
What I've been watching
An assortment of horror films, the best of which was probably
A Quiet Place: Day One
, but the weirdest of which was Satanic serial-killer hunt
Longlegs.
I'm not sure I'd say it was good, but I certainly wasn't bored.
What I've been listening to
I headed back to the Nineties at the start of the month to see Suede and the Manic Street Preachers, two of my favourite bands, at Cardiff Castle. Unfortunately, I also got to relive the parts of my teenage gigging days that involved "squelchy shoes" and "huddling under a tree eating chips to keep warm", but still. Those are some tunes, eh?
'Til next time.
JL