Writer Wendy Perriam confesses to Rachel Besser about love and loss, religion, Miss Whiplash and winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Wendy Perriam is unique. She is a captivating and prolific author with a good dose of chutzpah, daring to write where others prefer to shy away. She writes as she lives her life – rich in tension and conflict, with a twist of dark humour. Only Wendy would consider getting herself arrested just to experience life on the inside.
Her skill is to weave an intricate web of characters from a miniscule observation through the powers of imagination and fantasy. Her nineteenth book – and fourth short-story collection “The Biggest Female in the World”—is hot off the press. True to style, it promises to be full of tension, humour and originality.
What do you do all day?
I have a Higher Degree in Worry & Anxiety, so I waste a lot of time fretting about God, Hell, death and judgement (yes, I was brought up a Catholic), or about more mundane things such as have I disturbed my neighbours in the flat below by getting up at 5 a.m. I have always been an early riser and, since I’m very much a “morning person”, I try to devote the first part of the day to my writing. I usually continue for several hours, but some of this work will be revision and rewriting, once that initial burst of energy starts to drain away. I may also have research to do for a novel or short story. For example, last Sunday I spent at Heathrow, trying to look at terminal 4 through the eyes of an 18-year-old who has never flown before, or indeed even been in an airport. She’s the main character in a story I’m writing called “Indonesians”, which will be part of my 5th short-story collection.
On certain days I teach Creative Writing – private classes on two days, and at Morley College on Wednesdays. Alternating teaching with writing is the perfect combination. Writing can be a lonely occupation, as well as a self-centred one (concentrating on nothing but one’s own creations), whereas teaching provides company, stimulus and the opportunity to foster other people’s talent. In fact, I’m often both delighted and humbled by the talent I discover in my students, and I love watching them progress as their skills and confidence increase.
To make time for teaching, writing and family commitments (and for worrying, of course), I’ve cut out many things that other people may regard as essential: watching television, reading newspapers, shopping – and keeping up with fashion, which I loathe – elaborate cooking, and even holidays. Though sometimes, I suspect, I must seem as rigid as my old Reverend Mother!
What are you doing today?
The new academic year started yesterday at Morley College, so instead of putting my writing first, I’m working on my teaching: assessing my new students and their various needs, aims and problems, & planning my next few classes. I’m also reading scripts written by my private students for their workshop tomorrow afternoon, jotting comments and suggestions in the margins. I try to be encouraging. Harsh or negative criticism is no help to anyone, and may shrivel budding talent like sharp frost kills delicate plants.
Then I hope to continue work on my story, “Indonesians”. The ending is very tricky. It’s a desperate, madcap sort of ending but I have to make it believable and satisfying to the reader. Sometimes I get so involved in a story, I find I’m experiencing the same emotions as my characters – in this case extreme panic and disorientation. Oh dear.
What’s the best thing about your job?
Writing is wonderfully therapeutic. Constructing a novel is a process of bringing order out of chaos. By drawing on experiences that might have been dark and difficult in reality, the writer can transform such things into satisfying plot-lines, or use them for character development. And the actual process of writing is so thoroughly absorbing, it distracts one from day-to-day problems and is an antidote for, yes, worry!
And the worst thing?
Writing is a lonely job, with no colleagues, as in an office, to discuss common problems or simply have a laugh. My writer-friends will be working on very different things, and tend not to discuss work-in-progress anyway. And a writer receives no feedback or encouragement while working on the long and sometime arduous process of producing a novel or short-story collection. You have to just plod on, setting your own timetable and being your own boss.
Also, because my brain needs to be continually sharp, it’s sometimes hard to make myself continue if I’m feeling very tired or stressed. Occasionally I long for a mindless job where I wouldn’t need to concentrate so hard. In the past, I’ve done such jobs and some of them were bliss – being an artist’s model, for example. All I had to do was sprawl naked on a rug and daydream!
Who or what made you want to be a writer?
Two things – firstly, my rather eccentric family, and secondly, sheer wish-fulfilment. My paternal grandparents were one Hungarian and one Austrian, and my mother’s father was Jewish, but all this had to be hushed up, since it was deemed desperately important to be English. We failed in this respect, however, as my Hungarian grandfather landed up in a prison camp as a so-called enemy alien. As for my Austrian grandma, she told her sons, early on, she would rather see them dead than married. Thus warned, my father entered a Roman Catholic seminary to train for the priesthood, and, although he left after five years and did marry, he was always extremely strict and ascetic in his lifestyle. By contrast, I was, by nature, a wild and greedy child, so a clash with him was inevitable. In my work, I return again and again to this pull between duty, self-restraint and asceticism on the one hand, and licence, recalcitrance and hedonism on the other. I also write frequently about outsiders, as I never felt truly English, and, once I was sent to boarding school (to discipline me), I again had a sense of not quite fitting in, since the other girls’ parents tended to be richer, with big houses (we had a suburban semi) and, sometimes, their own horses.
Which brings me to wish-fulfilment. I longed for a dog (forbidden) and a pony (too expensive), but I could bring these things into being in my writing. In fact, my first “novel”, written at the age of eleven, was called A Pony at Last. The heroine owns not just one but three dogs, and eventually gets a beautiful chestnut mare.
In my later work, I could create people with those qualities I lack myself – the courage to break free and escape from other people’s expectations; the confidence to be wild and wicked, without a shred of guilt. Or I could depict eye-watering sex or roller-coaster romance – though rarely happy endings. That would be wish-fulfilment too far.
Your work often centres on the themes of loss, religion, sex and humour. Where do your inspirations come from?
My whole early life was steeped in Catholicism (I was with nuns from the age of 4 to the age of 21), so it’s a huge influence on my work – its symbolism & ritual, the stress on sin and guilt and self-denial, yet the satisfying meaning & structure it provides. With God in your life, you are never alone or resourceless. You concentrate your energies on doing His will in this life, in order to be with Him in the next. Thus you’re given a moral framework, conveniently laid down, without the need for hard personal decisions. Even earthly suffering can be turned to good account, since, the more blood and tears you shed – or so the nuns assured us – the closer you draw to Christ. As a kid of eight or nine, I’d put pebbles in my shoes, or force down double helpings of slimy tapioca, in order to earn Brownie points with God.
So, when I lost my Faith, this whole structure fell apart; my reason for existence, my moral universe, my strict but kindly Father In The Sky, all crumbling into dust. The nuns, outraged, banished me to solitary confinement, to contemplate my arrogance in presuming I knew better than the Church Fathers. Later, they declared that I was in Satan’s power and thus in danger of eternal damnation – a terrifying pronouncement for a once-devout child. This resulted in a long period of depression and insomnia, and even a suicide attempt.
My initial loss of Faith brought in its train a loss of health and happiness and of any sense of purpose. The world now seemed bleak and terrifying, and because I ate little and slept less (and was also gobbling tranquillisers like Smarties), I landed up in hospital with a so-called “life-shortening disease”. (I’m now an OAP, so the doctors were wrong on that count!) I was also told I was infertile – another aching loss – although again they were wrong, because, after 2 miscarriages, I did succeed in having a daughter – something of a miracle, in fact.
Why I write abut loss is that it’s part of the human condition, whether loss of love or innocence, of confidence, security or hope, of country, identity, child, partner or parent. In my 15th novel, “Tread Softly”, a black comedy about the tragi-comic goings-on in a Geriatric Home, I focused on the losses of old age – often loss of spouse and home, of independence, mobility and self-determination, and sometimes mind and memory, as well. I’m frequently touched by the huge courage of those who have undergone much graver losses than mine.
As for sex, I have always been fascinated by the subject, partly because it was shrouded in total mystery both at home and at school. I was so incredibly naïve and innocent when I left school at 18, I didn’t even know I had genitals, let alone the names for them. The nuns had told us that just one act of pre- or extra-marital sex would result in eternal damnation, so I believed that no one would dare to take the risk, yet when I got to Oxford, people were shagging away without any fear of Hellfire!
I sometime explore bad sex in my novels, because I’m interested in the huge gap between reality and fantasy. According to various research studies, many people are frustrated in their sex-lives (or don’t have one at all), yet the general impression given by our society is that everyone is experiencing multiple orgasms whilst swinging from the chandeliers.
The other thing I’m interested in is how that brief three-letter word ‘sex’ covers such an immense variety of experience – everything from a brief snack of junk food to a seven-course banquet with the finest wines. And since, even now, there’s so much secrecy about the subject, I feel that one of the tasks of the novelist is to open the bedroom door and shed light on what’s going on. How someone behaves in bed is an interesting guide to their character – and may be profoundly different from how they behave in public. I once met the notorious Miss Whiplash, when she ran a brothel in the Earls Court Road, and she told me that it was often high-minded and law-abiding professionals such as vicars and judges who would demand the most outrageous sexual services.
As for humour, what can one do in this sad, bleak world of ours but laugh? In fact, I love writing comedy, although I must admit it’s often dark in tone. “Fifty-Minute Hour” is my favourite of the 15 novels I’ve written because in it I satirise both religion and psychotherapy. Also, I divided all my own fears and neuroses among the three main characters, who are all seeing the same therapist, John Paul – named after the then-Pope, who is actually shot in the book. It gave me great pleasure to write a shooting-the-Pope scene, although, when I actually met John Paul, I was deeply moved by his obvious saintliness, and felt terrible guilt at having “killed” him!
Your latest collection, The Biggest Female in the World is just out. Where does the title come from and what are the themes of this collection?
The biggest female in the world, in terms of total biomass, is the invasive plant, Japanese knotweed, which reproduces so relentlessly that the infestation in Swansea alone weighs as much as 40 blue whales! I took it as a metaphor for the protagonist’s dominant wife, who runs roughshod all over him and cannot be controlled or put in her place. The story was sparked by an item I heard on “Gardeners’ Question Time”.
One of the joys of writing short stories is that they can be prompted by such tiny things – an odd line in the newspaper; a conversation overheard on a bus; a dusty old book in a junk-shop; a piece on “Woman’s Hour”. Something of that nature will jump out at me spontaneously and I’ll suddenly feel a narrative building up around it, taking me way beyond those particular circumstances.
Several of the stories in “The Biggest Female in the World” sprang from personal experience: a wasp sting that swelled my arm to twice its normal size; a train halted by a suicide on the hottest day last year; a visit to the Hackney Empire to see a production of “Paradise Lost” featuring a naked Adam and Eve.
There are many different themes in the collection, but one of the most important is the way that people use the power of the imagination to provide solace and satisfaction, or compensate for lacks and limitations in their lives. We may not always have the courage to be “the person we were born to be”, to use a phrase from my novel, “Second Skin”. Instead we often follow precepts laid down by our parents, school or society, regardless of the fact that these don’t fulfil our needs or honour our individuality. But at least we can live out the role in fantasy, as many of my characters do, indulging in fantasy food, fantasy romance, and even fantasy weddings and babies.
How did you win the Bad Sex Award in 2002? I believe you are the only writer who’s ever been nominated three separate times.
I don’t whether to blush or strut! The trouble is, people tend to misunderstand my sex scenes. The piece that won the Award – an extract from “Tread Softly” (the novel already mentioned, set in a Geriatric Home) was written very much tongue-in-cheek. Far from being geriatric, the heroine, Lorna, is a lusty 39-year-old, unfortunately afflicted with bunions, who has fallen for her foot-surgeon, Mr Hughes, mainly because he reminds her of her long-dead father. She knows this father only from his photograph, in which he wears a pin-striped suit identical to the one worn by Mr Hughes on their first meeting. Soon after, her husband makes love to her in his usual silent fashion, and she finds herself fantasising about Mr Hughes, who, in her imagination, is naked yet clad in pin-stripes – indeed, even his penis has a seductive pin-striped foreskin, enticingly rough yet silky inside her. The jargon he used at the consultation becomes bewitching love-talk as they build towards a mutual climax. “Dislocation of the second MTPJ,’ he murmurs in her ear, ‘titanium hemi-implant …”
“Yes!” she whispers back. “Dorsal subluxation … flexion deformity of the first metatarsal …” And so on and on to orgasm.
When they read this out at the awards ceremony (a glitzy affair, held, appropriately at the “In and Out” Club), it sounded absolutely nonsensical, and thus a good contender for the prize. But I had deliberately written it in ironical mode, and had also checked out all the technical terms with a real-life foot-surgeon, to make sure they were correct. One has to research even one’s sex-scenes!
In fact, “The Biggest Female in the World”, includes a story in which the wife of a much older man, frustrated by his lack of ardour, goes out on a blisteringly hot summer’s day, and, having encountered a gang of workmen re-tarmacing the road, imagines them all making rough, sweaty, brutish love to her, taking it in turn to pleasure her in public. The sex scenes I could handle – the tarmacing not so. I needed to watch a real-life gang of workmen and all their various machines, so that I could make the setting as realistic as possible. But such gangs seemed thin on the ground in our locality, and finally I phoned the Council and asked them where and when I could see tarmacers in action. (Did they take me for a tarmac fetishist, I wondered? – another worry to add to my ever-growing pile.) However, my research trip paid off, because the process was, in fact, surprisingly erotic: throbbing motors, panting engines, vibrating, shuddering machines. I watched the back end of a rampant lorry rearing up, up, up, like a huge erection and ejaculating spurts of sizzling tarmac into an open metal mouth that drew it in insatiably. And clouds of steam were rising from the tarmac, adding to the atmosphere of heat and macho power.
As for the other of my sex-scenes short-listed for the Bad Sex Award, I can’t actually remember which they were. But I certainly intend to continue opening bedroom doors, because sex is such a powerful force, creative and destructive at once, and so primitive an urge it can lead us to risk our health, marriage, career and even life in its pursuit. No wonder the medieval Church (and our medieval nuns) were so totally opposed to it. In the eleventh century, you could be sentenced to six months on bread and water for one single act of masturbation. Nowadays, teen magazines dole out blow-by-blow advice to twelve-year-olds on anything from toe-sucking to fellatio (although I’m not sure if that is progress!)
Many literary critics feel that you are underrated. Why do you think this is?
Well, actually it ties in with the whole sex thing. Because I’ve always written explicit sex-scenes, I’m sometimes dismissed as “steamy” (a description I detest) and thus not worthy of serious consideration. Some of my books were given very lurid jackets, which were entirely out of keeping with the subject matter. For example, my fifth novel, “The Stillness The Dancing” (the title comes form T.S Eliot’s “East Coker”) charts the spiritual and emotional journey of a woman moving from faith to doubt, and from the security of marriage to the uncertainties and loneliness of singledom. This book ends with a death, and with a vision of unity: “the simultaneous wave of creation, transformation, annihilation – all things interacting, no either-or, life-death.” This section required much thought and effort, and I even attended a conference on quantum physics, in order to better understand its paradoxes and mind-blowing implications, so as to use them in the book Yet the jacket of the paperback edition featured a naked woman floating in mid-air, and the sort of vulgar gold embossing associated with pulp fiction.
Another of my books, “Devils, for a Change”, has on its cover a woman, clad in a scarlet rubber leotard, riding a rocking-horse (again sexual connotations), wildly flagellating herself. There is, indeed, a scene of self-flagellation in the book, but only because the woman has been a contemplative nun for the last 22 years, and has just run away from her convent, escaping into an unknown and frightening world. She’s been used to whipping herself as a punishment for sin, and still has with her the cat-o-nine-tails issued for this purpose, and also the sharp, spiked bands, worn around the arms or legs, to inflict further pain and literally punish the flesh. After her first sexual deflowering (which she finds profoundly painful, in all senses), she feels such extremes of guilt and remorse, she whips herself so hard she actually draws blood. This, for her, is a traumatic and shameful experience, not the giddy gallop depicted on the jacket.
This ex-nun is a decent, caring human being, as is Morna in “The Stillness The Dancing”, but I also write about bad, wild, reckless women, who shoot Popes, or masturbate on trains, or lose their all at roulette and are forced to sell their services in brothels, and I suspect this, too, makes me unpopular with critics. I was once told by my then-publisher, HarperCollins, not to write any more books featuring neurotics and nymphomaniacs. Perhaps I should have followed the advice, but somehow I’m irresistibly drawn back to the transgressives, maybe because there’s a transgressive inside me, still struggling to get out!
Do you have any advice for someone who wants to become a writer?
Firstly, do persevere. Make time for your writing by cutting out some of the time-wasting activities I mentioned earlier. You don’t have to dust, or buy new clothes, or go to the hairdresser! Secondly, write from passion. Choose issues that fire you up, make you feel angry or elated, indignant or ecstatic. This emotion will imbue your writing with spark and bite. Thirdly, cultivate a habit of observation, rather than wandering blindly through the world. Develop a deep curiosity in everyone and everything; what makes people tick; how do they speak; how do they react to either tragedy or good fortune? What exactly happens when dawn breaks or the sun sets? How does the sun (or a snowfall) affect the colours in the landscape? If you describe such things vividly and above all truthfully, your writing will gain in immediacy and power. It may sound paradoxical, but truth is vitally important in fiction. We need to give the reader the sense that what we’re describing is utterly authentic, because we, as writer, have seen it, felt it, touched it, tasted it, lived it.
It’s also important to keep a constant look-out for subject matter and, here again, it’s a matter of cultivating “mindfulness”; of tuning in to every experience, however small or seemingly insignificant, in order to glean from it creative inspiration.
As for writing short stories in particular, the essence of a short story is concision. Too much exposition, explanation, or scene-setting will submerge it, and too large a cast of characters is equally unwise. The short-story writer needs to prune and hone, to concentrate on a moment of change or crisis, without providing a complicated back-story. The trick here, I feel, is to supply tiny clues and fleeting glimpses that, despite their brevity, somehow conjure up the sense of a character’s entire complex self, and leave the reader feeling that a whole distinctive world has been created in the space of a few pages.
Since short stories combine some of the elements of the novel (characterisation, narrative voice, a sense of pace) with some of the elements of poetry (intensity of language, economy, use of metaphor), it’s vital to balance these two aspects, keeping the writing vigorous and fresh, yet also taut and well-controlled.
And, however short your story, do spend time revising it: weeding out clichés, improving the language, intensifying the imagery. To return to my childhood passion for horses, you need to groom your story, buff its coat, polish up its hooves, remove knots and tangles from a shaggy mane or tail, and trim it down if it’s carrying excess weight.
The Biggest Female in the World And Other Stories by Wendy Perriam, published by Robert Hale, is available from www.amazon.co.uk priced at £12.53.
