Rosemary Tonks — The Bloater with Rebecca Perry

This transcript is auto-transcribed and my contain errors. AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes AMY: Hey everyone. This is how The Guardian described today's lost lady in 1970. "She has a white Italian sports car, a French purple velvet trouser suit, and lives in a Queen Anne house in Hampstead." So yes, we love her already. KIM: Yes, we do. Her name was Rosemary Tonks, and in the 1960s and early '70s, she was a celebrated presence in literary London. She published six novels and two collections of poetry, and her admirers included the English poet and novelist Philip Larkin. The influential critic Al Alvarez praised her "real talent of an edgy, bristling kind." AMY: But at the height of her career, Rosemary Tonks disappeared from literary life. Her books went out of print, and for decades, almost no one seemed to know what had become of her KIM: Well, let's find out. Today we're discussing her 1968 novel The Bloater with the person who put it in our hands, poet and novelist Rebecca Perry. So let's read the stacks and get started! [intro music plays] AMY: Our guest today is Rebecca Perry, an award-winning poet and novelist from London. Her poetry collections include Beauty/Beauty, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Stone Fruit. Her debut novel, May We Feed the King, won the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and is now a finalist for the BOOKER PRIZE, you guys! This is beyond exciting, and it's so well-deserved! KIM: The novel was published here in the U.S. by Transit Books, a wonderful independent press based in the Bay Area. It's a strange, beautiful, and completely absorbing novel about a museum curator, a forgotten medieval king, and the stories we construct from the fragments history leaves behind. I absolutely loved it, listeners. Rebecca, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit! We are just so happy to have you here today! REBECCA: I'm so happy to be here! Thank you for having me, and for making me revisit Rosemary Tonks again. KIM: I have to ask, when I first invited you onto the podcast, neither the Waterstones win nor the Booker longlisting had been announced. Can you tell us a little bit about what the past few months have been like ? REBECCA: It's been completely bizarre. I had, like, six or seven months of the book being out and it being fairly calm, and then in the space of a week, both of those things happened, and it just, like, gear-shifted overnight and sort of took on a life of its own, and has just been, yeah, amazing, but quite wild. AMY: Yeah, and I mentioned this to you before, but Kim read the book before I did, and she texted me and just said, "This book, oh my God, it's gonna win awards. It's so good!" And Kim, you were right! KIM: I guess we know what we're doing! AMY: So congratulations from both of us. We're gonna be spending most of this episode actually talking about a different book. When we asked you to choose a forgotten woman writer to discuss, you immediately suggested Rosemary Tonks. How did this book, The Bloater, first come into your life, and what made you wanna talk about it with us? REBECCA: So my poetry collections are published by Bloodaxe, in the UK, and Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe, and Neil is the reason that Rosemary Tonks's collected poems were published in 2014. So I've been kind of aware of her for a long time. In the kind of poetry scene in London, people were kind of starting to hear about her again and understand that this person had existed and disappeared. And we talked about her in workshops a fair bit, and then this collection came out, The Bedouin of the London Evening in 2014. And I read her poetry then. She's kind of writing like no one else, but also this story, like … it's so rare for people to make such a splash and then totally disappear because they've chosen to, like, to remove yourself from literary life and success was so interesting. And then, yeah, over the years, I've kind of picked up her novels as well, So I don't remember exactly when I first read The Bloater, but some years ago, and it was really good to revisit. I read it very differently the second time. AMY: Why don't you tell us a little bit about Rosemary Tonks' life and career leading up to the publication of it in 1968? REBECCA: Yeah, it's really fascinating, I think, that it feels like it’s split kind of down the middle of, like, this incredible activity in the first half of her life, and then very little activity in the second half. But, um, her early life was really, really interesting. She was born in Kent. Her dad was an engineer, and he died in Africa before she was born. And then she was sent off to boarding school, when she was a young girl. Um, then she married pretty young in the '40s, to an engineer, and then she lived all around. So she lived in Calcutta, where she got paratyphoid fever, and then she lived in Karachi, where she contracted polio, which damaged her right hand, to the extent that she couldn't use it to write and paint anymore. So she taught herself to do both of those things with her left hand, and apparently famously wore this very cool glove on her right hand. And then I think she lived in Paris for a while, and then came back to London in the mid-'50s, and sort of entered literary society and just started writing prolifically, poetry and novels, and was sort of this energetic center of the literary scene. KIM: Lucy Scholes, whom we adore (she's been a guest on our show several times) wrote a wonderful essay about The Bloater for The Paris Review, and she notes in that essay that Tonks wrote the entire novel in just four weeks during the autumn of 1967. Four weeks! AMY: And apparently, Tonks had intended to finish it in two weeks, actually. She hoped it would earn her, in her words, "A lot of red hot money." KIM: Yes, and who can blame her for that? So Rebecca, before we go any further, would you give our listeners a quick spoiler-free overview of The Bloater? REBECCA: Yes, absolutely. So the novel follows a character called Min who is living in London, and works in electronic sound at the BBC. She has a husband called George, who is such a minor character, it's kind of hilarious. Um, and she's contemplating an affair. She's pursued by these two different men. One, an enormous opera singer who is the Bloater, and another man called Billy who is a friend. And then we have this cast of characters around her who, yeah, form this sort of, like, really energetic backdrop, I suppose, to her life. So we have her neighbor, Claudi, and a young student cleaner called Fritz, and her colleagues at the BBC as well. AMY: Let's hear a little bit of Tonks' own voice in the book. Rebecca, would you do us the honor of reading a passage? REBECCA: Absolutely, I will. Um, so this is a section from when Min is at work at the BBC, and she's been talking to her colleagues, Fred and Jenny, and she is irritated with Jenny at this point because she has been sleeping really well, and Min is experiencing insomnia. [Rebecca reads from The Bloater.] KIM: I mean, it's like, first of all, to get a sense of a woman in the working world, at that time, it reminded me of my 20s on the job. I mean, it's hilarious. Audrey Wollen wrote in The New Yorker that “every single sentence of The Bloater is funny.” So Rebecca, is that an accurate analysis? REBECCA: I was thinking about this in the run-up to talking about this book, and you're kind of thrown into this world with no real context of who anyone is. Like, you just enter her house, and you have to make sense of this cast of people. So I think the first time round, I was trying to kind of figure out Min, the character, and figure out who everyone was and the parts they were playing. And then the second time round when I read it, I read it much more with a kind of, like, an ear and eye out for the humor. I was thinking, is that true? Is it funny every sentence? I probably wouldn't go quite that far, but I mean, it's really, like, 80 percent funny. Even when things are quite grim, it just remains very, very funny the whole time. KIM: Yeah. Hearing you read it kind of makes me think of Fleabag or something like that. It's that vibe. AMY: Yes! And I would agree. The first time I read it, I was highlighting different things, and then I was reading it again last night, and thinking, "Now why did I highlight that?" I didn't even understand where my brain had gone the first time around. ‘Absurd’ is the word I would go for, which kept making me think of one of my favorite movies, and Kim loves this movie too, Withnail and I. Withnail's writer and director, Bruce Robinson, wrote an unpublished novel that inspired that movie just about a year after Tonks wrote The Bloater. And I'm not suggesting there's any influence, but just the idea that he's kicking around 1960s London at the same time that she was. Their dialogue shares that same kind of cultured, highly articulate people saying really bizarre, funny things. They're almost using hostility as a form of intimacy. So those two works really reminded me of each other, I guess you could say. KIM: I love that, Amy. There's, like, this level of, um, I don't know, hysteria or something is the word that comes to mind there, and I feel like the dialogue is deliberately refusing to do what normal dialogue does in a novel: explain the characters and move the plot forward. Rebecca, what do you think about that? REBECCA: Yeah, completely. I see the link for sure. Much about Tonks’s writing is very, very self-aware, very acerbic, kind of like self-aggrandizing and really louche and excessive, but really withering as well. And yeah, tonally, the two pieces are very, very similar I think. And it must be something to do with the time. The '60s. You've had some recovery post-war. Everyone's having a lovely time. But then there's always more going on right under the surface of a society that appears to just be in full swing. AMY: I read an article by the poet and essayist Michael Hofmann about Rosemary Tonks, and he describes Min's “agitation and extreme vulnerability,” and I think the book does feel agitated, right? There's like a sort of unsettled quality to it, and yet she does feel vulnerable. And going back to that passage you read where she's manipulating her coworkers to sort of get what she wants, she does have that kind of command in a way, but yet you also see how kind of emotionally frail she is at the same time. REBECCA: Yeah, it all feels very much like a protection of some sort, this, like, facade of appearing not to care about anyone or their feelings. And, that section where she's having the gout flare-up and she's in bed and is in loads of pain, and just relying on people to kind of stop by. That feels very vulnerable. But also, she's still getting exactly what she wants every time somebody does come to visit as well. It's kind of this really interesting power and vulnerability dichotomy. KIM: And that totally, I think, relates to Withnail and I too, actually., And then also the setting too, which is shabby, smoke-stained, bohemian London. Jennifer Hodgson describes this period in her essay on Tonks, as “a decade of relentless brown. Brown ale, brown walls, brown corridors, brown light, brown days.” AMY: And yet at the same time, these are culturally sophisticated characters. You know, they're working at the BBC. They go to the opera. They have these witty conversations, but it's all happening in the midst of this “relentless brown” as you said, Kim. KIM: Yeah, she really captures that combination beautifully. And in the scene where Min and the Bloater drive to the opera, I feel like it really shows it. Amy, do you wanna read that passage for us? AMY: Yeah. It's one of my favorite scenes from the book, actually. It made me laugh so hard. But I do want to first say, there's an earlier passage where she is wearing a fancy dress, and this is my favorite line, I think, from the book, so I just wanted to read it. Min says, "Good heavens, how worldly I am. I'm so well finished I feel as though I've been dipped in some sort of classical French ennui and crisped before serving." KIM: I highlighted that line too! I loved the whole scene where she's putting on her makeup like Nefertiti. Yeah, I love that. AMY: And then that word ‘ennui’ just made me think of Baudelaire, who was an influence probably. REBECCA: Yeah. AMY: So moving ahead to where she is going to the opera, So she's going with the Bloater, who is sort of a famous baritone opera singer. So he's excited about going to see this performance, she almost has, like, this twisted sensibility of, like, "I wanna piss him off by making us late." So they're actually rushing to get to the opera, and they're in his car. The Bloater's actual name is Carlos, and she sometimes just refers to him as B. for the Bloater. She's trying to do her makeup in the mirror in the car. So I'll go ahead and read. [Amy reads selection.] KIM: It's beautiful. REBECCA: I was just thinking actually it's quite funny that both sections we've read, she's just trying to wind someone up! KIM: She’s so cool. REBECCA: She’s so cool. I love... like, the visuals are so strong throughout the book, and I'm from, I'm from London, my family are all from London. So I kind of, what comes to mind is, like, these sepia photographs of my parents as teenagers. Yeah, there's something really evocative about the brownness, like, the banal day-to-day stuff. So there's, like, this great scene where Min is with Jenny, her coworker, in a pub, and they're drinking, like, brown ale, and they're eating rolls with, some kind of cheddar in them that's, like, crumbling and so strong that it hurts their teeth, I think it says. AMY: The grit of '60s London meets also the glamour of her, you know, being a singleton, and … actually she's not single though! No! KIM: Yeah, she isn't! REBECCA: She isn’t. AMY: Yeah, so okay, one of the strangest things about this novel is how little we know about Min. Um, we do know that she has this random husband, George, um, but he's kind of comically absent, and you're like, "What is going on?" Why is she having these romantic interludes with other men, but then just casually name-dropping her husband? KIM: Totally. I mean, at one point she actually leaves the room and turns off the light, she forgets that he's sitting there, which is like an unforgettable little tidbit. REBECCA: We hear so little about George. We don't get any explanation as to why she's kind of embarking on these potential romantic liaisons, even though she's married and this person seems to, like, rarely be in the house. She says something like she suspects he's living two or three other lives elsewhere, and that seems to be fine. Like, no one seems to be asking any questions about that. She's so comfortable with this, like, ambiguous and there's so much nuance to all of it. But it's also, like, think she's an incredibly straightforward character in loads of ways. You kind of come away with a sense that she just wants attention paid to her. I don't mean she wants attention necessarily. But she wants to be involved in relationships with people where she feels very much at the heart of them. I think she has “main character energy,” I suppose, is a really simple way of looking at it. KIM:I love that. That's exactly right. REBECCA: She's never sitting on the sidelines whatsoever. AMY: Like, the idea of ennui again, that's not an option for her. She's resisting that with all her might. KIM: Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about the Bloater, because he really puts the “love-hate” in the idea of a love-hate relationship. REBECCA: Yeah, he's, um, he's a real presence, isn't he? Like, every time he appears in the book, he's so there in the scene. There's a lot of, like, smells associated with him, and, like, it's incredibly, sensual in a way. But she's also really disgusted. And he shows up with these gifts and she's in turns absolutely delighted by them or really horrified by them and we know he's obviously attempting (we assume attempting) seduction in some kind of a way, but also how much of that is her telling us that that's what he wants, and I find that kind of interesting as well, that this person never gets to speak for themselves. We never really get to hear from him. AMY: He's very off-putting, and even as a reader, you have this, like, feeling of repulsion almost. But when you actually look at him on paper, there's nothing that he does that's, like, so offensive. I do weirdly remember when I was single, sometimes you would encounter guys that you're just like, [sighing] "I don't knowwww." KIM: Completely. AMY: She’s weirded out by herself that she is kind of attracted to him. REBECCA: Yeah. That's exactly it. I think it's that confusion when you find someone really, like, alluring but you can't figure out why when everything about them is telling you not to be. It's like she's compelled towards him in some way, and she really doesn't want to be and, and that bothers her. KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Which is great and is another reason her character is so interesting. AMY: She ends up just being mean to him all the time. KIM: Yeah, because she can. Yeah. AMY: I mean, what does she really want? The husband is clearly not providing what she needs in some way. She wants to explore relationships, but then she's always, like, putting up walls. What do you think she actually does want, Rebecca? REBECCA: I kind of, this might be a cop-out, but I feel like she wants to know what she wants, she doesn't know, and I think, she thinks by doing these things, it will become clear to her at some point. KIM: I don't think that's a cop-out. I think that is sort of true to life, also, um, Audrey Wollen, I mentioned her article before, she describes flirtation in the novel as “a way for Min to organize herself,” and I thought that was a really interesting phrase. It's kind of what you're talking about, right? REBECCA: Yeah, completely. That's her language for most of her interactions, is something like a flirtation, like a silliness, a refusal to look directly at the heart of something … certainly with her interactions with the men in the book, it does feel like the only way she's able to communicate is through this kind of, like, veil of flirtation and innuendo. AMY: You mentioned “main character energy” before, and I was also thinking about the recent “weird girl lit” conversation um, novels that kinda center on women who are messy, don't have it all together, you know, not necessarily likable. Do you think Min could be considered a predecessor to that sort of character in contemporary literature? REBECCA: Yeah. absolutely. Tonks talked a lot about... I think more in poetry, she said, like, she just didn't understand why poets, why writers, are so ready to pick up trivialities, but they're terrified of writing passions. And all she wanted to do in her work was communicate the passion of life and, like, the joy and vitality of it. And what you then get is this character who's very much all of those things, like having big thoughts and behaving in quite outrageous ways. And yeah, it does leave you with this character who's, you know, at the time, I don't think that was happening a huge amount in novels. And she's just kind of really uncompromising about the way she's written this character and presented her. There's no sense that we should judge this person or dislike this person. It's just kind of like she's wrapped up all her beliefs about living with vitality and put them in a character and been like, "Here. Here you go.” KIM: Yeah. Yeah, which is so interesting when … we’re gonna talk later about Rosemary Tonks a little bit more, but yeah, it's just so fascinating when you look at her and then you read this novel again and turn it all around in your mind. I wanted to make sure that we talked a little bit about Tonks' poetry too. I really loved “Bedroom in an Old City.” There's an excerpt from that that I felt like we could talk about in relation to this novel. So I'm gonna read a few lines from that. "And when she wakes, this London minx of seventeen, the whole city, the whole imperial rubbish heap of wastrels, scullions, houris, fauns, and Bedouin will look to this pillow where a life so young, secret, and clean opens its eyes that it puts mortality in doubt for possibly forty seconds." AMY: For possibly 40… KIM: Yeah, possibly 40 seconds. Yeah. There are so many... I underlined so many great lines in that. Yeah. AMY: So you’re the poet, Rebecca. Do you think there are any correlations between her poetry and the voice in The Bloater? REBECCA: I do. I think you can tell that they're written by the same person, and I don't mean that to reduce what she's doing. You know, they're very distinctive. But I think they have the same energy to them, the same vitality to the voice, the same kind of strangeness. Like, when she's describing something, one or two words sometimes won't do. She'll, like, list things and really kind of go deep into the description of something and look at it from lots of different angles, and I think she does that a lot in The Bloater and she does it in her poetry a lot of the time. And, you know, she's obviously very preoccupied by London at the time and, all of the kind of, yeah, loucheness that comes with that. And I think that clearly is a priority, is getting across to people the sort of like sensuality of life. And yeah, she's certainly doing that in her poetry and in her novels. It's really astonishing to have somebody writing really unusual, lively, weird poems and then also, novels as well. KIM: Okay, so now we are going to return to the mystery that we teased at the beginning of this episode. What happened to Rosemary Tonks? Because after publishing six novels, two poetry collections, and a substantial body of literary journalism, and she became a really recognizable figure in literary London, she basically disappears. Rebecca, can you talk about Tonks' struggles following The Bloater and how it affected her outlook on her own work subsequently? REBECCA: Yeah. It seems like her mother's unexpected death in 1968 was kind of the catalyst for her changing her life. She also had, you know, her marriage broke apart at that point. She was struggling with kind of, I guess, the legacy of those physical illnesses, but started to have real problems with her eyesight. So for, I mean, years at a time, she would really struggle to see and to be able to write letters. She moved to Bournemouth and became kind of reclusive and turned towards religion. It's kind of unclear, like some people say that it was sort of Christian fundamentalist. She seemed to have worked her way through lots of different spiritual pathways and journeys, and then essentially ultimately ended up living a very isolated life, apparently reading nothing but the Bible. The Bible was the only book she would read, and she'd inherited this astonishing collection of artifacts from around the world from her aunt, and she burnt them all in her garden and broke them. So like incredibly valuable items and just, um, yeah, ended up living alone in her house in Bournemouth, refusing to be published, or allow anyone to publish her work. AMY: That's really wild to hear about. When you're reading this novel, you don't expect that twist at all from the author. She worked really hard to prevent people from reading her writing in this later phase of her life, and her family ultimately allowed this book to be republished after her death. How do you feel (or how should we feel) I guess, about reading and also loving this novel that the author had really tried to erase? REBECCA: It's really tricky, isn't it? It's really, really tricky. I have thought about that a lot. The instinct is to think, oh, you're kind of going against the wishes of the person who produced this work. So, you know, Neil Astley has this really brilliant introduction to the collected poems where he talks about his kind of quest to find Rosemary Tonks to speak with her. He ultimately leaves her in peace at her wishes. But this kind of journey he went on, there's a reference to Oliver Kamm writing in The Times about this kind of like ethical quandary, I suppose, of engaging with this work. And he said that the creator of a work of art can no more decide its fate than he or she can decide its critical reputation. And I do kind of think there is an element of, once a piece of art has been produced and exists, you don't own it anymore. You do, but it kind of belongs to the world. That makes me feel a bit more at ease with the idea of reading something that the writer tried to completely erase is that, you know. Once something's out there available, it's for the readers maybe. But it feels weird. I don't know how you guys feel about it? KIM: Well, it was already out in the world at one point, so it's kind of hard to put it back in the box. I know she went to libraries and was, like, checking out her books and burning them, but they kind of were already out in the world. I don't know. REBECCA: Yeah. It's kind of a bit like you can't take it back. AMY: Yeah, KIM: it's already, in the world, even if people have forgotten it in this case. But there's something about that artistic energy being already released. Uh, I don't know. Amy, what do you think? AMY: If you think of it as a creation, it's like having a child. You know, when you're raising a kid, you learn that pretty fast. Like, oh, they're their own entity at a certain point, you can't control them. KIM: Yeah. That question of what can be recovered from another person's life and what remains unknowable, um, it brings us naturally to your novel, Rebecca, May We Feed the King. AMY: Yeah, reading your book reminded me a little bit of the episode that we did on Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. That novel is a mystery that sort of investigates the legacy of Richard III, and the mystery of the princes in the tower. Was he really responsible, or was he a good guy? KIM: Yeah, and we both love Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, which creates this vivid consciousness from a historical record that is incomplete, partisan, and often hostile. Rebecca, what, draws you to that uncertain territory between the evidence that survives and the life that we can then only imagine? REBECCA: Yeah, I think that if you wanna engage with the writing of history you have to engage with the unknown. I knew I had no interest in writing historical fiction in the sense of fictionalizing something that happened. I knew that I wasn't drawn to those stories where we are clear or at least think we know what happened. I wanted to kind of take the genre, which I love, and basically give all of the time and space to the things that are happening between things we think we know. So I wanted to kind of roll around in the mud of the huge gaps that occur between the birth and the death or the whatever, you know, three or four things you find out about somebody, after they're gone, and it allowed me to like really think about history and reliability and truth and who we're hearing stories from, and how we're receiving our information. That's what poetry is as well. You know, like I started out in poetry. So much of that is just offering things up to the huge gaps between meaning and just seeing what happens. So that's kind of what I did, but with a novel. KIM: Can you give a quick little introduction to your novel? REBECCA: For sure. So we start with a curator who works in buildings. Um, they are incredibly dedicated to their work, very exacting. And during a commission, they discover a king in the archives of that palace, and the king has this one-page, very short entry. She becomes instantly kind of connected to this king. And then we move back in time, and we enter the world of the king, and we spend some time there, and he's an incredibly reluctant, sad, ill-prepared ruler who refuses to kind of step into the role and his power. Um, and then, yeah, we kind of find out what happens to him and then ultimately return to the curator in the present day at the end. KIM: It's so good. I can't wait to read it again. AMY: I know, and I want to add that Lucy Scholes, who we mentioned earlier in this podcast, when I was visiting London, she was like, "Oh, you have to go to the Dennis Severs’ House," which is a house in London, and reading your book just really reminded me of that because that was the most meticulously-crafted, even down to the scents and the lighting and how the food was portrayed, and it just, it reminded me of your book so much. REBECCA: It's interesting you mentioned Dennis Severs' House because loads of people have brought that up, I actually hadn't gone there until after I finished the book. AMY: Oh, okay! REBECCA: Loads of people are like, "Oh, you've kind of written a novel about Dennis Severs' House!" And I was like, no, I didn't even, I didn't even know it existed until I pretty much finished. And then my friend said to me, "Have you been to Dennis Severs' House?" And I went there, and I kind of was like, "Wow, this man was basically the same person as my curator in lots of ways." And it was just kind of a really mad of like, I've kind of created someone who already existed and.. AMY: Well, no, in that sense it's better that you hadn't been there. It would have impacted you too much. I also feel like your novel is so, um … I loved it so much and I kept thinking, "Oh this would be a great movie." KIM: Totally. AMY: At the same time, once you have the director filming the king's story, it's suddenly the director's viewpoint and that's the whole point of your book is that everyone has their own lens through which they're looking. So I was like, "Oh, that would be really interesting how someone would even tackle this cinematically because of the very question at its essence." KIM: But it would be beautiful like The Favourite or Barry Lyndon. It'd be amazing. REBECCA: I mean, I would love it. It would be so fun for it to be adapted, but I also have no idea how a person would do that. It would be so interesting. KIM: Yeah. AMY: We were also delighted to see that Lauren Elkin, who's another previous guest on this podcast, she reviewed your book in The New York Times. She focuses on the curator's awareness that every reconstruction of the past reflects the person creating it, and at one point, the curator in your novel says that she needs a “safeguard against certainty,” which is such a striking phrase. Was that one of the central ideas that you wanted to explore, like the idea of imagining the past while also being suspicious of it? REBECCA: Yeah, definitely. And I, in a way, I did the same... So in the novel, when the curator finally comes to creating these scenes in the palace, she has the archivist basically come in and move things if they feel like they need to, and kind of disrupt the reality she's created. And as a writer when I was working on it, I have no idea what happens to the king. I have no idea what happened to the curator. Like, I don't have these answers to the unanswered questions in the book. I haven't got that information. It sort of feels like the experience I have is the same as the reader in that all of these options for the king, = you know, what happens to him, to his ending, I knew that I couldn't have an ending to his section. I knew that I couldn't be like, "And then this was, and that's that." It had to be this kind of like, “We don't know, we have many options.” And also for the same to be true for me in terms of understanding the story myself. So I was safeguarding against certainty for me, and then also, yeah, the same thing is happening in the book as well, I think. So it's, yeah, everything's just very wobbly. Everything has to be very wobbly. No one knows what's going on. KIM: Yeah, that's so interesting. It's funny so when we read The Bloater, obviously we had no idea what connections we would see between your novel and The Bloater, so, um, in May We Feed the King, there's important parts of the curator's life that's unstated, and that reminds me of the gaps in what we know about Min. Do you see a connection between your use of those gaps and the things that Tonks withholds from us in The Bloater? REBECCA: I don't know. I think Tonks wants to... I think she wants a reader to have the experience of meeting a person, and that's the information you have about them. She's not giving us loads of backstory. She's not explaining who people are. She's not, like, couching everything in loads of exposition. It's just very, like, make of them what you want to, in exactly the same way that if you walked into a room and met a new person, you would have to do that as well, and be like, "Oh, they mentioned their husband, but they seem to be with this person. This is weird." So I think she's throwing us into something. Mine is more, I wanted it to be like an exercise in imagination for a reader to create their own story and fill their own gaps. And everyone has, it seems, ended up with, like, a very different cast of characters and a very different visual world for the book. So yeah, I think it was probably a slightly different intention, but in lots of ways the kind of outcome is the same, in terms of what you're asking of readers. KIM: Yeah, the connection's interesting to think about. REBECCA: Yeah. KIM: Um, so like Tonks, you came to fiction after establishing yourself as a poet. Can you talk about how writing poetry might have shaped the way you approached your novel? AMY: Yeah, because this is your debut novel, right? REBECCA: It is, yeah. So I don't write poetry anymore, or I haven't for a really long time, but I know that I wouldn't have been able to write this book without that background. It's kind of the foundation of everything that I care about and want to do in writing. So I basically took all of the stuff that I believe in about writing, and wrote a really, really long poem, basically. It's kind of how I feel about it. So it felt like an extension of the form rather than switching forms. It felt exactly the same. Then I think I just held on to… I’m a really terrible planner. Like, if I had to say to someone, "This is what my novel's gonna be about," I would never be able to do it. I have to just figure out what's happening as I'm writing it. That's the only way I think I can do it, and the same is true of poetry. So I think it gave me this, like, faith that probably it would work out okay, and if I just stuck with it, it would form into something. It would become something. I could hold my nerve in that sense because I know that poems do that. I just had to do it for way longer with a novel. I really held onto all of those, like, poetic concerns, I suppose, and just, hoped for the best. AMY: Well, it was successful. KIM: To say the least. AMY: Listeners, the title is May We Feed the King. If you haven't already started seeing this in your orbit, you are going to start seeing this book everywhere. The response to the book has been extraordinary. Um, it won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and is now shortlisted for the Booker. I'm sure your fall has just been a whirlwind. REBECCA: Yeah, it has. It's really interesting, I thought of my book, and I think I still do think of my book as, like, a quite weird book that's quite niche, and some people really like it, and some people really don't get on with it, and that's definitely remained true. So I had this idea of it as like my weird child, and loads of people passed on it when it came to, like, going out to publishers 'cause they were like, "Uh, this is a bit niche, and we're not sure." Which I completely get, like, I didn't try and write a commercially successful book at all. So I had, as I said at the beginning, this period of time with the book where I still was like, "Oh, there it is. It's kind of in my orbit. It's fairly safe.” I kind of felt like I had sort of control over it, which is like, you can't have control over it. I felt like I knew what I was dealing with, and now I kind of-- it feels much further from me, which I think just inevitably happens to pretty much every writer as you see it kind of further away from you. You're like, "Oh, there it goes. That's not mine anymore." KIM: Yeah, someone way over here in LA feels ownership of your novel. Like, I'm so proud! REBECCA: Yeah, you jumped on board really early. I really appreciate that. KIM: Yeah. REBECCA: I look at it slightly differently now for sure. KIM: Yeah. AMY: What's next for you? Are you working on another novel? REBECCA: Yeah, I'm trying. I'm trying to do that. That's the plan, is to write another novel. Um, I think writing second novels is really hard! AMY: Oh, yeah. REBECCA: Particularly, yeah, I think if you've written something quite conceptual and, yeah I'm like, “Where am I gonna go from here?” And I have some ideas, but I think I need to make sure that I'm really patient and careful and don't rush because that would end badly. So I'm trying to be cautious… KIM: Be like the curator in your novel. Take your time. REBECCA: I need the book to find me and present itself, rather than pin something down and beat it into submission, basically. KIM: Well, trust yourself because you obviously know what you're doing, so don't listen to anyone else. AMY: And also, take a moment to just enjoy all this. You deserve the attention. Enjoy it! REBECCA: Thank you. I really am enjoying myself. I'm really trying to intentionally be like, "This is incredible." Say yes to everything. I feel so grateful as well. I know this doesn't happen to everyone, particularly on a debut book. So I'm kind of just like, this is a once in a lifetime experience. Let's have a really, really nice time, and be really present for it KIM: Well, we can't thank you enough. In all of this craziness, you still held true to coming on and talking with us, and we're so grateful. We loved this conversation. We loved getting to read Rosemary Tonks. We can't thank you enough for coming on. REBECCA: Thank you so much for having me. AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you liked what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review wherever you listen. It helps new listeners find us. We'll be back in two weeks with a fresh episode, but if that's too long to wait, consider signing up for our twice monthly bonus episodes where I talk more about books and history relating to Lost Ladies of Literature. AMY: Go to lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron to learn more. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew. ​