Stella Duffy (photo: Geraint Lewis)
‘Mostly it takes work’
Zoë Fairbairns meets Stella Duffy
Someone has dumped a sofa on the corner of my street. It’s quite an ugly sofa, but it offers a pleasing moment of serendipity as I pass it on my way to the bus stop. I’m en route to interview novelist, playwright, performer, editor, blogger and Guild member Stella Duffy, whose latest novel The Room Of Lost Things opens with a sofa abandoned on a street in a south London suburb like mine. Like hers.
A short ride on a No.3 bus, a walk up a hill, and I’m there: she comes to the door of her modernised Victorian terraced house wearing pale blue jeans and a red T-shirt, emblazoned - for reasons never to be explained - with the words TWO WEEKS. She’s 40-something, blonde and slight, with bluey-green eyes and golden freckles. She’s London-born but was raised in New Zealand, as you can hear in her voice as she jokes about how she hopes I haven‘t come all this way under the mistaken impression that she is the Poet Laureate.
I reassure her that I can distinguish one literary Duffy from another, and even if I couldn’t it wouldn’t be a case of “coming all this way”: we are practically neighbours. And we launch into the south Londoners’ bonding ritual of making fun of our north London friends and the ludicrously-mistaken impression they have that south-of-the-river is difficult to navigate: “Everyone always goes ‘Loughborough Junction? Where is it?’ and ‘never heard of it’”. You can see the performer in her as she mimics their air of well-bred bewilderment. “There’s no tube. People are always scared of what’s not got a tube. It takes me 12 minutes to walk to Brixton tube. So that’s nothing.”
She used to live in Finchley, sharing a one-bedroom flat with her wife the playwright Shelley Silas. (“‘Wife’ is such a useful word. It says that I’m a lesbian without me having to spell it out.”) “I wrote four or five books on the computer in the bedroom, and Shelley wrote half a dozen plays on the laptop in the kitchen. It was a very nice one-bedroom flat, but it was tiny. And when we came to look at places to live, we thought we could afford a house in Loughborough Junction.”
Apart from the extra space (each of them now has her own study, and there is a 60ft garden at the back with fruit trees, an almost-black clematis and “a slightly insane new Zealand flax” ) the move gave Stella Duffy access to, and membership of, a vibrant, multi-ethnic, multi-faith community, including an inspirational dry cleaner named Faisal. “He’d been to see a play of Shelley’s at the Bush Theatre at Shepherd’s Bush. And he said, ‘you should write about a dry cleaner. We know people’s secrets.’”
“It was such a great thing to say,” Stella Duffy recalls. “Unlike every other shop, with a dry cleaner’s you don’t go in and buy something new and clean. You literally do take in your dirty laundry. It’s not like a laundrette when you do it yourself. You have to hand it over. So of course it comes loaded with secrets.”
Some of the secrets get left behind - shopping lists and speakers’ notes, loose change and love tokens, inexplicably-stained clothing that is never reclaimed. The room where these are kept gives the title to the book, a book which manages, in the words of the Sunday Telegraph reviewer, “to make a dry-cleaner‘s beneath a railway arch in Loughborough Junction seem like the most magical location imaginable.”
The Room of Lost Things (Virago, 2008) is Stella Duffy‘s eleventh published novel in 14 years. Her first was Calendar Girl (Serpent‘s Tail, 1994) which introduced private detective Saz Martin, who has featured in four other Stella Duffy books but is now taking a break.
Stella Duffy’s other novels include tales of love and infidelity, celebrity, and untimely death, as well as a religious satire on the relationship between the Archangel Gabriel and a lap dancer to whom he brings the news that she is to be the mother of the next Messiah. (Stella Duffy is an ex-Catholic turned Buddhist.)
She makes no apology for her frequent switches of style and subject matter. “Genrefication is an ugly word; it’s an ugly thing as well,” she says. “I wish that all books were just available. Personally I would sell them all with brown paper covers, and not even our names on the front.” Her next book Theodora, (Virago 2010) is a historical fiction set at the end of the Roman Empire; she is at work on a sequel, and has just finished her ninth play, a version in verse of the myth of Medea. She makes light of the idea that this might have been difficult: “Euripides had already written it.”
She comes across as a ferociously hard worker - on the day I see her, she’s just got back from seeing the Gay Icons Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and a screening of Brüno, in preparing for an upcoming a panel discussion on Newsnight Review. She is a district leader of her Buddhist group, which meets at her house, she edits anthologies, writes book reviews, has adapted her novel State Of Happiness for cinema, and writes a blog called Not Writing but Blogging (stelladuffy.wordpress.com) in which she sets out to demystify the writing process. “I’m very dubious about writers, and teachers of writing, who speak about themselves as talented or about writing as art,” she says. “I think it’s a craft, I think it takes application and time and some skill. Mostly it takes work. Keeping going. Keeping at it. I don’t like anything that suggests you need a certain type of personality or education to be a writer. I think you need drive and tenacity and a willingness to keep learning.”
It surprises her when she hears people say they like writing. “I don’t, and neither do most of the published writers I know. I like having written. I don’t go, ‘what a glorious sentence!’ I sit there going, ‘is this good enough, will it sell, does it make me happy and can it make them happy too?”
She’s been a Writers’ Guild member since 1994 - she’s also in the Society of Authors, and, although she doesn’t do much performing at the moment, Equity. “I wouldn’t dream of not joining the union. My father would turn in his grave.” (Both her parents were socialists and worked in a timber mill in Tokoroa, New Zealand.)
She sees her Saz Martin books as part of a socialist-realist bent in contemporary British crime writing, but she does not belong to a political party. She left the Labour Party when they abolished Clause Four.
She cheerfully acknowledges discrepancies between her ideals and her reality: she’d like to see an international army of women going to Afghanistan to sort out the Taliban, but she herself doesn’t want to fight. She doesn’t really want her books published anonymously - that way she might lose the sort of reader who thinks, “Oh, I liked that Stella Duffy novel, I’ll buy another one”. And, although she disapproves of the practice of ‘outing’ lesbians and gays who keep their sexuality secret, she is quick to share with me (and my cassette recorder) the gossip about a high-profile individual we both know, who I had not realised (until now) is gay but hiding it. Times are hard for writers, and that includes Stella Duffy. With disarming frankness - and in keeping with her determination to demystify - she identifies herself as a mid-list author, and dispels any notion that might be created by her productivity and visibility, that she writes a book then sits back and complacently thinks, “’Oh, I’ll just get another advance, and it will be loads more than the last one.’” It‘s not like that at all, even for her. “Each book requires thinking, ‘will this sell?’”
Still, she thinks of herself and her fellow writers as being lucky. “Even if we are only making a tiny amount of money doing it, we are lucky to be able to play and enjoy it. I have plenty of writer friends who aren’t in the market at the moment. It will change. You know? The market wants this this year, or this decade. It will want something else in another decade.
“We can’t assume everyone is going to want all of us all the time. And I think for all of us, that is really hard to accept. We’re human beings. We want to be wanted all the time.”
She tries to resist the temptation of comparing herself with other writers. “We all have friends who are doing better than us. There is no point in comparing my work, my achievements or my bank balance, with theirs. What I can compare is, how was your 500 words of writing today? What did you do? That’s what we can compare. Because otherwise we could go mad.”
back to top