Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Dominic Lee

NW The novel opens with the protagonist on holiday with her family, just before she starts her final year at university. She’s in this amniotic environment, either sweating in a hotel bed or floating listlessly in a pool. How much does the novel describe a movement from childishness to adult subjectivity?

HA I pictured the trajectory of the novel being about a character who is isolated from the physical world and other people, who then feels she’s coming close to real contact, then that falls apart. At the end, she’s alone, but in a different way. I started and ended the novel with water, and I was interested in her immersion during both of those moments. She’s permeated but not completely submerged. I see it as a very depressing book, in a way. She gains experience and memories that feel very valuable, but the whole thing still feels quite meaningless.

NW The experience of being in love for the first time, whether it’s requited or not, whether it’s a relationship or not, can be an obliterating avenue to selfhood. It does often involve breakdown. But it’s hard to locate the protagonist’s behaviour and her experience on the spectrum between ordinary anguish and actual psychosis. Where would you place her?

HA It’s a good question. Once I started sharing the book with people and seeing people’s reactions, I felt like people were interpreting this character as very self-destructive. That wasn’t my intention. I was interested in the ways her behaviour was irrational, but I didn’t particularly see it as psychotic.

NW There are a few ways to describe the novel, and I wondered how you feel about them. What is your relationship to the idea of it as a campus novel?

HA I wanted her to be surrounded by objective knowledge that she doesn’t feel is giving her anything. The ideas and the lectures are interesting but arbitrary. There’s also the sense that the rest of her life is about to begin, that horrible realisation that adult life is here. I was interested in the form of the campus novel but without the campus content feeling meaningful to her.

NW Something that comes up for her a lot, related to both the university context and to her relationship with Luke, is this quest for truth.

HA She is fixated on the idea that she can reach something true, but actually, it’s not reachable. The question of whether, after all the events of the book, she still believes in a deeper, inaccessible truth, striving for something that feels like it exists but can’t be accessed, is key. That’s at the core of the relationship with Luke. The whole time, she has this feeling that there’s the potential for something true and valuable between them. It’s obvious from the start that that thing is never going to be accessible to her. Truth and love are very bound up together.

NW It reminded me of that feeling when the person, the love object, becomes a film over everything. The whole world becomes Luke in a very literal way. Trees, buses, all things are overlaid with his presence.

HA Which feels so specific and personal in the moment, but it’s an experience everyone has. I was reading Knausgaard the other day, and he was writing some similar things about walking home from school and being obsessed with this girl and the trees being full of her presence. Obviously, it’s such a fundamental thing.

NW How long did it take you to write?

HA  It was quick, about three months. I haven’t felt this way before or since. I was almost possessed; it just came out, it was very natural. It felt like something unconscious was happening. I edited it after that, because it was nearly double the length.

NW She’s not especially economical but she does get to the point. There are other moments with a little shaking of the fourth wall, where she comments that if she were to write fiction, she wouldn’t be able to write about anything other than about a vaguely cerebral girl.

HA A big part of the novel was about her being trapped in her own body and, in many ways, trapped in her own mind. I wanted that to colour the form of the book. Even within the book, she can’t break out of this way of perceiving and narrating. So I wanted those moments where she’s frustrated with her own lack of ability to write anything except for that book.

NW It’s also a funny book. Did that also come very naturally?

HA It did. I’d never really written anything funny before, and that was what made me really believe in this book as a project.

NW It made me think about this line in Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism,” where he said the most surrealist act is to run down the street wildly shooting a pistol. At times, with this book, there is a sense of violence being linked to alienation in an essential way. Could you speak to that link between the absurd and the violent and how they’re met in the protagonist?

HA A lot of these sexual experiences that she’s seeking out feel very arbitrary to her.  There’s a moment where she’s on the bus going to meet a guy in the village, and she says it’s the most random thing she could do. Violence and absurdity are linked in the book as well. There is a sense of trying to break out of oneself and get closer to the physical world. She has a feeling that she needs to be in some kind of danger or in contact with something violent to have an authentic perception of things. In some of the moments of self-harm towards the end, she’s trying to access something violent, but she’s not able to do it. She’s not affecting herself. It felt very linked with that desire to break out of the individual self through violence. But I didn’t want it to be about a deluded person fixating on a guy. I wanted the core to be tender. .