Interview: Rosie Wilby

Ahead of her appearance in Bristol next month, award-winning comedian Rosie Wilby talks about her book, Is Monogamy Dead?, and how researching and writing it helped her understand 21st century relationships.

Why did you decide to write a book based on the show, Is Monogamy Dead?

It may be misleading to suggest that the book is based on the comedy show. The initial comedy show was written during the first half of 2013 for that year’s Edinburgh and was a bit like dipping my toe into a vast topic and realising, with quite some sense of panic, just what a Pandora’s Box I had opened.

Although I have written other shows in the intervening years, including one about feminism called Nineties Woman and one about breakups called The Conscious Uncoupling, much of my time has been spent on an epic quest to do the topic of monogamy more justice. The show was followed with numerous articles for magazines and newspapers, a TEDx talk and a Radio 4 Four Thought.

By then, I’d started to shape a very different sense of how I wanted to communicate about this complex question of fidelity and what it meant in the modern age.

How much of a challenge was it to adapt the show in to a book?

There’s really very little of the original comedy show in the book, even though it certainly opened the door to the idea. The key thing that remains, however, is my survey. I asked 100 random, anonymous people of varying genders, ages and sexual orientations what counted as ‘cheating’ in a monogamous relationship.

For many of the respondents, the answers to this lay more on a spectrum of emotional and intellectual behaviour than on the purely physical / sexual. It was more about what their partner thought and felt than what they did. This formed the key strand of my argument – that monogamy fails us if it is held up as a universal cultural default because our interpretations appear to be so unique, nuanced and individual.

The key challenge in structuring the book was to incorporate elements of science, opinion and interviews within a compelling narrative. In the end, I structured it very much like a novel around my own personal quest to find answers within my own romantic life. The scientific discoveries and humour were embedded within that story.

Which do you prefer, writing or performing?

I see writing and performing as part of the same whole. Writing is the hard graft and performance is the reward at the end. The motivation for writing a book was very much to have something that I could read out aloud to live audiences at book events and festivals. In fact, the way that I edited sections was to read them out aloud in my kitchen and think about where the audience would be a bit lost. When I say that, it makes a lot of sense that I narrated my audio book. I’d already done plenty of rehearsal.

You have done a lot of research for the show and the book. Have you found that people, in general, are happy to discuss relationships?

People are absolutely desperate to talk about this stuff. We don’t communicate enough about our individual struggles with love and relationships and go around feeling lonely and isolated in our despair. Although interestingly, it was the really happy, committed couples who were less keen to be interviewed. Maybe they didn’t want to divulge their secrets! Fortunately my good friends Jac and Ange stepped up at the eleventh hour with a really positive, inspiring story towards the end of the book.

Do you think relationships in the “scary, busy, digital twenty-first century” as you call it, are more difficult to navigate than in previous eras?

I think that the sense of choice that the digital world appears to offer can be overwhelming. It also makes bad behaviour like ‘ghosting’ easy.

How much did researching and writing the book change your views about relationships?

I’m now 18 months into a happy, monogamous relationship. People are often surprised to hear that and think that, given my book title, I’m flying the flag for non-monogamy. Whereas really I’m flying the flag for honesty, respect and compassion in our loving relationships, whether they are monogamous or not. So if I’ve changed, it’s in my more evolved definition of what ‘monogamy’ actually means.

Is Monogamy Dead? is out now www.accentpress.co.uk/is-monogamy-dead

Rosie will be performing a mix of comedy, talk, book-reading and signing copies of Is Monogamy Dead? at Exchange Bristol, Old Market St on June 11 at 7pm. For more information, visit  uk.funzing.com/funz/is-monogamy-dead-bristol-17014

Read more: Interview with debut novelist, Heather Child