Books / Fiction
Interview: Sarah Ménage
The new novel from Bristol author and songwriter, Sarah Ménage, The Glass Girl, sees glass collector Annabel suddenly end a long-term relationship to seek out a new partner with whom to start a family. Julie Fuster met the author to talk about a book she found both thought-provoking and funny.
Your characters face difficult and painful challenges throughout the novel, yet the tone is often humorous? Why did you choose that tone for the book?
I can’t help it! I think humour is what saves you from falling over the edge – it’s one way of dealing with those challenges and difficulties. If ever I find myself becoming too earnest or too heavy, a kind of survival instinct kicks in and I’ll undercut the mood, or step back and notice something absurd. I tend to do the same in my songs.
is needed now More than ever
Sarah Ménage’s new novel is a thought-provoking, witty read
Middle-aged women are often under-represented in fiction. Is the main character, Annabel an attempt to address this?
I find it strange now to think of Annie as middle-aged, although I suppose I did at the time of writing the book. She’s only 42! But I agree that older women are an under-represented lot – mostly invisible – because we are less saleable than younger women, on the whole less powerful, less wealthy than men; and because most of what we consume is man- not woman-made.
But the gift of invisibility confers vision; an older woman may have a clearer more critical perspective on the world and society. We can be freer of consumer society’s expectations and constraints, eventually we become freer of hormonal urges and maternal responsibilities (relevant in Georgie’s case), freer to be truthful about our experience, to rage, to misbehave, to risk looking ridiculous, to be expressive. On the one hand we’re fighting it, on the other hand the release can be explosive, so getting older is a great source of comedy but it’s tragic too, having to struggle with the loss of sexual power many of us didn’t know we ever had, and in Annabel’s case, with her dwindling fertility, her regrets.
Can you tell us more about the choice of glass as a metaphor for Annabel?
I knew she was going to be attached to the past, and having chosen the museum as her place of work I had to choose her specialty. I can’t remember why I chose glass, because I realised only later that she too was made of fragile, transparent, rather cold, stiff stuff; and she’s aloof, as if something solid separates her from others. The idea simply grew as many other ideas fed into that central metaphor, and then it became more explicit in the ambiguous title. Metaphor is a poetic tool, it appeals to the unconscious, it encourages divergent thinking, it can say more than logic, but also there’s a comic potential in taking it too far. I had great fun in the epigraphs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip-thIRxHog
Why did you set the novel in Bristol?
I live in Bristol. It’s easier to write about what surrounds you than what you imagine or remember. But, yes, it’s very different to London – or anywhere else that I know –and I noticed it particularly when I first came here thirty years ago. I perceived an alternative mentality, an open-mindedness, an off-the-wallness, which I found unusual, challenging, ultimately mind- and life-changing, as well as amusing.
I can’t resist quoting Tessa Hadley here, who kindly read the book and ‘felt all the pleasures of rediscovering (and discovering new insights into) the familiar milieu: Bristol, and that particularly interesting set of half-bohemian types with connections to nice-middle-class in one direction and dodgy-drug-dealing in the other. They are so characteristic of the place.’
Which writers inspire you the most at the moment?
I’ve been rereading classics, and really enjoying getting back in touch with the books I loved as a teenager. Last year it was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but my recent favourite was A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. I love his style, his elegance, his keen observation and incisive humour. I wish I could emulate him, but I’m too forgiving; like Anne Tyler, another almost guilty favourite of mine, I can’t resist some kind of redemption.
I find Jeanette Winterson’s writing almost miraculously good, and Ali Smith is another marvel. I read much more non-fiction, though, especially when I’m on a novel, and then it’s categories more than particular writers that inspire me: biography, history, politics, science – that just about covers it! I love reading!
Sarah Ménage’s latest novel, The Glass Girl, is available now. For more information, visit https://sarahmenage.com/buy-books
Read more: Interview with Imogen Hermes Gowar
Main photo: Frank Drake
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