Anna Stothard's Blog

Hello everyone, it's been a while but I'm back! I am thrilled that my new novel Follow Her is coming out February and is currently an Amazon Editor's pick in the UK and Australia, which means you can download it for free! It's the story of a toxic female friendship that turns into a cult, and I so much hope you enjoy it xxx

I’ve moved to Berlin and now live in an apartment with jungle animals painted on the front, near a park with a fairground. I’m back in London this weekend though, for cocktails and Soho stories at London’s most intimate literary event, The Word Factory #11 at The Society Club.

The Word Factory #11
A night of short story readings, conversation & wine













Soak up all the atmosphere of London’s most intimate literary event in the company of master storytellers. This month their tales will take you from the heart of Soho to the further reaches of the imagination. Relax, let your mind wander and don’t forget to pass this email to your friends.

Saturday, 25th May

6-8pm at: The Society Club

12 Ingestre Place, Soho, W1F OJF

£10 on the door




Please RSVP to register your interest. Places are limited – see below for more details.












An RSVP puts your name on the door but turn up early to guarantee your place.





















Helen Simpson

Helen Simpson is the author of five collections of stories, the most recent of which is In-Flight Entertainment. Last year Vintage Classics publishedA Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories,which included five stories from each of her five collections. She was chosen as the first Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (1993), and has also received the Hawthornden Prize and the American E.M.Forster Award. She lives in London.

Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honours and awards. His fiction has been published in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story and Stories from the South: The Year’s Best.

Roshi Fernando

Roshi Fernando was born and brought up in London and holds a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Swansea. In 2009 she was awarded the Impress Prize for New Writers, for her composite novel, Homesick a series of interlinked short stories about a community of Sri Lankan immigrants in London, published by Bloomsbury. In 2011 her story, The Fluorescent Jacket, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank short story award. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Anna Stothard

Anna Stothard is a novelist and travel writer. She has lived in London, Washington DC, Beijing and Los Angeles. Her first novel, Isabel and Rocco, was published in 2004, followed by The Pink Hotel in 2011, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. The Pink Hotel has been translated all over the world and is being made into a film by Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin. Anna’s latest book, The Art of Leaving, set in Soho about a girl obsessed by goodbyes and exits, is out now.

 

Hotels are the best cure for writer’s block. Better than temper tantrums or sleep. From the skanky motel near my former flat in LA to the marble-floored St Regis in Beijing, I’ve never slept in a hotel that wasn’t a story-machine. It’s the run-away atmosphere, the lack of personal possessions. A stage set of a bedroom, ready for fiction.

I’m in a Seattle hotel room right now, here to read The Pink Hotel at University Book Store on Tuesday night. I can see skyscrapers and early morning blue/grey sky outside the window, hear doors slamming around the ubiquitously trippy, geometric patterned corridor carpet outside my door. I’d like to stay here for longer than a few nights. I’d be like Eloise at The Plaza, but highly caffeinated and writing.

Unable to sleep at three am Seattle-time last night, my mind moved from Eloise’s Plaza to other fictional hotels, other writers who have shared my fascination for anonymous bedrooms and free time.

My first thought, after Eloise, was The Edmont Hotel in Catcher in the Rye: Holden Caulfield watching a guy trying on corsets and stockings in a nearby window, appalled but intrigued by the time-out offered by a hotel. Then I thought of the dreamy and watchful self-imposed exile in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac. The Pensione Bertolini in A Room with a View? Where all different classes are thrown together into the crazy intimacy of shared living. And The Dolphin Hotel in Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, the backdrop and epicenter of a distorted erotic memory.

There must be thousands. The plush hotels of escapist fantasies with glossy covers, the motels of crime novels and horror with their quilt covers and pale water color prints on the wall. The Overlook Hotel, of course, in The Shining, where the freedom becomes a curse. Oddly enough I fell asleep thinking about The Overlook last night, deciding that the one thing I won’t do in my quest to live in a hotel one day, is become a caretaker.

Do come say hi on Tuesday, if you’re in Seattle:

TUESDAY • APRIL 30 • 7:00PM

Anna Stothard

The Pink Hotel (PICADOR)

U District store: 4326 University Way NE. Seattle, WA 98105

Reading & Book Signing

“Stylish… captures an outsider’s gape at sun-drenched Los Angeles.” The New York Times

“This book moved and provoked me in ways I can’t fully articulate. I am incredibly excited to transform Anna Stothard’s extraordinary work into a film I hope we will both be proud of.” Anna Paquin (Trueblood)

“The Pink Hotel is mysterious, lyrical, and utterly absorbing, by turns funny and forlorn. Her writing bristles with sexiness and suspense, love, loss, and longing. This is the best book I’ve read in years.”Davy Rothbart, author of My Heart is An Idiot.

“Startling….The Pink Hotel is a spellbinding story about identity and inheritance, and how we know who we are.”  The Daily Beast

A “gritty but elegant U.S. debut…Stothard’s vivid descriptions of L.A.’s seedy underbelly make for an engaging read.” Publisher’s Weekly

 

A belated thank you to everyone who came to the launch of The Art of Leaving last week, held at The Society Club on Silver Place: an excellent venue full of Soho literature, first editions, vintage erotica and vodka.

When I first started writing The Art of Leaving, skulking around Soho mapping Eva’s life, the corner of Silver Place was a clothes shop. I bought a couple of moth-eaten hats and housed my character in a semi-imaginary flat looking out on a semi-fictional Silver Place. “As Soho alleys go, Silver Place was sedate. It was only a few roads down from Walker’s Court, where the sex cinemas were packed together and girls in leather skirts stood on either end haggling over the price of blow jobs…” Eva has been living in the alley ever since.  She would approve of the space at the end of her road transforming into a bookshop/gallery/cocktail bar.

The party got a good “review” in Londoner’s Diary, and the book’s had some nice reviews so far too:

“A stunningly accurate and chilling account of the acquiring of emotional wisdom, with vividly drawn characters,” Kate Saunders, The Times

“Anna Stothard’s third novel cements her her place as one of Britain’s best young authors… Stothard’s lush, dreamy prose is given full rein …” Kaite Welsh, The Literary Review

“Stothard gets her talons into you…read it for its beguiling heroine and sparky prose.” Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

“I would recommend it to anyone who likes being told a very good story,” New Books Magazine

“A witty, beguiling and increasingly poignant novel about the scars – physical and psychological – that make us who we are.” Stephanie Cross, The Lady

 

The contents of my flat is currently arranged in brutal piles of relative significance around my desk, as I pack to leave London for Berlin.

I’ve always loved leaving cities. As a kid I remember playing hide and seek amongst shipping boxes, waiting to say goodbye to a stray London cat we used to feed. Then later, collecting ants in jam jars under Washington sunshine as we packed to move back. Since my last escape from Los Angeles to London a few years ago, though, I seem to have accumulated a problematic amount of stuff.

What do other writers do with previous drafts of their manuscripts? I’d love to know. Tearing them up makes me think of infanticide. But as I fell asleep last night surrounded by paper I imagined myself, aged fifty, encircled by every incarnation of my earlier novels. Dying, eventually, when a pile of paths-my-characters-didn’t-take falls on me while I’m sleeping.

Do people keep their old notebooks? I have a box full of them from the last three years. They are full of frantic scrawls, the excess energy of yesterday’s preoccupations. Mostly, I have remarkably little idea what I was going on about. In faded pencil one pages says: “FROZEN DOLLS!!! Styled abandon. Flying corpses. An albino puffin with sad eyes.”

“Flying corpses” is underlined twice. I have no idea why.

But I’m definately keeping the notebook.

Yesterday’s packing ended when I opened a drawer full of string, usb sticks, matchboxes, paperclips and foreign currency mixed in with not only my own photographs, but washed-out snapshots from other people’s lives, bought from flea markets and junk shops. Honestly. Why didn’t anyone stop me before now?

Leaving makes you realise that your identity has settled, furtively, while you weren’t looking. Like saying goodbye to a person, gearing up to leave a city demands a full scale re-write. That is, I suppose, half the point of escape.

 

Sorry if you’ve fallen inexplicably in love with me in the last weeks – I was given a love amulet by a witch doctor while in Zanzibar.  Ameir lives in a mud hut above some haunted caves in Kizimkazi, at the far south of the island, where he works at cleaning spirits with perfume (ghosts hate to be dirty, and kick up a fuss if they are), and dragging pesky phantoms from beleaguered heads. If you happen to have a spirit of the opposite sex in your head it can cause havoc in flesh-and-blood relationships – physical harm,complicated bickering – so the spirits must be dragged out using spells, a stick, and in Ameir’s case… a horrifyingly real rhino horn.

In some ways Ameir wasn’t as scary as I expected. We chatted about his childhood, my marriage prospects, and he piled my arms with sticky mangos from his garden. He showed me the haunted caves under his hut and was genuinely worried that his magic wouldn’t work on English men. He didn’t want me to be disappointed. But all the while, there was this rhino horn sitting in the humid corner of the room. The fact that I was in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere stopped me walking straight out as I should have done.

Rhino horn is of course medically and magically useless and is made of the same stuff as our fingernails, keratin, but in Vietnam in particular there’s a traditional belief in its qualities.  More than 600 rhinos have been killed in the past year by poachers wanting the valuable horn. Trading wildlife is the fourth largest illegal trade in the world, coming in after drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking. If poaching stays at these levels, it’s quite possible that the rhinoceros could be wiped out across Africa in 10 years.

Look how strange they are, with their thug legs, unicorn horns and grey sad eyes. These are two wild rhinos drinking from Lake Nakuru, Kenya, taken a few days after meeting Ameir. Grumpy bulldozer creatures standing there in the sunshine, occasionally with fragile yellow-billed oxpeckers perched on their back like characters in a fable. The rhinos both had wrinkled smiles and unexpectedly Marlyn-Monroe-like struts to their bottom. We called them Ace and Abbie. They certainly shouldn’t be allowed to fall into the same bracket as dodos.

Now I’m home, petulant looking rhinos keep trotting through my dreams. Even though I buried my love amulet in the beach outside Stone Town, I feel haunted.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Ted Hughes’s Crow poems. Aesop’s Vain Jackdaw. Othello, Macbeth. Ngugi’s The Wizard of the Crows, which I started reading last night on a plane to Nairobi. Crow’s are notoriously freaky. As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel in Zanzibar having come in to escape the  bone-stiff smile of a single skinny crow I met in the higgeldy piggeldy streets of Stone Town. His back was curved like a piece of calligraphy punctuation, and he quivered his whiskers at me.  

When I was last in Stone Town three years ago, the place was overrun with crows. Where did they all go? No wonder the last skinny crow in Stone Town looked a bit irritable. I remembered the streets as having a similar crow-density to Kochi, Southern India, where I was just before Chistmas. There, shiny storybook crows waddle on the roofs of colonial houses and swarm the papaya trees over your head. They sit atop archaic Chinese fishing net contraptions, laughing at the fishermen, and argue with each other while shitting on tourists.

But in Stone Town they’ve been exterminated, all 5,000 of them according to the hotel manager I just asked. They were becoming a nuisance, killing indigenous bird species and spreading disease.

In a way I’m relieved to avoid another swarm of them. It makes me shiver when they stare. I feel like they’re ridiculing me. “He laughed himself to the centre of himself,” as Hughes’s poem Crow’s Fall goes, where a white crow attacks the sun and returns char black, with his words all mangled and charred too. “He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.” The audacity of them, the cheek! The horror.

But I also feel shaky, like a terrible thing has happened and the crows will somehow reek vengeance. Possibly, illogically, on me. The truth is, I wasn’t scared of crows until I went on a taxidermy course in London a few months ago, where I became unusually intimate with a jackdaw. (He died naturally, I’d like to add, I’m scared of the crow family but not vengeful.) I spent two days sewing and blow-drying him and now he’s propped up in a cheap black velvet stiletto heel on my bookshelf in London, beady (literally, made of beads) eyes watching me all the time.

You’d think that this experience would have made me less scared of crows, but it hasn’t. There’s too many crow deaths in my life at the moment. Perhaps, somehow, I think that all the other crows in the world know what I’ve done to their cousin. Perhaps I deserve their derision. 

 

Emirates Terminal Three in Dubai is basically a space ship – cruel tooth-shaped windows, curved walkways, giant ceilings. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the entire structure was hurtling through the atmosphere while I sipped coffee. Great reflective columns scattered light-rays on the ceiling and appeared almost fluid, dripping sunshine. Leggy tapered buttresses appeared to have re-arranged themselves into new shapes every time I blinked. The angles of the balconies were different. 

It’s my new favourite airport, winning for its sheer futuristic audacity. Travelling gives me as much of a kick as destinations. LAX and JFK both make me giddy. When I lived in Beijing, I used to go eat Szechuan noodles and write in the airport (admittedly I was horribly homesick – this may have been the start of my airport fetish). If my journey back from India via Dubai over Christmas was a sci-fi film, the mid point twist would have been that the space ship was in fact the antagonist. It was alive. I wrote my New Year’s resolutions while people watching at the departure gate and when I pulled them out of my pocket back in the safety of London, they all seemed a little far-fetched and unlikely. But strange things do happen.

Philip Womack kindly tagged me in “The Next Big Thing” Blog Meme, so thought I’d introduce my next book:

What is the title of your next book?  The Art of Leaving

Where did the idea come from for the book?  From Holly Golightly abandoning her cat, Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, an unhealthy fascination with airport departure lounges, changing schools regularly as a kid, moving cities, leaving relationships… Somehow it’s always the exit scenes that I remember from novels and experiences. I wanted to write about the adrenalin of saying goodbye. 

What genre does your book fall under?  Fiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?    I’m not ready for them to exist outside the imagination yet.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?   During a rainy summer in Soho when an eagle escapes London Zoo and a secretive stranger starts appearing around the city, Eva realises she’s failing at the only thing she’s ever been very good at: the art of leaving.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? The book is being published in March 2013 by Alma Books. My agent is Charlie Campbell.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? About a year.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  It’s a story for anyone whose ever found it difficult to leave…

You can read the first chapter here. 

I hereby tag journalist, novelist and best read person I know, Emily Rhodes, as the ‘Next Big Thing’.

The Spirit Collection at the Natural History Museum does not contain a curated selection of souls, or at least not exactly. Don’t go looking to understand the anatomy of a phantom or the evolution of your average poltergeist, but if you want to see embalmed miniature dolphins, rat spines in jam jars, perfectly preserved shark heads or a giant squid named Alfred, then a back-stage tour of the museum’s Spirit Collection will get you in the mood for Halloween.

The Natural History Museum is one of my favorite museums in the world. I’ve spent days studying the stuffed hummingbirds and the (justified) worry on the face of dodos; the whale-spines, snake heads, dinosaur skeletons and cabinets of beetles. This time I went to specifically to visit the birds, in preparation for a taxidermy course I have booked for the beginning of November, but I discovered that in all my years of coming here I’d never followed signs to the collection of “spirits”.

The small top floor gallery is spectacular – full of mice and bats and forlorn-eyed seahorses incased in jars of luminous methylated spirit – but taking a tour into the bowels of the museum, past laboratories and through grey filing cabinets full of curiosities, the air chill with a chemical edge, you’re in real Halloween territory.

There’s a squid as long as a double-decker bus with ragged pink flesh and huge talons to capture whales, but only tiny beak-like mouths to  to eat them with.  “Being eaten by a giant squid would be like being licked to death by a kitten,” the tour guide explained chirpily. There are fish with limb bones in their fins, bats that look like dragons, specimens from HMS Beagle, snakes with their tongues still hissing out.

If Pullman’s His Dark Materials was re-written as a horror movie, this is where the last chapter would end: all the daemons of the world torn from their humans and floating eternally in cold chambers of glass jars underneath London. The coiled snake grimacing out from a tube of luminous formaldehyde is your ex-boyfriend’s daemon, perhaps. That furless baby kangaroo? Belonged to the girl he left you for. That black crow, with her wings stretched up and her neck broken against the bottom of her jar, that’s your imagination before she was snipped away from you at the climax of act three and embalmed to leave space for a sequel.

Maybe, on Halloween, the souls will break out of their glass jars and scamper, shaking alcohol off their fur, across the great tiled floors, impatiently flapping wet bony wings, hopping into the air until they fly, sniffing for their humans. I hope so. I’ve booked a nighttime “behind the scenes” tour on the 31st, just in case.