On writing with empathy

 

I was very tempted, being a Black woman, to write about a white male character, and who knows maybe that’s down the line. Writing Lola, to me, was the audacious step - I identified with Lola so much more often than Darling, and that to me as a writer was really enjoyable, just being myself in those teenage shoes and challenging my own ideas, and you needed those two conflicting voices, that’s why I didn’t just write from Darling’s perspective. Writing Lola as an author is an act of empathy, as a reader you think how is that so, looking at her is really important: how would it feel to be a young white girl who has far-right sympathies? Getting her right, that was easily as much of a responsibility, if not more so than Darling because she’s supposed to be an enigma. It was important to get Lola right because she could have been a complete caricature of these people. I could have painted her as devilish because she’s had these had these doubts about having a Black stepmother but I thought that would have been a cheap way of doing it, I just wouldn’t have written the book.

 

I did feel quite protective toward Lola, more than I thought I’d be. It was a bit annoying at times because I had to battle with it - I thought, ‘oh but she’s a 16 year old girl’ and I was having these maternal feelings. I started off wanting to loathe Lola for what she could be but my relationship with her changed: more than my relationship with Darling, I knew her.

 

On a personal level, it is not how my own stepdaughter thought at all, but it’s important. I’ve thought how would it be because I’ve been with my kids since they were 5, but if I’d parachuted in at 16 - lots of people have challenging relationships with their stepmother and as a stepmother, having been one, why not explore that – to me it’s quite liberating.

 

On Darling and representation

 

Right at the outset, my first draft, I called it Blended because I wanted to talk about a blended family, a blended society, those are the things that are important to me, but I thought what approach do I take to that? That to me is the way forward in life, the great hope of the human project is the way I see it, it’s proving culturally difficult. I wanted Darling to be a novel that took on some of the way as a country that we were feeling at the time. I think I would have been doing my characters a disservice if I’d tried to do a slightly pat ending or wrap it up too neatly. Also if I wanted to end it that way when it is blended, as such, I would have written it in a different style.

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