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| Taste for the macabre ... Sophie Mackintosh Photograph: Antonio Olmos |
Sophie Mackintosh: 'Suddenly I really wanted a baby - I resented that it felt outside my control'
The acclaimed young author of The Water Cure talks about her latest dystopian novel, Blue Ticket, and how listening to music and speaking Welsh helps her writing
Claire Armitstead
Saturdad 15 September 2020
“Something has changed, but we don’t know what,” says Sophie Mackintosh. She’s explaining the scenario of her second novel, Blue Ticket, but she could just as easily be describing the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s days before the Covid-19 lockdown, and as we talk in the Guardian office a sense of impending doom swirls around us.
By the time of our second encounter, on Zoom four months later, office life is a distant memory and her book is one of many to have been postponed. She’s talking from the spare room of her east London home where she has been spinning a whole new world out of the disintegration of the old one.
“At first I was a bit shocked and disappointed,” she admits, “but I made myself get a sense of perspective, and when I thought about it more, I felt very relieved, because to be launching a novel seemed somehow trivial, and it was good to have a chance to think. I’ve used the time to crack on with writing.”
Mackintosh is part of a new generation of female writers creating feminist fictions that relate uncannily to our dystopian times. Her Booker-longlisted debut novel The Water Cure, published in 2018, is set on an island where three sisters and their mother enact bizarre survival rituals based on a fear that any bodily contact with men will poison them (a superstition bolstered by the sick, emaciated women who wash up on their shore from a terrifying elsewhere). Recognition was quick to come, not least from Margaret Atwood, who hailed it as “a gripping, sinister fable”.
Blue Ticket is another dystopia but this time it’s every woman for herself in a tyrannical society that dictates whether they are allowed to become mothers through a lottery of white or blue tickets, conducted when they reach puberty. At first Calla, the protagonist, is delighted to have been allotted a blue ticket, as it enables her to enjoy the hedonistic life of a twentysomething singleton. “We would drink fancy vermouth and it didn’t matter if I drank enough to ruin the next day, because there were days and days after, endless days marked only by my choices,” she says. But then her biology starts to rebel, and before long she is pregnant and on the run. Stranger and more alarming than the land through which she flees are the changes taking place within her body.
Mackintosh’s original idea was to write a horror novel about cannibalistic pregnant women. “Then I decided I wanted to write about a desire for something unexpected, which felt more scary,” she says. “I have had a lot of pregnant friends and family members and, hearing them talk about it, a lot of it is very weird: your teeth fall out, your hair falls out. My mum used to say people don’t tell you about it or you wouldn’t have a baby. So I was thinking of it as horror – of the pregnant body as a site of metamorphosis.” Or, as Calla puts it in the novel: “I had two brains inside of me and two hearts, and the baby-brain and baby-heart wanted to take me over.”
Like Calla – “though this is not to say she is me” – Mackintosh sailed through her early 20s convinced that she would never be a mother. “And suddenly in my late 20s I really wanted a baby and I resented that it felt outside my control. I don’t think it happens like that for everyone but it did to me. I thought: ‘My body is a stranger, I don’t like this.’”
Now in her early 30s, Mackintosh was born in south Wales, the elder of two sisters, but when she was small the family moved to the Welsh coastal county of Pembrokeshire, which would inspire the setting of The Water Cure. Her father is a GP and her mother a former nurse from a big valleys family, “with lots of female cousins”, headed by her grandmother.
Though their first language is English, she and her sister were educated in Welsh, giving them a secret language their family didn’t share, alongside a literary mythology, learned by heart, and a sense of the musicality of language. “I know this feeds into the cliche about Welsh language,” she says, “but it makes you think about how to put words together and how to make them work musically.”
She wrote her first story at the age of six on a typewriter belonging to her grandfather, whom she also credits with fostering her taste for the macabre by plying her with age-inappropriate Stephen King novels. As an “arty-goth” teenager, she played guitar and piano and would listen to Joy Division on the school bus. “Ian Curtis read Sartre, Ballard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and so did I,” she recalled in a tribute essay on the band. “This was the sort of literature, music and connection I craved in my teens. I wanted there to be deeper meaning in everything.”
At 17 she realised that this wasn’t necessarily a recipe for good fiction, abandoning her first attempt at a novel as pretentious nonsense 5,000 words in. But the poetry she was also writing began to win prizes, and she took it with her when she left Wales for a BA in creative writing at Warwick University. Part of the appeal of university was moving away from “the vast nowhere” of her childhood home . “I’d been wanting to leave for a long time, imagining this wonderful life outside. At the time I just wanted to be with other people and then when I got there I realised it was just like anywhere else. It wasn’t the glamorous life I was expecting,” she says.
She graduated assuming that writing was something she’d have to do in her spare time. “I tried to get into publishing but it wasn’t very successful so I worked in tech PR for a bit.” She moved to Glasgow for a year, jobbing in coffee shops and as a tutor, getting to her desk by 5am to put in “the cold blue hours” on fiction, kneading what she describes as “the wet clay” of her first drafts.
In 2013 she sent a novel – about an isolated community, and partially set in complete darkness – to the agent who would become her champion and first reader. “She was my first client,” recalls Harriet Moore. “We didn’t end up selling that novel, but I think of it still. What ambition!” In 2016 she won two short story prizes, from the White Review and Virago/Stylist magazine, and published a third creepy tale of teenage trophy-hunters in Granta. Seven publishers competed in an auction for The Water Cure in the spring of 2017.
Her poetry background shows in fiction that lives, to an unusual extent, in its musicality, in the rhythm and spareness of its sentences, rather than in a solidly constructed world – though it is studded with familiar markers, often involving food. In The Water Cure, the sisters survive on a tooth-rotting diet of cornflakes and tinned fruit; in Blue Ticket, the pleasures of a well-stocked supermarket transform for fugitive Calla into a nostalgic imagery of avocado baths and peach-coloured walls, sage carpet and apple-white walls.
“There’s not really much world building,” she admits. “It’s more about the people that are part of it. I like having a world where the rules are completely different and I’m in charge.” It’s uncanny in the sense of “not exactly eerie or creepy but something just a little off and maybe spare as well. I was thinking a lot about [Alan Warner’s] Morvern Callar and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin. You’re in a strange landscape and things are different.” Maggie Nelson and Jenny Offill are also among her literary heroes – “writers who are trying to figure out new ways to create narrative. I think you can do a lot with fragments; telling a story through shards.”
Music continues to play an important role in her work as well as her life. She met her fiance at a music festival, and creates customised playlists for each piece of fiction, be it a novel or a short story, to which she listens obsessively. Calla’s mixtape for Blue Ticket included “a lot of 90s and 70s stuff. Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins, things with quite a strong aesthetic feel of how I wanted it to look – that 70s road trip motel vibe, and a cross between the Highlands and Switzerland”.
Both novels have a political subtext that works through metaphor. While The Water Cure’s is toxic masculinity and an increasingly resonant fear of contamination by touch, part of Blue Ticket’s subtext is alcohol-based consumerism. The booze Calla once enjoyed is weaponised in the roadside dives where she stops to rest and refuel: “I suppose I was thinking of drinking as a catalyst for often impulsive action and also a useful signifier of what constitutes ‘bad’ behaviour,” she explains.
“I’ve been a quite heavy drinker since my teens. But I’ve actually really cut back on my drinking during lockdown, and it’s been interesting to note the clarity I feel without booze, sometimes an uncomfortable clarity, and to think more about its function as a sort of buffer or blanket, a self-soothing mechanism and distraction.”
Against such dangerous distractions, she posits sisterhood, whether by blood, in The Water Cure, or coincidence, in the fellow fugitives with whom Calla teams up in Blue Ticket, though even this is not quite as it seems. “Living in a patriarchy, women’s stories are important for me,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in alternative support structures, how to gather groups with everything going to pieces, and how women can look after each other but also betray each other.”
The novel she has been working on during lockdown promises a new departure: it’s her first venture into historical fiction and is set in 1950s France, with a soundtrack that includes Françoise Hardy and Charlotte Gainsbourg. “It’s based on a true event in rural postwar France, so I’ve gone the opposite way,” she says. But it will still have a big shot of the uncanny, she promises, and its period setting won’t prevent it from chiming with current concerns: “I can’t work without what’s happening in the world leaking in.”
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