Meet Ava Anna Ada

(In the run up to publication of Ava Anna Ada, I’m going to do something a little bit different here. Normal service will resume on Friday. I’m aware that this hasn’t looked normal for a couple of weeks. I’ve been on a deadline but it’s done and now my head feels a lot lighter, so I can get back to here instead of the tunnel vision the last little while has demanded.)

The question every writer dreads is where do you get your ideas from. Most audience members should dread it too since they always end up with a lengthy spiel; what follows is some background to Ava Anna Ada, the type of answer I’d give to a question like that.

In 2019, when I was writing the first draft of The Last Days, I kept being bothered by a short story I’d written years earlier. In this story, an un-named teenage sex worker is saving money to travel to visit her father, finally she saves enough, and travels to the US to meet him, where he assures her he’ll be wearing his new ten gallon hat at JFK. As is the way with stories, they have to come from somewhere. I’m a firm believer in the idea the mind’s eye works on what it’s already seen, and I’d already seen my father standing at JFK in his ten gallon hat welcoming me in 2001.

It was a strange trip. I tried to write about it in The Last Days, but it didn’t fit. My father was a big man. Perhaps too big for a chapter. Perhaps his ego demands his own book somewhere down the line. I dedicated Ava Anna Ada to him as a joke, without him and his stupid hat, it’s unlikely I’d have written the first story that returned to me in 2019, niggling between drafts of The Last Days.

It was a bad time then, it’s been a bad time since, it’s hard now, to remember the before times, certainly in about 2016, we passed the threshold of something. There’d been Brexit, there’d been Trump’s election, there’d been several Prime Ministers, and there was another election looming and I lived in the North East of England then, and I’d grown up in the Scottish Borders, I knew about neglected places, and feared for these places I loved too. An Independent Scotland would potentially mean ruin for Northumberland, already so far from Westminster and still suffering the economic blow of the mine closures of the 1980s, it ran the risk of being forgotten in terms of policy. At the same time, Instagram was really taking off, pedalling a constructed version of reality far removed from many people’s daily experience. On the screen, self appointed experts were telling people how to live, all vying to be seen and heard. Concurrently, in the winter of 2015, with increased floods and the focus on the Paris Climate Agreement, it felt as if climate change had moved from future to present tense and yet we were all increasingly preoccupied with our phones.

If the apocalypse was coming, we’d all want to be the one to take the first photo, I began to think.

And so it was, with the idea of everyone trying to get the first photograph to beam around the world to thousands of worshippers, sorry, followers, and the image of my father standing with his ten gallon hat at JFK, I started to make notes in my study, overlooking a river given to regularly flooding. I filled many notebooks that year, but in characteristic fashion, didn’t write a single word of the manuscript until the summer of 2020.

I’d been very ill that spring. Covid. On my 40th birthday, I turned blue. After, I thought I would recover. But I was wrong. I was ill for a long time, with many strange physical sensations and symptoms. I still have unexplained fevers, dizzy spells, tire easily after exercise. It does not sit well with me. I ran a fever for months. I learnt that tinnitus is not a hum or a buzz but that the sound of it can take on many shapes. I felt haunted by it and by who I’d been. During the worst of this illness, I didn’t feel like a shadow of myself as is often said, but more like a ghost. I used to wonder, in the long insomniac nights that were also a symptom of Covid, if I had actually died on my birthday and this was some strange prolonged purgatory. Perhaps this is why Ava Anna Ada is also in many ways a ghost story. I wrote the first draft that summer. I have no recollection of this. It is just on my laptop, evidence without memory.

Between 2019 and 2021, I had been writing about losing my mother. It is inevitable that Ava Anna Ada is also a book about loss. Now I am working on my third and fourth manuscripts I am seeing themes that will no doubt exist across a body of work. I like this idea of making something external to myself but that makes sense in relation to me, that could only be mine. Although sometimes I would like to disown the things I make. I’ve said it before but it is the truest alchemy, to make something from nothing and then to turn it into work, I am not sure I’ll ever get over this part of it.

Against this whole backdrop, Ava Anna Ada began to form in the spring of 2021. I’d watched webs emerge on hedges. Thick drifts of them. I’d never seen these before I lived in London. Under the webs, larvae writhed, much like the women I observed on Instagram, all locked in their popularity contest. I’d walk home from the school run and stop and look at the webs, at the stripped branches below and wonder how anyone could be writing anything nice about nature when this was it at its truest, rawest form, and how it reflected our natures back. I’m not sure I didn’t go slightly mad after that, for three weeks I wrote feverishly, as if possessed. I could only listen to Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem on repeat. I would wait until the kids went to bed and write in a dark room with my hood up, I’d go to bed about 2am, get up about 5am. I was so tired I felt stripped to my nerves, right back to bone, and something electric happens then, you’re too tired to be there on the page. I mean this as the ego goes. What comes out then is story. Sometimes I would listen to Ben Frost. Sometimes SUUNS. I craved heavy music. The dark stuff. I wrote more quickly than I knew possible. At some point it seemed I stopped writing completely and Ava and Anna took over. I wasn’t in charge. I certainly wasn’t making it up, I just wrote down what I saw. How can this be the case, I want to know now in the cold light of winter, but it is what it is.

What came out then became Ava Anna Ada. Hitting bookshops on Thursday. I am not ready for this. There is seventeen months age difference between my two sons, I was not ready for the second; there is almost the same difference between my first and second books, I am not sure with a book like Ava Anna Ada I’d ever be ready for it, it simply is. All my grief, all my worst fears, all those apocalyptic concerns, all wrapped up in ‘a contemporary fable against images and their enduring hold on us’ - I love that blurb on the back of the book.

That’s the backdrop to the book, tomorrow I’ll introduce Ava, and The Spit, a small stretch of land ‘not England, not Scotland, not Europe, not not Europe’, where the drama between Ava and Anna plays out.