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Interview

Diana Evans

talks to Daneet Steffens

From Issue 31 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2006

Diana Evans has been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf lately. She’s just moved into her new home in a comfortably worn-in neighbourhood south of the Thames with a library, pool, park and several West Indian takeaways. It’s a pleasant area with a mellow, local atmosphere. Evans is delighted with it – and with her brand new study. Having just moved from a central London flat where she’s been working in cramped conditions in the corner of a room – ‘I felt like my writing was being squeezed into a corner and it was awful, really awful’ – Evans is now sitting on a large floor cushion in her very first writing room of her own. ‘I think I changed my mind about three times about the colour for the walls,’ she laughs. ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever had a room of my own to write in and it’s making me so happy, this room. I just can’t wait to be working in it.’

The bulk of the work, presumably, will be on the follow-up to her highly successful debut novel, 26a, which was released last year to widespread critical acclaim and went on to scoop up the British Book Awards’ Writer of the Year, as well as the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers.

A lush, delightful, heartbreaking novel about a rough-and-tumble family living in tatty Neasdon in the 80s and 90s, 26a’s emotional centre lies in twins Bessi and Georgia and their private, extra-dimensional world. Their English father and Nigerian mother make love, fight and raise four daughters, as Evans brings to vivid life slices of London suburbia, urban and rural Nigeria and an ensemble of strong, compelling characters. Charting the sisters’ development from childhood through adolescence into young adulthood, Evans chronicles chip butties and choc ices, boyfriends and lip gloss, sex and multiple piercings, cornrows and dreadlocks, Charles and Diana’s wedding and Michael Jackson’s moonwalk.

Neasdon – ‘a little hilly place next to a river and motorway with nodding trees and one stubby row of shops,’ – is a nearly-fairytale place where Gladstone’s ghost wanders, and the air is scented with chocolate. When the twins are nine and the family moves to Nigeria for three years, they find an even more surreal land bordering on a nightmare: ‘The garden was twice the size of the one in Neasdon, and it was alive.... Moths were birds. Birds were harlequin bats. The spiders there were bigger than incredible, with muscled legs and visibly volatile eyes, and sometimes, even under Ida’s wicked broom, they refused to die. They strutted across the radiant grass with handbags and sunglasses and filthy feet and walked all over the house, taking siestas behind doors and under pillows.’ It is in Nigeria that a terrible incident will drive a wedge between Georgia and the rest of the world – including Bessi – forever, drawing out a dark element of her psyche and plaguing it until, years later, she commits suicide.

It’s a compulsive read that’s full of colours and swiftly changing hues of light and dark, an intense play on one’s senses, both enjoyable and heartrending. And Evans knows whereof she speaks: her own twin, Paula, committed suicide in 1998. Evans has written eloquently elsewhere about her personal experience of being a twin and losing a twin; in 26a she takes the reader on a remarkable journey into that world – magical on the one hand, delineated by the loneliness inherent in pursuing individual independences on the other.

Today, on one of London’s hottest days of the year, Evans is summery and relaxed in a sleeveless top, long skirt and headscarf. She has a deceptively shy, almost fragile demeanor: once we start talking she’s chatty, focused and straightforward, pausing at certain questions to think them through. Her eyes are bright with energy, looking away, then directly back at me. She appears quiet and serious at rest, but breaks easily into laughter, exuding an unlikely mix of poise and vulnerability.

She seems at home in her new house already, despite the chaotic spread of boxes and lack of furniture, an ability to feel at ease that stretches to other countries. ‘I do feel that wherever I am,’ she says. ‘And wherever I go, people tend to think that I’m from there. If I go to the Caribbean, they think I’m West Indian. When I went to Thailand they thought that I was Thai, and when I went to Cuba they thought I was Cuban. And that’s how I feel, I feel it especially in the Caribbean because the Caribbean is made up of such a mix of people who weren’t born there, their ancestors weren’t born there. I feel a real affinity with that circumstance because my ancestors weren’t born where I was born. It gives you a sense of natural displacement but it’s not negative, it’s something that you live with and that you celebrate in a way. It gives you a kind of global citizenship.’

Evans never felt the burden of what she calls ‘the mixed race story,’ despite having a Nigerian mother and English father. She attributes her grounding to stability within her parents’ marriage, and within the family – she grew up with five sisters – as a whole. ‘My parents both have very strong identities,’ she explains. ‘It wasn’t like one was pressing down on the other. My mum was very intentionally un-English, completely Nigerian in her food and the way she dressed and the way she spoke, and my dad was a complete Yorkshireman.’ She laughs. ‘They did clash, but it wasn’t like one was suppressing the other, nothing was suppressing a part of me, both parts were very prevalent and felt very natural.’ Her sisters were another resource of strength and solidarity: ‘With six of us, there was a very strong sense of sisterhood and female identity, and my twin relationship was bound up in that, like it was a smaller part of a wider experience. It was all very, very intense. I get a lot of my stability from my sisters, not just culturally but emotionally.’

As for the mix of qualities she drew from her relationship with Paula, she pauses, thinking, before describing that. ‘My experience of twinness was that we were extremely close,’ she says softly, ‘and we tended to retreat into our own world because it was very easy. We used to call each other our reference points, because if you’re in a bad mood and you don’t feel like talking to anyone at all, anyone would irritate you apart from your twin. In our own world, everything was effortless, there was no shyness or fear.’ She pauses again. ‘But we were extremely shy if we were on our own or without each other. If we were on our own, it was like we had to learn all these new social skills that we didn’t need in our world.’

By the age of fifteen, Evans knew she wanted more independence. She was very shy and self-conscious so she made a decisive move: ‘I didn’t want to be like that. So I just told myself, okay, I’m not going to be like this, I’m going to be different, I’m going to be really outgoing and confident. So I just started acting. I’ve always had that ability to hide what was under the surface.’ She also started writing around the same time. ‘It was something I liked doing and I did it very naturally,’ she says quietly. ‘When I started writing I felt completely powerful, mentally powerful and it felt like this secret thing that I had that no one could take away from me. I would always have this secret thing inside of me and I would always be able to do it.’

Evans went off to university to study German (‘only because I got an A in A levels’), switched to Philosophy (‘because I liked thinking and writing’), finally landing in Media Studies. ‘It never occurred to me to do an English degree,’ she says, with real amazement, as though the thought just hit her right now, this very minute. ‘It’s really funny that it just never occurred to me. But I never had a career plan at all, I just thought about what I liked doing.’

She took a year out during her degree to be a volunteer development worker on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. There, she cut her teeth on journalism, writing for local papers while she taught writing workshops.

Throughout university and even after, she was also intensely focused on dance – she and Paula were in a troupe together – but found that ‘dancing and writing are both really hard things to do when you are trying to do them properly,’ so, about to turn 25, she made another decisive choice and turned her energies to journalism (‘I wanted to make a living with my writing and journalism was the natural option.’). She started with what proved to be a serendipitous work experience placement at Pride: in her second week the arts editor left and she was handed the job.

A week after that she found herself covering a music festival in the Bahamas: ‘I was completely out of my depth and didn’t know what I was doing. I met another journalist, Derek [her partner of nine years], and he was there, helping me through it,’ she giggles, her hands out, demonstrating him giving her a helping hand.

Though she loved her work at Pride, interviewing artists and writers she admired – Alice Walker, bell hooks, Maya Angelou – being on the other side of the tape recorder became frustrating. ‘I felt like I was in the wrong framework,’ she explains. ‘I was talking to all these artists and writers about their lives, and I felt like that’s what I wanted – to be out there, doing stuff. They were really expressing themselves and I wasn’t.’

She found some freedom in freelancing and in branching out from her poetry into short stories, but it was when Paula died that a certain singlemindeness – the same quality that helped her override her shyness – kicked into overdrive. ‘26a did start off like a kneejerk reaction to the death of a loved one,’ she says. ‘I sat down maybe six months, maybe a year after she died, with a strong sense that I was wasting my time, that I had to do something to mark what had happened. It was a moment of focus; I was completely overtaken by this sense of “this is what I’m doing now.”’

She still found the book incredibly hard to write: ‘I had no idea how hard writing a novel is,’ she says, her eyes opening wide with still-there surprise, her words tumbling out eagerly. ‘You have a certain perception about what you want to do in your head and it’s so hard getting it onto paper and getting it to work. There’s all these things in the way like the structure and characters – it’s not just about one or two people, you have to create a whole world around them, a narrative drive, plot – there’s just so much to consider. And what you have in your head has this innocence and perfection that you want to put on the page but it’s impossible to get it down. It took me a long time of just writing – I don’t know even what I was writing, kind of like little scenes and images.’

She took her random mix to a workshop in combining poetry and fiction with Bernardine Evaristo, and struck mentor gold. At the end of the workshop, Evaristo offered to support her though the process of writing her novel-in-the-works, and they began working together. Evaristo told her – ‘and basically this was a groundbreaking moment in writing the book,’ says Evans – to ‘“just write it, write it scene by scene.”’

So that’s what she did, but the novel still felt very disjointed. She extended her freedom by going off to Norwich for the gilded University of East Anglia MA (Naomi Alderman and Tash Aw were classmates), and found that being away from London was just what she needed.

A telling response to her work during class – she volunteered to read first in order to knock her shyness on its head – made her realise she was onto something: in the single, random scene she’d chosen to read, she’d created enough compelling interest in the twins to make the audience care about what happened to them.

‘And then I knew how to do it properly,’ she says, hugging her knees to her chest. ‘Once I found the right way I started from the beginning and just followed my nose – I finally knew where I was going to start, I knew where I was going to end, so it kind of made it a lot easier to get through the middle bit.’

Though she found the research into depression and suicide tough, she used colours as a way of making the novel less depressing. She also drew from her own emotions and impressions of Paula. ‘But I was also realising that there was some of that darkness in me, that I was drawing on that part of me. I really do believe it’s there in everyone; it’s just a part of being alive and people have different levels of maintaining that darkness and it’s when it gets out of control that someone becomes really ill.’ Evans admires one of her favourite authors Jean Rhys for ‘the way she deals with emotion, the way she writes about depression in particular. She writes about it without writing about the actual emotion and that’s what I was trying to do in 26a. She ascribes emotional qualities to the object, the environment, the street, the weather and she always arrives at a really strong sense of character as a result of it.’

Her two-book deal means Evans can devote herself to writing novels full time, though recently her resilient singlemindedness has another focus vying for its attention in the form of a 21-month-old daughter. ‘My desire to write is still there and probably even stronger because I have more challenges to my time,’ Evans says. ‘I do have a sense that I’ll keep writing and will always do it, but when I was at a writers’ retreat and all I had to do was write, I found it a bit much. I want more in my life, a family and a rich, rounded life. I found that I didn’t want to just sit in a room all day and write or be completely wrapped up in my writing the whole time.’

That said, she affirms that this is an exciting time to be published, that ‘there’s a very good, strong, diverse group of young writers around me, that we’ve grown far beyond the multicultural box.’ Favourite reads include Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Ali Smith (‘I adore her stuff and read everything she writes.’).

As for her own work, it’s too soon for Evans to discuss that second novel. Still, as the warm summer evening light pours in through a large window overlooking the back garden, Evans hugs her knees, basking in her yet-to-be-used study. The newly laid wooden floor gleams and the “Steel Whisper” - painted walls give off a soft lilac glow. And the writer with a brand new room of her own allows a smidgen of information to escape with a little smile: ‘There will be dancing involved.’

DIANA EVANS was born in London in 1971 and graduated from the University of Sussex in Brighton. Prior to publishing 26a she worked as a journalist and arts critic, contributing to Marie Claire, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and The Independent. She continues to freelance, while working on her second novel.

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*31 The Evans Method

• When you start with an idea in your head you don’t have a sense of structure especially with a first novel. You just have an idea, but how do you tell the story?
• You start asking yourself these questions, like what comes first and next? It feels like the structure is getting in the way and interfering with the purity of the story.
• It takes a first draft to get over those boundaries – how are you planning it, how are you going to do it, how are you building images? – and the second draft is where the novel finally appears.
• Stay true to the picture in your head, it has an innocence and perfection that you want to put on a page, but it feels impossible to get down. Stick with it; make it possible.
• Focus on little scenes and images. write it scene by scene. Don’t think of it as a whole book, just build it up. Each scene is a building block, an additional piece of the puzzle.
• Think of the most important moment or scene, the heart or the nugget or the real starting point for the story – it won’t necessarily be linear. Start with the truth, basically, and work outwards from that most telling, compelling moment.
• Come up with a first draft; decide to do the whole thing again and be ready to completely change the structure.
• Things happen when you are writing a book and you don’t always know why they work, they just make sense, they fit. Surrender to your characters, to your story.
• Follow your nose. Even if you don’t know all the parts of the book, even if you don’t know it chapter by chapter, when you know the beginning and the end that makes it a lot easier.
• Make the characters as real as possible by making their world as real as possible. Bring their environment to life.
• Probably the strongest quality you can give a character is the importance that they have to the main character. They are reference points for the main character.
• Break into the day physically with yoga or a swim; break into the day mentally by reading some poetry as a warm up, then start writing. Write through the day into the afternoon. Finish by reading a bit of fiction for a cool down. Then go out with friends or family; relax, interact socially with the outside world, refreshing yourself for your solitary work the next day.
• It’s like a game of football or volleyball – everything has to meet up with everything else, it all has to be connected like meet-the-dots, and you have to keep the ball in the air. Basically keeping the ball in the air is the story being alive and working.

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