Eliza Clark: Seven Questions
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I wanted to start with the themes of desire and excess in the collection. As made clear by the title, the characters of this collection are gluttonous: the narrator in ‘Goth GF’ finds Willow excessively attractive, the characters in ‘The Shadow over Little Chitaly’ cannot stop eating and the protagonist of ‘Hollow Bones’ returns again and again to the pleasure and intrigue of her wound. Why did you want to write about hunger and desire?
Like most writers I have a fairly narrow field of interest and ultimately, I’m interested in power and desire. There’s a great deal of horror to be found when desire is misaimed or curdles – and I think our desires are often an expression of the systems of power we exist in.
A lot of the stories in She’s Always Hungry are very funny, even when dealing with quite serious subject matter. I had moments of actual ‘snort out loud’ laughter during ‘The King’… Can we talk about humour in your writing? Why is that often the tone you turn to? Do you find it helps to use humour with serious subject matter, or can it be obstructive at times?
I think being funny is just a huge boon for any writing. I like to think that I’m quite funny, so… Nothing buys good will like humour and it makes dark subject matter more palatable and often more realistic. My work would be relentlessly bleak without humour, and humour allows my readers a bit of breathing room. I also find most difficult situations in day-to-day life are often tinged with at least some absurdity – finding the absurd helps me write about it.
I enjoyed the range of form in the collection. ‘Build a Body Like Mine’, for example, plays with marketing copy and slogans, and ‘The Shadow over Little Chitaly’ is written entirely in restaurant reviews. Did you find you had more freedom to play with form in a short story, as opposed to novels? How do the two writing processes compare?
I don’t know – I don’t know if it’s something I thought too much about when writing. My reading is very contemporary, and I tend to consume quite a varied diet of media. Perhaps I feel less restrained by the formal expectations of the short story than some of my peers. I do think the short story is an easier place to experiment than the novel – a bit like writing a short story in takeaway reviews doesn’t wear quite as thinly over 3,000 words as it might over 80,000…
Not to be too flippant about it but short stories are… shorter. I can finish a first draft of a short story in anything from a day to a week – a novel can take years. It’s a much more sustained process that requires much denser material (plot, themes, characters, setting). But, I don’t know if there’s necessarily more freedom in a short story as its length can be a little constraining.
A few of the stories might be classified as dystopian, speculative or sci-fi, and I presume they involved some level of world-building. How did you find the process of world-building for short stories, particularly creating other planets in ‘Hollow Bones’ or the matriarchal society in ‘She’s Always Hungry’? How much work goes into it? Did you create ‘lore’?
‘Hollow Bones’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Extinction Event’) both had a great deal of extra ‘lore’ cut from them. Enough that I think I could keep working in this universe (as I consider them to be in the same setting decades apart) – details like the geopolitics of Earth and the politics around ‘first contact’ that were removed for time. I enjoy world-building a lot and as I said I might return to that setting in the future.
The setting of ‘She’s Always Hungry’ is much vaguer to me – not a lot of lore there, but then it was inspired by a real place (namely, the fishing villages in Aberdeenshire covered in a chapter for Killing for Company – a book I read during the research for Penance) so it required less building.
‘The King’ and ‘Extinction Event’ occur in near or post-apocalyptic settings. You manage to make it a more fun setting than, say, The Road. Can you tell me about the process of writing in that setting? Do you find it fun?
The King was inspired by Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Fire Punch and to a lesser extent, the cartoon apocalypses of Fallout and Mad Max. I suppose I find it fun to think about an apocalypse in those cartoonier contexts. There’s a lot of room for post-apocolypse settings to get a bit relentlessly bleak, and I don’t know how much interest I have in that kind of endless misery. ‘Extinction Event’ is a far more serious story, but I do consider it pre-apocalyptic and, depending on your interpretation, an apocalypse may have been averted.
Did you have any other conscious influences with this collection? Any writers who you felt inspired the themes or characters?
I would consider my short story writing to be chiefly influenced by Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Poe and George Saunders. Each story has its own Matrix of influence, and generally I take more immediate inspiration from film, nonfiction, music and manga.
Finally, ‘Company Man’ had a brilliant – and very sad – twist at the end. More generally, a lot of the stories play with subversion. Do you know from the start that these twists are going to occur, or do you find yourself feeling your way through the stories?
‘Company Man’ was built around the twist. I’m very influenced by the films of Chan Wook Park which generally also have big, dramatic twists. Whether or not a twist will occur varies from story to story – most exist in a somewhat subversive space.
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Image credits: Robin Silas Christian.
Eliza Clark is the author of Boy Parts (2020) and Penance (2023). In 2020 Boy Parts was Blackwells Fiction Book of the Year, and in 2022 Eliza was chosen as a finalist for the Women’s Prize Futures Award for writers under thirty-five. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023. She also writes for film and television. A stage adaptation of Boy Parts premiered at Soho Theatre in October 2023.
Zadie Loft is a writer from Suffolk, now living in London. After reading Classics at Cambridge, she studied Creative Writing at Oxford and is represented by Becky Percival at United Agents. She works as the Marketing and Editorial Assistant at The London Magazine.
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