Rosie Garland: The Palace of Curiosities

This is your first novel, but you've been a writer for quite a while. Can you tell us a little about how ideas of sex, sexuality and gender have influenced your work? 

It’s my first novel to get published – but I’d written four before The Palace of Curiosities, and they got nowhere! I’ve spoken to other ‘debut’ novelists who report similar experiences. As for how long I’ve been writing – I have a cigar tin filled with miniature books I wrote for my dolls when I was very young.

My fiction is about people who won’t (or can’t) squeeze into the one-size-fits-all templates on offer, whoever they might be, and the friction that occurs when they try. That’s what gets my creative engine going. I know this comes from having always been an outsider myself. However, as Stella Duffy says, feeling different is part of the human condition. So I hope my stories strike a chord for many other people.

This inspired my creation of Eve, one of the main protagonists in TPOC. Eve has hypertrichosis, a condition where the entire body is covered in a thick mat of hair. Her 'difference' is overwhelmingly visible, yet she is determined to get by on her own terms. She refuses to shave herself to pass for human. She fends off exploitation, discovers fulfilment, self-expression and self-reliance. I've been told that Eve's hairiness can be seen as an interesting analogy for being queer in a heteronormative world. I'm happy if she makes one person think about what it means to be female and have body hair. Let’s face it – women's relationship with their hair is particularly fraught. We mustn't have too much, and we sure as hell shouldn't have too little.

There is the trope that Victorian women weren’t supposed to have a sexuality at all. In Eve’s case, this goes even further. There is a horror (now, let alone in the Victorian era) around people with a very obvious disability being sexual. Why the hell not? Eve’s sexuality makes her very much human.

A reoccurring theme of your work seems to be a longing for a place, a physical location, where you can be accepted and belong. Do you feel you've found that in Manchester?

Place is important to me because I’ve never felt that I’ve belonged anywhere. I moved around a lot as a kid, and after I left home I continued in a similar vein. It’s made me pretty adaptable. Home has always been wherever I happen to be.

When I moved to Manchester I saw myself staying a couple of years – and I’ve never left, nor do I have any intention of doing so. It’s not what you could call ‘pretty’ (in the way Chester or York or Paris are ‘pretty’) but I am passionately in love with Manchester, for all its superficial ‘unloveliness.'

I am inspired by its radical history: birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, site the world’s first passenger railway station, of the Peterloo Massacre. It’s where the Pankhursts started the Women’s suffrage movement, where Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, home to Anne Bronte, Alan Turing – I could go on and on. Maybe there’s something in the water…

Would you say there's a political dimension to your work? How are you involved in LGBT and queer politics more generally? 

In many ways you could sum up my politics quite easily. Other folk have put Big Thoughts into words far more neatly than I can. "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people" (Marie Shear) is a favourite, as is this one from way back in 1838 – "I know nothing of man's rights, or woman's rights, human rights are all that I recognise" (Sarah Grimké, in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman). Almost 200 years later and we’re still fighting the same old shit.

This underpins all my work, whether poetry, novels or comic cabaret. But I have no desire to preach (too many memories of being made to sit through sermons in enforced church-going as a child). My novel is not a diatribe. It’s a novel, and a novelist should just get on and tell the damn story.

You recently appeared at Manchester Pride, right? Can you tell us how it went and, maybe, comment on the idea that, in Manchester, Pride has lost its political relevance?

Considering the situation for queers in Russia at the moment, Manchester Pride and events like it are more important than ever before. The fact that we still have this freedom is worth fighting for, and passionately. If that ain’t political, I don’t know what is.

In some quarters it’s becoming fashionable to knock Manchester Pride. Sure, don’t go to the Big Weekend and expect a small-scale meditative grass-roots community experience. It’s big, it’s noisy and it’s a money-spinner. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I was happy to do a spot on the Women’s Stage this year – and agreed to do so after I felt more comfortable about the general lineup.

As I say in one of my poems, the problems start when "those of us who are white and rich / think the battles have all been won." This is why I am very committed to supporting Pride events around the UK and the wider world that aren’t so glitzy and flash. This year I was delighted to perform as part of QueerAlt Manchester, which promoted alternative, independently funded LGBTQ events over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

It’s great to put energy into events where it feels like I can make a difference. I’m a patron of Oldham Pride, and very proud of it too. Come along next year and experience what it’s like marching through a town where not everyone is gay-friendly and on your side. It’s a heartening reminder of how different queer life can be only a short tram ride away from the centre of Manchester. Let alone anywhere else…

Do you think the portrayal of homosexuality in the book is realistic for the time period it's set in? I have to admit, I cried.

Obviously, I hope so!

I don’t use the words gay, queer, or even homosexual. In mid-19^th century England, when the novel is set, ‘queer’ meant odd and ‘gay’ was used to describe prostitutes. Executions for sodomy continued in England until 1835. The sexual act was seen as a sin, rather than being an expression of who you were. There was no sense of ‘homosexuality’ being an identity. That concept didn’t begin to enter the UK consciousness until the end of the 19^th century.

Alfred, one of the characters in TPOC, would be called ‘gay’ nowadays. But he would not have used that label to describe himself. All Alfred knows is that he has feelings he ‘shouldn’t’ have. He represses them – largely successfully.

Would you say there is a critique of marriage in the novel?

I don’t have a problem with ‘marriage’ per se. I am far more intrigued by dysfunctional relationships. You sure as hell don’t have to be married to be stuck in one of them.

One theme in TPOC is how tangled things can get when people don’t get the relationships they need, and waste a lot of time chasing the relationships they think they want. For example, Eve has a fairytale notion in her head about what a ‘marriage’ should look like. A big part of her story is what happens when the fantasy doesn’t fit the reality.

Abel and Eve, your protagonists/narrators are both referred to as 'freaks' during the course of the novel. Do you feel an affinity with the 'freaks'? What do you think it means to be a 'freak'?

‘Freak’ is a term I use on purpose and purposefully. Brits especially struggle with it – those who think of themselves as normal, that is. As for me, I’m not so much ab-normal as anti-normal. ‘Normal’ doesn’t exist, folks. It’s not real. But it gets into our heads and shreds what meagre confidence we might have in our selves and our bodies. It makes us depressed, envious and mean.

Perhaps if we spent less time trying to be something we’re not and accepted ourselves – celebrated ourselves – complete with all the marvellous, dangerous, uncomfortable, ill-fitting, weird, odd and freakish contradictions we encompass we might, just might, be a whole heap happier.