Among Others

"I’m from the South Wales Valleys, and I live in Montreal. I have a lot of Canadian friends with an incredibly romanticised idea of Wales; once I was explaining some political thing, and a friend said that they hadn’t actually thought of Wales as having politics. It’s magical, for sure, but it’s not real. In my LiveJournal – gosh, this was a long time ago, 2008 I think, when I still had a LiveJournal! – I wrote a description of the post-industrial landscape that I grew up in as a post-apocalyptic landscape. I wrote about how, as a child, I populated it with fairies, and I gave it names out of The Lord of the Rings , but that I should have given it names out of John Wyndham . This was just a blog essay, and loads of people said, ‘You should make this into a book’ – and I thought, ‘Oh, how silly . This isn’t the kind of thing that could be a novel.’ Then Michelle Sagara, who is a Canadian writer – she also writes as Michelle West – left a comment saying that it ought to be a novel. I went into the kitchen to make dinner, and as I was chopping up vegetables, I was thinking, ‘All these other people, they don’t know anything, but you would think that Michelle would understand this could not possibly be a novel…’ And then I thought, well, unless I mythologized my life, and put actual magic in it. I could do that… And I did the whole world build for Among Others while I was chopping potatoes. Then I kind of spite-wrote it! I realised I couldn’t write it set in South Wales; I could only write about being away from it. So I wrote it about going to boarding school. It was my ninth book, and the others sold fine, but they were not things that a lot of people read. So when I wrote Among Others , I wasn’t worried about my family reading it, or people that I’d been to school with reading it and recognising themselves… I was only published in the US, not the UK. I put in the character reading science fiction, and growing up in specific books, the way that I have. I think the reason it was so successful isn’t actually the fairies, though people like that. It’s that it is a female intellectual coming-of-age. Mostly, when you get books that are female comings-of-age, they’re an emotional coming of age, and they’re all about love or emotional connection. There are a gazillion books about men having an intellectual coming of age, but before Among Others , there were not a whole lot of books about women having them. There have been more since, and this is great. I think that’s the chord it struck. I had all these people saying how much they liked and identified with her, and I kept saying, ‘You didn’t like me when I was fifteen!’ The difference was that they were getting her from the inside. And I don’t deserve any benefit for the disability stuff that I put in it, because it’s all just me, just real. But also, I was mythologizing my life. There are people who read that book and they think they’re my best friend. For one thing, that was me when I was fifteen, not me now, and for another thing, I did make stuff up. I needed it to have plausible deniability. It would have to be unfalsifiable fairy. That’s what I thought, as I was chopping vegetables: ‘I could have magic where the potato peeler, if it cuts you, gets a taste for blood, and everything is slightly alive’… Things that we use all the time, we give nicknames to and care about. In the world of Among Others , things do become imbued with magic and aliveness in the way that they do in our minds. I take it a little step further and make it real. Magic works in those connections between things. I made it that most people can’t see them. Children can see them, but most adults can’t, because they’ve gone too far away from that. And then I had the great idea that when you pierce your ears, you can’t see fairies anymore. This made me laugh and laugh when I came up with it. I’d got the answer to, ‘Am I just stupid?’ No, I pierced my ears and now I can’t see them anymore! I have always been interested in what happens after the end of books. As a child, I would think a lot about the stories that happen after the end of stories, and about the kinds of books that leave it open for you to think about, and the kinds that close it all in so that it’s finished. That’s what I was deliberately doing with Among Others. You don’t need the earlier story – you’ve already read it, there are a lot of YA and children’s books that are that story. Actually, I think now I should have put in slightly more of it, which I ducked away from doing, because it is, in fact, my actual life, and it was a bit painful to do that. Anyway, I wanted it to be after the main story; I wanted it to be the scouring of the Shire. I put in precisely what I wanted to put in about the fairies, and what they are, and how much we see of them, because I wanted there to be questions there. I wanted them to be the way the fairies are in some uncomfortable kinds of stories, where they’ll help you, and they also won’t help you, and they have their own agenda. These are very alien fairies. As for the dead… I wasn’t going to do Celtic, but when I got to the Halloween chapter, I realized that I was doing this Celtic thing of the relationship between fairies and the dead – where fairies and ghosts are different, but also there’s overlap. That is right there in Welsh folktales. I just leaned into that. But I knew I was never going to explain what the fairies were – I wasn’t going to bring them fully on the page."