The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , the book, is another classic. She was 22 when she wrote it! Carson McCullers was a white woman, writing about black America, which is quite astonishing in many ways. She wrote about what it was to be an outcast, a misfit, to be depressed, to be lonely. She wrote about loneliness with such brilliance. But she had a sad life. She died of alcoholism in her fifties. The thing that was special in Carson McCullers, for me, is that when I get ill, I run. I don’t run massive distances but I run. And I listen to documentaries and stuff. I was listening, earlier this year, to a documentary about Carson McCullers while running, and it was fascinating. But what was most fascinating and literally stopped me in my track was this archive audio recording of her. She said: “Sometimes it feels like everyone is part of a ‘we’ except for me.” I was like, ‘You were wrong! You were part of a we, but you didn’t know it.’ But she created the we inside her books. I felt that no one had ever said anything that quite chimed with me like that. The result of that was that I went home and thought: I’m going to find my we. And I went on Twitter, and said: “Who wants to join a mental health walking group? We’ll call it Mental Health Mates. ” And eight months on we have several thousand members, and walks all over the country, and I have found my we. And that’s all thanks to what Carson McCullers said however many decades ago. So that’s why she is very important to me. She’s sums up the need to find your we. Yes, it is really amazing. What I wanted was that by sharing my own experiences, people would feel able to share theirs. I don’t know how many emails or tweets or letters I’ve had saying ‘I appreciate exactly what you have written.’ That’s the sentence that I hear: ‘You could have written that about me.’ And I think: this is collective. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think books are really important because they’re just quietly there. You can quietly identify with someone. There’s a trade-off between you and the person in the book, you’re having a relationship with that person without anyone else knowing, and you can find solace and comfort in that. I think that, to me, is the most incredible thing about writing the book. Forget about critics. The most incredible feedback you can get is ‘I felt as though you were talking to me’ or ‘talking about me,’ and that’s the thing any writer is aiming to do, isn’t it? It’s having an affinity with someone. If people have an affinity with you through your book, that’s amazing. That’s so much what I felt like I had with Emma Forrest, with Matt Haig… all of these authors. They do think that they know me. And they kind of do. I think that if you are going to write an honest book you’ve got to write an honest book. So they do basically know me, and what I’m like. They may not know every single secret in my head, or everything in my head. But I think that if people think they know you, that’s a good thing. It’s not something to be scared of. People are really scared of that. They say, ‘I want to keep this for myself.” Well, why? Why? I mean I could understand if you were Madonna or someone, and you wanted to keep a bit of privacy, but I find we are really in the cult of being mysterious and not over-sharing. It’s never ‘sharing’, it’s ‘over-sharing’. All sharing is seen as over-sharing. We have a very British stiff upper lip attitude: keep things to yourself, just get on with it. And I just think that’s bollocks. I don’t mind that people think they know me, or that people don’t like me, at all. More people should feel able just to be themselves. There’s no joy in being misunderstood, is there?"