When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

"Um, actually I think you can use the word play. It’s uncomfortable, but the beauty of what she does is that she takes an incredibly disturbing centrepiece—this abusive marriage—and turns it into a creative challenge, and a performance. It’s fiction, with an unnamed first-person narrator, and the narrator is telling the story retrospectively, about five years after these few months of marriage. It’s about how to tell the story: how do you go back and look at something so invasive, so encompassing, while reclaiming, or asserting, your sense of self. “Experimental writing needs an openness and willingness from a reader, to go beyond what you might be used to” What is the centre of the book is a playfulness about what it is to be a writer, and what it is to live a life—how we write narratives. And she has this very playful voice that shifts and flirts and diverts. It moves in lots of different registers. I don’t think it looks experimental on the page. It’s the shifting register that makes it feel really, really new. Kandasamy studies the different vehicles of how to tell a story. The novel moves between prose poetry, to bits where it’s like a Q&A. The narrator is simultaneously the actor who breaks the fourth wall, and the writer dictating the stage directions. So even though we’re looking at this abusive marriage, most of the time this person is almost testing you to see if she can make you laugh, think, shift your expectations of a ‘victim’. I think we act like there’s more we need from the reader than we actually do. That’s the barrier for people getting into this kind of writing. I think often experimental fiction is used as a warning term rather than as a way of elaborating what the writing is. There is a cost of admission, but maybe that’s only focusing for the first few pages. It’s not yet familiar to you. But each of these books is introducing a world that becomes familiar, and in which you can trust – they have a sound vision. So I think what we’re really talking about is just making the reader spend five minutes getting inside the world, and once you’re inside the world you’re sorted."