Anna Stothard

A belated thank you to everyone who came to the launch of The Art of Leaving last week, held at The Society Club on Silver Place: an excellent venue full of Soho literature, first editions, vintage erotica and vodka.

When I first started writing The Art of Leaving, skulking around Soho mapping Eva’s life, the corner of Silver Place was a clothes shop. I bought a couple of moth-eaten hats and housed my character in a semi-imaginary flat looking out on a semi-fictional Silver Place. “As Soho alleys go, Silver Place was sedate. It was only a few roads down from Walker’s Court, where the sex cinemas were packed together and girls in leather skirts stood on either end haggling over the price of blow jobs…” Eva has been living in the alley ever since.  She would approve of the space at the end of her road transforming into a bookshop/gallery/cocktail bar.

The party got a good “review” in Londoner’s Diary, and the book’s had some nice reviews so far too:

“A stunningly accurate and chilling account of the acquiring of emotional wisdom, with vividly drawn characters,” Kate Saunders, The Times

“Anna Stothard’s third novel cements her her place as one of Britain’s best young authors… Stothard’s lush, dreamy prose is given full rein …” Kaite Welsh, The Literary Review

“Stothard gets her talons into you…read it for its beguiling heroine and sparky prose.” Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

“I would recommend it to anyone who likes being told a very good story,” New Books Magazine

“The great strength of this book is the lovely London atmosphere; Regents Park, Fitzrovia, the winding streets of Soho, all of which Anna describes so well.” Wendy Holden, The Daily Mail

“A witty, beguiling and increasingly poignant novel about the scars – physical and psychological – that make us who we are.” Stephanie Cross, The Lady

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Ted Hughes’s Crow poems. Aesop’s Vain Jackdaw. Othello, Macbeth. Ngugi’s The Wizard of the Crows, which I started reading last night on a plane to Nairobi. Crows are notoriously freaky. As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel in Zanzibar having come in to escape the bone-stiff smile of a single skinny crow I met in the higgeldy piggeldy streets of Stone Town. His back was curved like a piece of calligraphy punctuation, and he quivered his whiskers at me.  

When I was last in Stone Town three years ago, the place was overrun with crows. Where did they all go? No wonder the last skinny crow in Stone Town looked a bit irritable. I remembered the streets as having a similar crow-density to Kochi, Southern India, where I was just before Chistmas. There, shiny storybook crows waddle on the roofs of colonial houses and swarm the papaya trees over your head. They sit atop archaic Chinese fishing net contraptions, laughing at the fishermen, and argue with each other while shitting on tourists.

But in Stone Town they’ve been exterminated, all 5,000 of them according to the hotel manager I just asked. They were becoming a nuisance, killing indigenous bird species and spreading disease.

In a way I’m relieved to avoid another swarm of them. It makes me shiver when they stare. I feel like they’re ridiculing me. “He laughed himself to the centre of himself,” as Hughes’s poem Crow’s Fall goes, where a white crow attacks the sun and returns char black, with his words all mangled and charred too. “He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.” The audacity of them, the cheek! The horror.

But I also feel shaky, like a terrible thing has happened and the crows will somehow reek vengeance. Possibly, illogically, on me. The truth is, I wasn’t scared of crows until I went on a taxidermy course in London a few months ago, where I became unusually intimate with a jackdaw. (He died naturally, I’d like to add, I’m scared of the crow family but not vengeful.) I spent two days sewing and blow-drying him and now he’s propped up in a cheap black velvet stiletto heel on my bookshelf in London, beady (literally, made of beads) eyes watching me all the time.

You’d think that this experience would have made me less scared of crows, but it hasn’t. There’s too many crow deaths in my life at the moment. Perhaps, somehow, I think that all the other crows in the world know what I’ve done to their cousin. Perhaps I deserve their derision. 

Philip Womack kindly tagged me in “The Next Big Thing” Blog Meme, so thought I’d introduce my next book:

What is the title of your next book? The Art of Leaving

Where did the idea come from for the book? From Holly Golightly abandoning her cat, Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, an unhealthy fascination with airport departure lounges, changing schools regularly as a kid, moving cities, leaving relationships… Somehow it’s always the exit scenes that I remember from novels and experiences. I wanted to write about the adrenalin of saying goodbye.

 What genre does your book fall under? Fiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?   I’m not ready for them to exist outside the imagination yet.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?  During a rainy summer in Soho when an eagle escapes London Zoo and a secretive stranger starts appearing around the city, Eva realises she’s failing at the only thing she’s ever been very good at: the art of leaving.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? The book is being published in March 2013 by Alma Books. My agent is Charlie Campbell.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? About a year.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? It’s a story for anyone whose ever found it difficult to leave…

You can read the first chapter here. 

I hereby tag journalist, novelist and best read person I know, Emily Rhodes, as the ‘Next Big Thing’.

The first thing I saw on arriving at Frankfurt Book Fair was a woman in a skirt suit holding a bag of unbound proofs, bending to swap stilettos for luminous green trainers before rising – a look of intense, Olympian determination on her face – and sprinting off around the corner.  Just as she reached the tram her bag fell off her arm and papers scattered up into the rain, landing smudgily in puddles, but she didn’t even stop. I like to think she arrived at her meeting just in time to snap up international rights to the Next Big Thing, proof pages be dammed.

Through glass doors into the hall, I ventured out of the rain into a space where the air hummed: caffeine was being inhaled on escalators while Reservoir-Dog-type cliques of publishers marched down echoing airport-style hallways clutching spreadsheets and editors jogged the bookish assault course of the fair. I’d imagined some whimsical Emerald City or Disney Land of books and wasn’t disappointed – giant book covers, enormous shelves of novels reaching up the ceiling, a Tolkien-inspired waterscape in the New Zealand pavilion – but almost more interesting was the sense of the cogs moving the clock hands, deals being made, the mechanics of the international book world setting stories in motion.

I was a voyeur in the nuts-and-bolts of book selling, there to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of my German publisher, Diogenes. I spent the afternoon at the fair eavesdropping on agents gossiping about who was drunker last night, watched roomfuls of publishers and reps holding meetings, heads bowed over spreadsheets and galleys, pens bobbing, arguments erupting. Then all the earnest meetings stopped for the party on Friday night, when a six hundred strong crowd of booksellers, publishers and authors turned up to celebrate.

As the Diogenes Owl logo bopped away in lights on the walls of the club, I met booksellers who worked in Vienna and Dusseldorf and everywhere in between. In a small bar above the dance floor they set up a mini-library so while the party thumped on and the lights spun downstairs, up in story-heaven everyone could lounge over booze and books, deciding which novels to take home with them. If all clubs promised libraries in their chill-out rooms I’d go out dancing way more often.

Rumor has it that Diogenes danced on until sunrise and wore sunglasses to the fair the next day, but I stumbled out at three in the morning, bending to swap my stilettos for trainers in the rain.

P.S. Pink Hotel has been getting press in Germany. There was an interview in Die Welt, and in Süddeutsche Zeitung’s online magazine, Jetzt.com. It’s been reviewed in Cosmo, Brigitte, Die Rheinpfalz, Welt Express, and by Christine Westermann on German TV. Liberatingly, I have no idea what any of them say….

Last week on Rue de la Soala in Essaouira, in a nameless bookshop near the main square, an albino kitten slept with her nose on Camus and her tail curling over Paroles d’un Soufi. Her mother dozed nearby, surrounded by a shelf of beat up beach reads while I browsed. If I were reincarnated as a cat, I’d definitely hitch a lift to this blustery Moroccan port town, where the air smells of sunshine, fish and salt.

Essaouira isn’t nearly ominous as Orson Welles makes it look in the opening scene of his Othello, where the Moor and Desdemona’s funeral march stretches bleakly across the sea bastion running along the northern cliffs of the town. Yet this is no easy beach town of plastic sun loungers and fried calamari – the strong winds that whip around the walls (alizee or taros in Berber) are reported to send people insane, and the sea is too shallow to swim in. Designed by a Frenchman but packed with narrow souks full of carpets and spices, it’s both oddly familiar and exotic.

In the mornings we stalked the woodwork shops underneath the town walls, buying boxes and miniature boats. In the afternoons we followed the slinking cats and an excited confetti-cloud of wheeling seagulls towards the port, avoiding puddles of fish guts and sea water, piles of mortified metallic eyes staring up from sliced heads at our feet.

Inside the town walls, merchants try to sell you anything (even the wild cats: “you like? You have as a present from me. Twenty dirham only”), so it was relieving to be ignored amongst battalions of blue boats and tables of fish at the port. Sardines on ice, giant spider crabs, sea bass, still-kicking lobsters, prices are shouted out while slippery creatures are gutted on the pavement. One fisherman saw me looking at his giant eels, which were as pretty as anything in the souks with their silver skins curled together – freshly polished swords, dangly earrings for a giantess – but he knew I wasn’t really a girl in need of meter long raw eel, so hardly blinked when I turned away.

The best lunch spot we found was fish stall 33, a little while away from the port but still outside the ramparts, where you choose your meal from a giant tray of the days catch and haggle over the size of your sea bream or the number of prawns for your dirhams. They grill it right there in front of you and bring you salad with big baskets of baguette while you sit at tables laid with bright blue plastic clothes, the same colour as the sky. Glossy cats roam over the hosed-down blue tiled floors, not even bothering to beg because it’s so obvious they’ll get fed at some point. A guy touts glossy argon cakes nearby, little domes of sugar-dusted pastries. He whispered to me that the chocolate brownies were “magic”, but I didn’t test him. This town was strange enough.

The best dinner spot was at the riad hotel we were staying, Villa Maroc, where they serve huge platters of meat or fish tagine by candlelight, at tables scattered all over the renovated private house. A fir tree grows right up through the middle of the riad and spills out over the red tiled rooftop amongst knobbly cacti and couples playing cards in the shade. It’s in a perfect location, right next to the town walls, so at breakfast you sit on the roof looking out on multi-coloured washing lines flapping inside the town, and seagulls screaming over the beach outside. We spent hours reading up there in the sky.

It’s rare that I go to places and think: I could spend time here and write. I mostly like to tap away in faintly unpleasant cafes – the less pretty the better – or amongst the extravagant mess of my trusty childhood desk. But the atmosphere of Essaouira has lingered in my mind. Hopefully I’ll go back there some time soon, even if I’m not reincarnated as a cat.