Gwendoline Riley

As her fourth novel Opposed Positions is published, I talk to the novelist Gwendoline Riley about domestic abuse, Tolstoy and how easy she found writing her first book.

Gwendoline Riley is sat at the bar of the West London pub we have arranged to meet in when I arrive, drinking vodka and soda, and wearing a complicated one sleeved jumper which looks better than it sounds. It is no surprise that she is well-dressed – anyone who has read her fiction will notice that she is intriguingly specific about the clothes her characters wear, not least Esther in Sick Notes who she describes as wearing a “snowbound-Kansas 1957 look” and later, a “Willa Cather” outfit. We have met before so I also know how wry and opinionated Riley is. 

At 33, her novels have already won a Betty Trask Award (Cold Water in 2002) and the Somerset Maugham Award (Joshua Spassky in 2007). Cold Water was also voted one of the top five debuts of 2002 by the Guardian. Her fourth novel, Opposed Positions has just been published. Its narrator, Aislinn Kelly, is a sometime novelist who is under siege from her abusive father. Riley says of the novel, “I hope it is fierce. I hope it’s quite radical in its way.” It is certainly the most explicitly feminist of her books, in the heroine’s utter refusal to allow herself to be objectified by the abusive history of her family.   

In describing the relationship between Aislinn and her father, Riley seems to pinpoint the way all emotional abuse, and not just misogyny, works. As she explains, “There is nothing about you being acknowledged or given any perspective and yet you’re in this double bind where anything you do… if you ignore them, they’ll come back at you with double strength. It’s like men’s rights activists or internet trolls or any of those type of people who will keep going for this thing that they can’t have, that they hate and fear for whatever reason.”

Anyone worrying that Opposed Positions sounds like quite a downbeat read should also know that the heroine is asked to send a picture message of her boobs, and she obliges after a fashion. This scene was something Riley had told me about in 2007 when we first met and she was publicising her third novel, Joshua Spassky. At that time, she also said she had been thinking about War and Peace and was droll about this, given that she writes short novels. The picture messaged boobs made the final cut but before I can ask her about the influence of Tolstoy on this novel, she starts laughing and says of the boobs, “Very Tolstoyan”.  She then says, “I don’t think everything should be measured against War and Peace! I always want to write a long book, to write something more acquisitive but I can’t seem to do it without feeling tense. It doesn’t seem to be how it works, not just on a structural level but on a sentence by sentence level. It just seems to be these pieces that I need to get into some sort of cosmic alignment.  […] And in this one, well, because she feels herself to be very endangered psychically – there’s something she has to escape from and sort out. I don’t even know what that is… senselessness, I guess. Because of that, it couldn’t be loose, it couldn’t have those vistas, it had to be like that.”

I get the sense with Riley that the thing she is striving for in writing fiction is accuracy and she refers repeatedly to the painstaking process of “getting it right”. She doesn’t dress up her craft but talks instead of throwing thousands of words away. Having said this, I think she was a born writer and she admits that she was not remotely surprised to have published a novel, and a well-received novel at that, when she was 23. “I guess it was just me being very senseless and naive but it seemed to me to be quite natural. I wanted to be a writer but it was very unformed, I didn’t really know what that involved, I didn’t know that I had to think about sentences or have a sensibility but then that’s a good thing. I remember copying paragraphs of Beryl Bainbridge but changing the nouns, so that it still made sense. When I started writing the first one [Cold Water], I remember thinking once I’d got one paragraph down, I just thought it would be easier to do the rest and then it was quite easy.  I recall the first one as being a very mild, enjoyable, sort of crafty thing to do.”

She has felt the pain of prurient questioning about her work in the past, particularly with the publication of Sick Notes (2004) which she says, laughing, is about “an incontinent drunk who is just sort of in a pit, vomiting on herself.” It is also a formally aggressive, slim masterpiece, something which she is uncomfortable about acknowledging. “My favourite book is the next one. I hate Sick Notes. I’m not disowning the first two but they do make me feel embarrassed.’’

Her work seems to attract speculation about her own life partly because she writes about characters who are not ostensibly a million miles away from herself (all are young female writers) or from each other. “It’s evolving in its own way. I haven’t made them arbitrarily different… I think there’s this echo chamber and people just google you and say what someone else has said. These are books that will take someone an afternoon to read. There are loads of other books to read out there, they don’t have to read all of mine in succession for all time, so what’s the problem? Lots of the writers I like don’t feel the need to change the scenery or the hairstyles every time.”

It is no surprise that she adores Philip Roth, given that the narrators of all her books are novelists as Zuckerman is and the epigraph to Opposed Positions is a quote from Roth, “Did fiction do this to me?” On a more light-hearted note, she says that she wanted to call her most recent novel My Life As a Woman after Roth’s novel My Life As a Man until she found out this was the title of Roseanne Barr’s autobiography. “I love Roth, he and Alice Munro are my favourite living writers but she’s probably really my favourite. It’s not that I wouldn’t have a word said against Roth. I love him but I don’t feel like I would defend him to the death, not like the way I would do J.D. Salinger or Morrissey.”

Morrissey appears in Opposed Positions, briefly, as he did in Sick Notes, her second novel. She says “I think he’s going to do a Hitchcockian appearance in every book from now on. I think he should stroll by in every book I write.”

Lastly, we talk about the adoration Morrissey inspires and I wonder how Riley relates to her own audience. She says, “Have you read Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark? Oh that’s brilliant, she [the narrator] is a young novelist in that and she says ‘You don’t want cheap people reading your books, do you?’” Riley bursts out laughing before adding, “Five or six nice people will do.”