manifesto by bernardine Evaristo

evening standard 4 october 2021

Bernardine Evaristo came to popular attention when her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. She was of course joint winner alongside Margaret Atwood (for The Testaments) but Atwood had won the prize before (for The Blind Assassin, 2000) whereas Evaristo – somewhat staggeringly – was the first black woman and also the first black British person to win the prize in its 50 year history. As she points out in this lively and important memoir, although her life changed overnight, she was far from an overnight success.

Her story up until this point is worth reading not just because it is an entertaining account of a noteworthy life, but because she is unfailingly generous in delineating how she became herself. I have read few memoirs where the author demonstrates so explicitly how they arrived at their current success. This kind of self-actualisation is always hard-won and Evaristo had – as she points out – no privilege to draw on in her ascent to become a successful, happy and recognised woman of letters. She is determined not to pull up the ladder behind her and is also, often wickedly funny – particularly about her varied sexual conquests.

She began as one of eight children born to a white English mother and a black Nigerian father and was raised in Woolwich, South London. Evaristo draws a brief but pleasing parallel between her own story and that of the pop star Boy George, who grew up a few streets away – another suburban kid who had the gumption to make his dreams reality. Her parents took in lodgers throughout the 60s, including – startlingly – a family of 15 who had recently arrived from Goa.

Leaving home at 18, Evaristo had a series of precarious housing situations whilst trying to get her writing career off the ground. She also had some undesirable boyfriends and girlfriends along the way – including her first boyfriend who pushed her and her belongings down some steep concrete steps as she moved out of their shared house. She equally had plenty of fun, not least with a woman whom she calls “eX” and whom she met at Melkweg, the famous Amsterdam club, in 1982. There is a lovely photo included in the book of eX embracing Evaristo on the night they met, as young women, and she writes touchingly about this relationship. Evaristo serves up scrupulous honesty throughout, however, noting that regardless of how much she enjoyed Amsterdam’s cool lesbian scene, she often “felt self-conscious as the only person of colour in the room”.

Later, she entered into a relationship with a woman whom she nicknames, with good reason, “The Mental Dominatrix”. As a reader, I thought I knew what was coming – a brief but frightening period of experiencing coercive control before Evaristo escapes and meets the husband she now speaks so fondly of. Oh, how wrong I was! Evaristo’s account of her destructive relationship with TMD is far more nuanced and therefore interesting than that. She forensically examines her own role in this dysfunctional alliance, and traces some of the less obvious warning signs of what was to come, most notably TMD’s defensive hatred of success – something a shrink might term “turning a pathology into a virtue”. As far as therapeutic terms and therapy itself go, Evaristo hasn’t had any, which surprised me – partly because she must be in a minority amongst novelists living in London who can afford it, but also because it is rare that someone does so much work on themselves without psychoanalytic support, quite frankly. Nonetheless, this ultimately makes sense – as Evaristo at each turn reveals herself to be someone who gets things done herself!

I found it very moving to read about the affirmations she wrote for herself and how these applied both to work and love – both appeared to have worked out for her, in spades. She also describes her writing process, particularly writing her first novel Lara (1997), with an admirable lack of hauteur. It has recently been announced that Girl, Woman, Other, is to be added to the A Level English Literature syllabus. How I wish when I was 18 that someone – if not necessarily my school – had also thrust Manifesto into my hands.

This review originally appeared in the Evening Standard