A Chat With: Rebecca Wait

We chatted with the wonderful Rebecca Wait on her new book, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, which is shortlisted for the 2023 Nota Bene Prize. She graduated from Oxford University in 2010 with a first-class degree in English. Rebecca is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, The View on the Way Down, The Followers, Our Fathers, which was a Guardian Book of the Year and Waterstones Thriller of the Month, and I'm Sorry You Feel That Way.

First, would you be able to talk us through your journey as a writer leading up to the publication of I’m Sorry You Feel That Way?

I’m Sorry You Feel That Way is my fourth novel. My first was published more than ten years ago now — I was very lucky to get an agent and then a book deal not long after finishing university, though for a long time my sales could be described as ‘modest’ (a publishing euphemism), so it hasn’t exactly been a meteoric rise. I’ve never been a full-time writer; I’ve always juggled writing alongside teaching English in secondary schools, which I absolutely love. I’m Sorry You Feel That Way has done the best of all my books. I’m going to be taking a break from teaching for the next couple of years so I can focus on writing and spending time with my daughter, who’s two. I’ll really miss the social interaction (and chaos) of being in a school, but it’ll be good to have a bit more headspace.

For anybody who hasn’t read the book yet, could you tell us a little bit about the plot and your initial inspiration for the story?

The novel’s about twins, Alice and Hanna, and their fraught relationship with each other and with their controlling mother Celia. It begins as they’re children, and follows them into adulthood. I was particularly interested in exploring the legacy of family dysfunction, how this kind of messiness gets passed on from one generation for the next. And I was also very interested in the impact of having a ‘bad’ mother, the shadow it can cast across our entire lives, how it continues to shape us in adulthood.

You’ve also written crime thrillers, so I was wondering how different the experience was writing a thriller from your most recent novel? Do you think there is a thread that links all your stories together, regardless of genre, or are they all entirely disparate narratives in your mind?

My third novel, Our Fathers, looks at the impact of a terrible crime on the community of a remote Scottish island. When it came out, I often saw it categorised as a thriller which really surprised me because I hadn’t conceived of it that way. I’d intended it as an exploration of trauma, and of damaging models of masculinity. It was later selected as a Waterstones ‘Thriller of the Month’, which worried me, because I thought people would come to it expecting something fast-paced and exciting, and find it to be a very different kind of book. But I think the categorisation was really helpful for the book: people are much more likely to pick up a thriller than a book the author goes around describing as ‘slow-paced’. It’s lucky I’m not in charge of marketing my own books, really.

The main thread that links all my books together is probably family dysfunction, and how the past shapes the present. So although my books look quite different on the surface, I don’t think they’re as wildly dissimilar as they appear.

I found some of the most compelling moments in your novel are the truthful and acutely written human interactions that are often equally as humourous as they are moving. Has this always been something that you have been interested in exploring, and how do you approach such complex characterisation and relationship dynamics? Where does your inspiration for these intricate relationship dynamics come from?

I’m really interested in undercurrents: those tiny ripples beneath the most mundane conversations. And spaces and silences on the page can be just as interesting as what’s said out loud. I ration the big, dramatic moments I allow myself to include in my books. Most people’s lives aren’t made up of big, dramatic moments, but our lives still feel urgent and important to us. Barbara Pym writes in her novel Excellent Women, “After all, life was like that for most of us – the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.” I think that’s the principle I write by. But writing those small interactions does require care and precision, or the book ends up boring. You have to pay attention, both to the reality of how people interact, and how to get it down on the page.

I’m Sorry You Feel That Way is incredibly funny (I particularly loved the pastry miscommunication scene in the coffee shop), and I wondered whether, as a reader, you’re drawn to reading funny books and other media yourself? If so, what kind of humour do you enjoy?

Thank you! The kind of comedies I like best are sad ones. I loved Less by Andrew Sean Greer, and I’m a big fan of Charlotte Mendelson. I need there to be some emotional depth and complexity. It can be a tricky balance with comedy: you want to amplify every day absurdities because that’s usually where the humour is, but if you heighten things too much, or get preoccupied with only looking for the comedy rather than developing the characters, you can lose the reader, because they no longer believe in what’s happening. I had to force myself to tread the line between farce and plausibility very carefully in I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, which meant going to the edge of what I thought I could get away with and no further, and being prepared to cut some jokes (even if I thought they were hilarious). Ultimately, it is a family drama, and I need the reader to care about the drama part.

Are you one of the people, as mentioned in your novel, who views life as a comedy with a few tragic moments, or as a tragedy with a few funny moments?

The second. But I’m interested in how the two can coincide. I’ve had some unexpectedly good laughs at funerals, even when my heart has been broken. George Bernard Shaw said, “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh”, which is a quotation I like. Life can be a difficult business. I think without a sense of humour it might be unendurable.

Not surprisingly, your latest novel has been likened to Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss and TV shows such as Fleabag – how have you found being compared to these works and are they examples of other works you found inspiration from?

I love Fleabag, and the dinner scene that opens series 2 was an indirect inspiration for I’m Sorry You Feel That Way. It’s so perfectly paced and choreographed. I watched it and thought, that’s what I want to do!

Sorrow and Bliss sounds brilliant, but my book started being compared to it very early on, and so I’ve deliberately avoided reading it. I thought I might get writer’s envy.

I’m Sorry You Feel That Way explores family dysfunction, mental illness, and intergenerational trauma with an acute attention and truthfulness – could you talk a little bit more about your interest in these topics and how you approached weaving them into a wider narrative?

There’s a ‘touch of schizophrenia’, as one might say, in my family, which can be a very messy illness. I used to worry when I was young that I’d get it myself; it was like a sword of Damocles over my head, but one I’d invented because I was such a morbid teenager. I’ve had my own experiences with depression, first as a teenager and then in my twenties. I’m interested in how mental illness can derail, with alarming suddenness, a seemingly stable life. It used to terrify me. So of course I wrote about it. Intergenerational trauma is something I’ve seen first hand too. So much gets passed on. Epigenetics is a fascinating area, too — it blows my mind.

As the Nota Bene Prize is all about directing readers towards books worth taking note of and sharing with other readers, do you have any recommendations for books we should all be taking note of?

Sarah Gilmartin’s Service, which came out in May, is brilliant. It looks at sexual abuse allegations within the context of a high-end restaurant. It’s fast-paced, complex and beautifully written. I also absolutely love the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. They are among the few books I regularly re-read. I think EJH has always been underrated, but she has such a keen eye for the detail and texture of ordinary lives, and she makes them really matter.

The cover of I’m Sorry You Feel That Way is so perfect, and does an incredible job of reflecting the energy and atmosphere of the book. So I wanted to end with a question we love to ask authors – do you judge a book by its cover?

Thanks! I love that book cover, and can say that very freely since I had absolutely no hand in it. I think I do judge a book by its cover, though I’ve read enough by now to know I shouldn’t, and some books I’ve loved have had dreadful covers.

I love holding the physical edition of a book: the packaging does matter, and creates that extra frisson of excitement. I like the idea of a book as an object, not as some intangible collection of words and thoughts. As a teenager, I remember buying the hardback first edition of a book by Douglas Coupland called Hey Nostradamus! and it was so gorgeous: a small maroon hardback with no dust jacket, and line after line of little kneeling figures debossed in silver, with just one debossed in white kneeling the wrong way. I lent it to each of my friends in turn and we all read. I think the book was good, but with a cover like that it didn’t even need to be.