Madness or perseverance? Tessa Hadley has described her dogged determination as both in the past. While raising children and keeping a home, the now-68-year-old wrote steadily and passionately for 20 years before her debut novel, Accidents in the Home, was published in 2002.
Since then, Hadley’s success has been enormous. Admired by audiences and fellow authors alike – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes her as “one of the best fiction writers writing today” – Hadley’s novels and short stories capture the little victories, quiet defeats, and profound magic of ordinary life. And her new novella, The Party, is no different.
To celebrate The Party’s publication, we sat down with Tessa Hadley to hear about her writing journey, the power of returning to education later in life, and what inspired her latest work.
“It just seemed so feeble what one could do in sentences on the page compared to the richness of what one could do in the flow of play”
Growing up in 1960s Bristol, Hadley describes herself as “an oddball; skinny, not very good at sports, with a few odd friends like me.” As you might expect, books played a huge part in her childhood, but she’s hesitant to call what they offered ‘an escape’. “Escape is the wrong word,” she explains, “but a sort of multiplication of your own experiences by reading other experiences, other worlds, other ages, all of that.”
Despite being an avid reader, Hadley traces her storytelling sensibilities back to play-acting with her friends. She says, “We played obsessively and made up little stories and games, which we acted out. There was the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; somewhere, we’d read that it took three blows to get her head off. I don’t know how we imagined that she was still alive, but anyway, [that’s the] gruesome side to young girls’ imagination. And others were like soap operas with an unfolding story week by week.”
Alongside this, Hadley tried her hand at writing, but found it “incredibly thwarting”. She explains, “It just seemed so feeble what one could do at that point in sentences on the page compared to the richness of what one could do in the flow of play.”
Credit: Sophie Davidson
This tension between her need for expression and the limits of her creative powers was something Hadley would contend with for years to come. When she went to study English at Cambridge in the 1970s, it wasn’t to become a writer. “I was just so awed by the riches of literature,” Hadley explains, “and very drowned out by the feeling that it was insuperably hard.”
That wasn’t to say there weren’t brief flashes where Hadley believed being a writer was possible. She says, “I remember a strange moment in the university library. It was a wonderful place, though I used to fall asleep in there. I can remember looking at a piece of Shakespeare and suddenly thinking (this is so wonderfully immodest that I can afford to tell it), ‘I can see how it’s done!’ And then it got away from me again.”
“This sneaky desire to put my life, or something about my contemporary world, down in writing just began to devour me”
After Cambridge, Hadley trained to become a teacher. However, while she maintains that it’s one of the “most honourable callings”, she soon discovered it wasn’t for her. “I was absolutely rubbish at it,” she says, smiling. “The children just ran around my classroom and taunted me.”
Then, Hadley started a family with her husband, Eric, whom she met when she was training to teach. “But gradually,” she says, “this sneaky desire to put my life, or something about my contemporary world, down in writing just began to devour me. And it was, for a long time, just incredibly painful because I couldn’t do it.” That wasn’t to say that she wasn’t trying. In fact, throughout her late 20s and 30s, Hadley wrote four novels and sent them to publishers to no avail.
“It’s just a humiliating, horrible thing to write and not be any good at it,” she tells us. “Every time, I would swear I wouldn’t do it anymore, that I’d find some more useful calling. No doubt, I fantasised about being a nurse or something useful, but every time I gave up, after a little while, the hunger to write would come back and I’d start again.”
In her late 30s, Hadley applied for a creative writing MA at Bath Spa University (then Bath College of Higher Education). She says, “I was very sceptical; I didn’t think anyone could teach anyone how to write. None of the writers I loved had been on a course. On the other hand, it seemed to me that I’d better do something, otherwise I was going to be unhappy forever, or I’d better decide that’s finished and draw a line under it.”
“You can never know how much anyone else is going to want to read what you write, but you have to tell the story you have to tell.”
Fortunately, Hadley’s scepticism about the MA was soon allayed, and she describes it as a “turning point”. Not only did returning to education provide a chance for her to “get back out into the world” and do lots of “talking about books”, but having an audience (her fellow students) to read her work also re-jigged her creative process in a meaningful and productive way.
“For the first time, I had a real audience instead of somebody in my head that I was playing to. I had those eight people in my class,” she explains. “As I wrote each sentence, I would actually think, ‘This is boring. That’s good. That’ll make them laugh. That’s smart. That’s no good.’ And that was fundamental. I needed that.”
While Hadley describes the novel she wrote during her MA as “a hybrid mess”, she could see “places in it where the writing would suddenly fly”. Perhaps more importantly, she also wrote a few short stories, which were published in a small Welsh anthology.
Credit: Sophie Davidson
The next few years were a hugely productive time. With three sons and one stepson at home, Hadley wrote another novel and embarked on a PhD, which eventually led to a teaching job at Bath Spa. And while in her office at the university, she received a call to say that her latest effort, Accidents in the Home, had been bought by the publishing firm Jonathan Cape. “It was really the transformation of my life. I was able, for the first time, to think, ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’” she explains.
Speaking about what finally worked about Accidents in the Home, which was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, Hadley says…
“I knew I’d got something right, for what it was worth, for the first time, really, apart from the scatter of independent short stories. You can never know how much anyone else is going to want to read what you write, but you have to tell the story you have to tell. All the rest had been me faking it and trying to write other people’s stories and, I knew, in a way, that what I was now putting down was my truth. So it was good not to be published before then, actually.”
“Don’t be afraid to write close to home. Don’t think, ‘That’s boring,’ and reach for the exotic because you think it’ll be more interesting. It may well be the other way around”
Hadley compares the experience of finally writing something ‘true’ to “walking into [her] own home, having been wandering around outside for years.” Regarding both subject and style, she isn’t sure writers have much choice over what will feel true to them. And, while some authors scoff at the age-old advice ‘write what you know’, Hadley doesn’t.
She explains, “That was a recurring experience when I was teaching; people who wrote quite weakly about crazy stories, and suddenly everything would change when they started to describe something that happened to them. You can feel, because it’s vividly in front of their mind’s eye, that they reach for a better vocabulary. They’re more stringent in demanding that the sentence be right, and they’re not satisfied with cliches, with the smooth sentence. So don’t be afraid to write close to home. Don’t think, ‘That’s boring,’ and reach for the exotic because you think it’ll be more interesting. It may well be the other way around.”
That isn’t to say that Hadley believes writers should restrict themselves to autobiographical tales. “I think you know more than you think you know,” she says. “That doesn’t mean you can only write things that are coextensive with your own experience. You can, of course, make stuff up. But you have to make up what you know, which is a paradox, but a true one. You have to make up the stuff you feel sort of sure that’s what it was like.”
As Hadley tells us where the idea for The Party came from, it’s easy to see this wisdom in practice. The novella (her first ever), which focuses on two sisters coming of age in post-World War Two Bristol, was inspired by tales her mother shared about being an art student in Bristol.
Speaking about The Party, Hadley says, “It felt very promising and I loved writing it. It was as hard as all writing is – that never changes – sometimes one struggles with doubt and thinking, ‘Is this the right story? Am I doing the right thing?’ You never have a conviction that anyone else will like it. But you have the sense that you like it – that it’s alive for you – and that’s very confirming.”
Tessa Hadley’s new novella: The Party
Since Accidents in the Home first hit shelves in 2002, Haldey has published seven more novels and four collections of short stories – with her tales appearing regularly in the coveted pages of the New Yorker. And, over this period, her confidence has grown immensely.
“One of the lovely things that being published can give you is that you trust yourself more,” she says. “You’re not quite so anguished and eaten up as to whether you’re doing the right thing. So I am a bit more ambitious in the things I think I know. I probably push a little bit further.”
Now at 68, Hadley shows no signs of slowing down. After reading The Party, which you can buy using the link below, fans can look forward to her next project, which she describes as “a big family saga.”
And for more interviews with authors, check out our conversations with Kate Mosse, Barbara Erskine, and Nick Harkaway.
Want to read The Party?
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