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The Normal Man
I started writing The Normal Man in the summer of 1991 at the
end of my second year at Oxford. I was sitting in my room in a
house I shared with four other people, waiting for a friend to
visit, a friend who was always always late which was something
I found intolerable then. Half an hour before my friend was due,
in order not to mind his imminent lateness so much, I began a
short story. Luckily my friend was late, hours late, and in that
time I wrote most of a tale about a shaky girl called Janey March
who goes to a party, falls for a man she meets there and promptly
has her wrist cut badly as she tries to hand the man a glass of
wine at the exact moment that he makes a speedy and extravagant
hand gesture which knocks into the glass, causing it to smash
and bite into her skin.
I was quite stimulated by this idea for a first meeting, this
very unlucky domestic accident which also had darker echoes of
suicide and murder. Looking back I suppose it was a sort of symbol
of how difficult the relationships between men and women, or just
people of any gender, seemed to me then. I was also attracted
to the idea of two young people spending their first date at Casualty
and being suddenly thrown together in this joint project of rescue
and recovery when they had virtually no history between them to
help them manage things.
This episode became a key scene in The Normal Man and then, gradually,
less of a key scene, as the fledgling new romance became decreasingly
central and more a backdrop for Janey's examination of her feelings
of loss for her father who died ten years earlier.
I still find the scenes of mourning in The Normal Man very difficult
to read. Having suddenly lost my closest friend in a climbing
accident in Oxford the previous year, I knew all to well what
it felt like to love someone who was dead more than you loved
anyone who was living.
Another aspect of The Normal Man which reflected particular concerns
I had at the time are the scenes that are set in the music hall
where Janey's father Norman worked before he died. I was quite
obsessed with the Music Hall at that time in my life and used
to go regularly to a rather inauthentic version under the Arches
at Charing Cross where I heard for the first time many of the
songs which feature in the novel.
Last year I took part in a reading for Amnesty International in
the very same theatre and before I did my reading from The Last
Hope of Girls I found myself asking the audience if they'd mind
if I sang a chorus from 'Are We to Part Like This Bill' which
I then did to rapturous applause.
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