A.L. Kennedy: 'I don't have an ideal life. I'd rather be in a relationship and I'd rather have kids' (Portrait: Lloyd Smith)
A L KENNEDY suggests a particular teashop for our interview. I recognise the name from the award-winning writer's other interviews and assume, since she always chooses it, this place says something about her. ("You'll hate it," one of her fellow writers says. Why? "You'll see.")
Of course, it could just be that it's convenient for her west end Glasgow home, but so are lots of places. Turns out it's in this dishevelled, hippy-dippy hut down a lane. Two studenty types are wrestling with a strange pipe contraption – presumably a hookah – but are looking at me like I'm quite the weirdest thing in there. (Clothes lacking beatnik appeal and clean out of eau d'incense.) It's depressingly dingy, dark as an opium den. If allowed only one word to describe it, I'd choose 'self-conscious'. So… got the message, let's get out of here.
Back up the lane, I meet Kennedy. No space down there – shame – so we go round the corner to a place quaint enough to have lightbulbs. Kennedy has just won the prestigious Costa Book of the Year award, earning her a total of £30,000. She always received literary acclaim (in other words she was poor) but a popular prize can change your sales and your life. I'm curious to know how much, because she's always been so dismissive of prizes. But there are so many contradictions to Kennedy.
"She's good company and amusing and I've always liked her very much," says one of her colleagues when I ring round. "Self-obsessed with a gift for manipulation," says another. "Be prepared for a performance," he warns. "Remember this is a woman who trained to be an actress." (She has an honours degree in theatre studies and drama from Warwick University.)
It is true there is something quite mannered about Kennedy. In conversation, she's witty but sometimes gives the impression of being the clever cat playing with the mouse. For the last few years she has been involved in stand-up comedy as well as writing, a development she attributes to the break-up of a close friendship. She and her friend shared a sense of humour and that comedy had to find another outlet in his absence. Performing was like trying to find her voice all over again. "You have to find out who you are and what you look like and what you look like to other people," she says. Why do looks matter? Because people only listen to 20% of what you say.
What does she think her appearance says about her, then? She smiles across the table. "I obviously care much less about my appearance than you do," she says, with just enough sardonic politeness to be both amusing and mildly insulting. Really? Let's examine that. Kennedy is wearing a green, quite masculine, tweedy jacket, several sizes too big. She doesn't live with a man so she hasn't grabbed it from a partner's closet and thought, yeah, that'll do. Presumably, she bought it too big for effect. At the neck, a maroon woollen scarf. Dark jeans. At floor level, red flashes dance from an incongruously bright pair of canvas baseball boots. The point is not that it's an offbeat ensemble but that I suspect it's deliberately so. Does she really not care about her appearance, or does she perhaps want us to think she doesn't care? She grins at me. "Yours to decide," she says.
Oh yes, she likes her verbal games. Her Costa award was for her anti-Iraq novel Day, the story of a Second World War gunner. But let's start with Paradise, her 2004 novel about alcoholic Hannah Luckraft. Hannah, who falls in love with a fellow alcoholic, is depressed, isolated and self-destructive. She sounds not altogether unlike Kennedy's descriptions of herself in interviews, though her own depression was partly caused by a long-term serious back injury that has now been largely resolved. Kennedy always denies autobiographical content in her fiction. But while fiction is the product of imagination, it is also the product of experience. Did she write about alcoholism because that was a route she had taken?
"No, what I wanted to do with Paradise was write a book where the person had got to the same age I had got to, and grown up in the same place, but had gone a completely different way." She wanted to write about the St Andrews landscape, she adds, and she also knew female drinking would reach epidemic proportions.
But somehow, her answer doesn't feel like a direct response to my question. So alcohol wasn't a temptation for her? "No, I am allergic, so it isn't a temptation at all." (Does she think I won't notice that I ask the question in the past tense and she answers in the present?) 'Allergic' is a strange word to use. As she will know, because she closely researches her books, it's a word people in AA often use in recovery. Is she trying to tease? Confuse?
Another figure on the Scottish literary scene e-mails saying Ms Kennedy is "a genius", before adding: "But oh dear, there is something there which is very, very strange. Perhaps calling her a psychopath would be going a bit far..." Well, yes, I think it would – although I also think it would make Kennedy laugh secretly. Is she odd? Or does she just relish the idea that we are all daft enough to think she is?
Kennedy's account of her near-suicide attempt in her non-fiction On Bullfighting is very funny. No, really. In fact, it's so funny it makes you wonder how real it is. Kennedy is a master of tragi-comedy, seeing the black humour of both her own and her characters' lives. But the suicide passage is so beautifully, comically constructed that you can't help suspecting artifice. There she is, in despair, about to jump out of her tenement window when she hears a man singing 'Mairi's Wedding'. He's "criminally flat". As for the tune: "I need hardly say that it is annoying enough to be utterly unforgettable without having a single moment of charm." It's simply too ridiculous to commit suicide to the tune of 'Mairi's Wedding'.
Kennedy strikes you as a writer before she's anything else. Was she really suicidal, or just looking for a good line? No, she says, your sense of your own ridiculousness is genuinely what stops you killing yourself. "The terrible thing is that once you've called your own bluff, you can't do it again. You're trapped. I talked to a friend who is an undertaker. I was very depressed, kind of bouncing along the bottom, and he said, 'Don't do that, because you'll look silly.' It's a hugely egocentric thing to do – you are completely self-obsessed. The only solution you can think of is to remove yourself, and actually there would be a whole range of other solutions that don't involve you being the centre of the universe. It's different with different people, but he had me nailed so gave me an egocentric prevention, which was that just when you are completely powerless because you are dead, you will not be in control and will look a fool."
Her despair was prompted by depression over her back pain, a failed relationship and the death of her beloved grandfather, who had been a bright spot in a difficult childhood. She lived with her teacher mother and psychologist father but her parents divorced. Tense or volatile atmosphere? "Tense. Which is not… yeah… being tense is not great."
She was, she says, "a fussy eater, nervous, a pain in the neck; an only child, which means you kind of like your own space a lot". She was close to her mother but didn't get on with her father. Is it too late to build a relationship? "To do the father-daughter thing, yeah. Much too late. We had a go but there are reasons why it can't work, which is unfortunate. But it's not like you had a dad that you loved hugely and he died in a horrible accident with a combine harvester, disappearing into the thresher," she says, typically seeking out the surreally tragic over the mundanely sad.
Her grandfather was lovely. "Hello, Tiger," he'd say to her. "But a strange man, actually, an odd character." Kennedy loved the comedian Dave Allen and remembers watching her grandfather explode with laughter at a rude joke. "It was the only time I ever heard him laugh at that kind of joke. He was very proper. My granny wasn't. She was very bawdy and outgoing and flirty and wore miniskirts till she died in her 90s. Good legs, but a bit scary."
Her grandfather taught her to play cards – but not poker, because that wasn't a ladies' game. Pity. She'd be good at it. "He was the kind of man you shouldn't play a casual game of cards with on the train to Blackpool because he'd take your holiday money. He hadn't got any holiday money but by the time he got off he'd have yours. He was a boxer, did bareknuckle fighting, and was in London for years with some really dodgy people, but by the time I knew him he was fantastically gentle, lovely."
An old acquaintance who knew Kennedy as a teenager says she was awkward, painfully shy and plump – surprising, because she's now very thin, has been quoted saying she can't be bothered with food, and gives the impression of being quite delicate. She orders peppermint tea because caffeine makes her "jangly". She doesn't sleep very well. She also often sounds as if life has been a disappointment, though she says she's just a realist.
"Everybody has things that don't turn out the way they wanted, and everybody dies and everybody you care about may die before you do. It's a bit crap, really. But I think it's also the place where you find your compassion because anybody you meet is in the same circumstances." Is she depressed? "I don't have an ideal life and there are things I would like to be different but I don't, on a day-to-day basis, think I am depressed." What would she change? "I'd rather be in a relationship and I'd rather have a kid."
Her old acquaintance also said she seemed to "long to be cherished", but was drawn to unavailable men. Kennedy says relationships – with both friends and lovers – are difficult because her work is so isolating and because she travels so much on book tours and readings. She also feels she gets things wrong in human interactions, which is interesting, because that's the food of writing. When people cry she just wants to cry too, which she thinks is pretty useless. She may spend her days writing dialogue but she doesn't know what to say in real life.
Writing has been an escape, but no, her "imaginary friends don't fill the gaps". But ask if she'd swap her talent for a more 'normal' life and she says: "Probably not. I think I would just have made some different decisions when I was younger. But I didn't meet anyone. I wasn't swept off my feet. I'm not impenetrable, but there was no one around that I thought, I would be happy having children with you."
Emotionally, she would have liked children? "Oh, I love kids. I love kids. I just borrow other people's now. Which nobody believes. Nobody believes I can cook. Nobody believes I'm not a vegetarian. Nobody believes I'm good with children, or like them, or am liked by them. I'm this kind of monster." She smiles. "I have been asked to babysit!" she insists. "I have babysat mortally ill children. Alarming! The kid was hallucinating. This isn't my child. Please don't die!"
She considered having a child alone. "But at the time I was a more suitable age, the kid would have been trapped in the house with someone who was constantly hurting. Someone who couldn't stand loud noises, couldn't lift, couldn't afford to pay someone else to lift, someone distracted from making what little money they could so they wouldn't both starve. It would have been completely untenable." And yes, later she thought about a foreign baby, maybe Chinese. "But that would be a Chinese person not brought up as a Chinese person. That's liable to be quite confusing and it's confusing enough being alive."
Has she ever been in love? "Yes," she replies instantly. "Why?" Well, I noticed a review of Day criticised the way her characters fall instantly, irrevocably – and unrealistically – in love. I like her answer. It feels – unusually – spontaneous. "Have you never sat and had a cup of coffee with someone and thought, shit, I have to see them again? It's not the whole story, but it's part of it. There's a minute when you know and you just think, oh no, it's happened again."
So why do people often assume she's a lesbian? "I have no idea. I have never been remotely tempted in that direction and I have to say I've never met a lesbian who thought I was gay. I've never confused a lesbian. Which is handy because it would be a waste of time."
Does life improve when she's in love? "I get very sleepy, like a cat. I am very anxious and if I am actually with the person… it's miraculous, actually. Lovely. One of the things I like about it is that you are just in a room with the person and you kind of go hmm… it's just nice being there. You don't actually want to do anything and it's like being slightly drunk. But I always assume that if I like someone very much and care for them then they'll die horribly."
I was reading about someone who described themselves as "alone but not lonely". Which is she? Mostly alone, occasionally lonely. "There are times when I just miss that taking-you-out-of-yourself thing. You just miss sitting on the sofa with your arm round somebody, the humdrum stuff, because I'm quite tactile." On the other hand, solitary sometimes suits her. "There's days when I love being in the house by myself. I love when I've been away, sitting in my jimjams, having two baths a day and making a big pot of soup."
The picture makes me smile and I suddenly wonder how real wanting a relationship is for her. The compromise… the bother… Actually, could she handle the disruption of meeting someone? She laughs. "Probably not," she admits.
"The thing about Alison," says one of her fellow writers, "is that she slips skins. She likes to make herself seem interesting." I think she is quite interesting, actually. But that description does chime with a self-consciously clever quality to her writing. (Her website is also littered with sharply facetious lines.) Kennedy's books are not sink-back-in-a-cushion-and-lose-yourself books. They are sit-up-straight-and-pay-attention books. They engage the brain more than the heart. Somehow there is a cerebral quality even to the emotions.
The Costa prize has changed things only in practical ways. She has been insanely busy and has just spent the morning saying no to things she doesn't want to do. "But it doesn't mean you are a better writer than the day before. It's my job to write, to have reliable standards by which I can judge my work which aren't to do with fashion. Everyone is now turning round and saying how fantastic I am… well, you know, I was last week or I wasn't last week. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've just got a cheque."
She refuses to be driven by literary criticism. "You can't live there. You have to create a place within which you feel totally happy and safe and secure to make up what you want to make up and go where you want to go." Perhaps living alone gives her an emotional independence about her work, but she insists other people can give only limited help because you are trying to build a voice unique to you. "I very rarely give things to people. I trust my editor. He's a poet and has a good eye, and if he says it's okay then it's okay. My agent's opinion I care about. If you have a whole bunch of opinions, it's no use to you at all. You don't want a whole lot of din round you. Two good opinions are enough."
Her books are very internal. Is she more comfortable in there, inside her own head? "No, I like being out of my own head, so I like being in someone else's. Given that I'm being somebody else, I like being as much of somebody else as I can get. I like the difference between the inside and the outside. What I am interested in is not me but the interior of other people."
The interior and exterior. It's hard to find the joins sometimes. Kennedy says she can't be bothered with people psychoanalysing her work and they don't know the bits that really reveal something about her. Not that she's going to tell us because that's like being in the magic circle and revealing tricks. Maybe. And maybe, like every other writer, she reveals things involuntarily and is just terrified of being out of control. (The bad thing about being dead, remember, was not being dead, but being out of control of how she looked while dead.)
She has one difference to many other writers. Often, writers say their work is so personal and internal they find it hard – sometimes hurtful – when people don't like it. Not Kennedy. If complete strangers criticise, why should she care? "It's a bit like somebody saying your jacket is horrible. It's just my jacket – it's not me. I can take it off."
If her writing, like her jacket, really can be separated from what's inside her, it's interesting. Perhaps a strength and a weakness. She is a very amusing person, good company. Both edgy and vulnerable. All through our conversation, her green jacket hangs on the back of her chair. But did she really take it off? Yours to decide. r
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A L Kennedy will be appearing at The Stand in Edinburgh on April 1, and at The Stand in Glasgow on April 2 (www.thestand.co.uk) The full article contains 3118 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
