Interview with Josa Young
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Q: Hello Josa. ‘One Apple Tasted’ is your first published novel but words have been your career since you were a finalist in a Vogue talent contest. You have written and/or edited for The Telegraph, The Times, Vogue, Tatler, Harpers and Queen and countless magazines and websites. How did this prepare you for writing a novel? What drives you to write novels (I know that you are now working on a new one) and to what extent do you share my view that the novel is the ultimate expression of the written word?A: I am driven to write novels by an overwhelming urge to make sense of things by telling stories. I have always adored narrative: why things happen as they do, how personality drives action. I suppose I am trying to construct meaning out of the chaos of human life. One reason why I could not have written a novel when really young: I knew I hadn’t encountered enough straw yet to spin into gold (or even table mats – I am not making precious claims).
The main preparation that features writing provides is fluency. You just know you have to write to a deadline, so you do it – there’s no fannying around and worrying about writer’s block. The difference with features writing is that you are always doing it to a commission i.e. there is always (or should be) a payment at the end of it. Writing fiction has to be for love of what you are doing – earning anything significant at all is almost unknown for debut novelists.
I have always wanted to write fiction. I read a lot of it, and was desperate to join in and write something I would like to read. Before I wrote ‘One Apple Tasted’ (OAT), I produced some short stories which I didn’t rate. I also wrote bits of novels – including ‘Tuscan Torment by Mavis Flame’ my attempt at an overblown kind of romance – but never finished anything. So when the first draft of OAT literally poured out of me over five weeks, and I felt that at last I might have produced something that people would like to read, I was on a total high.
I am not sure about the “ultimate expression of the written word”. I think it very much depends on the novel. But I do think that we can learn almost everything we need to know about how to be human from the best novels, poetry and plays.
Q: I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of clothing in the book, particularly the contrasts of Dora’s and Amabel’s outfits at the wedding and then Dora’s dismissal of fashion in favour of function during her Indian quest. Did your time at Vogue influence your sense of the importance of garments on a woman’s state of mind or do you think this is something more innate in the feminine sensibility?
A: I think it’s the other way round. Clothes and how and where and when we wear them to me are fascinating expressions of the inner person and what is going on in their lives. My late mother made beautiful clothes to my designs, including several wedding dresses for friends. Perhaps I have replaced the process of making real clothes, with making fictional ones.
I have always pored over books about costume and fashion and my idea of heaven as a child was always the Costume Court at the V&A. For me the best thing about working in Vogue House was the library in the basement. A treasure trove of cultural history and changing silhouettes that defined 20th century womanhood. Fashion, in the macro sense – i.e. how it metamorphoses over time – is a source of abiding fascination. Fashion, as in what is on trend right now, less so. I am so glad my descriptions of what people wore when and why appealed to you and filled out the action and characters.
Q: We met on Twitter and you have a far-reaching web presence with your own websites at www.josayoung.co.uk and www.oneappletasted.co.uk, a blog on The Telegraph’s site at http://my.telegraph.co.uk/josayoung and many other articles and reviews on other third party sites. In addition to being a novelist you also write web content. How has the internet evolved with you and your ambitions as a writer over recent years and are there any ways in which you could see it, or technology as a whole, performing better for you in the future?
A: Yeah! we met on Twitter. I love Twitter. I started tweeting, initially rather occasionally like a sleepy bird just before dawn in 2007, and now several times a day as the bookish community where I met you has formed and is very active.
I got my hands on the internet for the first time around 1993, when I downloaded a Cezanne from a Paris museum and printed it out. I cannot even describe the sense of power and purpose that experience gave me. Soon afterwards, I specified a transactional website for my husband’s organic business. And I have been working on and off in the internet ever since. For a few years there, my fellow journalists thought I was completely mad and that writing for the internet was some kind of lesser art that they should ignore or despise. That view is gradually dispersing, as they realise their work lives on instead of being chip paper the next day.
These days I am an internet content consultant, determined to wed content in interesting ways to delivery and often frustrated by how dull a lot of web design looks. I am particularly interested in interactivity and how we are able at high speed to be in contact with each other to share our experiences. There are horrible things about the internet of course – as there are about the human species. But the warmth of community gives me a great deal of joy.
The other thing I love as an author about the internet is being able to talk to my readers without boundaries and hear their views on my book. Also to be able to go and review books I love too, and contact writers I admire. It has all been enormously encouraging and I am very pleased to be being published now, when it is possible.
www.josayoung.co.uk has been up for years, and needs a thorough refresh, but www.oneappletasted.co.uk launched in April this year. I designed it and had it built in India, and now perform that service for other writers as well, such as www.simongray.org.uk.
Q: Guy, the male protagonist of ‘One Apple Tasted’, is rather hapless and emotionally haphazard. In fact, apart from being handsome and charming he somewhat lacks the traditional characteristics expected of a romantic hero. Dora is very much the heroine of this story – it is she who has the strength of character to believe in the relationship and effectively saves him from himself. Is this how you set out to write the novel or is it how it evolved once you embarked upon it?
A: I honestly didn’t plan anything much. The characters just ran away with me completely and did some outrageous things that I had not expected at all. Frankly, I was rather embarrassed.
Also, I find conventional romantic fiction a little iffy as I have never met a conventional romantic hero. All people are flawed, but somehow some people manage to find someone they can love all their lives long. I find that completely romantic – forgiveness and going through the tough stuff, and the bond being strong enough to hold in spite of it all – the grief, the joy, the weakness and the strengths of the human condition.
Q: I have read that you wrote this first draft of ‘One Apple Tasted’ in a five week sitting, but also that it’s an incarnation of a novel you started writing several years ago. As an editor you have a tighter handle than most of us on the amount of rewriting and tidying and tweaking any piece of writing needs to make it really good. How would you describe the process you went through to both write and publish this book, and what learnings are you taking with you as you work on your future novels?
A: The first draft just emerged without much help from me some years ago. I did a lot of editing over the years, adding stuff, cutting out bits that had come to bore and embarrass me more than others and adding new bits. I do think it is vital to get the first draft down before tinkering. Although this time, I am breaking my own rules by constantly going back and editing bits.
There I was writing last week. I thought I had planned two essential characters, a mother and her daughter. During the course of writing one chapter, the mother became 20 years younger and the daughters vanished. That is how writing fiction works for me, planning doesn’t work at all.
I write in any old order as well, so a major editing task is deciding what order would work best for the chapters I have written. As you mention, I slide around through time, and believe I am incapable of writing a straightforward timeline.
I am an editor by trade, and get annoyed with myself when I notice I have used the same word or phrase repeatedly. Control F has made eliminating this human failing much easier!
Q: I loved, as I alluded to in my comments about Guy and in my review, the strength of the female characters and the thoroughly modern women you portray. I particularly savoured a conversation that Dora had with Tirzah where she challenged the view that a woman’s existence can only be justified by the presence of a man in her life and that perhaps there is more to life than marriage and children. Indeed, perhaps that a woman could define herself primarily by the work that she does, as is typically the way for a man. How controversial do you think this view is, even today, and do you feel in any way that you betray womanhood by suggesting that being a wife and mother isn’t necessarily everything for all women?
A: I have been married for nearly 22 years, and have three children. I always wanted to be married, and I always desperately wanted to have children. What I could not bear was being someone’s girlfriend. I regarded this as a complete waste of time. If the guy wasn’t the one, then I quickly became bored. I remember a strong sense of relief when we were wed, thinking “Well that’s that dealt with. Let’s get on with all the other exciting stuff that life has to offer.”
Not just work, which can fade away with age and redundancy, but creativity, friendships, the interests and excitements of life. And children grow up and leave. And marriage is not always permanent. If we need our lives defined at all, surely our inner resources should be constantly honed in order to make ourselves more fully human? Nothing outside ourselves can do that for us. I think it is deeply unhealthy for men as well – look how many die shortly after retiring. Work is just work. Life’s the thing.
I also get bored very easily, and cannot imagine ever doing just one thing at one time. But you would have to ask my children if I am any good at the bit of me that they have experienced first hand. They are the best thing about me.
Q: The title ‘One Apple Tasted’ reminded me of the Cat Stevens song ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ and indeed the themes of first love and losing one’s virginity appeared and reappeared in the novel. It also brought shades of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge into my mind. When did the title occur to you and are my thoughts about it in any way accurate?!
A: It is a quotation from ‘Paradise Lost’, so you are very much on the right lines. I had a tutor at Cambridge who taught Miltonic grammar, and the inversion caught at my fickle fancy. And the passionate love between Adam and Eve in spite of all adversity, the human weakness and pain, appealed to me very strongly.
“It was from out of the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil as twins cleaving together leaped forth into the world.”
The first LP I ever bought was by Cat Stevens, and Spotify is allowing me to listen endlessly to him once more.
Q: If you were a pair of shoes, what would you be? I’m struggling to answer this one myself as I think that women love shoes so much as they are excellent at projecting and reflecting our moods. But I think, right now, I’d like to be my (last season) creamy beige patent, block heeled Bottega Veneta knee-high boots.
A: I am rather fancying those Jimmy Choo deconstructed sandal/boot things. I love lots and lots of straps and had a glorious pair in my trousseau by Martine Sitbon, a designer I adored in the late 1980s, that looked like Edwardian tart’s shoes, all straps and a lavatory heel.
WIN A COPY OF ‘ONE APPLE TASTED’ BY JOSA YOUNG BY POSTING A COMMENT TO THIS ARTICLE NAMING YOUR FAVOURITE VARIETY OF APPLE!
No. 1 — November 15th, 2009 at 19:07
Fun interview. My apple of choice is a Cox’s Orange Pippin. Mmm tasty.
No. 2 — November 15th, 2009 at 20:55
Have you ever tried a custard apple? It literally tastes of custard. I have a feeling it’s not really a member of the apple family but its vanillarey sugary goodness means I have to vote for it.
Nice shoes.
No. 3 — November 16th, 2009 at 04:48
My favourite apple is the Russet – the beautiful, slightly roughened, amber coloured skin and inside, the pale honey coloured, scented flesh. The most delicious of apples.
No. 4 — November 16th, 2009 at 08:04
Excellent interview.
No. 5 — November 16th, 2009 at 20:08
Granny Smiths of course!
No. 6 — November 17th, 2009 at 12:33
I am partial to the occassional Pink Lady. But not all the time.
No. 7 — November 17th, 2009 at 12:38
TheBeast, Heather, Maureen and Saffie – you are all in the hat! There is one variety of apple I am looking for that will trump all previous entries and it’s not appeared yet! Keep commenting readers! Competition will close on Saturday 21st November!
No. 8 — November 17th, 2009 at 16:28
It’s not the ‘Nonnetit Bastard apple’ is it?
No. 9 — November 17th, 2009 at 16:39
I like any apple juicy and sweet, Discovery apples are good
No. 10 — November 17th, 2009 at 16:48
Haha no Maureen it is not. And in a turn of events that if it wasn’t my competition I would think was a FIX!, Alaric has named the trumping apple and so the copy of ‘One Apple Tasted’ will go into the post to him tomorrow morning. Thanks for participating everybody… I shall run another one soon since this one was FUN.
No. 11 — November 17th, 2009 at 17:02
My favorite apple is the Fireside, although Lodi is a nice second favourite.
No. 12 — November 17th, 2009 at 18:51
Pink Lady – a bit ‘greasy’ if you ask me – but probably no-one will. ‘Nonnetit Bastard’ is much more interesting even though Danish!
No. 13 — November 17th, 2009 at 18:54
Honeycrisp! I don’t know how big they are outside the US but I can’t get enough of them.
No. 14 — November 17th, 2009 at 19:28
This competition is now closed, with Alaric the winner with ‘Pink Lady’. Please keep on leaving comments with your favourite apples though!
Maureen – what do you think of the ‘Pink Lady’ as an apple, please? (I actually thought you’d made that other one up!)
No. 15 — November 18th, 2009 at 10:24
I have never eaten one, sadly many apples make my mouth and eyes itch when I eat them. though Russets are my fave and I can eat them.
I do think ‘Pink Lady’ is a pretty name for an apple.
Made it up! As if I would……..
No. 16 — November 18th, 2009 at 10:34
Ha! Another person with a fruit allergy. I am finding more and more of us… I have that problem with apples, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots. All fine cooked and through my juicer but not in their whole, raw form. Used to be fine – started in my bit twenties. All very odd.
No. 17 — November 18th, 2009 at 11:13
Helen, I am exactly the same – same fruits all okay cooked. It started with me in my early 40′s. Ian has become the same as well.
No. 18 — November 19th, 2009 at 18:30
Pink Ladies! I have yet to find a superior apple.