KYLIE WHITEHEAD BECOMES ABSORBED [AUTHOR INTERVIEW]

22/11/2021

So I knew that it wasn't going to be straight up horror. But I also knew that it was going to have this weird element that a lot of literary fiction wasn't playing with. I do think that's changed massively in the few years since I started writing it. And even in the month since it's come out, so much good, weird literary fiction is coming out, which is really exciting

Kylie Whitehead is Absorbed, an author interview by Jonathan Thornton

Kylie Whitehead is a writer based in London, UK.

Her debut, Absorbed is a darkly comic novel of female insecurity, body horror and modern relationships, in the tradition of Naomi Booth and Otessa Moshfegh.

Order now from New Ruins, Waterstones or Bookshop.org.

“Uncomfortable psychological accuracy, dark humour and out and out horror. I loved it.”
Jenn Ashworth, author of Ghosted

“Full of existential dread and sardonic humour, I enjoyed it immensely.”
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

“A consuming exploration of the madness of love and its distortions of the lover and the loved. A literary debut that has so much to say.”
Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

“Fresh and compelling, this claustrophobic debut will suck you in and never spit you back out”
Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts

Your debut novel Absorbed came out earlier this year. Would you like to tell us a bit about it?

Yeah, sure. Absorbed is the story of a woman called Allison, who is feeling a little bit unsatisfied with her life. She's not too happy with her with her job, or her friendships, and she feels like her boyfriend is pulling away from her, and she's gonna lose him. And one night, pretty early on in the book, so it’s not a spoiler, she physically absorbs him into her own body. And after doing that, she starts to take on elements of his personality, or feels that she's taken on elements of his personality. And is kind of in this battle for the rest of the book, trying to figure out who she is, in relation to other people, and the person she has absorbed.

The whole book hinges on that early scene where she absorbs him into herself. Was that always the central part of the book that everything else came from?

The concept is something that I have dwelled on, I suppose, for quite a long time. I feel that especially when you're much younger, when I was in my early 20s, relationships felt very involved. And you felt that you had to give a lot of yourself to your partner, and you wanted a lot of them in return. And it felt like what you were aspiring towards was becoming the same person to a degree; becoming a unit. And when you're in a relationship, people tend to refer to you as so-and-so and so-and-so; you kind of come as a pair. And I always thought that was kind of interesting, and potentially damaging, or, at the very least a bit of a strange aspiration to have from a relationship. So I was always really interested in this idea of two people becoming one person. My best friend once said to me, I wish that we could run at each other really fast, and just combine and become the same person, which I thought was just a very lovely thing for her to say to me. I'm sure other people might find it a bit creepy! So I had this concept. And I was playing around with it and trying to figure out how I thought this was interesting. And initially, when I was playing with this idea, the absorption might have been the thing that happened at the end of the book. A few people have told me that they're kind of surprised that it's just like, bang, it’s there, on like page ten. It's pretty quick! But what I really wanted to explore was that, okay, so what if that did happen? Then what becomes of your relationship, what becomes of yourself? So, rather than exploring the relationship, and what might lead up to such a strange thing, I wanted to explore the strange thing through a lens of something we just can't explain or understand. Because that felt fun to me. That felt like the interesting thing.

And it's part of what makes the book so unusual, and the way that it straddles different genres. When you were writing it, did you feel like pressure to make it more traditionally horror or more traditionally literary in order to sell it?

When I first started writing it the prospect of selling it was so far from my mind. It's my first novel, I don't have an MA or anything. I'm not a novelist by trade, I suppose. I was just kind of playing around with this idea of, could I take this concept and make it into a book? But I've always really loved horror as a genre. But it's sometimes difficult to slot that in with other things that I'm interested in. If you go to Waterstones or Foyles, and you go to the horror shelf, everything's got this black cover and this red font, and everything feels the same. And I've learned since I've written Absorbed, since I've understood more about indie publishing, and since I've really started to like dig into what kind of weird fiction is out there, there is a lot of interesting stuff hidden among the stuff that feels very same-y. But when I set out to write this, I really wanted to use the horror lens, which I think is make an exciting and kind of fun way to explore quite depressing or intense topics. But then I wanted to mix it in with other kinds of literature that I like. And I've always liked wry women, women telling stories that are quite desperate or upsetting, but who are very funny at telling them. People like Muriel Spark, even Shirley Jackson has this a little bit, where the stories can be quite fraught, and the women can be quite sad and depressed or fragile, but the way that they're told they are quite funny, and almost relatable in parts, even if you don't feel that you want to relate to that person! So I knew that it wasn't going to be straight up horror. But I also knew that it was going to have this weird element that a lot of literary fiction wasn't playing with. I do think that's changed massively in the few years since I started writing it. And even in the month since it's come out, so much good, weird literary fiction is coming out, which is really exciting. But yeah, I didn't necessarily feel pressured. Because I didn't really know what was sellable. I didn't know how publishers were thinking about this stuff. I was just thinking, what would I want to read.

And it's the first book out with New Ruins, a collaborative imprint from Dead Ink and Influx, two indie publishers who both do really interesting stuff. So how did that come about?

Yes, I think the idea had been on the cards, that those guys had been speaking about it for a while. And yeah, they both received absorbed, they both really liked it. And they spoke to each other about it. And this was the way that they decided to take it. They have been talking about this idea of horror that straddles genres, that doesn't really fit into any particular group. And this came along, and they felt like this was the kind of book that embodied what they were trying to do, which makes me feel just like, really arrogant, saying it that way! Obviously I was so thrilled when I found out that this was how they were thinking of approaching it, and that I was going to get to be the first title. That was a really amazing feeling. And obviously, they’re both great publishers who bring out really interesting stuff, and I think Absorbed would have fitted well on either of their lists. I think they both have almost comparable stuff on both their lists. But getting to work with both of them has been amazing opportunity.

Yeah, super exciting to be the flagship release as well.

Yeah, like who knew when I started faffing around with this idea however many years ago that two publishers we're going to decide to start a new imprint and publish my book first! It was wild.

And the book is about the very real pressures that young people do feel today. Was that something that you explicitly wanted to engage with as well?

Yeah, this concept of what people feel is expected from them. And the different ways in which people carve personalities out of specific elements of their lives. So you have these career people who, they are their job, they'll introduce themselves, and they'll say, Hi, I'm Kylie I do this. And that's how they define themselves in the world. And then you have people who define themselves by their relationship, and the most important thing is being so-and-so's girlfriend or boyfriend. And I feel a bit silly, making a generational comment, because obviously I've only ever lived as one generation, but it does feel like we're expected to want more than ever before. And that with every new generation, we're expected to be more. We're expected to have very strong defined political opinions, we're expected to care about our careers, to the degree where we are, you know, putting in extra effort outside of our working hours. We're supposed to be bettering ourselves, we are supposed to be excellent friends, we’re supposed to be there for each other and be very supportive, especially when times are turbulent, which, at the moment, I'd say they are. So there are so many different ways to define yourself. And it sort of feels like a checklist, sometimes, am I this is? Am I this? Am I this? And it's just so much pressure. And I just find that fascinating, in terms of how different people choose to define themselves. What would the ideal personality look like for people? How do we craft our personalities? There's obviously a lot of stuff that that just happens, due to how we're raised with our families, the friends that we make, the people that we surround ourselves with. But I think there are some conscious decisions in there as well about the types of people that we want to be. If we want to be kind, or we want to be smart, we want to be funny, we do kind of work on these elements. I'm just quite interested in how all of that fits together. And there's an awful lot of pressure on everybody just to just to get by, just to live your life. But then trying to get by in this sort of ideal way, in this picturesque version of the world, whatever that means to you. Just a really fascinating concept. I think there's loads to dig into there. With writing, I'd love to see more really great workplace fiction. I haven't read that many amazing books about work. There's this book by Hally Butler called Jillian (2015), which is about work, which I think is very funny. But I think I think we could do with more of the kind of arbitrary day to day.

Yeah. I thought one of the one of the interesting things about the book is that, it's not about social media. But social media is such a huge part of how we curate versions of ourselves that we present to the world. Was it a conscious attempt to sort of like engage with those ideas without explicitly featuring the technology or that much?

I don’t think so. I don't think that was necessarily intended. Although it's an interesting way to look at it. I definitely think I wasn't going to write a social media book. I'm not a hugely online person. I mean, I do I look at Twitter all the time, I look at Instagram all the time! But I'm not massively engaged in the whole thing with online culture, which makes me feel like I'm about 70! But it was never going to be that kind of book coming from me. I think plenty of people have done that kind of stuff, and will do a much better job. Have you read A Touch Of Jen (2021) by Beth Morgan? It's just come out. It's a very good millennial social media novel with a horror twist. It's really kind of unexpected and fun. And then Fake Accounts (2021) by Lauren Oyler which came out of this this year, as well is another great social media book. But I think that the pressures that we put on ourselves are no doubt exacerbated by constant social media in our lives, for sure.

It’s a very contemporary book with the way that it deals with our current anxieties, but you also have the strand with Alison's parents, who've been accused of being part of a satanic cult, which harkens back to the Satanic Panic of the 80s. How did that element come into the book and what what sort of originally drew you to that?

I have just been fascinated by the concept of the Satanic Panic since I first found out about it. I just think it's absolutely wild. And there will be many examples of such panics spreading in that way, but I just found this one particularly resonant. I mean, I grew up listening to nu-metal, watching Kerrang, and stuff. And it just seems wild to me that there was a point in history where your parents would take that as a concern that you are engaging in stuff that is horrific. I've just always found that very, very fascinating. I did force myself to read Michelle Remembers (1980), the book that was a big part of the Satanic Panic about a girl called Michelle, who has these memories come up when she's a little bit older in the 20s. She worked with this psychiatrist called Dr. Pazder, and they write this book together, and bringing up her memories. And it's all it's very shady. The way that it comes about, the theme of the psychological technique leaves a lot to be desired. But I just think it's a really fascinating time in history. And I think it is also a very sad time, right? Because a lot of bad things do happen in the world. And there are a lot of people doing horrible things. And I think that kind of cultural panic probably detracts from that to a degree. There were lots of instances of people being wrongly accused. And then you have to wonder how much real actual awful stuff fell through the net as a as a result of this. So I just thought it was a very interesting lens to give a person where you are going to have a very unstable idea of who you are, and where you came from. And this idea of not knowing, of being fairly confident, but not really knowing for sure. And then obviously having a supernatural element to that kind of ties in with the concept. So yeah, I thought it was just a very interesting place in history to put Allison. It’s not actually stated where the book is set, which is on purpose, but it is a British book, and the Satanic Panic was primarily American phenomenon, although it did have a big after effect here. I think it's interesting also that this stuff was happening. And it was just something that we didn't really talk about.

Absorbed is your first novel. Have you published any short fiction, or do you consider yourself mainly just a novelist?

Yeah, I played with short fiction. I actually don't think I have the patience for it, which might sound strange! But I think I have a tendency to, if I write a short piece, to go, Okay, well, that's done. I put them aside, and I don't necessarily have the like writing stamina to keep up and improve and edit and work on that. Whereas I think a novel you have so much space to breathe, and figure out what it is that you want to say. And that's what I really enjoy. I didn't know where this book was going. And I just thought that was that was really good fun. It's almost like reading it in that you don't know what's going to come out next. And you'll just be typing something in, and go, oh, this is interesting, let’s see where that goes. And I think I have more room for that with novels. I'd like to go back to trying short stories at some point. But I don't think I'm ready as a as a writer.

What are you working on at the moment?

Yeah, I'm trying to work on another book at the moment, which kind of has similar themes of self identity and how we figure out who we are. And perhaps what it feels like to have these ideas about who you are questioned, or even disproven, to a degree. I'm being purposely cagey because who knows what will happen, if it will pan out! So yeah, similar themes, slow going. But still excited to see what comes out.

Thank you, Kylie Whitehead, for speaking with us!

Further reading

Read Jonathan Thornton's review of Absorbed here

Absorbed by Kylie Whitehead

Allison has been with Owen since university. She's given up on writing her novel and is working a dull office job at the local council – now it feels like the only interesting thing about her is that she's Owen's girlfriend. But he's slipping away from her, and Allison has no idea who she'll be without him.

Panicking, she absorbs him...

Soon Allison begins taking on Owen's best qualities, becoming the person she always thought she should be. But is Owen all she needs to complete herself? Will Allison ever be a whole person?

Absorbed is the original and timely debut novel from Kylie Whitehead; a darkly comic story of female insecurity, body horror and modern relationships.

“Full of existential dread and sardonic humour, I enjoyed it immensely.” – Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
"This quiet novel has a wonderfully dark and savage little heart. Not only did it move me, its horror still lingers. A fantastic debut." – Matt Wesolowski, author of Six Stories

Purchase a copy here