Award-winning novelist and short-story writer Alison Louise Kennedy may be among our most popular literary authors but she’s not without surprises. Few other Granta magazine “Best of Young British Novelists” – an accolade she’s been awarded twice – having performed stand-up comedy or written a Doctor Who novel. Yet she insists: “Anybody who knew me wasn’t remotely surprised. If you never met me, presumably everything could be surprising.”
Arguably, Alison’s new novel Serious Sweet is what regular readers might expect from her; a poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written love story in which two damaged – yet fundamentally decent – people try to make the best choices they can in what appears to be an immoral world. Nevertheless, it was written – “soft pedal on one, hard pedal on the other” – while she was also imagining Tom Baker’s Doctor Who battling an ancient alien monstrosity hidden beneath an Arbroath golf course.
“I’ve been told I don’t do plot; I even sort of joke about it,” she says. “But there’s always plot; it’s either internal or external things happening, and I tend to be slightly more interested in the internal. It’s not that I don’t like plot, it’s that, quite often, it doesn’t interest me. But with Doctor Who, it’s fantastically interesting because anything can happen. Sci-fi tends to start with ‘What if…’ and then you go with it.”
Any connection with what is now a global fantasy “brand” has had consequences, of course. “Kids now turn up to readings,” she says, “which can get quite problematic if they turn up to late night events. If I’m reading from the new novel, there can be a lot of swearing – depending on which bits I’m reading.”
She doesn’t think any children who read Doctor Who and the Drosten’s Curse will transfer to her other books; nor does she have any idea of the cross-over with adult fans of the television series. “I don’t know how many adults read the Doctor Who book, to be honest, but it does mean you can be much cooler in conversations, which is always fun.”
Between Doctor Who and Serious Sweet, Alison wrote around 250,000 words last year. She’s always been prolific, but accepts: “That was too much, I think. I had a migraine for most of last year; that’s why everyone has a headache in Drosten’s Curse.”
Nevertheless, she did enjoy the experience of writing a Doctor Who novel. “Fun is not necessarily the principal driver in an adult book, although I think writing Drosten’s Curse, in a way it, put a different kind of fun into Serious Sweet. It was enjoyable and it was doing what I always wanted to do; you sort of want to be standing next to the Doctor, but you also sort of want to be the Doctor. If you’re having to write both, that’s where you’re living, you’re with that thing that you always wanted when you picked up a 1970s’ Doctor Who paperback, read it and wanted more. Which is why I became a writer; because I want more.”
Does that also explain why she left her native Dundee? “There are Dundonians everywhere, except Dundee,” she says. “I didn’t have a terribly tough time, but you’re aware that other people were having a tough time; when I was growing up it was a very divided city, with quite a lot of local government corruption, so I wanted to get out and really be in Glasgow, and to go to London to see theatre. And that was kind of what I did.
“But you can’t really say what influence any place had, because you haven’t had the chance to be born anywhere else. I’m sure it had an effect; certainly Dundee of that time gave birth to an awful lot of writers. There was a sense that you were sending messages out in bottles because nobody really cared – in Scotland, Dundee was the one that was never talked about. It’s always been a place with an honest potential, and maybe now it’ll do something with it.”
Her focus for 2016 is likely to be on “the smaller stuff”, as she puts it.
“Whenever I get a significant break I try and write telly and film things – nothing happens, but on we go. And building up the stock of short stories, doing some more essays – lots of quite short things, while thinking about what the next big thing is.”
Unfortunately, that “next big thing” is not likely to be performing comedy. “I’m beginning to miss it, but I need to write a new show, basically, and I don’t know when I’ll have time to do that,” she says. “But I’ve got no intention of doing what I would have to do to do conventional standup, which would be starting doing open mike spots in London and spending three years of that to get back to where I am anyway. I do like being on stage, talking to people; reading to them is a slightly different dynamic.
“I love comedy; I find it fascinating. It’s fascinating to do too; if you start doing it, its sort of really hard to stop doing permanently. People have breaks, because it’s quite physically tiring, but they come back because it’s a very beautiful form. It’s not sort of completely gone away; certainly writing two novels in a year, and a whole load of other stuff as well, there’s not really been much room for anything else.”
This year will also see her travelling around, promoting Serious Sweet at book festivals and other events; a process she’s not entirely unhappy about. “I mean it’s too late; the book is done. If it’s a terrible mistake, then it’s a terrible mistake. But meeting people and travelling round, you kind of get an idea of really what the book is in other people’s eyes; and while that’s not useful for that book, it is useful for what you’re going to do, so that’s helpful.”
The perceived need for authors to push their own brand puzzles her, however. “I think there’s a curiosity about the writing process, but there’s this idea that if a book isn’t that interesting in itself, then you have to fall back on mining the person, which I think is a whole queue of mistakes.
“If a book’s not interesting without the author sort of being draped over it, then it’s not a good book; it’s not going to last, the author’s not going to be around for ever. If it doesn’t work without a whole load of extra author stuff, you’re kind of drowning.”
Alison insists that she never “wanted” to be a writer. “I always did it. I never had an urge, because it wasn’t an unfulfilled urge. I always made up stories,” she says.
Nor was there a single moment when she decided writing was her chosen career. “People had said I should send it off if you’re doing it because otherwise you’re wasting your own time, and by about the second book, I kind of thought: well, I seem to be doing this. Which is very nice, but very surprising, and I think I’m fine with it continuing to be surprising.”
First published in The Scots Magazine, June 2016.
