Gabriel Ricard: Right from the start, you make it clear to us that this is going to be a very extreme, very over-the-top story in terms of its plot and characters. Still, I am curious if anything in the book was inspired, however loosely, by anything that might have happened in your own life, travels or experiences.
Michael Kelly: God no. [Flips through book to check.] Trucker whore, no, didn't look good enough in satin hotpants... workplace incompetence and bizarre effect on machinery, yes actually... Masturbation Addiction, no comment. Raped by priests, no, which is quite hurtful considering the amount of time I spent as an altar boy, I must have been a very repulsive child indeed. Mistaken for Hitler! Frequently, after a few drinks.
One of the less awful but still pretty bad things that happened to Euphemia was based on something a friend had to put up with. Otherwise, no.
GR: Any reason for all the hate heaped upon Northumberland (Northumberland is a ceremonial county found in the north east of England and is frequently cited as the tenth level of Hell throughout My Godawful Life)?
MK: I should put together a cheat-sheet for the book explaining some of the British references for overseas readers. Mainly just this one really. In a nutshell I'm actually taking the piss out of sneering big-city types looking down on inbred provincials.
Just before I started writing the book there was this nine days' wonder in the media here. There was this woman, a well-connected London media type, who went through the terrible ordeal of being forced to live in Northumberland. I'm still laughing to think of it, I realise I'm probably alone in that. Her husband insisted on relocating there, and she didn't have the heart to divorce the unspeakable bastard, so she found herself moving from the bright lights of the capital to the backward rural north. Which could describe where I live, if she'd moved to my part of the world she would have had the same horror-struck reaction. Londoners tend to regard the rest of the country as the outer darkness. The North in particular, we're probably regarded with the kind of suspicion that gets directed towards some of the rural Southern states in the US, we're seen as these uncouth hicks who do terrible things to our animals and our sisters, but the truth is if we do it's always consensual.
Anyway to keep her sanity she started a web-log charting her descent into hell. She finds the locals intimidating, she can't handle the fact she meets people who are openly Christian, she appeared to be pleasantly surprised to find we have coffee machines up north nowadays. And she became famous overnight for it, after about a week she got linked by all the big 'Net people and there were newspaper articles and serializations, and she got this huge book advance instantly. Which was what I really resented, that and the fact that she was insufferably dull, I mean surreally banal. There wasn't even that much about the culture clash with the glowering Heart of Darkness natives, it was just your typical bored housewife web-log. And I hate web-logs anyway, so much so I refuse to type the moronic abbreviation, and this was the worst kind, pure drivel. She has to get the builders in. She misplaces her car-keys and the TV remote control. Insects annoy her. These are made into big portentous ordeals, and she has these weird inner melodramas of her own. She worries her son will fall off a wall and calls the wall her enemy. I found it inadvertently hilarious, and somewhat less funny that after a week of this dreck she got this lucrative book contract when I'd been carefully crafting beautiful jokes for ten years and had been largely ignored.
So I hated her with a passion that could power a thousand cities and unbalanced my own book tearing into her. I think anyone who's actually read her who also reads Godawful Life will find the Northumberland bits the savagest, cruellest, most merciless and funniest parts of the book, but I think that will probably be about three people. Based on the hype I falsely anticipated she'd be world famous and everyone would know what I was talking about. Just lately I heard she actually has a big film contract now, which proves the devil loves bores but which may eventually save me from having to keep explaining the damn thing.
GR: As far as the art of mocking things goes, you certainly didn’t seem to leave anything out. Did you feel like you got to run through everything you wanted to take a shot at? Is there anything that didn’t make it into the book? I’d also be curious to know if there was ever a moment in the writing process when you thought, “Hmmm, I might be going too far with this part."
MK: I shot pretty much everything and everyone I wanted to shoot at, and then some random bystanders too. I ran out of targets actually, there were places where I was thinking, 'Oh, I could use this situation to make a joke about such-and-such intolerable outrage, but, damn, I already did that, twice. How about those other sods? No, they're down for a later chapter. This is awful, I have run out of people to hate. I know! I will say "Northumberland" again, I still hate that woman every time I think of her fat bloody advance for her five-minute-old web-log, it will be amusing to me if to no other bugger.'
There were a couple of jokes and ideas I couldn't quite shoehorn in. But the main thing that didn't make it in is what I've put on my website as a 'Deleted Scene', the extended director's cut version of the final chapter. This is a big loss. There was a tragic misunderstanding over when the book was going to press, I thought I still had another set of proofs to correct and the opportunity to make insertions, so I'd held the final chapter back because I couldn't get it right and just sent in a perfunctory stopgap version, but I finally finished it two days after the book was actually printed. A friend I trust tells me this was for the best and I sort of see that. Part of the reason I couldn't finish the deleted scene was that I was dithering over whether it was necessary. The preceding chapter is probably the natural climax of the story and Euphemia's monograph which comes after as an appendix does most of what I wanted the longer final chapter to do and has more impact on its own. But the final chapter as printed is a damp squib and in my heart the longer one is the real ending. Anyway it's on my website for those who've read the book.
Going too far. Halfway through writing it I came to a dead halt through revulsion and self-loathing and guilt and almost gave up. I just thought, 'God, this is such bad taste, and it's going to look like I'm mocking people who've had terrible things happen to them.' Before writing the original spoof on my site I'd actually decided I wasn't going to do crass and sick humour any more. But it was obviously indispensable for something like that, and it's bloody funny when you get it right. And to me, it's in poor taste obviously, but most of what's in Godawful Life is just cartoon slapstick, it's really too silly and absurd to be offensive. Still in the course of the book I violated every single taboo I had, I'm not even talking about social taboos, I mean personal taboos. I'd turned against swearing and I'm especially against gratuitious and repetitive swearing, and I end up writing this character with Tourette's. Or another example, I think it's moronic and clichéd and no help to civil debate to call people you disagree with Nazis, and in the book I end up... well, you've read it.
Anyway I came to a halt, a devil sick of sin, and started to draft an apology to my editor for not being able to complete it. This is getting too long, but I stumbled on various things that kept me going. One of them, I happened on a quote from Lawrence Durrell, a very civilised man, not a barbarian, saying that he thought that to work a comic novel had to be as vulgar as it was satirical. Another was looking through some of the Amazon reviews for child abuse memoirs. For one thing I found reviews from people who had themselves written abuse memoirs, worrying that newer additions to the field were becoming too graphic. For another, reviews from readers saying in effect — I quote or paraphrase or encapsulate them in Euphemia's bit — 'This is boring! Not as gripping as some painful lives I've read!' There's something terribly, terribly wrong there, people revealing these traumatic experiences and other people evaluating that in terms of entertainment value. And there were other things that convinced me I was right to do it. Long story short, I decided it was God's work after all, and of course once you've decided that you can justify any crime.
After that point I had no qualms whatsoever. It became almost an exercise in learning not to care if people didn't like something. On my website I would very occasionally rant about the state of the world, what I thought at the time to be real fire-and-brimstone tracts, and I had recently re-read them and found them to be incredibly pusillanimous, there's all kinds of hedging and qualifying and modifying and at one point in something I even found the words 'Please don't hate me if you feel different' and I thought, Jesus, you wimp. So there's something to piss off everyone, even friends, not just tea-sipping dowager polite society (which barely even exists in Britain any more) but liberal consensus polite society, and that's good.
Once it was done, however, then some qualms kicked in. I mentioned above about the miscommunication with my publishers, thinking I had another set of proofs to correct. There are three specific sentences where I thought I might have gone too far, and if I'd had that chance to make further corrections I think I might, rightly or wrongly, have toned them down. (Only three? Out of that whole vile book? The man is a monster!) I won't specify, but one's a crass piece of playground humour earlyish on. The other two lines come in Euphemia's memoir. The first is near the beginning of that and you can probably guess which. My editor said it kept him awake at night worrying about it and it still does me too at times. It was meant to be shocking, it had to be shocking, it encapsulates her anger at what's wrong with child abuse memoirs. I've read worse or comparable from them and if we don't find that shocking there's something wrong. And to me, toned down it would have been worse, as I've written it it's like a playground-humour spoof of porn, that takes the sting out of it for me a bit. I tried to change it but couldn't find anything else with the necessary mixture of real shock and so-over-the-top it becomes harmlessly absurd. The other one is a line near the end of the second section of her rant which I think you get within the flow of her argument but which could sound appallingly callous taken out of that context. At the time I was convinced all of these were necessary and said I would withdraw the book rather than make changes, and if I re-read it properly I think I still would be, but if I flip through it, even in my mind, these three sort of leap out at me and I do indeed go, to say the least, 'Hmmm.' Or, like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner after killing everyone in sight, 'I have done questionable things.' Satirizing something sick I had to be as sick myself, but then people always seem to find artistic or moral justifications for the most terrible things, and I may have gratuitously added to the amount of unpleasantness in the world and therefore be damned.
I bet you're sorry you asked now.
