It’s getting better to be bad
‘ Anti- heroines’ embraced by modern culture, British author says
TORONTO — Lena Dunham’s edgy TV show Girls has helped usher in a new era of “transgressive anti- heroines,” says British writer Helen Walsh.
The protagonist of Walsh’s new novel The Lemon Grove is a case in point: Jenn is a 44- year- old who becomes entangled in a torrid affair with her young stepdaughter’s boyfriend during a holiday in Mallorca.
“There’s this cultural shift, this trend at the moment in publishing ... it seems there’s a lot of female writers writing about transgressive antiheroines and so ( my book) is kind of sailing along on this,” Walsh said, mentioning Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Natalie Young’s Season To Taste ( about a woman who kills her husband and eats him) as other examples of the genre.
“I think it’s really interesting how all those books come together, and is it purely a coincidence that various female writers have written books with quite transgressive females or anti- heroines ... or is there something that operates on the cultural subconscious that starts that way of thinking?”
When pressed on what could be triggering such a movement, she mentions Dunham’s hit show, which has received both kudos and criticism for its frank portrayal of sexuality.
“I just love it,” Walsh said of HBO Canada’s Girls, noting she sees a cultural shift in how girls perceive sex and sexuality. “It’s so smart and ‘ now.’ ”
Other culture- watchers have noted the anti- heroine trend in fiction as well.
Writing in The Guardian, journalist Sarah Hughes
Is it purely a coincidence that various female writers have written books with quite transgressive females or anti- heroines ... or is there something that operates on the cultural subconscious that starts that way of thinking?
HELEN WALSH
AUTHOR, THE LEMON GROVE
recently cited Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out and Caitlin Moran’s upcoming How to Build A Girl as part of the trend toward protagonists who are more roughly hewn than chicklit heroes such as Bridget Jones and TV’s Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City.
Walsh — who says she “likes a divisive text” — first made a splash on the literary scene with her 2005 debut Brass, a drug- ridden novel that had reviewers suggesting she was a female version of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh.
She followed that up with 2008’ s Once Upon A Time in England, a tale of race and poverty, and 2011’ s Go to Sleep, about a new mother who becomes unhinged from exhaustion.
In The Lemon Grove, she continues her penchant for writing in “morally ambiguous spaces” while meditating on desire and aging.
“( Jenn is) on the cusp of menopause, she hasn’t been able to bear a child of her own ... and I think in a youthobsessed society she sees her body as useless, as futile, as withering. And the irony is that in my head when I wrote her ( I saw her as) really, really beautiful ... but she doesn’t see herself that way,” said the 37- year- old author.
“That’s juxtaposed with the arrival of ( her stepdaughter) Emma, who is blossoming and flourishing and is in some way a threat to her because she represents everything Jenn feels is taken away from her.”
Walsh eschews social media and avoids contemporary fiction when she writes, preferring instead to draw inspiration from other art forms ( in this case citing the Kristin Scott Thomas film Partir, about a woman who leaves her family to embark on an all- consuming romance with a labourer).
“That system that I’ve got of hiding away in my cellar and writing for 12 months and isolating myself from social media, or reviews or contemporary fiction means at the end I might not have a text that can be published, but is an honest representation of what I want to write,” said Walsh, who has just finished directing the feature film, The Violators.