GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23
An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author Naomi Wood
Congratulations on your GBP Short Story Prize longlisting, Naomi. To start things off, can you tell our readers a little bit about what ‘Comorbidities’ is about; how and when the idea came to you; and the writing of it?
Thank you! ‘Comorbidities’ is a story about a couple of exhausted parents trying to make a sex tape while their kids are having a sleepover at Granny’s. This story is one I’ve been working on for a few years. When the idea came to me I was reading a lot about the internet, as a hyperobject, as a piece of art, and as toxic cesspit. The internet in the story is both hostile – teenagers are ruined by it, sex tapes get leaked in it – but also as faintly consoling; all the free therapy! Also of course it came out of my exhaustion about being a parent, and how much of your pie is given over to the governance of these wild unpinnable beings that you love more than anything else in the world.
‘Comorbidities’ is often very funny (I’m thinking of the sex pie) – but it also gently nails some of the anxieties of early parenthood; carving out time for yourself, and also making enough time for your relationship with your partner. The story is suffused with frustration and the vague threat (real or imagined, or both) of abandonment. Can you expand a little on this?
Yes, all of this. There is a threat of abandonment and a sense of wanting to abandon everyone, which is a difficult emotion to express, and socially impermissible, especially for women. I see this as the Coriolis Force of parenting: they suck you in, and it’s quite pleasurable, this hyper-love oxytocin spiral, but all the while you are also trying to get out and be your old self, which doesn't actually exist anymore. It’s a paradox you can happily enough live in, I think.
And the parents-in-law, too. By bringing them in, you present a wider family as well as the nuclear one – and the older mother and father feel both terrifically well realised in their own right, whilst also adding substance and body to the world you create. Can you tell us a bit more about them: their inclusion, and also their development.
I’m glad you say this. In a previous draft they were much bigger characters, with much bigger backstories. These backstories went on in fact for pages and pages, and that’s why I think they have a strong reverberation on the page, because I wrote so much about them off the page. As a white person, I was anxious to create realistic Chinese characters of that generation. In the end, I based them on the grandparents of my friends. I grew up in Hong Kong, and this granny and grandpa feel quite familiar to me.
Back to sex pies. When you mentioned the Prize on social media, you made sure to say that ‘Comorbidities’ is not autobiographical. … Were you worried that family and friends might ask you about your sex pie – or, worse still, start telling you about their own?
Haha. Yes, I think the worry is there. It reads autobiographically to me because so many things correspond. And I don’t know if people will believe me when I tell them it came out of some academic theory about the internet-as-hyperobject? I’m happy for people to tell me about their sex pies. I don’t know many parents who have much more than an acute angle, Euclideanly-speaking.
Let’s move onto wider writing. You’ve published three novels, most recently The Hiding Game in 2019. What are you working on at the moment?
I am finishing this collection of stories and ‘Comorbidities’ is one of them. It’s called This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (a much repeated motto) and they centre around slightly mean, kind of feral, subversive, unsentimental mothers/pre-mothers. When I became a mother it was the first time that I really felt squeezed into a mythology where I didn't at all belong. That's where this emotion comes from, and the drive to write these characters in the first place.
Is writing short stories a different process than writing a novel – or is it more or less the same (albeit shorter)?
I have found the short story form much more difficult than novels. Novels are pretty generous. If you write a boring chapter, okay! No biggie. In a short story, everything counts, marks must be hit much more cleanly, and they are harder to ‘land’. But they are also incredibly satisfying. And they’re easier to give up on if they’re not working.
Tell us about some of your favourite writers.
I love Deborah Eisenberg for her phenomenal wit; Danielle Evans for the seductive ease of her stories; Wells Tower for his observational power (forgive the rhyme) and Jenny Zhang for her absolute filth.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve been given? (And the worst?)
Baby steps. Little and often. The worst? Maybe ‘write what you know’. I think you can write what you don’t know.
Finally, we’re asking all our longlistees to host their own fantasy literary dinner (time travel permitted). Who would you invite, what would you eat, where would it be – and what would be the high point of the evening?
Oooh. Can I invite all the writers above? I’d also add George Saunders, Ann Beattie and Mavis Gallant. We would eat a Vietnamese banquet. In Hanoi, that would be fun. The high point would be the whole thing! We’d absolutely murder the short story, and come out sated and full.