Meeting Zoe Pilger and a review of her first novel, Eat My Heart Out
This week has gone so quickly! Last Sunday, I went along to the Das Mag book club at (aptly) The Book Club in Shoreditch. Thanks to Jena Fleiner my fellow UCL MA Publishing student for taking me with her! We arrived in the basement bar to find a ring of chairs surrounding a table with a bottle of vodka on top. We could tell this was going to be good.
Das Mag is a Dutch quarterly literary magazine, founded in 2011. The Das Mag ‘book-clubbing’ Festival in London saw ten venues in Shoreditch host ten authors on the afternoon of 22nd November. Authors included Laline Paull, Gerbrand Bakker and Evie Wyld. I had been sent Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out in the post a couple of weeks prior to the event and devoured it on the train home to see my parents.
“Ten book clubs, ten authors, you choose!”
Our book club was hosted by Hannah Westland from Serpent’s Tail, Pilger’s editor. Pilger herself was also present, so the book club became more of an author Q&A. We began with a quiz which ended in a shot of vodka if you got a question right. This was the perfect opener for the chilly basement setting and got quite competitive. Westland did a great job of steering the discussion and questions from the group, who were eager to ask Pilger about the decisions she’d made. Pilger is an art critic for The Independent and is currently researching for a PhD at Goldsmiths. Eat My Heart Out is her first novel and has won a Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award. The novel took about two and a half years in total and is not biographical.
Eat My Heart Out follows Ann-Marie, a twenty-three year old Cambridge graduate as she embarks on a sado-masochistic adventure around London: meeting unsuitable men, trying to reconcile with friends and becoming the protégé of a leading feminist. This novel is an uncomfortable and challenging read, but everyone should read it, precisely because of this. At times, it will make you physically recoil at the characters and make you want to distance yourself as much as possible from them. At the same time, Ann-Marie will get inside your head and you wonder if you’re starting to identify with her.
Ann-Marie lives with her gay friend Freddie and begins a destructive relationship with the much older Vic. She is recovering from losing her boyfriend Sebastian to her friend Allegra whilst Allegra’s brother Samuel is desperately in love with Freddie. Ann-Marie is taken under the wing of Stephanie Haight, a famous feminist who believes she can save Ann-Marie from ironic detachment using master/slave teaching methods. It’s a novel about friendship, mental health, youth, money, feminism and sex that flows from one event to another in a chaotic rush.
“a novel about friendship, mental health, youth, money, feminism and sex”
It was fascinating to hear from Pilger herself about the construction of the novel. Pilger said the book is about the ‘gender, equality and violence around being a traditional female and how mutilating that can be’. She was greatly influenced by her PhD work on the ‘seismic change’ in female freedom in the 1960s, British black comedy and her love for Amy Winehouse. In early drafts, the novel centered on Ann-Marie and Sebastian’s romantic relationship, but eventually it became more about feminism. Pilger says she ‘has no agenda but wanted to explore feminist ideas’. Pilger found a ‘freedom in fiction’ she does not see in academic language, which she is often ‘frustrated’ with.
“the element of discomfort can be powerful”, Zoe Pilger
The novel is a series of extreme situations and events and Pilger herself said some scenes ‘viscerally disgust’ her but that ‘the element of discomfort can be powerful’. I absolutely agree and feel it is important to read this book and think about it afterwards; think about these characters, and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, because it will make you a better individual. Despite at times pushing the limits, parts of Eat My Heart Out are bitingly funny. Pilger talked about ‘challenging the genre conventions of romantic comedy’; this novel is full of romanticism and comedy, but the darkest kind. It’s definitely a stretch to compare it, as the jacket does, to Bridget Jones’s Diary.
“suspended moments of horror”, Zoe Pilger
I asked about Pilger’s attitude towards the art world, which features in the novel when Allegra and Freddie put on a show. Pilger said ‘being an art critic was framing for writing [her] creative fiction’ and that ‘there is more creative freedom in the art world than there is in the book world’. The art world is ‘less dependent on public opinion and taste’ whereas ‘literature is dependent on sales’. Within the publishing industry, profitability does restrict creative expression as publishing companies increasingly homogenise their content to fit demand. Pilger said her novel at points reflected ‘the YBA tradition’ with its ‘suspended moments of horror’. I am very interested to read Pilger’s second novel to see if she maintains this style.
At the end of the book club, someone posed the question, what would Ann-Marie be doing now? To which Pilger replied, ‘I hope she goes off and has some vigorous psychotherapy’.
Find out more about the Das Mag event:
Take a look at Eat My Heart Out on the Serpent’s Tail website here.
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