“I think it also has something to do with the fact that the sea can be many things at once. It’s a really useful tool in queer storytelling, which is why people return to it. That speaks to the way that we as queer people have to be so many different things to so many different people: to our parents, at work, to society, to our partners, et cetera.
It can be very calm on the surface, and something can be going on underneath. I think it also has something to do with the fact that the sea can be many things at once. So it’s often a very natural setting for coming-out narratives. There is something about the way that a sea is so often used, firstly, as a symbol of something forbidden, something which you want to dive into and can’t. I think there’s something about liminality. I actually wrote an essay about it, which is coming out soon. What do you think it is about the sea that works so well with queer stories and characters? I find it so much easier to write about daily relationships and boring things when they are split through I was doing what I often did with my short stories, which is trying to figure out how I could tell essentially a quite mundane story through this weird prism of being under the sea and something strange going on. I was also thinking about a novel by Lauren Groff called The Monsters of Templeton, which is about going back to your hometown, but also there’s a monster in the lake, and just the way those two extremely realistic, extremely not-real things rub up against each other. I think there’s a lot of that - like, Céline Sciamma in novels I’ve noticed recently. It was an idea which came predominantly from wanting to write about the sea, which I always want to do, being very aware of this sort of crossover with queer women’s fiction and the sea. And then I came to this, which had essentially been a short story idea I wanted to write as my treat for finishing a novel. Unsurprisingly enough, that was not the novel I actually ended up writing and publishing. That won’t mean much to you, but that was not a very long train. Most of the time when you sell a short story collection, which I did in 2018, will be like, “That’s cute, but do you have a novel?” So what originally happened, of course, was I did not have a novel, but I was like, “Sure, yes.” And then I wrote a pitch for a novel on a train between Clapham Junction and Balham.
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