Sophie Mackintosh Vs. The Toxic Male

No, I wanted to write a book that was not political at all. I wanted to just write about a family, it was going to be on an oil rig, the world has flooded, and it was going to be all about their isolation. But while I was writing it, I just felt really lost and angry. The idea of a masculinity that is literally toxic just felt really right to me, that this is the kind of disaster I’d be wanting to write about. I was so focused on the survival, and them living away from the rest of the world, but I think the outside world just sort of leaked into it, and forced my hand on that.

I was actually thinking more of King Lear when I wrote the book. With a first book you have so many things that get kind of mashed up and leak into it, when she pointed that out I was like, “Oh yeah, The Tempest, I can see that”, but that’s something I really love about the reception of the book, people have so many different reactions and readings of it. And obviously it’s great to have any kind of acknowledgment from Margaret Atwood. My friend @ed me and was like “Holy shit have you seen this?” and I was like “Wow.” I really like how supportive she is of new writers of feminist dystopia books.

Misogyny is such an integral part of far right views—so much is about ownership, control, putting you in your place. I don’t find it surprising, for example, that a prominent far-right figure such as Richard Spencer has a history of domestic violence, or that here in the UK Tommy Robinson was jailed for attacking a police officer who defended Robinson’s partner during a domestic incident. I remember when Brexit happened in the UK—it was around the time that I started writing The Water Cure, and all of a sudden it was like people felt ok to air all of these racist, misogynistic and homophobic views. How long had people been holding onto these views? How long had people been waiting? Now the Brexit chaos is worsening, the mask is slipping further, and we’re realising how much far-right policies are taking hold globally. There’s no hiding it (or even attempting to) now. You have events such as the Kavanaugh case, where a powerful man accused of sexual assault can still be untouchable; or the abortion referendum in Ireland, where conservative religious pro-life propaganda was incredibly distressing. And these are just two recent examples. It’s all part of the same spectrum of ugliness.

The inspiration behind the rituals and stuff was the old cures for female hysteria, stuff from the Victorian era, the idea that you could use physical methods to cure things you’re feeling emotionally, how that relates to things we might do to control our emotions today and how people can kind of exploit those things. The idea of energies, how we control and suppress our own but also how others can manipulate that. I wanted the novel to be ambiguous, but there was a literal disease that men have learned how to exploit.

Are you talking about real life or the novel? [Laughs]

With that quote I was thinking about men who are quite performative and they say, even to themselves, “I love women! I love my mother, I love my sister” but then their actions reflect the opposite. Lia has never been in love before, she has no context for love, she has no concept of the relationship norms we have and I guess you forget how devastating love can be, and something we always think of as kind of trivial can be the most catastrophic in the world.

I’m quite a visual writer. I really like fashion. I studied dressmaking—briefly, like, for a year, and I think when I write I see everything visually and what it all would look like. I guess it is a film, in my brain. It was very tactile to me, as I was writing it I wanted to see it, I wanted to feel it, and I think the fabrics and stuff reflect that.

Rather than dystopian I would describe it more as a 'parallel universe' novel, a world of strangeness and its own surreal justice. There are the obvious questions like—why the lottery? Who gets to decide? But actually, I'm less interested in exploring those questions than what it means to live in that world where a decision you have no choice over affects the path of your whole life, exploring ideas of free will and expectation, and what it feels like when your body surprises you, when it becomes alien to you. In terms of finding the time — I wrote The Water Cure while working a full-time office job, and have always written around work, so actually this year I had more flexibility (I'm a freelance copywriter), and was therefore able to prioritise writing more than ever before. Because I went to freelance, specifically, in order to write more, I was pretty hard on myself, scared of ending up empty-handed. But more than that, writing keeps me accountable to myself. It has always been my biggest comfort, my purest source of joy, and so, in this stressful, amazing and heartbreaking year, it was always where I turned.

I think it can help us make sense of things. It can help us get more…well we don’t need to get more angry, we’re already angry enough at the news, but it hopefully helps us find a degree of hope or might get more people thinking about what’s going on. It helped me feel less powerless, like I’m less powerless in my day-to-day life. Or to foster a sense of solidarity. I know I feel less alone knowing there are other people who are having these feelings and responding in similar ways.