Alice Winn: Author of In Memoriam

This week Jack is joined by Alice Winn. Alice Winn's gorgeous In Memoriam follows Elwood and Gaunt, two boarding school boys desperately in love with one another. Together they navigate the highs and lows of school life until World War I comes crashing into their lives, irrevocably changing them and the world they know forever.


Purchase In Memoriam


(0:27) Introduction
(1:23) Being a debut author
(11:10) Growing up
(28:47) Reading as an adult
(39:37) A favourite read
(45:14) In Memoriam

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a weekly podcast by the independent award-winning bookshop, Mostly Books. Nestled in the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon-on-Thames, Mostly Books has been spreading the joy of reading for fifteen years. Whether it’s a book, gift, or card you need the Mostly Books team is always on hand to help. Visit our website.

The podcast is produced and presented by Jack Wrighton and the team at Mostly Books. It is edited by Story Ninety-Four. Find us on Twitter @mostlyreading & Instagram @mostlybooks_shop.

Meet the host:
Jack Wrighton is a bookseller and social media manager at Mostly Books. His hobbies include photography and buying books at a quicker rate than he can read them.
Connect with Jack on Instagram


In Memoriam is published in the UK by Penguin Books


Books mentioned in this episode include:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - ISBN: 9780141040387
Vanity Fair by William Thackerey - ISBN: 9780141439839
The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbitt - ISBN: 9781847498427
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel - ISBN: 9780007250554
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin - ISBN: 9780141186351

To find more titles, visit our website

Creators & Guests

Host

Mostly Books

Award-winning indie bookshop in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

What is Mostly Books Meets...?

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a podcast by the independent bookshop, Mostly Books. Booksellers from an award-winning indie bookshop chatting books and how they have shaped people's lives, with a whole bunch of people from the world of publishing - authors, poets, journalists and many more. Join us for the journey.

Jack Wrighton
Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, the weekly podcast for the incurably bookish. We will be talking to authors and creatives from across the world of publishing and discussing the books they have loved. Looking for a recommendation? Then look no further. Head to your favourite cosy spot and let us pick out your next favourite book. On the Mostly Books podcast this week we have novelist and screenwriter Alice Winn. Alice Winn's gorgeous In Memoriam was published on the 9th of March. It follows Elwood and Gaunt, two boarding school boys desperately in love with one another. Together they navigate the highs and lows of school life until World War I comes crashing into their lives, irrevocably changing them and the world they know forever. It is at once a Bildensroman, a romance and a historical epic. It is no wonder it is already in the Sunday Times Bestseller list. Alice Winn, welcome to Mostly Books Meets.

Alice Winn
Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Jack Wrighton
Our absolute pleasure. Now I should let our listeners know that Alice and I have met before because Alice came into Mostly Books to drop off a proof of in memoriam and we were talking about the the process that you went through, the research and sort of how you decided on this story. So this has been a you know a kind of a love project of yours for a little while now. How does it feel that it's now out in the world finding its readership?

Jack Wrighton
It is so lovely. I had coffee with Garth Greenwell right before it came out. I didn't know him, but basically after he gave me a blurb, I was like, "I want to be his friend." So I'm trying to sort of friend-court him. It's not going well. But he and I had coffee and he said, he spoke about something he called "first novel psychosis." He was like, "You people just go a bit mad when they first publish a novel." and I felt very insane. But now that it's out, I do feel much calmer and I think a lot of my sort of madness came from this feeling that it wasn't actually going to happen. And it's just so lovely to have it be read by people, anyone who likes it, you know, just even to have a few people connect to it and get something out of it makes it all feel worthwhile and so to have it be read by, you know, more than a few people is really, really special.

Jack Wrighton
And to go through that process of being a reader to then having your work read, I don't know, it must be a sort of a big transition to make mentally to think that, you know, people are experiencing your book in the way that you've experienced other people's works.

Alice Winn
That's interesting. I mean, do you write prose? I feel like we talked about this when I met you in the shop.

Jack Wrighton
I do. Yes, I do. When I'm not bookselling, I attempt to write. I feel I should strongly emphasise the word attempt.

Alice Winn
What kind of thing?

Jack Wrighton
Now we're here to talk about you so I'll be very brief. They used to be theatre but now I'm moving into prose writing for fiction.

Alice Winn
Okay like a long form novel type thing?

Jack Wrighton
Yes.

Alice Winn
Yeah so I mean you know that when you're writing something on a word document on your laptop and you're maybe sending it to friends and they read it as a favour, it feels really really just improbable that anyone would ever read it for pleasure, you know what I mean?

Jack Wrighton
Absolutely and then to suddenly you know the process of then you've sent that and someone said oh yes we really like this and then they send it to someone else it feels like once that gets going that's kind of it's not a cascade because so many things have to happen in order for a book to be published but you know you go from yes that handful of friends to now you know you've got people that you will never meet who you'll never have contact with who that your book is now a part of their kind of internal world almost because I think when you read a book you absorb it in some way.

Alice Winn
Well I do think something that's been weird about this is that you know I wrote the book years ago and so I was really upset about World War I. You know around 2019 I was really that was the main thing I was thinking about all the time was World War I and then you know spent a year and a half reading nothing but World War I literature and then I mean that's not even true I mean but anyway I read a lot of World War I literature and you know then I sort of I kind of came out of it I came out the other end and now everyone's like talking to me about World War I'm like listen we've got to get over the war it was 100 years ago. I think we've got to move on now. I mean no, I sort of find myself shocked sometimes when I have to go back in and read the book for some reason by how upsetting it is because I think I, you know, it really, it was, yeah, it's, it's pretty brutal. I mean, not just the book, but just, you know, the, the context of the book, World War One is, is pretty full on. Wow, stay here for riveting sound bites from Alice Winn. World War One is pretty full-on.

Jack Wrighton
That, that will, that, they should put that on the cover, actually.

Alice Winn
I think so, yeah.

Jack Wrighton
Well, that's interesting, because I can imagine you've got, you know, there's now been a process where your friends were thinking you know in 2019 oh god Alice is talking about World War One.

Alice Winn
They made a bingo sheet.

Jack Wrighton
No oh!

Alice Winn
Yeah they were like it's bad because I just kept bringing I would chew on it in into everything like it was like you'd be talking about anything else and I would just be like well you know what's interesting about that is that in the Great War and everyone would be like no one cares about the Great War. Yeah no they um I really ruined a lot of parties.

Jack Wrighton
Yes, and now I imagine, yes, the reverse is happening. They're sort of going, "Oh, you know, I read this bit and you're thinking, oh yeah, whatever, you know, I've done that now."

Alice Winn
Well, obviously I don't want to, you know, it's not, I don't want to, obviously it's lovely to be talking to people who are in it, but I'm sort of being kind of brought back to all the horror of it in conversations with people who have read the book and it just kind of, I think I'm almost like god I really I can't believe I spent so much time in it like so much sustained time in it because you know it's so incredibly upsetting you know when you think about all the literature from that time period not that my book is incredible my book's really fun, you should read it listeners!

Jack Wrighton
It's very light-hearted.

Alice Winn
Yes it's a romp!

Jack Wrighton
But it does you know like anything it has you know it has those very necessary sort of light points and moments of humour and that you know must have I'm sure sustained people at the time as well.

Alice Winn
Yeah you really see that in the literature you know people are fun if you read I mean just Journey's End I don't know if you've read Journey's End or seen it but you know it's funny as a play.

Jack Wrighton
And do you find because of course we're I feel in the UK we're sort of in many ways we're steeped on I mean maybe more so the second world war now but kind of you know war the two world wars is kind of a big part of our past and a part of our national identity and I feel with younger people there can sometimes be a sort of fatigue with that and I'm sort of imagining you you know talking about World War One with your friends and them thinking oh my goodness we don't want to talk about this but then you pick up something like In Memorium and you are even though we know because we're given sometimes the figures and the kind of hard facts but when you're reading about people experiencing these unimaginable horrors it's suddenly it's renewed to you it feels refreshed in some way.

Alice Winn
I think that is definitely part of the appeal of In Memoriam is that you know in some ways it's not even particularly original it's just that people aren't going to be reading you know Siegfried Sassoon's three-part autobiographical memoir novel series where the first one is just about him playing cricket and then the second one has all this stuff but it's you know it's not… they're not easy reading and I think that the and memoriam is sort of a an approachable entry point in a way but and maybe this says more about my friendship group than about sort of youth at large but my British friends my American friends don't really like well one is kind of a niche war in America because they weren't really I mean we weren't really in it but my British friends actually all had very emotional ties to World War One. I would talk about the book to them and they all had some kind of perspective on the war that they like clearly they had all thought about it in some different way you know I remember one time I was walking through London talking to a friend of mine about the book and she told me that when she was a little girl her grandfather used to sing her World War One soldier songs and then she started singing me one and she started crying and I was like wow this is really an ongoing thing huh you know and I don't know I think I think a lot of people it's really left a mark on Britain and I think Europe but in Britain there's the war monuments everywhere I don't know I think I think it has culturally had quite a strong effect I think on a lot of people in Britain so I think this idea of people in Britain thinking about it's like a fuddy-duddy war, yeah I'm sure that is the case. But I think also on flip side a lot of people really do see the pathos of it.

Jack Wrighton
I suppose I was trying to more express that because of that you know every town has its own, you know most towns have their war memorials and things like that, it becomes a sort of a part of the every day and because it's a part of the every day it can be easy to kind of forget exactly how horrifying it was and then you find yourself getting emotionally involved in two characters and they experience the war and suddenly it feels you are reminded of exactly you know what it is that I suppose things like Remembrance Day and those war memorials were trying to grasp at but in a way that you know once you read it you feel actually is quite uh you can never quite fully articulate that in a monument or in a kind of Remembrance Day service.

Alice Winn
No it's interesting reading in the the school newspapers that I read that gave me either sort of a start on this on this novel, you know, if you're reading papers from 1919, there's all these sort of letters to the editor of people being like, "I'm outraged by your proposal that this is what the war monument should be like." Clearly, that's a bad war monument. We should have, and everyone has such strong opinions about how you memorialize this war because there was such a feeling of like, "Never forget, never again." And that's, you know on a kind of macro scale that's the the saddest part of World War I is that it's really just World War II - Part I, you know so it's so you know pathetic in a way I mean that's the wrong word but it's so it you see these people just desperately saying you know peace forever war tend all wars and you know we from our position in history we know how completely futile that is.

Jack Wrighton
Absolutely I would like to if you don't mind I'm going to put a pin in now for talking about in memoriam because we'll go back to it later on and I'd like to talk a bit more about you both as a person and as a reader now am i right in saying from reading your sort of biography on the back you know it mentions you were born in Paris is that correct?

Alice Winn
Yes

Jack Wrighton
And then you were educated in the UK.

Alice Winn
Yeah my parents are American.

Jack Wrighton
Your parents are American and you live in America now?

Alice Winn
Yes

Jack Wrighton
And there's also something interesting in that as well because I think there's a, you know, Gaunt in the book experiences kind of, you know, has one of these nationalities where, you know, he kind of identifies with England but, you know, is also German as well and the kind of difficulties of that, which is very interesting.

Alice Winn
I think Gaunt and Elwood both, because Elwood is ethnically Jewish, although culturally Christian, and I think they both feel that they have a sort of tenuous hold on England, and especially at the the beginning of the novel they're both rather in love with England and yet feel that they sort of have to grip it very tightly in order to really feel as if they belong because they're both insider outsiders which is you know relevant to me.

Jack Wrighton
Yes yeah of course yeah and and you know being educated in the UK what was if you don't mind me asking what was your experience of that as you know someone who is an American that you had been born elsewhere and you know you must see things maybe slightly differently or maybe you don't?

Alice Winn
Well you know, I went through the public school system in England and so that's a very different experience from what most people experience. Isn't it like 7% of the population or something? I don't even know. It's small. So yeah, I don't know. It was sort of fascinating. I sort of really like I think I really liked the education. I've never been a good student anywhere, but in Britain, so like in France, I was also educated in France and in America and in Paris and then LA where I was also in school, I was always just a terrible student because they have this system whereby it's kind of a marathon. You just have to continually do quizzes and tests all through the year and they all, they're cumulative. I remember when I was like maybe 15 in LA and I was like, "Well, whatever, I'll just skive off for the year and then at the end of the year, I'll do really well on the test." because that's that's how it works in England. You've got it off for a year and then you work hard at the end and then and then it all goes fine. But so I remember I you know I scabbed up the whole year everyone was very worried about me but I was like okay guys you don't know how well I'm going to do on this test and then I do the test and it turns out it's 15% of the final grade so you know you've just got to work all the time. Really really boring, yeah I just never… and also it's the specialisation thing you know I was working so hard to make my sort of maths and science grades a C that my English and French and history grades would fall down to a B and it was just I was just a blah. Whereas in England, you know, that chance to specialize meant that I was able to just focus on the things I wanted to focus. I just really, I really, I really, yeah, I really liked that system. I can't speak to how different it is in the state school sector. you know, I had a good experience but then, you know, it's not a good system overall, is it, for you know, the country at large. So there's this, I have a lot of conflicted feelings because I think politically speaking I feel differently from emotionally, if that makes sense.

Jack Wrighton
Which I think is true, you know, for many people on many different subjects and that's expressed beautifully in the book as well. I think that, you know, the love and certainly when they're in the trenches, the fond memories of their school and the memories from that and how much they love their time there. But the flip side of that as well in terms of the class element is expressed beautifully in In Memoriam as well as the fact that not everyone did have a good time at the school and I'm thinking of a particular scene there where someone expresses that actually, you know, what do you mean you loved it there actually, you know, I had a horrible time and that vein throughout the book is lovely.

Alice Winn
It can be quite brutal you know sorry to interrupt, yeah it is but you know I went to school when I was eight and if you have a bad day in a normal school you go home at the end and hopefully you know if you're lucky you've got loving parents and they're like oh I'm sorry you had a bad day but if you had a bad day in boarding school you know you go home and you're still in the same room as the people who are making your life misery so you'll you know and then you can hear them talking about you while you're trying to go to sleep and it's just so it is pretty intense in the pleasures and the miseries.

Jack Wrighton
And of course Elwood in the book is a very, you know, well-read person and is, you know, deep into his love of poetry. And as a young person yourself, were you much of a reader when you were at school? Did you enjoy reading or did that come later on for you?

Alice Winn
So I couldn't read till I was nine because I had quite bad dyslexia and then I made up for lost time and read a lot and with the exception of there were a couple of years in my teenage years where I was busy doing other things and I didn't really read much but yeah no I think I especially in my late teens I was yeah I definitely relate to the way that Elwood reads. Did you read a lot when you were younger?

Jack Wrighton
No and interestingly for the same thing I'm also dyslexic and so for me that came much later on as a kid you know people tried to talk to me about books they read as a child I mean I do it on this podcast all the time and I'm like yeah I didn't read that because I started reading later on and there's some books I'd love to sort of go back and you know experience again I think you know all books are kind of for everyone it doesn't matter what kind of age they're given but yeah no it wasn't until I was 18 that I really properly picked up a novel and read it front to back.

Alice Winn
For pleasure. That's so interesting and when you fell in love with reading was it fast or was it slow?

Jack Wrighton
It was relatively fast but I think if I'm being perfectly honest with myself I think there was a little bit of a, at the beginning, a prestige reading thing for me.

Alice Winn
Of course, me too.

Jack Wrighton
It was, yeah, I was 18 and a friend gave me To Kill a Mockingbird and I did really enjoy it and I thought it was a great book but I was aware that it was also a great book in kind of, you know, capital letters and so for a while I think I tried to stay on that track and it's only really as a fully grown adult that I've realized that's a kind of futile attempt.

Alice Winn
Well that's so interesting because that's also what I was like when I first started reading. I was I did read children's books, but I also really read, you know, one of my earliest like books that I read myself was Jane Eyre and I remember that the teachers at school were like, you're reading Jane Eyre and I was like, that's right, I'm reading Jane Eyre and it was like, you thought I couldn't read? Well, I couldn't a month ago, but now I'm reading Jane Eyre. And it was like, it was this, you know, this feedback loop of like, of getting of going from having felt like such a, you know, a dance to having people be like, wow, it's really impressive that you're reading that. I was reading a lot of books that I, you know, I remember I read Thackeray's Vanity Fair when I was about 10 and I definitely could not understand all of it, you know, and I just had this approach where I was just like, well, whatever, I'll just read it and if I miss sort of 45% of what's going on, that's fine and yeah, I don't know, it was definitely the prestige was, it was motivating.

Jack Wrighton
It is motivating, but you can also get to points where you wrongfoot yourself or you put an obstacle in your way. 'Cause I remember I was one of those, you know, people in their late teens who thought, do you know what? I'm gonna read Ulysses by James Joyce, and I'm gonna love it." because I love big books and I'm really smart and then I picked it up and, you know, I could tell it was clever, but I didn't know why and I didn't know exactly what it was doing and so in my head, I was like, "Oh, well that's actually because I'm profoundly stupid and I should be greatly humbled." And I think the moment you kind of throw the shackles off and you kind of go, you know, I will read books that I want to read and if I start reading something and it's not for me, that's fine. I think you develop a great, a deeper love for it.

Alice Winn
I didn't get there till I was like 22 in terms of, until I was 22, I had a basic rule, which was that I'd only read books by authors who were dead and then when I was doing my finals at university, I then started, I was just reading so much literature by people who were dead that I was like, got to just so I think I picked up Gone Girl and I was like this is so fun! Wow! It's so easy to read this compared to like you know Wilkie Collins or whatever and it was um it was kind of eye-opening but you know honestly I don't regret it because I really love having this kind of base of that and also you know honestly I think it's because I'm lazy I like I like reading books by canonical authors and not just you know like picking different types of canons right because it's already stood the test of time. Like if people are still reading a book 50 years after it came out, that's a pretty good sign. You at least know that you're gonna get something out of it. Although I realise I'm speaking to a bookseller who specializes in selling, you know, new and upcoming books. I do also read debut novels and that's why you should read mine.

Jack Wrighton
No, that's fine. We sell. I now sound like I'm plugging the shop. We sell everything at Mostly Books, both classics and new debut fiction.

Alice Winn
You should check it out.

Jack Wrighton
Check out our website. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think I went through a journey of initially kind of embracing everything, the classics, and then rejecting that and going, "I'm going to read all the modern, sort of kooky stuff." And then yes, realizing I picked up Pride and Prejudice, and I'm like, "This is a banging book. This is so good. There is a reason why it's classic."

Alice Winn
I did write down, because I was thinking about favourite books as a child, a child and I think one that I mean obviously I had I had a lot because my mother read to me a lot and one of my favourites is the story of the treasure seekers by Inesbit she did you know five children in it and the phoenix in the carpet so she was writing in the Edwardian era and um I kind of picked this one to talk about because I think it's relevant to in memoriam right because these are the books Inesbit is the kind of writer who boys at the school in memoriam would have grown up reading. You know, she was a big deal because, especially in the Victorian era, there were a lot of sort of morality tales for children. It was a lot of like, you know, Elsie's brother like stole a bit of pie and then Elsie told on him and Elsie died and she went straight to heaven and the children in E. Nesbitt are so lifelike and it's usually, you know, a bunch of siblings and they all bickering, get on each other's nerves and like they do a lot of wrong things and it's just much more realistic in it and they're very funny. They are also generally speaking racist like if you pick a book where that doesn't come up it's sort of that's kind of luck. I don't know enough about Ines but to know if she was especially racist for her time I think she might just be kind of representative of her time but yeah there are definitely times when like you know they oh yeah actually in the treasure seekers there is an anti-semitic bit for sure. So the Treasure Seekers is one of her few non-magical books and it's this story of these six children, the Bastable children, and their mother died and their father has fallen on hard times and so they decide when they're going to take it in turns to come up with brilliant plans to make the Bastable family fortune return again and the problem is that all of their plans are really stupid. It's things like, you know, they know there's this lord who like walks on Hampstead Heath or something and they make their dog attack him and then they make one of the boys come up and save the lord from the dog and then they anticipate that the lord will be so grateful he will adopt Oswald or whoever it is and then their family fortunes will be made but in fact the lord is just like “did you set your dog on me?” and they're like uh um so there's a lot of stuff like that they get into a um what's it called is it like MLM like you know those schemes where you buy a bunch of knives and sell the knives to all your friends and then they have to sell all the knives to their parents? They get into one of those with this really horrible wine that they buy from a catalogue and they keep trying to sell the wine to everyone who comes to the house but they've like they thought the wine was gross so they put a bunch of sugar in it and it makes it even more disgusting and it's just they're very very funny and the conceit of the book is that it's told by one of the Bastables and the narrator is like "I won't tell you which of the Bastable children I am" but whenever the narrator talks about Oswald Bastable the oldest boy the narrator is always like "and Oswald who was the bravest and most intelligent of the Bastables" and it's really funny and the thing also that is I have this in my acknowledgements but my mother when she was reading these books to me she would kind of stop mid-sentence and just be like Oswald is just the right age to be killed in the trenches and I'd be like oh no! She'd be like all of these boys are going to sign up, they were all going to go to the front. So it was really yeah that felt very the war was encroaching because the other thing is the boys in E Nesbitt’s books are all obsessed with soldiers like half of them except for Noel who is clearly gay and very very into poetry and just wants to hang out with the girls but I mean maybe I'm making an assumption here about Noel but Noel is great anyway but apart from him the other characters are all these like macho little boys who can't wait to go fight for the Empire and my mother would always really hammer home to me that they would probably all die it was very very demoralizing.

Jack Wrighton
What was it about mums? And I didn't know, I feel just death slips into, it's a huge generalisation, but I feel when I talk to my mom, it's always, "Oh, yes, well, I went to the shops the other day, dotty up the road, yeah she's dead. And I got four cans of soup, and I got some milk." And it's just like, it's just there. It's just like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah. It's interesting, because I think it'd be easy to sort of think, and I know Five Children and It, I must say not from reading it, but from seeing, I don't know when it would have been made maybe the 80s but a TV adaptation that I grew up watching because my mom loved it and she had shown it to my sister so I know the story so well. But the way you explain the story there, it sounds so… except for those things that you mentioned like the racism or the antisemitism, it feels very contemporary in many ways. I love that whole thing of you don't know who the narrator is but you do know by the way it's written these things that kind of humanize history which I think is again very easy to see in a kind of a 2D kind of sense.

Alice Winn
Absolutely, yeah. No, and I think the fact that the humour still rings true is pretty impressive. Also, one of the protagonists of the Bastables is called Alice and she is one of the reasons I am called Alice.

Jack Wrighton
Oh, wow. Okay, so your mother then obviously had like a great love for these stories.

Alice Winn
My mother has read too many books, I would say. She's taken it too far. And so she has many, many favourite books. I wouldn't want to say, yes, the Bastables is my mother's favourite book, I would be misleading.

Jack Wrighton
But it's interesting, you know, I do love from that story there of, you know, oh, and he would be old enough to die in the trenches and, you know, and the kind of the period that you're reading from there, it's obvious that this book, it's easy to say now looking back, oh, this book was obviously a turning point terms of what led to In Memorium but it does you know it feels like it had some…

Alice Winn
Yeah well I you know it was just I was always really interested in the Edwardian era and interestingly enough there was actually a book that I think did quite well a few years ago I can't remember exactly it was something like Five Go on the Western Front or something like that and it was a sequel to five children and it about World War one and it was a you know it was a children's book but it was it was very very vivid and good yeah I don't know if you it came out like six years ago probably.

Jack Wrighton
Unfortunately, I'd love to do the bookseller thing of someone mentioning vaguely what a cover looks like and going oh yes you mean this book no unfortunately I don't but I will look it up after but that's what this podcast is for it's for recommending books you are a bookseller for the day and you're you know you're recommending and me books as well.

Alice Winn
I was so jealous of all the booksellers when I went on my proof tour because it just seems like such a lovely job and also all the booksellers at every shop I went to there was this kind of like camaraderie of like fellow booksellers it was like you were kind of having it just feels like it feels like every bookshop I went to should have had its own little sitcom about the booksellers that's like they were living their own little sitcom life and I was just I was a guest star and I was like I want to be in the sitcom, that looks really fun.

Jack Wrighton
Visiting star like Alice Winn for the, you know, yeah, for that particular episode. Yes, it's very interesting. There is a, yeah, it's a very particular community. It doesn't matter what social media app you're on, there will be a whole section of it dedicated to kind of booksellers. The same on TikTok, there's BookTok, but there are, I feel there's like a subsection which are specifically booksellers as well.

Alice Winn
Well, I just, I also read grownup books for grownups.

Jack Wrighton
Yes, tell me about those grownup books for grownups that you have read and enjoyed.

Alice Winn
Well, so you asked me ahead of time to think about a couple of books. And so the first is "Loat" by Shola von Reinhold, which is this book that came out in 2020, and I kept getting recommended it. So it's about this young black woman who is obsessed with the bright young things of the 1920s and she dresses in elaborate costumes and she's really, really fascinated in the kind of like seriousness of pleasure and partying. But there is this tension, right? The bright young things of the 1920s were predominantly white and so one day she's searching through the archives at this museum and she finds this picture of this gloriously beautiful, glamorous black girl in a picture with several of her favourite bright young things and she figures out that she is this poetess called Hernia Druid, but there's almost nothing about this woman. She's impossible to find. There's one book that talks about her, but that book has been out of print and the woman who wrote the book is dead and it's like, she has to really, really, it's like a mission to find out anything about this woman and she ends up tracking down the traces of this woman who was a kind of key figure in "The Bright Young Things," but there's almost nothing about her. She's been buried, she's been sort of disappeared from history and so our protagonist, Matilda, ends up going to Europe to an undisclosed European country, where she ends up joining this sort of this art program, that sort of half art program, half cult and the secrets all sort of merge in this cult in this European town, where in the town there's also this very beautiful, very sad, very tragic trans woman who is also looking for the poetess. She's also black and so it's just this really, really good read in that the plot is banging. You're like, "Oh my God, what happened to the poetess? Did she die? Did someone kill her? What happened? What happened to her? And why is there no trace of her in history? And what happened? She published all these poems and they've all just disappeared." and our protagonist has basically joined this cult to try and find out about her and the cult is like incredibly white and she's the only black person there and you're like what's going to happen next but on the other hand, it's also incredibly it's funny and it's really really sort of philosophical and it talks in incredibly intelligent but accessible terms about the tension of being a black person who is sort of nostalgic for this Eurocentric version of beauty, and like how Matilda kind of negotiates that. And then, you know, it also deals with queerness and transness and class. I mean, it's just the number of plates that are spinning, you know, effortlessly in this novel that's actually really fun to read. I just I was so, so impressed and enthralled. I really, really thought it was, it was incredible. I wish more people would read it.

Jack Wrighton
God, you've absolutely sold that to me.

Alice Winn
Really?

Jack Wrighton
Yes, you should work as a bookseller, because that would I would be if you had that in your hands now I'd be snatching it out of them well politely in order to yeah in order to buy it that sounds absolutely fascinating and did you read it in a short space of time it sounds very compelling.

Alice Winn
It is compelling and I found myself picking it up a lot but I also was it was one of these books that you also keep reaching for a pencil so I didn't I did not storm through it no because I kept underlining things and writing things down because it has so many ideas in it that you're like "oh what is that? Good point, Shola, good point!" So it wasn't like that discovery of Gone Girl being such a quick read, it wasn't like that. But yeah, I really wanted it to be a TV show, that's what I want.

Jack Wrighton
Yes, I feel it's funny, I think sometimes in not to hold you, but in the book world you know there can be a bit of a shyness to admit that maybe you've seen the TV adaptation before you read the book or things like that which happens you know it happens all the time or to say that you've read a book it feels like you're sort of you know discrediting it by saying that you know it wasn't enough as a book I want to see it but I think it just expresses that you loved the world so much or the characters so much you would happily experience that again in a different medium I think that all the time with books that I would love to see it.

Alice Winn
Well I think especially with Lote it's so aesthetic it's you know it's so much about beauty that it just seems so obvious that a good companion to the book would be something more visual.

Jack Wrighton
And I suppose do you because you're a screenwriter as well aren't you?

Alice Winn
Well, I write screenplays I wouldn't I don't know I feel like there's a difference.

Jack Wrighton
I feel like going into my life they always say that it doesn't matter that you know you should go yes I am as opposed to a...

Alice Winn
You know they always do say that but I really take issue with that because the problem with, I always found this when you know when I was sort of labouring in obscurity scribbling my unwanted unpublishable novels and people would be like you should just say you're a writer and I was like no because that if you go to a party and say I'm a writer and then people are like what have you published then you're like well you're on the back foot whereas if you go and say well I write novels and then people go you should really call yourself a novelist and you're like no I don't know and then you to feel humble and they get to reassure you it's a much better dynamic.

Jack Wrighton
Mmm oh very good that's yeah you've…

Alice Winn
I've persuaded you.

Jack Wrighton
Yeah you have, you've really thought about the dynamic. No I must agree it's easier said than done because it always comes with that question of oh yeah have you done anything I would recognize and I'm like unless you've somehow hacked into my computer and decided to read some of the worst things you've ever read then no so no you wouldn't have.

Alice Winn
Ahh give it time. I look forward to reading your published books.

Jack Wrighton
Oh, that's very kind of you to say.

Alice Winn
I wanted to tell you about the second book that I had.

Jack Wrighton
Yes, please.

Alice Winn
I wanted to talk about, sorry, I've been proselytizing about both these books. So I only just read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. Have you read it?

Jack Wrighton
No, I've read the "Wolf Hall" trilogy, but not….

Alice WInn
So I actually haven't finished the "Wolf Hall" trilogy 'cause the last one is just so long, but I will one day probably. But so A Place of Greater Safety is about the French Revolution and it is so good. Okay, so let me set the scene. It is about the friendship between these three revolutionaries, some of which you may have heard of. So first you have Danton, who is described as erotically ugly and then you have Camille de Moulin, who is sort of chaotically bisexual, and he's this like vicious journalist, but also has a stutter and whenever anyone attacks him, he starts stuttering. and he's really pretty and everyone's just like "oh don't attack Camille" and then he goes back and writes nasty journalistic screams against them all. And then the last one is Robespierre, right, who is described as being terrified of violence. So these three men are sort of besties/frenemies and it follows them from their birth all the way to the terror in 1793 and the emotional maths of this book is just incredible because the relationship between the the three of them is so weird and compelling because Camille de Moulin is maybe a bit in love with Danton and Danton is in love with Camille's wife and Robespierre doesn't have any friends except for Camille and Camille has a thousand friends, he's incredibly popular and so Robespierre just kind of wishes that Camille would just hang out with him but then Camille brings Danton over and Robespierre has to pretend he likes Danton even though he doesn't really like Danton but he likes Camille, he'll do whatever Camille says and then Danton doesn't really like Robespierre but he also feels a fondness for and it's just like the dynamic it's just like so complicated and then you bring in all the other revolutionaries and how they all relate to this and that's just kind of not even that's sort of the B story right because the A story is the revolution and she does this really brilliant thing where it's kind of she head hops right? So you're mainly in those three characters' heads but you also kind of jump around and it's often in these like small little paragraphs of different people's perspectives. And then in the middle of a chunk of paragraphs, she'll just do something like, you know, we're in like the 1780s and she'll just drop in statistics about the inflation of bread prices in the last three years and then she just moves on and you're like, "Oh, that makes me feel very sad and worried.” and yeah, I don't know. And it's really, really big. What that does is it really makes you feel, you know, the Revolution breaks out in 1789, and then the Terror is 1793. And so what she really makes you feel is that those kind of three or four years before the Terror happens, they just feel like years. You know, when you're looking at it on paper, you're like, okay, so the Revolution was like, you know, roughly 10 years and okay, but it makes you feel like, God, this has just been dragging on forever, you know, and it's just still going on it's such a mess and no one knows how to fix it and everyone keeps coming up with different ideas for how to fix it and it just because it's just spiralling out of control and oh god I mean it just gave me such a hangover when I finished it I felt like something bad had happened in my personal life for like two days maybe that's not a good reason to read a book but I recommend it.

Jack Wrighton
No, I think that's a great reason to read a book and you've absolutely sold that to me as well which you know I mean with it being Hilary Mantel who you know I mean I remember the first I think particularly for it was Bring Up the Bodies for me finishing that book and just wanting to sort of climb into her mind.

Alice Winn
She had a sort of interesting career if you're listening and you're you know an aspiring writer something I thought was kind of inspirational about Hilary Mantel is that she really didn't push through until Wolf Hall. She was getting good reviews and stuff but she really was not selling books and she wrote I'm making this up but it was many novels, like something like nine novels before Wolf Hall and it was quite late in life. So I was like highlighting stories like that because I think stories about young whippersnappers coming out with their works of deathless prose is sort of exhausting to hear about.

Jack Wrighton
Yes, absolutely. I think you can get it's kind of easy to champion in the kind of national conversation about books kind of all you know the kind of new young thing that actually...

Alice Winn
It's usually classist isn't it? Because you know if you have dependents and you know if you're if you're in debt and if you know basically if you're financially strained the chances of you coming out with a work of deathless prose at the age of 23 are very slim so it's very I don't know it seems very elitist I think or the fixation on youth.

Jack Wrighton
I think if we got into the conversation about the publishing industry and class and elitism I think we could be here for a very long time but let's move on. So another question we'd love to ask on the podcast is a book that for you is a favourite book or a book that you recommend to everyone something that really stands out for you.

Alice Winn
So I really really love James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. It's a book so I often because I write reviews of books on my Instagram and I often get people DMing me and being like look I used to read a lot when I was younger and I just don't read anymore and I really want to get back into it, what would you recommend?" And I often recommend this because it is exquisitely beautifully written. I mean, the quality of James Baldwin's prose is unreal. It's really like magic. He has this piece of writer's advice that I always come back to, which is, it's something like, "You want every sentence to be clean as a bone. That is the aim." It's something like that. I might have butchered it. But so that the just the writing is so gorgeous and it's also one of the most like feelsy emotional stories I've ever read and it is a it is a gay love story but a really sad one in that the opening chapter it's actually kind of a bisexual love story really I think people forget about that but it opens with this guy thinking about how his lover is going to be executed that day and it's like 1950s Paris and then we just go and find out we like see their love story and so you know immediately that this is a love story that's going to end in one of them being executed so that just casts this pull across the whole I mean you're reading it and you're just like maybe there's a twist and it'll all be fine and what James Baldwin said was he said something about how he didn't even think it was a book about homosexuality he thought it was a book about people who are so scared that finally they end up not being able to be loved by anyone, which I think is exactly right. It's this character who just doesn't, he's just so scared of the stakes of letting someone love him and that's it ends up being, you know, the most frightening thing of all and it's just, yeah, it's Paris, it's the fifties, it's gay love, bisexual love, tragedy and gorgeous writing and it's not very long and everyone I've ever recommended it to has read it like really fast and then been hungover from it so it just seems like you know especially if you're kind of in a bit of a slump it's sort of short circuits the slump sometimes I think because it's just so visceral.

Jack Wrighton
That's a really lovely way of putting it sometimes that's what you need it's almost like a book as a palette cleanser is the wrong word but it's something that kind of reignites your love of reading. And yeah, Giovanni's Room, yes, I think of the edition that we've had at work. It is a small piece of writing, but sometimes those small books, they can really pack a punch, and it sounds like "Giovanna's Room" is a case of that.

Alice Winn
It's one of the best books I've ever read, I think. If I had to pick two of the best just written books, I would say that and Anna Karenina for me come to mind, which is not to say they're necessarily my favourite books, But I was saying to someone that really my favourite books, I probably have like 45 favourite books and picking three of them makes it seem as if the other 42 are less important than they are. So I kind of, yeah, I like picking Giovanni's Room because I do think it's superlatively well-written and I think a lot of people would like it if they gave it a go.

Jack Wrighton
Yes, asking people to rank books is kind of, it's quite a cruel thing to do actually and I'm aware of the podcast we ask these questions I think I actually couldn't answer that you know I'm like what hypocrite I'm asking I'm asking questions that I would struggle to answer myself because I think books are it's so hard to pick out a single book and go this one in particular you know somehow trumps others because on what playing field because you know two different books that deal with the exact same subject can leave you with a host of different emotions or can do brilliant things but in very different ways.

Alice Winn
I mean I guess it's important not to, I overthink it and I'm like well I've got to be really honest. I don't want to misrepresent and it's like I was saying this to my publicist and I was like you know I don't, Chloe what do I, they keep asking what my favourite book is and she was like Alice like fundamentally they don't really care what your favourite book is like they care about the fact that you wrote this book and that's what they're interested in and like if if you have another book that they might like if they also liked yours then that's really what matters and I was like oh that's yeah you're right I'm really overthinking this I'm like I must be honest!

Jack Wrighton
We're like you don't know but just like out of sight I'm just like writing a score down of your answers like oh really okay like 3.5 you know.

Alice Winn
Oh no how am I doing? How am I doing?

Jack Wrighton
It's you know it's we do yeah it's absolutely true we you know we ask these questions because it is interesting to see kind of what someone's reading background is but I suppose it is a way in sometimes of kind of knowing the mind of the person who's written In Memoriam and it sounds like you know I don't know the books that we've discussed about there are a lot of themes there you know that childhood book you read and the fact that your mom would go oh they were old enough to die in the trenches which I laugh about every time I think of how wonderfully dark that is and you know and then you've got Giovanni's Room which is this kind of beautiful bisexual sort of queer in the wider context love story and of course all of these come together in In Memoriam. With the idea of In Memoriam exactly when did that come about? Did it start with the war? Did it start with the love story? What was the kind of in for you?

Alice Winn
Well I was trying not to write a novel because I had written three novels and had had zero success with them sending them out to agents and so I was trying to focus on screenwriting and I had been given some edits on a screenplay that I was supposed to be doing and I was procrastinating on them. And, well, you know, Siegfried Sassoon went to my old boarding school and I remember I was just like, "Oh, I wonder," I was reading Robert Graves and I was like, "I wonder if Siegfried Sassoon wrote any poetry in the school paper while he was there." So I went and looked and he didn't. He actually really did not like the school very much. But he, yeah, so he hadn't done it. But the school had uploaded the newspapers from the early part of the last century. and I just got sucked in and I read all the papers from 1913 to 1919 and they were, I mean, they were like nothing else, you know, because they were student papers by the students for the students and, you know, they begin and it's just these, you know, it's these public school boys and they're these, you know, they're funny and irreverent and entitled and naive and smug and they have every reason to believe they're going to, you know, inherit the earth. and then the war breaks out and they're so excited and they all start writing poems about how they're gonna you know punch the Germans in the face or whatever and they're so yeah they can't wait to go fight and then they all start enlisting and then they enlist and then they'll write letters back to the school which to me has this special kind of poignancy where it's like you know these are boys who are so young that when they have to write letters to people like they can write to their families and they can write to their school and that's sort of the extent of their world and the letters back to the school paper are things like, you know, it's so great. No one's making me bathe and then they start dying and it, you know, falls to the boys who are still at school to write the in memoriams of their older brothers and their friends. And they, these change in texture as well throughout the war. So at the beginning of the war, they're very sort of starry-eyed. It's a lot of like, we envy him, his gallant death, you know, hopefully we too can give so much to England, that kind of stuff and then as the war just keeps going, it becomes just much, much, I mean, it's all so, it just becomes so incredibly raw and there was this feeling when I was reading them, it felt so voyeuristic because like, they're not writing it for an audience, they're writing it just for each other. They're all going through this tragedy together and they're writing it for each other and there's really no expectation that someone else is going to read it and try and interpret their grief from what they've written. So it's really… not unedited, but yeah, it's a very real feeling and I was reading that and I think the first thing I did was, you know, the reality of it is that a lot of these newspapers were quite boring and so what would happen is you would read three pages of quite boring stuff and then there'd be one page where there was an obituary that was just devastatingly sad. So I would copy, I would write that out, I would type it out and I just compiled these newspapers that were just made up of the things that were the brightest and the most stark to me and I was just doing it almost like, I don't even know what, I guess I was procrastinating. So the first things I wrote were the newspapers. And then the next thing I wrote, because I was just kind of doodling around in my head, if you know what I mean, sort of pottering around this idea. I was just thinking about it a lot because I'd also been reading Robert Graves and the next thing I wrote was just two letters. It was a letter from one boy to another and back and these letters were not, they didn't make it into the book and they weren't really the same characters exactly even. But it was just, it was a young boy who had been injured receiving a letter from a boy who somehow had got out of, I don't even remember, but like there was always weird tension beneath the surface of these two letters and I was like, oh, these two characters are in love with each other and then I just went with it and then I wrote most of the book really, really fast in about two weeks and then I… don't get excited. I then spent a year and a half editing it. So it wasn't just like, you know, because I think isn't there like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that was written in like nine days on a cocaine binge from what I remember. So that's you know, that's truly impressive. This was you know, this was, it took ages to edit it into something that made sense.

Jack Wrighton
Potential writers out there, I just like to state mostly books does not recommend cocaine binges. Is this the way to finish your manuscript?

Alice Winn
I wonder how many books have been written on 9-day cocaine binges that are not classics? Probably quite a few.

Jack Wrighton
Well, I might be wrong, but am I right in saying that the First World War fell into the period that they call the sort of the Great Binge because basically a lot of the drugs that we now consider sort of illicit and legal and you know, hard to come by unless you know the right people were actually quite readily available and were sort of being given out on the trenches and things like that. I don't know if that aligns with any of the research that you did or whether...

Alice Winn
I don't know about that. I haven't read anything about that. I could definitely believe it. Yeah, no, it is interesting because they had a big laudanum problem, I think. I don't know. We're out of my depth here. I don't know the legalities of things here. But yeah, no, I definitely believe things being allowed that way. I feel like in war people tend to just give the soldiers whatever they need to make them fight, don't they?

Jack Wrighton
Yeah, to keep them going. But it's interesting what you say about, you know, you wrote it in a short space of time but then the editing process was very long. I do wonder how many of those stories that we hear about, oh it was written in X number of days or weeks, actually mean the first draft which is a very different thing to the final.

Alice Winn
Yeah, I wonder because I always remember Shakespeare wrote the Merry Wives of Windsor very fast but I feel like you can tell.

Jack Wrighton
It's a bit of a flabby story.

Alice Winn
It's not his best is it? He's like maybe you should go back and do that a bit better Shakespeare. Billy go back to work.

Jack Wrighton
Yeah, Billy come on and you know it's interesting in terms of the history of you know I do not know anything about the Shakespeare scholarship so no one quote me on this but you know it was performed so I do wonder how much was changed in the moment of an act as said oh I'm not saying that I don't like that line and so yeah that is you know cutting it and so you know yes he may have written you know I think also Othello I think was is something like written in 10 days.

Alice Winn
I'm going to be very upset if that turns out to be true because Othello is one of my favourites and I'm going to be very very stressed.

Jack Wrighton
Shakespeare if that's how dare you but then I just wonder if that means you know Shakespeare came after 10 days oh I've got this in the rehearsal process.

Alice Winn
Well something I'm really curious about and I would like to read a biography of Dickens because you know he wrote in installments and I believe that at least for some of his books he did not plot that much ahead of time so he would like write two chapters publish them and then write the next two chapters which reminds me of like how people write online right you know when people are publishing stories online they'll just be like well and here's the two chapters and then the comments come in and they're like oh great everyone loves that and then they carry on in that direction and I think that seems like what what Dickens was doing which is kind of fascinating.

Jack Wrighton
That's a really interesting idea because of course I suppose he would have seen like the letters that people would have sent and that's I'd love to know because I've got a difficult I once tried to read Bleak House and I felt to myself I don't know if this is true at all but I was like he was getting paid per word because I just remember reading it.

Alice WInn
People say that no I mean so I think it is true but I think people use that as a criticism that I absolutely love Dickens I will say about Dickens in every single book there are 50 boring pages you don't know when they're gonna come and they are often at the very first 50 pages if they are at the first 50 pages then usually that means you're good there won't be another 50 boring pages later on but yeah so if you come across 50 boring pages in Dickens you just have to keep going. I seem to remember in Bleak House it's the first 50 pages that are boring.

Jack Wrighton
I probably stopped at 49.

Alice Winn
Bleak House is my favorite Dickens novel I love it. It is massive. It is huge. Have you read any other Dickens that you've liked?

Jack Wrighton
Oh I have read A Christmas Carol which I have enjoyed and the stories I love and again it feels bad to say as a bookseller but I grew up with my mum and my grandmother watching any tv adaptation of Dickens watched it and usually loved it so the stories feel so familiar.

Alice Winn
Yeah no I actually really approve, especially with these old books, watching the thing first. Like I watched a bunch of Jane Austen adaptations before I was even really able to enjoy Jane Austen. I think it really helps because if you don't, if you're not confused by the story then it's much easier to kind of get through prose that can be a bit inaccessible sometimes. But no, I'm a massive Dicken’s… when I read A Tale of Two Cities, again, Tale of Two Cities, boring first 50 pages I think, and I was reading it on the tube and there's this twist and I literally, I was like holding this, you know old copy you know this like 1800s copy of tale two cities and I was like mon dieu!

Jack Wrighton
As if you're like paid by the Dickens lobby to do that in public to sell Dickens books.

Alice Winn
He's so fun and he's so funny as well he really is and I also think something I really love about Dickens is that he writes these stories that are you know the worlds are always really, really grim and nasty, but the characters always have people who love them. They're never like completely alone in the world. There's always someone who loves them and is nice to them, even if the way in which they love them is to us a bit unhealthy, but all the same, it's still always there. So I think he's, there's a kind of optimism to his grimness, which I think is really lovely. No, I've got a lot of time for Dickens. I'm worried if I read a biography of him, I'm going to find out things that I want to find out, but never mind.

Jack Wrighton
Yeah, the ongoing problem with, yes, any creative is like, do I want to know too much about them? Just in case. But it's interesting you talk about the kind of the love amongst the kind of the grimness or the kind of the light in the dark. 'Cause that feels very key to In Memoriam, even in those, you know, really bleak moments. You talk about these letters and you use letters, newspapers, roll of honours and things like that the book so effectively that you find yourself looking through those lists of names as the characters do you're looking for names that you know and that was yeah that was very effective for me and just I'd love to hear you talk you know more about that.

Alice Winn
Thank you yeah I mean that's absolutely something we wanted to get across because I had that experience when I was reading the newspapers because you would get to know a boy from the way he had written his cricket reports or what things that people had said about him or poems he had written or whatever and then suddenly you'd see his name or you would have seen this name in the wounded or he would have been name checked as like the only living brother of a pair of brothers and then you would see his name later or for instance, you know, I remember this kind of jolt I felt when I saw Siegfried Sassoon's brother's name. He had a brother called Hamo and I don't know very much about Hamo Sassoon and Sassoon doesn't talk about Hamo very much but one of the only anecdotes I found about Hammo was that when Sassoon confessed to his older brother Hammo that Sassoon was gay, Hammo said that he was too. And that's the kind of only thing I know about Hammo and then I'm just reading and suddenly, you know, I was just looking through a list of names and suddenly there's Hammo and you know, there you go, he's dead and it just had this, you just, it was like this experience of looking at a long list of just words and one of them coming out and meaning so much more to you than any of the others did. I really wanted to get that across in the novel so I'm glad that that worked for you.

Jack Wrighton
Oh absolutely it's done so effectively and I can think of several scenes in which characters are kind of looking through those lists and you feel as they do you're kind of you know you're looking out for those names that you know and you're left with that feeling of you know you say about that that one name will mean something to you but of course for a lot of these people reading it there is a one scene in particular I'm thinking of where so many of the names mean something and there's references of "oh I played him at cricket once" and even just those little associations it must have been just as devastating that that was a whole life just gone.

Alice Winn
Yeah and I think there's a little bit of you know that the Indiana Jones where the place of the storage unit at the end of one of the Indiana Jones films? Yes yes. You know and they go and they put away the Ark of the Covenant in the dangerous things storage unit and then it pans out and you're like "oh my god there's so many dangerous things and this storage unit and it's like I think there's that right you know you're reading you're reading the book and you care about your character and whether he'll live and then you know you see his name or whatever and he's dead and you're like oh god but there's you know 27 other names on that list and every one of those is just as meaningful even if you don't know about why it is meaningful to you know what I mean so it's that I mean that was the feeling I had when I was reading them you know.

Jack Wrighton
That absolutely comes off in the book as well and of course, another very key element of the book is the relationship between Elwood and Gaunt and there's a really interesting look as well about the attitudes to, you know, homosexuality, gayness as we call it now, you know, whatever the terms were then I think it was invert still a term then?

Alice Winn
I think that was a polite way of talking about right.

Jack Wrighton
Okay. That was the kind of respectable, term and it's really interesting because it does for me what it makes me think of something like The Strangest Child by Alan Hollinghurst, which kind of looks at the changing attitudes of homosexuality and it's what I really loved about this book is, you know, there's a great moment and again, without sort of spoiling anything, where this is talked about openly between a person who is, you know, gay or bisexual with people who are straight and is expecting one opinion but actually gets quite the opposite and you know did you do research into how it was viewed at that time or did that come before you started writing?

Alice WInn
No, I mean okay so firstly I did not want to write a book about homophobic hate crimes and everyone hating gay people I was like god that doesn't sound like anything I want to read and I also think there's other people who are better equipped to write that and I did a lot of research and among the aristocracy, there's often been a sort of live and let live tolerance to homosexuality in many countries. I don't know why that is exactly. Like in France, under Louis XIV, I remember reading that his brother was flamboyantly and very much out gay and he even started this secret group of gay men who had to all swear they would never sleep with another woman except to sire a child. So they would sire a child but then after that they weren't allowed to sleep with women anymore and they were having like gay orgies in the like parks of Versailles and Louis XIV's very pious wife was like "can you control your brother?" and he was like "what do you want me to do? He's my brother!" but meanwhile right so like that's one world but then meanwhile in France at this time homosexuality, well sodomy was punishable by being burnt at stake. So these two things were true at once. So yeah, I mean, that's not specific to World War One. So what I have in the book is there's this sense that at the boarding school, there's one set of rules, which is that as long as you are popular, as long as you're good at sport, as long as you're doing it quietly in the dark, and no one really knows about it, it's fine and as long as you know, it's going to finish, you know, by the time you leave university, like you're going to go and marry a nice girl. Those are the rules and those are rules I picked up on by reading between the lines of a lot of books from the time, especially books like Alec Warr's Loom of Youth, which was one of the more explicit depictions of this and even so, it's not very explicit. You really have to do your reading. But then the characters get to the war and there the rules are completely different. It doesn't matter if you're popular or good at sport, you're doing it quietly in the dark. If you are caught, you will be court-martialed, you might be shot, you'll certainly have a career and your life ruined and bring shame upon your family and so these two different sets of rules are both true at once and you know our characters are teenagers so Elwood in particular is he's a very brash reckless teenage boy for whom things have always worked out and I think it's just really really hard for him to understand that the stakes are different at the front than how they were at school he's just like it'll be fine you know and Gaunt is a bit more nervous and is a bit more like no I don't think you understand that this is real life like this is not we're not playing at this anymore like the stakes are very real but yeah when it when it comes to the friends this might only be on my website I think my historical note had to be radically shortened because it was like 12 pages long but the full thing is on my website and I think it is not inconceivable that a gay man would have as many supportive friends as I have depicted in this book, it's not inconceivable I think it is improbable but it's not completely out of imagination. You know I think there were definitely people who had that experience but probably fewer than people who didn't and I just chose to depict the one that I wanted to depict really.

Jack Wrighton
And it's interesting you say that actually because I think that's one thing I found really refreshing reading about it is yeah you do come across a lot of fiction that depicts you know gay people or bi people or queer people in which it focuses on the fact of like you know they were treated really badly and for me it was really wonderful and refreshing to realise that laws exist but human history you know kind of proves that even if a law says something is wrong that doesn't mean that everyone is going to immediately, if they hear someone you know is gay or something that they're going to sort of banish them or treat them differently and it was really lovely to kind of see that humanity at that time kind of expressed.

Alice Winn
Well you can see it a little bit in that anecdote I mentioned about Sassoon telling his brother, you know, he wasn't that close with his brother and yet he still felt a) the need and b) the ability to confess his proclivities to his brother and his brother was like, yeah, you know, so it's, to me, that's a very telling anecdote. I think that that shows a lot about the possibility of being open in certain circles. Right and I think Sassoon was a very, um, he was in very, very rarified circles of, you know, aristocrats and artists and so I think it might have been more acceptable for him than, say, the protagonist of Maurice, Ian Forster's Maurice, which is also another great classic of the genre. And he at some point tells his doctor and his doctor is just like, "Oh, don't be ridiculous. You're not a monster." but that I think is because Maurice is much more like stolid middle class, I think. I don't, I'm hungry. So I think I might just be making things up.

Jack Wrighton
Well that's probably a good note to say that we're approaching the end now and I think it's always nice to end on a reading from our guests to hear the words of their book so I was wondering if you'd mind reading from In Memoriam for us.

Alice Winn
Of course, I was really stuck when you asked about this. I find it really hard to single out a passage that has no spoilers and that I don't think sounds sort of naff out of context so what I did instead was I had a look at some of the people who tagged me on things on Instagram and some of them had quoted things and I was like "all right this one this bit keeps getting quoted so people have liked it" whether or not I do that's another thing but there you go. So this is just two paragraphs or so. So this is a scene from it's from Elwood's perspective and it is from Lower Sixth which is when they're like 16, 17 years old. May 1914, Lower Sixth. It was spring of Lower Sixth, and Elwood was so in love with Gaunt that his thoughts ran wild with anger. Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Elwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried. He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Anthony falling on his own sword. and it was a magical thing to love someone so much. It was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky. Sometimes he imagined what Gaunt would look like when he was old, and he knew with dizzying certainty that he would love him even when Gaunt was balding and wizened and spent."

Jack Wrighton
That's beautiful. Thank you Alice for sharing that with us. In Memoriam is out now and it's available in Mostly Books, in the store or online. In fact, I was talking about recording this podcast just earlier on the shop floor a customer approached me we were talking about her experiences her father had fought in the first world war and he had become a father later on in life actually after the Second World War in which he was in the sort of dad's army, I've forgotten the actual word for it and we were talking about it and I talked about the story and she went home with a copy which is I think always a brilliant sign it's a fantastic book so whether it's from your local independent or wherever you choose to get books from. I highly recommend it. Alice Winn, thank you so much for joining us on Mostly Books Meets.

Alice Winn
Thank you so much, Jack, it's been a pleasure.

Jack Wrighton
Mostly Books Meets is presented and produced by the bookselling team at Mostly Books, an award-winning bookshop located in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. All of the titles mentioned in this episode are available through our shop or your preferred local independent. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our previous guests which includes some of the most exciting voices in the world of books. Thanks for listening and happy reading!