"Writing is sometimes a series of tricks and traps and treats and punishments..."
For the final issue of From The Sublime, earlier this year, I got the chance to sit down with the brilliant Rose Ruane ahead of the publication of her second novel, Birding.
It was one of my favourite things to write for the ‘zine, and one of my favourite interviews full stop. And brilliantly - deservedly so - the book has been receiving rave reviews.
So here, originally published in April 2024, is that interview…
“Probably the main reason I write is Bagpuss!”
Rose Ruane has incredible eyebrows. Not only styled, but coloured into two matching rainbows. It’s the perfect encapsulation of her - an unexpected splash of colour, at a queer and tangential angle to the rest of the world.
We’re in a coffee shop in Glasgow’s Merchant City, talking about her new novel Birding. It is the follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut, This Is Yesterday, and tells the story of two middle-aged women with very different backgrounds whose lives intersect in an unexpected and highly consequential fashion.
The release comes at a busy time for Ruane, who’s also completing a PhD which has seen her curating stories and content around art therapy from those who were in an institution in Glasgow in the 1960s. Visitors to her social media channels will have seen glimpses of the art in question, which feels entirely in keeping with her characterful, sensory-heavy writing.
These two parallel lives, as academic and author, curator and creator, are perfectly in keeping with the themes of her books, it turns out…
Congratulations on the new book. How has the process been getting there - given you were promoting the first one during lockdown and this one, I would imagine, was written during lockdown. Did that change how you approached it, and what you were doing with it as it went along?
Birding came from the sort of collision or elision of separate ideas that existed before lockdown and before This Is Yesterday came out There was a point where I believe they were very separate things, because it sort of follows two main protagonists who start as strangers and their lives end up on a collision course.
One felt like it was very much about what it’s like to arrive at middle age with an abject lack of self-awareness, and one felt like a story about what is it like to arrive in middle age with an almost uselessly overwhelming sense of self-awareness - that sort of like self-destructive self-criticism. They felt like they were dealing with separate things in a very similar way.
Then there was an incident in my personal life which unlocked the idea of, actually, what would it be like for those worlds to collide with one another? These women who are ostensibly at a very similar point of life in terms of ageing - the menopause - neither of them are where they sort of want to be… what would it be for those lives to intersect?
I just got really excited about that and both of those stories, which I’d been sort of writing in parallel and felt like they'd become a bit becalmed… the alchemy of placing them into the same story really animated them, both in terms of the excitement of plotting how you would start to bring them together and work out like what the impact they would have on each other would be.
I was just starting to feel like I was really flying with it when the pandemic happened, and it sort of stopped me in my tracks, as I think it did for so many of us. On every level you’re experiencing such a huge tectonic event.
For me, just with the book, it was like, you know, a contemporary work of fiction, and you're like, what is this anymore? I'm writing about a world that doesn't exist at the moment and might never exist again. Is this suddenly historical fiction, is it speculative fiction? Am I writing a parallel world?
My relationship with the book sort of became an avatar of my relationship with everything in the world we were living in. It was all shut down. I was very fortunate that that didn't last for too long, simply because I think I arrived at a point of going like, there is nothing else you can do.
Was it difficult to continue?
It seemed even more impossible to begin something else. It seemed really impossible to continue writing Birding at the time, but it seemed even more impossible to work out what the hell else I would do. I don't think we talk enough about how boredom is sometimes sort of the most disruptive force in the world and how sometimes it is the locus of creativity and ability - you just are bored enough to get on with something that you didn't know how to continue working on. And so I went away, and finished it and I was sort of almost at the end when life went back to, in scare quotes and with great scepticism, normal.
It's so rare for me to write based on like a big revelation or some kind of big Damascene moment. It's much more tricky and ugly and messy and effortful. There was something about those months where we were sort of slowly going ‘there isn't another lockdown’. This kind of messy, altered. unrecognisable but actually quite quotidian, in some ways recognisable, version of like everything opening back up told me how the book needed to end.
It's like sort of one of the only times where I've written based on receiving some bolt from the blue of how a thing should finish. I feel like that the only two good things that came out the pandemic for me was that I got to grow out my undercut in private, and that there was this point right at the end where I'd had no idea, I still didn't know how to stick the landing, And I did for certain receive inspiration from the ether and go, oh, that's it!
Is that how you tend to write? Not starting with an endpoint in mind?
Yeah, I'm a big sort of steer into the sweep of your own headlights kind of writer. Writing for me always feels a bit like a dot-to-dot thing. There's always sort of some inciting incident. And there's certain scenes that feel like they led to moments that I absolutely understand - with great clarity from the beginning - what they will be like and how they'll act on the characters.
The visual world of my books is very strong. I think it's a lot to do with the fact that my writing is as much inspired by TV and cinema as it is by literature or other writing, and the fact that I was originally a visual artist who came became a writer by accident. I think that sort of cinematic thinking also helps you have a sense of a scene. I write reactively - I think I enjoy slightly surprising myself. Writing is sometimes a sort of series of tricks and traps and treats and punishments, and rewards that you inflict on yourself both daily, within the writing and within what you find yourself.
When I was writing This Is Yesterday, there was a bit with Peach, the main character, where I just locked her in a room for about two months where I had, like, no idea how to get her out of her needless, terrible, personal locked room mystery. But the relief of finally working on how to get her out of there and knowing what she would do, and how that would affect the story of the other characters, when I finally released her was like such a big alchemical sort of energy that it was amazing.
I think I realised that to a certain extent I'm always writing about whether or not change is possible. A lot of my characters are people who sort of feel like failures or have a strong sense of their life having gone off course.
As an outsider looking in - I’m a white, middle-aged bloke, so I’m admittedly not in that demographic - it does feel that there’s a kind of gap in women's literature looking at the type of characters, and age of characters, you write. It seems there’s lots of memoirs in that field but not a lot of fiction. Was that your experience too?
I think that a lot of fiction with middle aged women, because they - this is of the vast majority of women - do end up having children, a lot of them are about sort of motherhood or marriage, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. That isn't a criticism - probably the majority of protagonist of that kind of fiction are those kinds of people because the majority of readers of that kind of fiction, are parents, and that's fine.
But I think especially because of the socioeconomic conditions in which we live… increasingly, there's a lot of not just women, people of every gender in their 30s and 40s who are still renters, who feel there's no opportunity for career progression.
That there's a lack of opportunity, the fact that you won't have secure housing, you wouldn't have job security. And I think there's a gulf between like a lot of great fiction about women in their 20s and 30s dealing with relationships and lostness and mental health issues, and like economic uncertainty, and then there's a lot of fiction about women in their late 30s, or into their 40s feeling trapped in motherhood or marriage.
But there’s not so much fiction about those women who exist otherwise; who actually are in middle age, and they're not mothers, either because they didn't want to be or because they were unable to be, women who are queer, or women who actually, you know, sort of don't know who they are. And I think there’s also a thing about sort of with middle age and menopause, where like, you know, you sort of to do confront, like, a surprising amount of concerns that feels similar to adolescence in terms of things that you end up questioning your identity, you know, what you intend to do with the rest of your life?
So to me it's not a sort of deliberate ideological choice, I just find myself really moved to sort of write about the versions of middle-age that I think are less seen. They’re still the concerns of, sort of, white middle-age and cis middle-age. None of my protagonists are affluent, but they probably quite well-educated, well-off backgrounds, which, again, I think, is something maybe we don’t see written about so much, and that sort of those complications, or paths, where you sort of are still essentially a middle class person who grew up in that world of privilege, but also where they, you know, you certainly don't have the homeownership of your parents, you don't have the sort of conventional heteronormative marriage of your parents, you don't necessarily have children. And so you slightly exist in this funny betwixt.
Both Peach in This Is Yesterday and Lydia, one of the two main protagonists in Birding are both people who are realising quite shamefully late in life like how much privilege they've actually enjoyed, but they're both people who are pretty broke and pretty broken and sort of assessing where to put this sense that they are essentially privileged, who have taken like a lot of their advantages in life, taken those for granted and you know, probably haven't acted with great care or thought for others - but they both are, you know, people who are realising that they perhaps have the right to the idea of themselves as some kind of like victims or survivor of harms of their own.
Particularly Lydia in Birding – a lot of her story is involved in the idea that both as a younger woman when she was in a sort of Shampoo style pop punk band, and as an adult in a relationship she had with like a sort of famous man, she sort of has a right to consider herself, abused. She’s the victim of certain things, but also in realising that she has a right to feel like terrible things have happened to her, she also has to sort of assume responsibility for her complicity in, you know, things she's done to other people that weren't ideal.
You said earlier you got into writing by accident. How did that happen? You were a visual artist initially, and those are very different mediums…
In lots of ways for me, art and writing were never that separate. I always want to make complex things not simple but accessible, you know, and I think, so much for me is about the ways in which we might without simplifying things, make them accessible.
For me, there's always a sense of like, once I became like, I get really sort of obsessively gripped by ideas. And I think, sort of one of the good fortunes of that is that I sort of think, I don't know how I'm going to do this, I just know that I have to do this.
When I was making art, writing was a way of thinking things through with myself and now that I predominantly write, throwing and making things is often a way of thinking through ideas. They're not necessarily things that I put into a public realm. But I feel very fortunate that I have multiple strands of practice where I could try a lot of things.
Maybe in Scotland more than anywhere else there’s a bit of a tall poppy culture, you know, and I realised I have no need to feel uncomfortable about this, but all that happened was I started to think that the writing might be good.
It's funny that like, you know, even after years and years of therapy, sort of unpacking all those forces that shape you into, sort of self-loathing, human, whether they're like, familial, or sort of cultural or emotional, I still feel really uncomfortable going, like, I just started to realise I was good at it.
I think it's a gendered experience, as well. As a woman, you are taught to be incredibly, forelock-tuggingly grateful to have your creative efforts like tolerated in one area of the arts. It felt like I was being I was like a bit greedy or grasping to go ‘what if I asked the world to also tolerate my terrible littles scrawlings in another aspect of the arts?’ and actually, it was incredibly liberating to go ‘what if I am just good at multiple things?’
Again, it's that thing about access and privilege where like, you know, I was fortunate enough that because I was working in one branch, I knew people in other branches of the arts and, you know, I started to share my writing with other people, other writers, who were like, this is good, you can do this.
So I started writing a novel just to see if I could, and it became This Is Yesterday - and it was entirely initiated by a visual thing. I was on a train to the midlands, and the train stopped. And it was stopped by a place where there was like a big polytunnel style greenhouse. There were two women inside the greenhouse, one younger, one older, being clearly having an argument and one of them started throwing plant parts at the older woman.
The train moved away, and I never left them behind her. I was like, “who are those people?” It was one of those real, utterly banal Wednesday morning. I was having this entirely prosaic train journey. And then you see this thing where you're like, that's like a pretty massive moment in somebody else's life.
I started writing This Is Yesterday as complete conjecture of who these people were and how they had come to be shouting each other in a greenhouse, and shying plant pots at one another.
The other story from Birding is about a mother and daughter, who live a sort of hermetically sealed, almost Gothic symbiotic relationship, very much sort of informed by Grey Gardens and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that was initiated by two women that I used to see around all the time. It was a mother and a daughter who dressed absolutely identically.
There's like fascination about like, how have you become these people? Who are you? What is your life and since I will never know, like a little psychopath, I will allow myself to make that up.
Birding is a lot of about whether or not we can ever really see ourselves, whether or not how truthful we can ever be with ourselves or by the extent to which we're unreliable narrators of our own lives. One of the catalysing incidents in Birding is the fact that one protagonist, Lydia takes a photo of the other protagonists Joyce, assuming something about her.
I’m very interested in that, you know, both as an artist and a writer, how we normalise taking photos of strangers and putting them on social media - which, for me, is a thing I would never ever, ever do. Yet I would write a fucking book based on an imagined life of someone I'd seen in the street. In the time that I've been making art, visual culture has become a totally different thing.
Self-portraiture, what once was sort of the preserve of the artistic - the visual rhetoric to make a self-portrait was once very much the preserve of artists, to put yourself on camera as an act of art was quite a singular thing, a challenging thing … but like now we do it all the time. I do it all the time. I fucking love a selfie. which I never thought I'd say. I see a lot of people from my generation like being really scathing of like people of all ages for taking selfies, you know, you must be really unhealthy and you must hate yourself to need a strangers validation. For me that was a lovely thing about it!
Finally, what’s next? Is there a third book planned?
Birding was going on for a really long time, my PhD has been going on for a really long time. And I'm really looking forward to writing something unrelated. Actually, I had a meeting with my literary agent the other week and had a really surprising conversation with her. She doesn't normally represent horror, she doesn't accept submissions of horror, but we had this conversation where she was like ‘I always thought you had a really good horror novel in you. I think you should sit down and turn out a horror novel really quickly once you hand in your thesis.” So that's what I'm gonna do.
One of the cover quotes for Birding we got called my writing hauntological. Hauntology was always in my work, that sort of urban weird… I feel like I'm very aware of it, but it was was the first time it was like, well, good, someone else has seen it.
Probably like the main reason I write is Bagpuss. I feel like the seismic impact of sort of that combination of melancholia and joy was just indelibly burned on to my brain, telling stories and conjuring worlds.
I get that - one of the most viscerally scary things in my head is the music from Picture Box. It terrifies me to this day for some reason.
There is something in that, actually. I feel like sort of most of my writerly sensibilities were formed in childhood. Maybe it is a bit like that thing of like sitting down in front of the television. And it's this thing in your house, that sort of like furniture, but it's a portal and it's a window. And the sort of the attention that you pay to that, you know, and the whole world is new, you're constantly in this present state of like time to sort of signal from noise, like I felt like everything that made its way into my head and the first 50 years from Bagpuss to like, the films of Derek Jarman on Channel Four, and like public information films.
I think essentially my entire sensibilities as a writer was formed in the first five to 15 years of my life, but basically, I'm gonna write a whole novel about a haunted public information film. Basically it’s about a woman in middle aged like who's sort of haunted by the fact that she was the drowning child in a sort of The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water-style of public information film and as she spent her entire childhood, not knowing when she would encounters herself drowning on television and being bullied for being the case in the public film and as you know, as an adult, sort of confronting that in a real world way, but also just being haunted to fuck by a sort of MR James-ian, Whistle and I'll Come To You evil on like a shingle beach…
That’s how I want my work to feel like. You know, not being flippant - genuinely, it always comes back to Bagpuss...