Behind The Spine: Episode 20 Transcript

In At The Deep End: Love, lust and control with Kate Davies

Hi, I’m Mark Heywood. And this is Behind the Spine, a podcast which deconstructs genre and narrative and finds learning opportunities for writers in the most unlikely of places.

“When I came out, I had no idea what women did in bed at all. You don’t get taught how to have sex. That’s why I want to do it, write about it as frankly as I did.”

When we don’t educate people on an issue, either because it feels uncomfortable, or we aren’t qualified to do so, or perhaps even because we simply don’t want them involved in that activity, it often backfires. When the formal education system fails, people will often seek out answers from other sources. Despite our society’s increasing liberalism, there are still glaring omissions in education and young people are left with no choice but to go online for help. Our guest today is Kate Davies. In her book In at the Deep End, she explores the story of a woman who comes out as a lesbian later in life with no prior knowledge about same-sex relationships. Through the story, Kate touches on some incredibly salient points about love, lust and control.

Chapter 1: Coming of Age

In last week’s episode, disability awareness consultant Andrew Gurza told us how he was often asked to leave sex education lessons in school. He says it wasn’t until much later in life that he realised he’d been asked to do so because the teachers didn’t know how to talk to him about sex. They didn’t and couldn’t understand the needs of a disabled boy, or how to educate him. But sex is such a big part of many people’s lives that having a disability, or a different sexual preference, or even conforming to a different gender, doesn’t make that any less true. When education fails, then people will often try to teach themselves. But for same-sex couples, searching gay or lesbian is likely to bring up more in the way of pornography than anything else — and that’s far from educational.

Kate: I used to work as a commissioning editor in children’s publishing, and we commissioned a book called Yay! You’re Gay! by a great YouTuber called Riyadh Khalaf. And he was talking about particularly in his experience, but so many young gay boys, particularly gay guys, learn about sex from porn. I mean probably a lot of young guys, and probably girls as well, are learning about sex from porn, which isn’t real sex. Obviously it’s a performance. So I think a law was passed, was it last year that they’re going to introduce LGBT+ sex education in schools, I think? I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but definitely I don’t think there’s enough realistic portrayal of queer sex.

Mark: It’s certainly unlikely to get some of the journey that Julia goes on fed back to you by a teacher. And what I like about the honesty with which you approached the subject is that we’re effectively learning as she is learning, and there’s so much that she doesn’t know. And one of the themes that comes up on this show more often than not is about being an expert, or if you’re not an expert, learn to be an expert. And we go on this journey with her that starts with a broken penis and really unsatisfactory sex into some pretty hardcore detail. But at no point does it feel gratuitous. It feels honest. And a few weeks back, we spoke to an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, about what writers can learn from this. And she said you need to be very explicit, with a lower case e. You need to be very clear about what’s going on. You can’t just say, “They have sex,” because an actor can’t do anything with that. And I guess it’s the same for a reader. What you’re doing is, you’re not being provocative, you’re being factual and descriptive about what’s going on. That was a deliberate choice, wasn’t it?

Kate: A hundred percent, yes. Because I mean that is the journey that she goes on. It’s a journey of sexual discovery. And so there’s not really much point in writing about a journey of sexual discovery and awakening without being specific. That’s how I felt about it. And I felt very much like the relationships we have with those characters are expressed in the sex that they have, particularly with Sam, because sex is such a big part of that relationship. And the control that Sam holds over Julia is partly to do with sex as well. So I wanted to be really specific. So yes, it was 100% a choice that I made.

And funnily enough, I’d seen Lena Dunham, who wrote Girls and performed in Girls, in conversation with Caitlin Moran, when I was writing the book. And she was talking about honesty and truth in writing, and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be really truthful in my portrayal of those sexual encounters, because first of all, I didn’t think I’d seen enough of it, and secondly, because… I mean, when I first started writing it, I started writing it as a screenplay in a screenwriting class quite soon after I’d come out. And I was really excited about sex, because I didn’t know it could be so fun and I wanted to celebrate it. So it was both of those reasons really.

Mark: Very early on, the character talks about liking the idea of sex more than the actual act of having sex. And what starts with fairly innocent conversations between her and her female flatmate about what she can hear through the very thin wall very quickly escalates. And I read with increasing, not trepidation, but almost a little bit of nervousness about… I would get so much from the chapter headings. When you read a chapter heading that says, “Licking the Snail,” you kind of know you’re in for a bumpy ride, right?

Kate: Yes! Oh dear, yes. I have a friend who thought… a gay guy friend who read that and thought that that was an accepted lesbian term for cunnilingus — which it’s not, I just want to say.

Mark: I heard one on a train a while back, which was Finding Nemo, which I thought was…

Kate: That’s great!

Mark: You can use that if you want to. You mentioned control, and you get the sense very early on that there is something about Sam and the relationship that these two characters have which is pretty one-sided. It’s a terribly toxic relationship, or at least becomes it. I think… and I went back and re-read some of the early sections once I’d gotten to the end, and you do lay that out. It’s very authentic, the character that Sam reveals herself to be. It’s all there from the very beginning, isn’t it? That relationship that they have or that control that she has over Julia.

Kate: Yes, definitely is. And I think that that is… but she sees it in a different way. Julia doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into, because I think she comes out and she’s so new to being a lesbian that she kind of takes what she’s given. So she throws all of the rules that she’s known out the window, and she thinks, “Oh, this must be how it is in lesbian relationships.” And she also is lulled into a false sense of security, because she thinks that because she’s now a lesbian she’s going to have a really equal relationship. And it’s going to be an extremely feminist relationship and everything is going to be an equal partnership because they’re both women, because she’s sort of opted out the patriarchy. And that isn’t how it works, because there are power dynamics in all relationships, obviously. And that’s definitely something that I think I assumed when I used to go out with men. I think I was like, “Oh, well the patriarchy is the problem,” and that isn’t the case. I mean, it’s partly the case, but you’re not naturally going to have an equal relationship just because you’re going out with someone of the same sex.

Mark: We get a lot of it in a monologue from Julia. She does comment a lot on things that are said to her by a woman. And she reflects on the reaction that she would have had, had it been a man that had said that to her. There’s some really nice honesty in all of that. There were a couple of things that really, really stood out for me. Some of them thematic, and some of them just tiny little throwaway touches, like the name that you give the drag king, who is a character called Butch Cassidy, is just wonderful. It reminded me of a few years ago I was in Johannesburg and I got taken to see a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And the part of Frank N. Furter was played by their leading drag act, and his alter ego is a flight attendant, and it’s a pun on Cathay Pacific. She’s just called Cathy Specific, which I just thought when I got to Butch Cassidy, I was like, “That’s perfect.” That’s really, really nice.

But in and amongst that, there are some really important themes. She has a very visceral reaction to the celebratory mood that her friends are in when this relationship goes south, doesn’t she? Is that something that… I can’t think of a relationship that I’ve been part of either as the friend or in the relationship, where someone at some point hasn’t said, “Oh, she was never right for you anyway.” That’s entirely… we do that all the time, don’t we?

Kate: All the time. And it’s very difficult when you’re in a relationship that isn’t right for you to hear that, isn’t it? I mean, that’s my experience. And my personal experience, and sort of watching friends have relationships throughout the years, is that, as a friend, you can’t be too critical of a relationship or that person might pull away. And particularly when someone’s in a controlling relationship, other people not being supportive of your relationship can isolate you even further. So I think that’s something I have experienced. I’ve seen friends go through it over and over and over again. And it’s hard to know what to do, though, isn’t it? It’s hard to know what to do when you see someone in a controlling relationship, because your sort of instinct is to try and help them get out of it. But in a way, that won’t necessarily work because that person has to be ready to hear it.

Mark: Right. And I think there’s something deeply disingenuous about after the fact saying, “She was never right for you anyway.” It’s like, “Well, why don’t you tell me that before I got in too deep? It would’ve been helpful a few years ago, not when we have to halve everything and get divorced or sell the house,” or whatever it is.

Kate: So, at the same time, in the beginning, I think definitely in the book, Julia’s in such a kind of honeymoon stage. She’s so caught up in the thrill of it that she couldn’t have heard. She wouldn’t have seen and she wouldn’t have heard. And I think that’s realistic to how relationships play out.

Chapter 2: The Villain in Someone Else’s Story

It’s tempting when we’re writing about a minority to live within the confines of the stories we’ve told in the past. It’s why our guest Professor Vincent Brown a few weeks ago told us that we need to rethink the way we tell stories of slaves. Why Andrew Gurza says that films about disabled people often miss the mark. But rethinking the narrative doesn’t mean you can only ever write positively about a minority. Kate says that what’s really important is honesty.

Kate: I hope that we’re at a place where we can represent all kinds of queer relationships and we don’t have to sort of portray it as a… not everything has to sort of have a happy ever after. So I think that when you are a member of a minority writing about a minority, there’s sometimes a kind of weight of expectation or pressure to represent the whole community, or to represent the whole community in a great light. And I wanted to be more real than that. But at the same time, there’s a kind of cliché that stories about queer people often end with people dying. You can’t have a kind of happy story about queer people. And I didn’t want to do that either. I didn’t want to do a Chasing Amy. You may have seen the film Chasing Amy, which I loved as a teenager. And now like, what? She gets together with a man at the end? It completely ruined the whole thing. Kissing Jessica Stein. There’s so many films where it’s this great lesbian love story, and then she gets together with the man at the end. I didn’t want to do that, obviously. I didn’t want to portray the community in the negative light. But at the same time, I hope there’s space for realistic stories of abuse in queer relationships and not everything has to have a happy ending.

Mark: I agree. And it’s had a very supportive reaction from the community that you’re writing about. A friend of mine who’s an actress who was in a theatrical adaptation of Sarah Water’s novel, The Night Watch, which is a series of lesbian relationships set during The Blitz, and they took that on national tour. And she said it was interesting to gauge the different reaction from town to town as to how a play predominantly about lesbian relationships went down. In some areas like Brighton, obviously, it was championed and welcomed with open arms. In other parts of the community, very much less so. Outside of LGBTQ, your readership, what’s the reaction been like? Have you had some, “Oh, my god, this is completely unacceptable,” reactions to the book?

Kate: Yes. I mean, I am definitely not a writer that seeks out my reviews, so I just don’t think that’s healthy. So I don’t really do that. I’ll read them if it’s in the Guardian or I’ll read those reviews, but I’m not going to go and look on Amazon, for instance. But I do know that there are some people who… It was out of NetGalley before it was published, and there was a one star review and it said, “No.” Just no.

Mark: Just no?

Kate: Yes, just no. So yes, it’s not a book for everyone, but it has been… Mark, what’s interesting is that Harper Collins is a mainstream publisher and they’ve marketed it as mainstream fiction. And I don’t know if it’s most of the readers, but probably most of the readers have been straight women, and they’ve loved it because it’s not a story for lesbians. It’s a story about, hopefully quite a universal story in a way, about controlling relationships. And I’ve had lots of messages from almost exclusively women, but not entirely, not always women, either women who’ve recently come out, but quite a lot of women of all sexual orientations who’ve been in controlling relationships and who have thanked me for writing about that. And that, to me, is really lovely.

Mark: Yes, because the control is irrespective of sexuality, isn’t it? It’s still a toxic relationship. Just because it’s a lesbian one, that’s kind of irrelevant. It made me think of Big Little Lies, the TV show, that was an adaptation of a novel. They moved it from Australia, I think, to Monterey. And the Nicole Kidman character, we’ve talked about this on the show before, about how she is in a deeply controlling, very sexually aggressive relationship with her husband. And there is a sense, a glimpse, that part of her likes it. And she deals with that horrific realisation, or self-realisation. It’s kind of like what you’re doing here seems to me to be flipping the narrative of a coming-of-age story, for want of a better word. She comes to this as, as you did later in life, than a lot of the stories that we hear about. I know it’s more common now to come out later, but if you think about those traditional coming out, it was like you may be in your early twenties when you finally confront this. It came later for you, didn’t it?

Kate: Yes, I was in my mid-twenties. I came out at secondary school as bisexual. And in fact, I think I probably came out as lesbian at some point and then just sort of went in again because it was quite stressful, and I didn’t really know what to do about it. And so I kind of forgot about it, really. But then I made a New Year’s resolution, actually, when I was 25, I think I was 25, to not go out with men any more. So I obviously knew that I wasn’t straight, but I knew I wasn’t going to do anything about it unless I took some sort of action. So that was the action that I took and I never looked back.

Mark: I think the decision to market it as a mainstream book is absolutely appropriate because of what it becomes as a narrative. I want to spend some time thinking about one particular aspect of the book. It’s very much from her perspective. It’s her journey. And we are effectively her, as she learns all of this brave new world for her. But towards the end, you do a very brave thing that I think a lot of writers could learn from. You flip the perspective, and she tries to imagine the entire thing from Sam’s perspective. And there’s a great… I can’t remember the exact line, but she talks about being, is it the bad guy?

Kate: Yes, the villain of someone else’s story.

Mark: The villain in someone else’s story. Thank you. And that made me think of so many things about you’re actually taking what is a first-person narrative, and then trying to flip that. So she tries to imagine whether life would have been different, or imagine it from Sam’s perspective. That was a real gearshift for me. Has that had a reaction from your readers?

Kate: Yes, I have. I had lots and lots of people comment specifically about that line, of that section of the book. And for me, it was really important because it is a subjective story. And I think that some readers who were — again, I don’t read their reviews — but I’m absolutely certain that there are some readers, particularly in the kink community, or the polyamorous community, who might see this as a kind of anti-kink, anti-polyamory tract. And it is not at all. I kind of was quite careful, hopefully, to put in characters who… positive characters who are in those communities, in this book as well. But I wanted to make it clear that this is one character’s perspective and it’s one character’s journey.

And people who are in controlling relationships, the controlling partner doesn’t think that they’re a bad person. The controlling partner is doing what they need to do, I think, to get through life. And they don’t realise that the… I don’t think often that people realise the impact they’re having on their partner. And so it was important for me to think about that, and to have Julia think about that, and to make the reader think about that, because it’s a first-person novel as a one-sided story.

So I’m sure that, you know, I’ve been in controlling relationships in my life. Several. And I’ve had controlling dynamics in the workplace — but I’m sure if we heard those stories from my bosses, my ex-boyfriends’ points of view, it would be a very different story.

Mark: You file it under ‘everybody’s fighting a battle we know nothing about’, don’t you? You know, it can be very difficult. It can be what you said about the kink or polyamorous community, there is a certain control and sex of this type. It goes hand in hand, doesn’t it? Because that is part of the appeal in that you are potentially giving up control. That’s often the attraction. So it’s a very layered discussion about control, isn’t it?

Kate: Yes, it is. It’s exactly that. What attracts people to kinky sex is that power dynamic that you can play out safely, and then hopefully not play it out in your real life. And just because something is a sexual fantasy, doesn’t mean that’s how you want to live your whole life as a kind of submissive wife or something. But at the same time, for Julia, she’s newly out. She’s quite innocent in a way. And this kind of glamorous woman who she’d do anything to keep, wants to do this with her. So although she consents to it, can she fully consent to it?

Because of the power relationship in that relationship, outside sex isn’t equal. Even though someone is consenting to what’s happening, they might not really want to do it. And I think that is quite common. I mean, we’ve seen I May Destroy You. If you’ve seen that, it’s absolutely amazing. `the Michaela Coel show. And I think that all this stuff, all these conversations about sex and consent are so complicated, and there isn’t really a right or wrong. It’s so much more subtle than that.

Chapter 3: In at the Deep End

Often, when we’re forced to face the reality of our actions, or of the events unfolding in our lives, it can hit us like a truck. It’s very rare we are ever eased into the biggest, most life-changing moments of our lives. But hopefully, we’re at least prepared for them. The story of Julia shows how you can become tangled up in the unexpected when you’ve not been properly prepared for what might come and how difficult that can be to figure everything out on your own. And it’s quite the journey. Julia goes from first kiss with girl, to visiting a sex shop, to visiting a sex club, and it all happens rather fast.

Kate: She just literally just goes all in, and I think that that can happen. I think, “Did it happen to me?” It did happen to me quite like that. So, once you’re in the community, if you’re going out with someone who’s more experienced than you, or… I call the character of Sam, an ‘advanced lesbian’, and Julia is like a ‘beginner lesbian’. She’s just kind of right in there doing everything and loving it, and it’s a whole new world. And so, yes, she doesn’t have time to catch her breath. She doesn’t start out as like, if you’ve come out sort of 15 or 16, you might have a kind of teen relationship, which is much more vanilla. She doesn’t have any of that. She goes straight in with some quite hardcore action.

Mark: Well, we love reading or watching characters who make decisions we disagree with, and there were times when I was going, “Girl, just maybe stay in tonight.” You know? “Don’t go to nightclubs.” I mentioned earlier, the guy I spoke to, who is a disability consultant, and he talked about his own need for intimacy. And he said something really interesting. He said it was so much more than the physical act. It was almost a way of him feeling normal that he was able to, or he had the ability and the permission to, experience things that able-bodied people have.

There’s a real shift in Julia, isn’t there, where she has that first deeply sexual encounter with Sam. She experiences something that she has never experienced before, and there’s a lot of detail about that. That really is the moment at which she experiences meaning and truth, and who she really is for the first time. It’s a very, very visceral and incredibly visually described scene. She effectively experiences utter joy and ecstasy for the very first time.

Kate: Yes. She feels joy and ecstasy, and a sense of rightness, I think, because she feels like she’d always felt like she was wrong or that’s why didn’t she enjoy sex. She didn’t really feel attractive. She felt she didn’t get the point of it, so she was sort of living outside this, you know, everyone’s like, “Oh yes, sex is great,” but she’d always been feeling like, “It’s not that great. I don’t know why everyone’s going on about it all the time.” And suddenly she gets the point and she feels like she’s come home.

And I think a lot of people feel like that when they come out. When they realise, “This is what’s been going on for me,” and I wanted to capture that. But like, a lot of coming out stories are about the problem. You know, often it’s extremely traumatic. People are rejected by their families, about the struggle of coming out. And I wanted to write about the absolute joy that you feel when you figure out who you are. And especially, I’m a white, cis woman living in London in 2020, and therefore being queer is a joyful thing for me. And I wanted to capture that in the novel.

Mark: There’s a sense that one of the early characters that we meet, Alice the flatmate, has a fairly active sex life, early doors, with her boyfriend. There is a sense, it’s not really touched on that much, but there’s a sense that Alice begins to grow in some way resentful of this new experience because it makes her conventional relationship with her boyfriend almost a little boring, doesn’t it?

Kate: Yes, it does. Yes. She feels like she’s quite parochial, and that Julia is having a much more exciting life than her. It makes her question her sort of ‘trad’ set up, I think, and there’s a plot line in the novel about her. Her boyfriend proposes to her, and she feels very torn by this because… and I think a lot of women of my generation and younger are having this conversation about, “Do we want to get married? Will that trap us?” She’s kind of struggling with those questions that feminist women are struggling with. Then her best friend is having this delightful, non-traditional experience. I think they both, in the beginning, think, “Oh, Julia’s so lucky she’s opted out of the patriarchy,” like I said earlier. “She’s not going to have any of these struggles because she’s with a woman.” And obviously that isn’t how things are.

Mark: You mentioned earlier that you started writing it as a screenplay, and it’s obviously become a novel. How much did it change from initial idea of the story to what is actually in the book?

Kate: It changed a huge amount, because I started writing it a really long time ago. It was the first thing I’d properly written. I mean, I’d written children’s books, but I hadn’t written anything for adults before.

Mark: This is certainly not a children’s book!

Kate: It’s not a children’s book! The overall structure, the kind of three-act structure is sort of the same. But when I was first writing it, it wasn’t about an abusive relationship. I was writing it about like, it was a ‘funny romantic comedy!’ with some sex clubs in it. And then I wrote it… I never actually wrote it as a screenplay. I structured it as a screenplay and wrote a bit of it. And then I wrote it as a very Bridget Jones-style, funny broad diary. So really frankly plagiarised Bridget Jones there. I kind of thought it was fine, but it was too late and it didn’t feel truthful. And that’s when I went to see Lena Dunham speaking to Caitlyn Moran.

And I think it was around that time that shows, television was becoming more honest and authentic. I decided to rewrite the whole thing as honestly as I could. And when I rewrote it at that point, I stripped out a lot of characters and it was really just about Julia and Sam, and Alice and Dave were in it, and one person at work, but it was kind of… it was a much more serious novel. The beginning was very funny because that was sort of from my earlier draughts and the end was extremely dark and bleak. And when I went out — and it was about 70,000 words, I think, when I went out to agents — my agent said, “You need to lighten it up a bit.” So I added in a lot of subplots at that stage after I got my agent to lighten the novel, because I wanted it to be warm as well as honest.

Mark: What’s coming up for you next? What are you working on at the moment, Kate?

Kate: Well, I just finished a draft of my second novel. Hurray! It’s taken me a lot. Well, it’s taken me nearly two years. This first novel took me embarrassingly long time, maybe eight years or something. But yes, nearly two years, but I’m now a full time writer so I feel like I should have been more speedy. That is a novel about donor conception, and the different ways that people become parents, and the kind of impact that donor conception has on children as well as the parents who choose to use a donor.

Because I’m donor-conceived myself, and I’m also a lesbian thinking about having children, so I wanted look at it from both angles. And In at the Deep End has been optioned for TV, which is very cool. So I’m really hoping that will happen at some point. And I’m also kind of new to screenwriting, but doing some screenwriting, so I’m working on a really fun Cartoon Network children’s series about a medieval deer. So it’s just really fun to do that alongside writing quite a sort of personal, serious novel for adults. It’s really fun to write about medieval deer, and doing jokes about Lord of the Rings. So yes, a bit of both.

Mark: Thrilling news about the TV option! It is written in such a visual style that it does lend itself perfectly to the screen. And just the ability to see some of the things that you’ve written about is… you would get people watching.

Kate: It would be fun to have a go and see if it will work. Yes.

Mark: But on that note, Kate Davies, thank you very much for being a guest. It’s been a pleasure.

Kate: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Conclusion

Massive thank you, then, to Kate Davies for joining me on the podcast and to recap, what have we learned?

When you’re writing about a minority group or anyone for that matter doing right by them doesn’t mean you can only ever write positive stories. It means being honest and truthful, reflecting on a broad cross section of experiences in a realistic way.

With that in mind, your story’s protagonist might be from a minority group, but you shouldn’t lean on that at every available moment; don’t make that your only hook. Kate’s book is less about a woman discovering her sexuality and more about how that woman navigates the unexpected and how she copes with the stranglehold of a controlling relationship. The relationship just happens to be with another woman.

Kate cleverly flips perspectives in her book. She allows the reader to see things from the villain’s perspective. Perhaps you could go further, write two separate storylines which mirror the same narrative, but come at it from different perspectives. It may offer your readers an insight into how our definition of right and wrong is skewed by personal experiences.

And finally, if you’re overly critical of a friend’s relationship with someone else, even a bad and toxic one, they may pull away from you even further, always aim to nurture, encourage, and inspire. That’s the sign of real strength.

Thanks for listening. I’m Mark Haywood. And if you’d like to get in touch we’re on Twitter and Facebook as @BehindTheSpine. New episodes released weekly, please like us and review us on Apple podcasts. It really does help. Up next week, I’ll be in conversation with Lara Maiklem, author of the Sunday Times’ bestseller, Mudlarking.

“When you find something on the foreshore, you’re very aware that you’re the first person to touch it since the original owner and some things you pick up and they just feel like they have a past.”

Goodbye for now. Stay safe, and keep writing.

To listen to this episode of the podcast, visit the link below: www.behindthespine.podbean.com/e/kate-davies