Jenni Fagan won the Gordon Burn Prize for her memoir, Ootlin, which was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Her debut novel, The Panopticon, saw her selected as a Granta Best Young British Novelist, and her second novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, gained her Scottish Author of the Year. Jenni has been listed for the Encore Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and the Pushcart Prize. She is a Doctor of Philosophy, a member of Liberty, and a Royal Society of Literature Fellow.

Peggy

So this book, The Delusions, we’ll get right into it so we can range about, but I love that Irvine Welsh has called it ‘a 1984 for the afterlife’.

First of all, how do you feel about that as a description of the book?

Jenni

Yeah, I don’t think it’s not apt. I think there’s, you know, I’m always responding to the unseen forces that claim to hold authority over our lives, whether it’s in this life or the afterlife.

And, you know, my background is quite heavily in structuralism and my academic career. Work is separate to my literary work, but those questions are always there.

I’m always responding to, responding to, you know, the powers that be in one way or another, but I’m always focused on the lives of the individuals, and that’s what fascinates me.

So yeah, I mean it’s a huge compliment as a quote.

Peggy

Lovely, superb. Well, on that, you said your academic life and your other writing life are separate. Is that by choice? Is that by design?

Jenni

Yeah, I mean, they feed into each other, obviously, and the questions that I would explore or research within, you know, in my PhD and academia, you’re able to do that in a much more immersive and direct way. Academically, you know, if I was to do the novels in the same way, you’d really feel like you were hitting people over the head, you know?

So fiction is its own alchemical being. You know, you start with, or for me, I start with a question. Each novel starts with a question. There’s something that I’m leaning into, or there’s something that I’m looking to explore. I try and keep it clean and try and keep it to one main thing per book, and I’m… all of those modes of study, you know, they’ll filter in there, but you try and let the actual world take over. You try and let this world build that’s a world of its own rules and its own characters.

And so in that way, you can’t do it in the same way as doing a, you know, a massive thesis on the metamorphosis of society, which is what I did for, yeah, which is what I did for my PhD, and I used Kafka’s Metamorphosis, you know, as a text to kind of explore that.

So yeah, I mean, you have absolute freedom in fiction, which is something that I adore. You know, I adore entering a space where I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t want to know what’s going to happen initially at all. I think if I had it all planned out, it would feel like a dot-to-dot process for me.

I want to be surprised, I want to be shocked, I want to go further than I thought I could every single time. So it’s really a voyage into the unknown, whereas academia is very structured, it’s very rigorous, it has to, you know, really adhere to so many different facets to be considered good academic writing. So I keep this one over here and this one over here.

Peggy

There’s so much in there I want to spring off, but I think we do need to set the scene of The Delusions. And I wonder if you would do that, if you would describe the context of this novel.

Jenni

So The Delusions is set in a place called Processing, and Processing looks like the biggest airport hangar you’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely gargantuan. You can’t see to the end of it, you can’t see to the beginning of it, it’s absolutely humongous. And what it happens to be is the largest sole terminus in existence. So all of the newly dead go via Processing onto the Great Beyonds, or not onto the Great Beyonds, as may be.

In Processing, there are queues, lots and lots and lots of different queues, and each of the queues has a different criteria. So you might have under 18s in a queue, you might have all murderers in a queue. The queue that we are in, and where we meet our main character Edie, is the queue of those ordinary people formerly considered, in some small kind of a way, to be living.

Which Edie thinks is hilarious, because she’s been working on Processing now for, I think, it’s 47 years, and she’s fully aware there’s no such thing as an ordinary person. And she is on a disciplinary programme from HR. She hasn’t been doing so well at work, she hasn’t always been adhering to the protocols. Things are quite rigid in Processing. You have to take certain stages to be able to go through. So the newly dead find themselves, on the day of their death, in this huge space where they don’t get to be on their own. There is no golden light, their ancestors are not there to meet them, their dog’s not there to meet them.

And what they have to do is they have to get to the end of their queue, and they have to account for themselves and account for their own lives. And so one of the questions we ask in The Delusions is, what condition is your soul in lately? You know, have you had a look at your soul lately? Because what happens when you arrive there is you find that the only thing that you actually own, the only thing that you have ever owned, is your soul.

You arrive in life and you’re bequeathed a body, a temporary body and a temporary life. We live in a finite life and a gargantuan universe. And when we pass, the only thing we take with us is the thing that we arrived with, which is our soul. And so one of the premises of The Delusions is, you know, there are no red carpets, there’s no marketing, there’s no money, there’s no status. They don’t care who or what you are. They care who you are.

And that’s what you’re going to have to engage with, for some people, for the very first time in their lives. So to be able to answer the questionnaire when they approach their own personal admin, to be able to answer the questionnaire, the first thing they have to do is extract delusion from their body.

Some people really struggle with this. It’s a kind of oily substance, you know, it comes out of the kind of porous leftover, shimmering thing that would have been your body, and it has to be dragged out, and it sort of turns into this long kind of eel-like shape with gnashing teeth, and you have to whack it down into, you know, what looks like an airport tray, and then it’s belted in and it’s sent off for data analysis. And only if you can extract delusion do you have the chance of answering the questionnaire truthfully.

And so you have this huge cast. You have the whole of the human race, basically. And as it turns out, we appear to be on the day of the sixth mass extinction event, behind all of the admins that are leaderboards that count up the newly dead per day, and they fly around and they fly and they fly around. And this day they are spinning so fast, the whole of Processing are turning their eyes towards it. Engineers are coming in to work out what’s happening, and the rumours that have been coming through from the newly dead to the admins all this time about this war and this other thing and this next disaster have accelerated to the point where it looks like today is the day that everybody goes up.

The ancestors are banned. The ancestors are not allowed in Processing on account of the riots. We don’t go into detail about what happened, but sometimes when the newly dead met the long since past, it didn’t always go so well. So there is this separation, even within this moment in a human’s life.

And you are not given all the answers. You’re not given a condo. You know, Edie says we are godless, but not unholy. Your location is within the universe. So there’s a big kind of milky, glassy floor underneath everybody, and that’s the floor of trapped souls. That’s people that weren’t able to pass, and they’re down in this very dense looking, milky, cloudy kind of floor. But at nighttime, the floor clears, and you see our universe, you see our solar system, and you see Earth below you looking as utterly stunning as it ever could.

So the backdrop is completely beautiful, and that’s the sweetener for the newly dead. That’s the moment where Processing quietens down and people begin to feel connected to themselves, to each other. They experience what astronauts call the overview effect.

So when astronauts go into space and they see the Earth for the first time from space, they experience this thing called the overview effect that apparently is so profoundly life-altering that once you’ve seen it, you’re never the same again.

And so I wanted to take the readers out to this stunning vantage point and look at our utterly beautiful planet and have that little second of, what are we doing here? Look at what we have, look at where we come from. And so that’s where we begin our journey.

Peggy

Wow. Fabulous. What was your visual landscape when you were writing this? How do you build the world of the novel? You’ve mentioned Nina Simone at the top of the podcast. What are the things that you deploy to get you into there, you know?

Jenni

Yeah, so I’m 48 now, I’ll be 49 this year, and I’ve been writing since I was seven. I’ve been writing since I was very little, so that’s nearly 40 years at this point.

And as the years went on, I’d say in the last couple of decades, I really leaned into automatic writing. So I’ve learned to really trust the process of handing over everything to my unconscious. They say that the amygdala is like the holy grail, you know, like the god source. They don’t know exactly how it works, but they know that everything is recorded there. Gertrude Stein, for example, used automatic writing, and some of the surrealists used automatic writing, and they would go into a kind of trance-like state.

It’s very natural for me. I will begin with an idea. The idea might be very small, it might just be a line, and then I’ll just switch out. And so I write sort of in another space, if you like. And four hours later, six hours later, ten hours later, if I get the liberty of a long day, I’ll kind of come back out of it and the room will have gone dark, and I’ll have forgotten to put the lights on, and I might be cold and need a blanket or whatever.

What I find is that there’s a part of your mind that is the most clever, the most in tune, and the most intuitive. And I don’t like to mess with that part of my mind. That part of your mind remembers everything. We don’t. But if you learn how to really tap into it more and more, what happens is when you write, it brings you all these bits of gold.

Then you have to work out what they mean, and what you’re doing with them. So I edit completely differently. I edit quite critically. I’m very mercenary. I will cut a novel in half if I need to. If it doesn’t serve the novel, I don’t keep it. I really don’t write from a position of ego when I’m editing a book. I will chop it up and do whatever I feel like doing with it right until the end.

I’ll still play with it right until the end because I feel like that’s how it gets to stay alive. You know, you want it to be a living thing.

Peggy

Yeah. It sounds to me then that this novel possibly came together quite quickly. Would that be true, especially of your fiction, that it is a quick write and a slower edit?

Jenni

Yeah, and you might go through that process over and over. You know, I was writing a lot of this in New Zealand, actually. I was on residency in New Zealand. And I should have been out doing some lovely things there, but I rarely get the opportunity to write all day and night. So there were certain points where I was just back to back. I like to stay in the world as much as I can, but each of them is different.

You know, Luck and Booth took probably about five years on and off, going in and out, and then having to completely revise because that was set over a hundred years. The Delusions would have been done in, you know, two or three months, then stop, then two or three months, then stop. Each book will take as long as the book needs to take. And you just have to honour the work, really.

I’m always in it for the work. I’ve always been in it for the work. I’m very, very, very old school as a writer, in that I’m here to serve the work. And so I’ll do whatever I need to do to get the book where it needs to be.

Peggy

Surely. This is not the first time, Jenny, that your fiction has looked at the sort of end times. I mean, Sunlight Pilgrim similarly was concerned with that. And I wonder, why is that? Why are you drawn to explore or to think about that kind of concept?

Jenni

I mean, I think at the moment it’s certainly very pertinent. It’s a subject that’s going around. And you know, there are scientists who think we are already fairly well established in the sixth mass extinction. We’re seeing much larger numbers of species being eradicated than is even remotely comfortable.

I’m very interested in the fact that we live on a planet. And, you know, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that we’re surrounded by this vast, vast, vast universe, only one of an infinite number of universes. And we know very little about it. We know very little about where we come from, and we know very little about where we go. Even if somebody believes in God, or a form of God, they still have to question the fact that we need to have autonomy over our own humanity. We have to have autonomy over how we live as a human race and what we do with that.

So questions of this saviour, this saviour that will come in and fix everything, this parental figure that will tick all the boxes and make it all right later on, I never had that personally, and I also just don’t see it as something that makes sense to me in the wider scheme of things. And so I think of humans as like crazy islanders. The Earth is an island in space, and islanders by their nature can often be a little crazy and dislocated, depending on what they’re having to deal with and the elements and otherwise.

One of the conversations in The Delusions is this silent universe that won’t speak to us. You know, it will not have a direct conversation with humans. And NED says we’re a feared race. We’re gossiped about, a gossiped-about species in all known universes, and we’re considered a concern to the universal order.

And so in Processing, sometimes people from the Universal Order will come in and voyeuristically observe Processing. There’s a building called the Theatre of Cruelty, and that’s where the people who are too evil, beyond evil, go. They don’t go through Processing in the same way as other people do. They don’t get the chance to pass, and they have to perform.

Each of the acts they committed themselves, or got others to commit that caused great harm to humans, they have to perform. And when they perform them, they have to feel what their victims felt, and then what their victims’ families felt. If that was a million people, they’ll have to experience that for a million people.

Part of the reason I needed them to feel what their victims felt is that a very pure psychopath, for example, does not have the empathy to experience it in the way a regular person would. And so part of that flip was, what if people had to understand the outcome of their actions, absolutely, and in totality?

Sometimes you get universal dwellers going past the performance of cruelty, having their little stardust cocktails and observing the humans, but they won’t interact. HR doesn’t interact, HR doesn’t answer questions. Some of the newly dead will say, ‘We want to speak to the manager,’ and HR’s like, ‘It’s best you just don’t even ask that.’ There’s this idea that when we die, all the answers are going to be there, and it’s all going to be neatly tied up.

One of my questions in The Delusions was, what if that’s not the case? What if this is only part of the journey?

Peggy

Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned at the top that your novels always start with a question that you then want to explore or unpack. I just wonder, was there one central question to The Delusions then? And if so, what was that?

Jenni

I think there were a couple of main points that I was leaning into. One of them was that we live in a world that appears to be heavily dominated by delusion and heavily dominated by delusional individuals. And we are asked to participate in, and be conditioned by, that as a race. I think it is one of the main issues of modern society. Stephen Hawking used to say stupidity is one of the greatest threats to humanity. I think delusion is similar. It is the softening effect of, you know, capitalism, the eternal distraction of the internet, and the constant fear and worry of providing for your families. These things keep people in a certain mode, often so they feel quite helpless.

We are watching people around the world marching in numbers I have never seen, asking their governments to act with the humanity and intent they would like to see, and that is not always what we are seeing. We see it in some places, but it is a very tense moment in life. I really wanted to lean into the question: what does delusion mean? Who does it serve? Delusion is not something one person has. It is something everybody has, to a greater or lesser extent. What happens if you have to remove that? What happens if you have to wake up? And what happens if you have to fully face yourself?

There is a bit where Edie says life was not about just wandering around being randomly distracted by inane nonsense, like we all like to be. You were meant to figure out who you were properly. You were meant to take the journey. You came here to take a journey.

Then my other question was inspired by having lost some of my closest people over the years, and a lot as a child. There was this circular process of loss in my life. We always think about how we miss the dead, how we miss those people who have passed. But what if you were in a position, a vantage point, where you see how much they miss you and how much they miss the Earth?

Edie had to leave her son when she died. He was only about seven years old, and she was around forty-three, so both very young. She has really struggled in the afterlife ever since because the only person she has ever loved is her child. Even among the backdrop of gathering humans that begins to look like everybody on Earth, all the species, all the birds, all the fish, all the animals, and all the humans on Earth, and then on the other side all of the ancestors who have already been processed, Processing has been a busy place with the whole of holy humanity living dead in between, she just wants to see one pair of eyes, and that is her son.

I think most people understand that what we live for in life is love. What we live for in life is often the small number of people close enough to us who give our lives meaning, who help us keep going when it is hard, keep going through illness when it is too much.

I liked exploring this idea of love as a continuum. Love is something that is eternal because the soul is eternal.

Peggy

Yeah. I mean, it is a love story, basically, isn’t it?

Jenni

Yeah, absolutely.

And it is a love story, not just between a mother and her son, who she is waiting to see come through, who will be a grown man by the time she sees him again. She has every hope that he might have had joy in his life and done the things he wanted to do. It is such a beautiful exploration of motherhood in that way.

But it is also an exploration of love between all of humanity. There is one point where somebody shouts, ‘Nobody loved me in the queues.’ And somebody else shouts back, ‘We love you.’ It is a story of profound human connection because humans are designed to connect to each other. We are designed to live with deep connections between ourselves and the world that we live in.

In the world of Processing, it does not care about that in the slightest. In fact, it is not profitable for humans to be that closely connected. I think the moment we are in, and just in the history of the human race full stop, is the moment where we either reconnect or we do not make it. We would not be the first human race to burn itself out or no longer be here, and we would be a really unsuccessful species. Really unsuccessful. There is an oxygen-producing bacteria that has been here, I do not know, however many billion years. That is a really successful species.

Modern humans, a couple of hundred thousand years. We are barely even tipping the surface. We have everything we need to be in it for the long haul, but we are sitting at the precipice of a very specific moment. The Delusions was about that.

It was about the anger. It was about the very deep rage I feel when I turn on the internet every morning and see what is happening in the world and I want to go out and change it. I have a child who is going to be here when I am not. I think about all the other kids out there. I grew up in the care system, and I watch kids in war zones losing entire families over and over. This is inexcusable. There is absolutely no reason that it should be like this.

All of those things began to feed into my desire to create a world where accountability is part of the equation, whether you go through it now or whether you go through it later. I kind of thought, if I were a psychopathic, genocidal maniac and I had to roll up into Processing and go to the Theatre of Cruelty, and delusion was going to be extracted one way or another, would I at that point think maybe I was playing to the wrong crowd? Life is very short. Eternity is very long. I really think we should be thinking about these things more again.

Peggy

All of that said, then, what do you hope The Delusions would do in the world as a piece of fiction? Who would you want to read it, and what change would you hope that would bring, I suppose?

Jenni

Yeah, I write in a very inclusive way. I write big ideas in a way that feels simple when you pick up the book. It is a real challenge as a writer to take these heavy ideas and play them out in vivid stories. Edie has this amazing friendship with the Edmunds on either side of her, Shiva and Eustace. They drink in a bar called Galileo Galileo, which is in front of Jupiter. You have all of Jupiter’s amazing moons there, and they drink extraordinary combinations of nitrogen, other chemicals, and stardust while watching the whole universe go by.

It is a beautiful vantage point. They have affairs, sneak out into the universe where they are not meant to go, and humanity is gathering, living, being, doing all those amazing things. I hate the idea that a good book should turn anyone away. Any book worth its salt should be able to be picked up by anybody, and they should find a place in it.

I have no set reader. I do not really think about the readers. I think about the world. My obligation is to the world that I work and serve. If I do that to the best of my ability, other people open up the pages and make that world real for themselves. They bring in the people they miss, the things they would love to do, their fears, and their concerns about life. They make it alive. The books do not belong to me once they are finished. They belong to whoever is reading them on that day. I only get to hold them when I am writing them. That is a sacred part for me. Today, on book launch day, it is the marker point where I hand it over. You open it to the world and let it take another journey.

I would like to see it be a space where people can have conversations about the nature of delusion and what it means to be human in a finite life in a universe that is silent and offers no adequate explanation that I would consider definitive. As a storyteller, I examine every story, including our religions. There is a space for them. They have built civilizations and created many amazing things, but there has also been great violence and imbalance of power played out through those original stories. I lean into the question: what are we actually doing right now on Earth in our own lives, and what can we do about that?

I am a working-class mother. I am very practical in that way. I want people to have joy. I want them to feel like the people they love can reach through and touch them for a minute because I believe they can. I believe that love travels, and I certainly hope it does.

Peggy

Yeah, yeah. This book definitely gives me hope that it does, I’ll say that. Jenny, in your work, you are a multi-instrumentalist as well as a musician. You are a poet and a novelist, obviously, as we have discussed. You have written a memoir. Where are you most at home in your writing? Where is the most comfortable groove, would you say, if that is possible to say?

Jenni

That is a really great question. I do not get to play music much, and I miss it a lot. I miss singing and just being in little dark rooms with bands, hanging out.

The place I would be most at home really is where I started, and that is with poetry. I do not write poetry all the time. I only write it when it appears. I do not chase it or force it.

It is kind of the original form of everything I do. Novels, to me, are just very long poems. A film is a poem. A piece of art is a poem. A piece of music is a poem. Everything for me comes from poetry. Poetry is, when it comes to it, much shorter. It will just arrive and be there, and quite often it is just done. I have been writing poetry all my life.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for me. It is something that reminds me every once in a while to anchor back into looking for the poetry in everything, and that helps.

Peggy

Which poets then, you said you have been writing since you were seven, were you reading when you were a young writer? Who gave you hope, technique, or guidance in any of that?

Jenni

Yeah, I mean, I was always very punk. I was living in a caravan park when I was seven, and we used to go out and make stilts and walk around on big, tall wooden stilts. We used to play in the city dump and go up in the farmland. It was quite a feral existence, so there was no sophistication about it.

How I arrived at poetry really was just in me. The early examples would have been things like Roald Dahl, the little poems or songs in his books. Not long after that, I would have picked up The Hobbit, and again I would have found a version of poetry in there. So there really was no reason for me to be writing poetry. I had no place writing poetry.

There was a library van that used to come up to the caravan park. We were not far from a coal mine, so it was a coal mining village, and the caravan park was on the outskirts of that. The library van would come around once a week, and I would borrow books from it. Other early influences would have been nursery rhymes and fairy tales. I was heavily into fairy tales.

Between those, something sparked. I remember right up until I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, I only wrote poetry with rhyming schemes, and I really invested in exploring those schemes. When I got to about fourteen or fifteen, I started writing freestyle, and everything since then has been like that. There might be an internal rhyme or occasionally I will write a haiku, but overall it is just really free form for me.

Peggy

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely fabulous. Can you remember the best piece of writing advice you ever had within all that?

Jenni

Best piece of writing advice I had. I had different pieces of advice that I remember from different times. I studied playwriting for a while. I was working as a young playwright in Scotland with the Traverse Theatre. I represented Scotland and Europe as a young playwright. It was really a long digression for me to be able to write dialogue well. I was not writing dialogue very well and I was aware of it. So I thought, okay, I will try playwriting because dialogue is so upfront and exposed. You really have to get it right. It was maybe a two-year immersion.

There was one playwright who taught us for a little while at the Traverse called Douglas Maxwell. He had two pieces of advice I remember. One was never lay down in the picture. Another was if a photographer is taking your photo and you have written something really grim, do not be in the photo with a big cheesy grin and thumbs up. Learn to present yourself and your work in alignment.

Another piece of advice I found interesting happened on opening night of one of his plays. He was sitting underneath the poster for his play, excited, and opened a rejection letter for the play he was about to show the audience. He said it was a real leveler. There is always one person who will like it and always one who will not. There are so many opinions on work. His advice was to ignore all that. Pay attention to the writers you really like. Read to a club of drunk people. You will get a fair idea if it is working.

And the final lesson. Just write. Write and write and write. It takes a long time to get really good. Some people may arrive at that with little effort, but that is rare. Writing is like playing an instrument. You see a musician throwing out flawless riffs, effortless and gorgeous. It looks easy, but it is the result of playing and practicing over and over until you reach that point.

Write for the love of writing. Write because you want to be with the words and the words want to be with you. If you write for that reason, you will have all the reward you need in the process before it goes out into the world. It will buffer you against whatever comes next. You are not beholden to being liked or disliked, approved of or disapproved of. Your obligation is to write the best work you can. If you have done that, you have given everything and gained all you needed to gain.

I do not read my reviews. I do not look at anything really. I like meeting readers, booksellers, and audiences, reading and chatting. Other than that, it is all external.

Peggy

Perfect. Yeah, I think that is probably the perfect place to end. But I would like to ask you, acknowledging tonight’s launch night so that is front of mind, what are you working on next? Is that too early a question?

Jenni

Well, it’s never too early a question for me, Peggy.

There’s always, there’s always a line of them. So I’m about to finish a modern adaptation of Frankenstein, which will come out in Berlin next year. So I have been working on that. I’m in the last edits on that just now. It’s a novella. And that’s been amazing to work on. I’ve been very, very closely aligned with Mary Shelley the last couple of years. I wrote a foreword to a new edition of her work and then I hosted a Frankenstein cabaret at the Edinburgh Book Festival last year. And yeah, I just ended up very immersed in Mary Shelley the last couple of years.

Actually doing this modern adaptation of Frankenstein has been amazing. And I’ve brought Mary Shelley back as she’s a character. And it’s been really cool to work on.

So I’m excited about that. And then I’m straight on to writing the sequel to The Panopticon, which was my debut novel. And so that will be getting delivered. Every maybe 10 years or so, I outline a decade’s worth of work.

Then I might write all of those books, I might not. So I’ve outlined about 10 novels just very, very loosely. So if I decide to keep writing for the next 10, 20 years, I know roughly where I’m going with them.

I’ll be directing this summer. I’m directing a short film called Anchor, which is taken from a scene from The Panopticon. The main characters are the girls in Shorty Island Tash, so it’s a standalone. We’re looking at the potential for me to go on and direct The Panopticon as a feature. These are all my immediate projects.

Peggy

Oh, wow. Amazing. Busy as always. Superb.

Ah, Jenny, well we really appreciate you taking the time today.