I’ve definitely gone through some of the stuff Queenie has gone through. Mental health issues (I know them), bad dates (I absolutely know them), and identity issues rule much of my day. As I’ll say more than once in this essay, and have said a million times in interviews, and will have as my epitaph, “I am not Queenie”; but I knew I wasn’t alone in some of the experiences I’d gone through in some form I needed to capture. I was also a lonely Black girl. I never felt like I fit into any group, into my family, into any actual unit.
Talking about the book now, when I’m thirty, has done very weird and wonderful things to my identity. I realize now that every time I’ve been asked to talk about writing the book, I am taken back there. I am back to being that twenty-six-year-old in that horrible flat, writing in bed to stay warm and doing probably irreparable damage to my back in the process. When I talk about the process of writing Queenie, I immediately forget about anything I’ve achieved since starting it.
A few months ago, I did one of many phone interviews. I like phone interviews because I can stay in my house. I’m not much of a people person. I don’t think so anyway, but being an author has meant that I’ve sort of had to pretend to be one, but I’ll come back to that. In this phone interview, I was caught off guard when the interviewer asked about the impact on my mental health that all the attention my book, and subsequently I, had been getting. Now, I’m good at interviews; I’ve never had to worry about saying the wrong thing or not being able to find the words. But this question stopped me in my tracks. It had been a long time since anyone, even friends and family, really, had asked how I was. Not how the book tour was (long, lonely), how the book was selling (great, thanks), or, as a friend of mine once asked out of the blue, “Have you been having loads of sex since you became famous?”
“I’m tired,” I said to the interviewer, surprising myself as I did. Was I truly that tired that the words jumped out? “I’m overwhelmed. Every day. And I’m trying to be grateful, and I’m trying to be in all of the places trying to inspire all of the people, but I’m struggling a lot.” It was the first time I’d said that or even thought it. When I got off the phone, I started thinking about what I’d said. I started to interrogate how I’d been feeling. It’s important to say that, generally, I interrogate all of my feelings. I don’t mind how uncomfortable that makes me, because it’s absolutely vital for me to get to the root of how I’m feeling. But this interrogation had to be a forced one.
What I realized was that I’d been wrapping my identity (of self, rather than character or characteristics—as Candice, a twenty-nine-year-old Black woman from south London) up in Queenie (the novel). This went deeper than me not wanting people to think I was Queenie; this was about me linking how people were receiving the book with how they were receiving me as a person. All anyone ever wants to talk about is Queenie, when it’s often the last thing I’m interested in discussing. I sort of couldn’t believe that people couldn’t separate me from my work, while they also couldn’t separate me from the character I’d written.
Funny enough, before the book came out, I made sure that my hair didn’t resemble the hair of the illustration on the book cover. Once, a friend came round and saw the advance copy of the book and asked, “Is that your head?” So, out came the twists and on went the headscarves. I refused to read from the book at events lest I invite the comparison, and in every single interview, even when I wasn’t asked, I’d lead with “This isn’t autobiographical in any way” (which still hasn’t stopped people thinking I’m Queenie).
Anyway, in my haste to separate myself from the fictional character, I hadn’t thought about how I could bind myself, and my worth, up in the success of my work. Even though I’d previously thought I would have that sort of self-preservation covered.
Writing this, I am remembering a conversation I had with a DJ friend of mine I hadn’t seen for a while. Queenie was just about to come out, and I was telling her about the journey I’d gone on to write the book, edit the book, find an agent, go to the meetings with editors, and get it published. As I was talking, she looked more and more concerned, which in turn made me concerned, and when I finished speaking, she said, “This is all great, but when you talk about it you’re kind of talking about it as though it’s someone else. You okay, babes?” I think that was the point that I realized I’d subconsciously created a whole new identity. I think I’d created an identity somewhere in the middle between myself as a person and myself as an author. I wasn’t willing to let my life go. I didn’t want to be someone who just spoke about my work.
That middling identity, the one that almost had me speaking about Candice the author in third person, was just one identity I’ve created in the last couple of years. The upgraded 2.0 version of that identity is People-Facing Candice. People-Facing Candice loves talking to readers who want to talk to her about the things they’ve been through or the ones who want to ask questions about what’s next for Queenie. People-Facing Candice loves talking to the press, especially when they ask invasive questions about her personal relationship to sex, and People-Facing Candice doesn’t mind when people come up to her on the tube when she’s looking or feeling her very worst and ask for a selfie.
When I started with this author business, I genuinely thought that my job, as someone who wrote books, was going to be to . . . write. Even though I worked in book publishing for years, somehow I forgot that writers have to publicize the book. We actually have to get out of our pajamas and emerge from our hovels blinking into the light, to stand in front of people and talk about the book. I know that I have never, and will never, like public speaking, and I still struggle with the reality of it being something that’s about to happen days before an event. Before one talk I was doing at 7:30 p.m., all I could manage for the whole day was a biscuit. One biscuit. That’s the funny thing about writing; you spend your whole day (or night, in my case) being solitary, silent, for months, maybe years, on end. You get comfortable with being alone. You get comfortable telling people that they won’t see you for a while because you’re working. And then one day, after all of those solitary days, you’re thrust in front of an audience, squinting when the bright lights hit the eyes that have been focusing on your laptop screen in the dark, and you have to perform. We didn’t plan for this! We didn’t rehearse for this! The disconnect between doing the work and being the work is a hard one to navigate.
On not being a people person: I used to be someone who thought of herself as an introvert. Being a self-confessed introvert was a very comfortable and safe part of my identity. It meant that when I was out, I could get away with only talking to my friends and not engaging with anyone new. None of my friends thought I was rude, they just put it down to my introverted nature. It also meant that I could quite happily say to colleagues, “Why would I come to the pub after work when I’ve seen you all week?” and they’d all say, “Fair enough, that’s just Candice,” rather than be offended. I cannot get away with this anymore. I have to be “on” when I’m being an author. All of that wanting to hide behind introversion has got to go out the window.