Show Notes
Novelist Jem Calder joins Freya to talk about I Want You to Be Happy, his debut novel about two people trying to fall in love while everything around them is engineered to distract them. Jem’s writing career started with Sally Rooney emailing him about the first story he’d ever finished and now his debut is on the tote bag of every literary it girl this summer. He tells Freya why he’d rather write a novel than a memoir (he’s a self-described cagey person who doesn’t like giving too much of himself away) and why he thinks of fiction as a gift, something a reader can reach for in their worst moments. They chat about how quickly a good line about phones curdles into cliché, why he keeps thousands of words of notes he’ll almost never use and why writing within the constraints of a genre is a form of respect for the writers who came before. A funny, honest conversation between two writers about connection, cringe and what fiction is for.
00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:44 Book tour vs writing — the "spiritual maths" of promotion 00:04:24 Why Reward System reads like a novel, not a story collection 00:05:17 The novel-in-stories form and Tulathimutte's Rejection 00:06:04 "Limbic capitalism" and the little treats of modern life 00:09:26 Writing a love story when everything conspires against connection 00:10:29 Writing cringe, and the brutal comedy of small humiliations 00:12:08 Turning real life into fiction — the notes process 00:13:41 The anxiety of being judged forever on your first book 00:16:44 When readers over-read symbolism into your work 00:18:15 Cringe as comedy, and fiction that makes you feel understood 00:19:36 Why fiction, not memoir or autofiction 00:22:38 The Cazalet Chronicles and reverence for the family saga 00:26:32 Chuck as a version of Jem who took the other path 00:27:41 Comedy as inspiration, and the sauna theatre reading 00:30:25 Writing an unlikable character you still feel empathy for 00:32:40 The likability question and his Financial Times essay 00:39:30 Why he wouldn't want to adapt his own novel 00:42:09 Annie Baker, plays vs screenplays 00:44:41 Favourite live performers — and a clowning night gone wrong
⚠️ Contains spoilers for the ending of I Want You to Be Happy — skip forward when you reach that section if you'd rather go in fresh.
Links to further reading: This Substack on writing by Naoise Dolan Liadan Ní Chuinn – Every One Still Here Tony Tulathimutte — Rejection Philip Roth – On writing and re-writing a novel Elizabeth Jane Howard — The Cazalet Chronicles, including the announcement of the reissue of The Light Years with a foreword by Jia Tollentino Elizabeth Taylor (novelist) Ella Hickson – The Writer Annie Baker – Infinite Life
🎥 WATCH the full episode 📘 Buy Jem Calder's 'Reward System', and I Want You to Be Happy 📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Character Study
Novelist Jem Calder reads from I Want You to Be Happy in this passage episode of Character Study, a scene about a hundred pages in, as his two characters go on early dates and feel each other out across a pub table by the river.
Poet Will Harris reads Speakee Stonehenge, an exclusive sneak peek into the collection of poems he is currently working on, Speakee.
Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved.
Screenwriter, artist and Murky Book Prize-winning novelist Sufiyaan Salam reads the opening chapters of Wimmy Road Boyz: three young men in a BMW, cruising towards Manchester's Curry Mile at the start of a night that none of them yet know might be their last together.
Screenwriter and novelist Sufiyaan Salam won the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize for his debut Wimmy Road Boyz. He joins Freya to talk about his novel that follows three young British-Pakistani men across one chaotic night on Manchester's Curry Mile. Sufiyaan, who’s also a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter and animator, tells Freya where the book came from: a real night out where he wanted to tell his friends what he was going through but couldn’t, and wondered if they were holding something back too. They chat about why the novel is built to feel like a rap album rather than a novel, how screenwriting taught him to chase specificity and what it was like to take his dad to the BAFTAs. They also get into whether film audiences really are ruder than book audiences and why saying the dumb idea out loud is worth it if one in ten turns out to be brilliant.