July 23, 2012
This week’s story, “Permission to Enter,” charts the life of its protagonist, Keisha Blake, and her best friend, Leah Hanwell, neighbors in a housing estate in North West London, from the ages of four to twenty-one. Through a series of numbered vignettes, we watch Keisha’s progression through school and university as she and Leah gradually leave the estate and its expectations behind them. Why did you decide to use this format? Did you enjoy working within the boundaries of these contained sections?
Well, the story is an extract from a novel, and this sectional style only appears towards the end of the book. When I was writing the book I was trying to think about how we experience time. How it really feels to be in time. And the answer ended up being different depending on who or what I was dealing with. In Keisha’s case, she has this belief that life is a meaningful progression towards some ultimate goal—in her case, “success”—and this made the numbered sections the obvious choice. It was also an attempt to force myself into a new mode. I’ve always admired the idea of the “fragment,” but fragments are usually single-voiced—often a monologue of some kind. I can’t write in that singular way, it bores me. I think I wanted to see if I could make a fragmentary third person work. Finally, there is the simple time restraint of having a kid. Four hours a day is as much as I had. I didn’t have the time or inclination for sixty-page chapters. The idea of writing at any great length became absurd.
