This
interview with Serena Mackesy was conducted in May 2000 by Kevin Patrick
Mahoney. Serena Mackesy is the author of the best-selling novel The Temp.
KPM: When you were a kid, what
job did you really want to go for? Did you have a burning ambition to become
say, an astronaught?
Serena Mackesy: Tragic, really, but
I think I first announced that I was going to be a writer at around the age of
seven. Up to the age of 12, I wanted to combine it with a career as both a
three-day eventer and a member of the bridge crew of the Star Ship Enterprise.
Then I spent some time pursuing a career as a sideshow attraction. After that,
I went to university and lost all ambition.
KPM: What was your first
job as a writer? How did it come about?
Serena Mackesy: Life imitating
fiction. I arrived at the Independent as a temp to cover for the secretary on
the TV listings page (who is now an editor, by the way), for a couple of weeks,
realised I'd found somewhere I enjoyed and somehow never left. I edited the
crossword and worked as a sub-editor, and gradually started picking up bits of
writing here and there. I think the first writing I did was little potted movie
previews on the weekend TV spread. The first thing anyone seemed to actually
notice was a small daily bar review I used to write when the paper had a London
supplement. I think everyone was more overawed by the robustness of my liver
than the peerlessness of my prose...
KPM: What aspects of your
temping experience are most useful for your career as a journalist?
Serena Mackesy: Blimey. I suppose
temping taught me to walk into unknown situations and be able to project a
certain level of knowing what I'm doing. And of course, after a couple of years
on the temping circuit, I was well versed in the powerful misanthropy that is a
prerequisite for a career in Grub Street.
KPM: Which writers do you
read for pleasure? Have any of them been a big influence on the way you write?
Serena Mackesy: I read everything I
can lay my hands on; I always have at least five books on the go. But I suppose
people for whom I have slavish admiration include Dorothy Parker, George Eliot,
Ruth Rendell, Stephen King, Kitty Kelley, Scott, Wodehouse, CS Lewis (sorry,
but a Narnia book and a bowl of kedgeree is an almost infallible cure for the
blues), Dickens, Cynthia Heimel. I have been passionately and hopelessly in
love with Kurt Vonnegut, not even wavering when I discovered he had a
moustache, since I was 12 years old and read The Sirens of Titan for the first
time. If I could write something that went even half-way to the achievement of
that or Breakfast of Champions, I would be able to die content.
KPM: How did the transition
from columnist to novelist occur? What are the main differences between the two
styles for you?
Serena Mackesy: I know it's a bit of a
cliché, this column-to-book thing, but hell, everyone's got to start somewhere.
Firstly I'd better explain how The Temp came about. The divine Hilly Janes, an
editor to whom I owe an incalculable amount, was looking for a sort of comical
"office anthropology" column to sex up their Secretarial page. The
original idea was to do it in straight discursive style, but there were a
couple of problems with this. Firstly, I've always been more comfortable making
points through narrative, and wasn't entirely sure how long I'd be able to keep
up a "commenty" style without getting bored. There was a bit more of
a problem, though, with the fact that I was both working as a restaurant critic
at the time, and also had an almost entirely fictional first-person column in
the Saturday paper in which I presented myself as a grubby layabout who never
seem to do anything apart from get into minor scrapes. There was obviously going
to be a bit of a credibility gap if this person who claimed not to have been in
an office in four years suddenly started presenting herself as some sort of
authority on the subject. So I came up with the idea of this fictional temp,
which sidestepped the problem. Her primary virtues at the time were that she
was anonymous and that, whenever I got bored with a situation, I could move her
on without having to bother with lengthy explanations. I had no idea when I
started writing her that I would get so fond of and involved with her, or, more
importantly, that the readers would do so. It was the really sweet letters -
I'd only ever had letters written in block capitals before - that made me think
that there could be a book in her experiences. People genuinely seemed to
believe that this character was a real person, and her experiences were
happening in real time. Quite humbling, in a way.
Writing
a book was both wonderful and terrifying. Just amazing to get a block of time to
concentrate on one thing rather than churning out fish and chip wrappings every
day. And absolutely terrifying as I realised that, instead of being part of a
branded whole, it was my neck, and mine only, on the block. But it was fab to
get so involved with a set of characters, and also to have the luxury of a plot
that could unfold over a period of time rather than having to cram beginning,
middle, end and point into 1000 words. It's brilliant. Sometimes it can be like
pulling teeth - sometimes there are times when I'd rather be at the dentist -
but I was jumping for joy when I got the chance to do two more. In my spare
time, I like to stick superheated needles under my fingernails.
KPM: An amazing amount of
graduates now want to work in the media. Like Craig, a lot of people aspire to
become editor of the Guardian. But of course, not everyone achieves their
ambitions. Do you think graduates are being promised too much?
Serena Mackesy: Not really. Someone's got to
do these jobs; they exist, after all. The problem, I think, is in the
unrealistic expectations people seem to be given about how quickly things will
happen for them. The first couple of years after leaving university are pretty
grim for most people, and it's made a lot grimmer by the fact that so many
people feel that they're going through the process alone. My first five years
after leaving university were pretty grim, to be honest, and I do feel that, if
someone had told me that this was normal, that I wasn't a freak, I probably
wouldn't have had the blinding depressions I did. Then again, I would probably
have less to rant on about if I had been happy all my life.
KPM: According to your bio
in 'The Temp', you're a fan of Malta. I like the place because it was the
destination of my first foreign holiday as a kid. What do you like the most
about the island?
Serena Mackesy: I just love the
place; fell in love with it when I went to stay with friends in the container
port of Birzebuggia 12 years ago and can never go back enough. It's the most
centering place in the world, particularly if you're mildly barking. I love
everything about the it. Well, everything apart from St Paul's Bay and Popeye
Village. In no particular order, my edited highlights are: fields of rock and
rubble that are covered, in Spring, with creeping thyme and dwarf irises; a
language that can turn "St Jacob's Alley" into "Squaq San
Jakbu" and "information" into "tal'genn"; walls made
of old fridges; 6,500-year-old temples that have none of the hands-off, film
set qualities of Stonehenge; the Elidor-like ghostliness of Valletta at night;
roof dogs; the fact that EU safety regulations don't apply there, so that you
have a very real danger of being clocked by a rogue Catherine Wheel at a
village festa; the relentless eccentricity of the people; rock diving at the
Delimara salt pans; forests of television aerials on piled-up sixteenth-century
tenements; long rabbit lunches at Bobbyland on the Dingli cliffs on a Sunday;
baroque churches in two-horse villages and the gobsmacking, breathtaking,
weeping-fit-inducing view of Grand Harbour from the Upper Baracca Gardens. And
the secret beach on Gozo, but that's a secret.
KPM: I've never really
thought much of the Moomins, except as white blobs with funny voices. However,
I've noticed over the last few years that they seem to have quite a devoted
following. What do Moomins really mean to you?
Serena Mackesy: Comet in Moominland is the
greatest work of fiction of the twentieth century. After Barbara Cartland's
autobiography, I Reach for the Stars, of course.
KPM: What's your average
working day like? If you work from home, are you seduced, like Craig, by the
wonders of daytime TV?
Serena Mackesy: Oh, god, I'm a total
lazy-arse, just like Craig. I was distraught when they rescheduled Springer to
9.25am. Most of my career focus seems to have been on not having to get up
before eleven. I tend to work when I need to and not when I don't; I've always
been deadline driven rather than consistent, which is probably why I became a
journalist in the first place. The nice thing about writing for a living is
that practically everything you do - lying around eating crisps, taking
last-minute package holidays, watching Point Break frame by frame - can be
classified as "research".
KPM: What was your worst
experience as a temp, and what were the best times?
Serena Mackesy: Hard to identify a
"worst" time; it was all pretty vile. Worst bosses have both turned
up in the book: Melissa the American drama queen and Alec the hair-transplanted
tyrant; their names were different, of course. And the anonymity is a real
killer; I go on about it a lot in The Temp, and with reason. It's amazing how
difficult it is to volunteer this information to people who just don't want to
know. I worked at the shipping company Canadian Pacific, may their containers
rust in perpetuity, for six weeks and not one person bothered to ask my name.
The woman I'd been sitting next to did get round to asking on my last day, but,
pettily, I refused to tell her. Best times? Going home.
KPM: Do you think that women
still have difficulties presenting themselves in the workplace? For instance,
'The Temp' features one female boss who isn't 'a sister', and there's also the caricature
of the Narnian White Witch. Why are women so poorly represented in management
still, with only a few, like Heather Rabatts, really making the headlines?
Serena Mackesy: I think it's still going to
be a couple of generations before we achieve an even playing field, and to be
honest I think that the world of work will have changed so much in that time
that it will probably be fairly irrelevant. The problem doesn't just lie in men
blocking our rise (though there is still a fair amount of that going on),
though. Big-time success tends to require a pretty ruthless streak, and people
still seem to be more shocked and react more angrily when a woman gets tough
than when a man does, which can be pretty off-putting for a gender who are on
the whole raised to make themselves "likeable". I think, also, that
the prospect of fighting harder to get less gets a bit wearisome after a while,
and loads of women realise just around breakthrough point they could that
they'd rather spend more time having a real life. I worked macho hours like
everyone else throughout my twenties. Going freelance and being able to
schedule work round life rather than the other way round was the best move I
ever made. Of course, I'm talking bollocks and should not be listened to.
KPM: Right, you've had a
very successful first novel, and you've now been laden with a certain amount of
fame. In the novel, the character of Ben goes through the highs and lows of
notoriety, moving between the A-list and the B-list. What advantages have you had
from your success? Have there been any disadvantages? Do you really think that
the public wants to see their stars miserable?
Serena Mackesy: Not really, no, though I'm
sure if I was famous and the constant butt of celebrity gossip, I'd be making
the same kind of wild statements myself. But celebs are easily as entertained
by celebrity gossip as the rest of us: very few of the tabloid stories actually
get there via phone calls from butchers in Dagenham, after all. I think that
everyone, however high-minded they think they are, enjoys the blunders of
everyone apart from themselves and their closest companions. It feeds some
basic need to believe that we personally are on the winning end of the
evolutionary chain. And gossip has also always been used as a way of ensuring
that people stick vaguely within the general rules of society. But most people
get easily as much pleasure from gloating over the misfortunes of colleagues
and acquaintances as they do over the cock-ups of celebs, don't they? The
difference is that, if you're a household name, you become an
"acquaintance" to a far wider network of people whom you've never met
yourself, and the thing that's always really disturbing is when people you
don't know know stuff about you.
Having
said that, I'm fascinated by celebrity - my next book, Virtue, is also partly
about celebrity, its uses and abuses and the qualities we are willing to
project onto famous people - but the thought of being "famous" leaves
me cold on a personal level. Ben's one of those people who took on celebrity
before he was old enough to understand just what a poisoned chalice it is and
is now stuck with living out his failures in the public eye. The two central
characters of Virtue are the daughters of famous mothers, trying to live anonymous
lives in a world that won't let them. They're all, I guess, people I would feel
pretty sorry for if they were real. Personally, I wouldn't want to be there;
even the little bits of public speaking and the odd interview I've done have
left me quaking with fear both before and after. It's like that feeling when
you see a photograph of yourself taken unawares. We all have a
"mirror" face, which is how we think we look, and it comes as a
terrible shock to discover that that's not how other people see us.
I
don't think that I'm remotely "famous" yet - it takes a lot more than
one book to get there - but I don't think I'd be the kind of person who would
revel in it particularly if I did. Unless Air Malta fancied giving me free
tickets, or upgrades at least, hint hint. Years ago, I interviewed a rather
lovely actor who'd been famous for about a year by then, and he said that he
always knew when there was something nasty about him in the News of the Screws
because no-one in the newsagents could meet his eye. Yuk. My newsagent already
makes jokes about the rather unorthodox hours I keep; that's about as
recognised as I want to be.
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