Elizabeth Day: On Societal Pressure on Women, Healthcare, When a Writing Routine Isn’t a Routine at All and Her Latest Novel, “Magpie”
I was beyond thrilled to have the opportunity to read Elizabeth Day’s newest novel, Magpie, not just because it is a gripping thriller (I didn’t put the book down once from the moment I opened it), but because it is also a rich and thoughtful exploration of women’s reproductive and mental health – topics that are all too frequently minimized or brushed over. Having suffered from and written about my own personal experience with a maternal mental illness, I deeply appreciated how in MAGPIE, she deftly yet powerfully brings this often taboo topic into the light.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth about societal pressures on women, access to healthcare, and how it’s okay if your writing routine isn’t really a routine at all.
BARRIE MISKIN: I’m so thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with you about MAGPIE, which was just so gripping. I always had it on my lap, at work, during lunch, on the subway. I put my daughter in front of Paw Patrol for hours just so I could finish it.
ELIZABETH DAY: Thank you. That means so much to me. I also love your manicure.
BM: Oh, thank you! (laughs)
ED: So cool. I got mine done yesterday, colors of the UK paperback, which is coming out next week! (both laugh)
BM: Love it. So, I was obviously thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with you about MAGPIE because it’s a fantastic book, but also, I've actually suffered and recovered from a severe maternal mental illness myself. I was wondering what drew you to writing about the struggles women can face during pregnancy. For example, difficulty conceiving and maternal mental health.
ED: First of all, thank you so much for sharing that with me. And I think it's such a testament to your strength and your courage that you are sitting here today. I can't imagine what that must have been like.
And it means so much to me to hear that you connected to MAGPIE on that level because I wrote it born from my own experience. Okay. So, I have spent a decade trying and failing to have a baby and I have been through lots of different fertility procedures. I've had IVF, I've had three miscarriages, I've froze my eggs. I had an operation on my womb, like all of this stuff, and it just made me realize a number of things. It made me realize what women go through, how women are sometimes made to feel when they can't achieve that supposedly simple biological act of motherhood in a ”natural way” and how the medical establishment that often makes them feel. Like that it is dominated by an old fashioned, almost patriarchal way of thinking.
So, there's a broader question there about how women are treated in medicine, but also on a personal level. I wanted somewhere to put my experience and fiction is where I understand the truth of something. I wanted to write a book for the woman that I had been, for the woman who might be going through something similar.
There’s very little fictional content out there for women who are going through fertility treatment, whose part of motherhood hasn't been smooth. And so, I wanted to write the book that I would've liked to have read. So that's where it came from in the first instance. But also, as you will know, talking about these topics and writing about them is an amazing lesson through which we get to see who we are as people, what our gender means, the constraints it might place on us, the competitiveness we might feel with other women where we're in a space where it seems like everyone else is easily having children. And we are not perfect.
BM: Like social media construct of like the perfect mom, you know?
ED: Exactly. And, by extension, a media construct of what a perfect life is. And so that was really the starting point for MAGPIE. What makes a quote-on-quote perfect life? And when you think you have everything and the rug is pulled from under you, what happens next. So, it was about all of those things in one, but the starting point was my own experience.
BM: That's amazing. Thank you. I mean, and just on a personal level, I actually wrote a memoir about my experience and it's out on submission.
ED: I’d love to read it!
BM: (laughs) Oh thank you! That would be amazing. It’s actually been really hard to sell, it seems like a lot of publishing houses have a tricky time getting traction on this topic, even if they do connect with the book.
I wanted to ask you, and obviously, I know you're British and the book has been released right in the UK already with great success. So, it's interesting to me, that books such as Laura Lee Dockrill’s WHAT HAVE I DONE? and Catherine Cho’s INFERNO, which is amazing, about her experience with postpartum psychosis - and she's not British, she's American, but she's based in the UK – It seems like books that deal with maternal mental health seem much more embraced outside the US market. Do you think that has to do with like the higher level of maternal and mental health care in the UK?
ED: That's an amazing question. And I've never been asked it before. Part of the reason I wrote MAGPIE the way that I did, it's been described as a thriller, which I'm super happy with. I didn't think I was writing a thriller, but I hope it's compelling to read. And the reason I wrote it like that is because I wanted to make those themes, which can feel quite uncomfortable for lots of people, I wanted to make them accessible almost to sort of sweeten the pill. So, I was like, I will use genre fiction in order to get my message across. Whereas in a memoir, you don't have that, that kind of privilege or that freedom. And so, it's much more difficult to do.
I don't think that the maternal care for mental health conditions and fertility is greater here from my limited experience. But I think what I realize in America is the issue of motherhood and pregnancy is much more polarizing in America because of the political climate right now that you have in your country. We are very lucky in the UK that there is no discussion over Roe vs. Wade. People might have their personal opinions, but there's generally a feeling that a woman has a right to choose
In the UK, I think we have enough health service, which is just one of the greatest gifts ever. I think that the way things are treated is much more specific, and much more focused. In that respect, maybe we are more clear sighted about things here.
I think, Barrie, that this is the next frontier of feminism. This is the thing that we should be talking about, writing about advocating for and it's just taking the rest of society a beat to wake up to it. Women, quote unquote, women's issues, which ultimately are human issues, have been marginalized and silenced for so many centuries and I think we're also battling against that kind of preconception.
BM: Absolutely, I obviously totally agree that this is the case right now.
Just switching gears a bit to talk about your writing. No matter what you're writing, and you're a very prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, and you have your really successful podcast How to Fail, you still find a way to weave in very strong women, really supporting, the very feminist ethos like as we've been talking about. And although Kate and Marisa, the main characters in MAGPIE are obviously flawed, just like everybody else is, it's clear that you have an affection and an admiration for them. Marisa's not a villain and Kate’s not a victim, just like in a classic thriller trope. I agree with you - I don't think MAGPIE is strictly a thriller. There is definitely a twist and it's gripping, but I think there's a lot of tenderness in it as well. So, how did Kate and Marissa first begin to take shape in your mind?
ED: Thank you so much for saying that, that's absolutely everything that I wanted to achieve because for me, there's no such thing as a good or bad or black or white character. There are just characters who exist in lots of shades of gray, because that's what makes us human. And I made the active decision, even though they do start out as rivals by the end, there is a solidarity, a sisterhood of sorts. That was really important for me. Not to, as you say, pigeonhole, someone as the monster and someone as the victor. Um, so where did they come from? That's a really good question.
BM: I know, where does any character come from? (both laugh)
ED: Actually, with MAGPIE, the idea for the twist came first. The idea for what I wanted to explore came first. I had some really good advice from a dear friend of mine, who is also a writer, a highly successful one - Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she created Fleabag.
We went out for a drink, and I told her I'm struggling. I told her I need to know what I’m going to write about next and I don’t. And she gave me this piece of advice: She said: “The only thing I can ever write about is what's going on in my life at any given time. And obviously then it, it gets twisted through the lens of fiction, but you have to write about what's preoccupying you right now.”
For me, it was motherhood. So that came first and then I love reading a good twist. I wondered; how could I use that to sort of create a twist? And then the characters came. I knew that there had to be two women and Marisa came because prior to meeting my now husband, I had gone through a phase of online dating in my late thirties. It taught me a lot, but it was tough. And I wanted to write about a woman who had been left disillusioned by that and therefore was in a vulnerable position.
Kate came about, because I wanted someone who was different from Marisa, not only physically, but in terms of her character, but also someone who was strong because of what she'd been through. Kate advocates for herself in a way that I in the past haven't and it was sort of my way of correcting that. The other female character, Annabelle is this kind of monstrous mother-in-law and I needed someone who could stand up to her. Kate's strength had to be equal to, to Annabel's as well.
BM: Could tell us a little bit about your writing routine? Does it change depending on if you're writing fiction or nonfiction?
ED: I’m a writing routine geek. I love reading about other people's writing routines.
BM: Me too! I always feel like it's going to unlock something for me.
ED: Well, I hope it does because I actually don't have a routine and I hope that feels hopeful for people who sometimes might feel burdened or overwhelmed by the idea of having to have a routine! Like, having to have your morning rituals, etcetera. I don't do any of that. So, it's partly a function of the fact that I used to be a full-time print journalist. I had a full-time job when I wrote my first three novels, so, I had to fit it around my day job. I started writing in cafes during my lunch break and at weekends, and then I really enjoyed writing in cafes and carried on doing that, where I would pick up my laptop and I would go and be surrounded by the murmur of other people. And the one deal that I have with myself is that every time I open my laptop, I have to write a thousand words and I have to do that as much as possible without internal judgment.
The wonderful thing about writing a book, as you well know, is that you can go back the next day and edit it. It's not like a piece for a newspaper that's that you need to write to deadline and then it's done. So that's the only deal I have with myself, but that obviously massively changed during the pandemic, because lockdown happened and all the cafes shut down. I was in the middle of MAGPIE and for the first six weeks I couldn't write. And then I came up with a plan which was to listen to coffee shop sounds on YouTube.
BM: Ahh, that’s so nice!
ED: Honestly, I still do it now! You can go on YouTube! There's loads of ambient noise videos, and I set up my laptop in our spare room and I would make myself a cup of green tea - I basically created a cafe in our spare room. And I did fall into this routine of writing every evening from five until seven and then going downstairs and having dinner with my husband and talking about what I'd written and discussing plot points. It was a really beautiful part of lockdown that I'm very grateful for because I'd never been able to do that before, just day after day. Now my routine is a bit of everything. It doesn't change for non-fiction, it's the same for non-fiction, but now what I've done is I've ring fenced one day a week, purely for my own writing.
Every Monday, I go to a cafe and I will write bits of my new book and that's really nice cause it means I can get into my flow. The final thing I'd say about my routine is that the beginning and ends of each book, I try to go away for a bit, even if it's just for a week, just to get started and get finished. Sure. I really appreciate that time where I can devote every single day to writing and be in the rhythm of it.
BM: That's great. One last question I would have for you is just, are there any writers you've turned to again and again, while you're writing or is there any writer you turned to when you were writing MAGPIE?
ED: It's a good question because I do have authors who inspire me and who I return to in my head. With my first novel, because I've never studied how to write fiction, I did look at one of my favorite authors and was like, how did they do that? And are you allowed to do this? The writer was a woman called Elizabeth Jane Howard. I don’t know how well known she is in America, but she used to be married to Kingsley Amis and was Martin Amis's stepmother. She's a very character driven writer. I really sought her mentorship for my first novel. But with MAGPIE, I mean, for me, one of the greatest twists in all literature is GONE GIRL. I thought about GONE GIRL a lot whilst writing that, because GONE GIRL also did something brilliant in terms of feminism as well, I think.
The books that I was returning to would be that sort of mad woman in the attic genre – and I'm putting that in quotation marks- but the cliched stereotype of an unhinged woman and how we misunderstand them and how scary they can be because of that misunderstanding. That was always playing in my mind.
I always turn to books that represent a kind of liberation and explore a sense personhood. Books that allow for self-realization. I love those books so much.
Elizabeth Day is an award-winning author and broadcaster based in the UK. Her chart-topping podcast, How to Fail, is a celebration of the things that haven’t gone right. Guests have included Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Gloria Steinem, Andrew Scott, Lily Allen, Mabel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Malcolm Gladwell. It won the Rising Star Award at the 2019 British Podcast Awards. Elizabeth is the author of the novel The Party, which was published in the US in 2017.
About the Interviewer
Barrie Miskin is a teacher and writer whose work has appeared in Hobart, Narratively and elsewhere. She recently completed her first book, HELL GATE BRIDGE, a memoir of her journey through maternal mental illness. Barrie lives in Queens, New York with her husband and daughter.
