Welcome to The Edinburgh Bookshop On The Sofa
with Jess Kidd, and your book The Hoarder.
Thank you so much for coming to see us.
Thank you for inviting me.
You are so welcome. Would you read a little
bit from your book?
I’d love to. This is from the start. “He
has a curious way of moving through his rubbish.
He leans into it, skimming down the corridors
like a fearless biker on a hairpin bend. He
gallops and vaults through the valleys and
hill, canters and bobs through the outcrops
and gorges of his improbable hoardings. Now
and then he stops to climb over an obstacle,
folding his long legs like picnic chairs.
And all the while his chin juts up and out
and his body hangs beneath it, as if his grizzled
jaw is wired to an invisible puppeteer. And
all the while the backs of his big gnarly
hands brush over the surfaces. For a tall
man and an old man he can shift himself when
he wants to. I don’t move like that. I wade,
tripping over boxes and piles of mildewing
curtains, getting caught in cables, hooked
on hat stands and assaulted by rutting ironing
boards. I flounder over records, books, stained
blankets, greasy collections of plastic bags,
garden forks, antique mangles, a woman’s
patent leather shoe and an unopened blender
that also grates and peels. And cats, cats,
cats. Cats of all kinds: ginger, black, brindled,
tabby and piebald. Cats sleeping, eyeing,
scratching and licking their arses on sour
cushions, humping under upturned boxes and
crapping on great drifts of newspaper. I try
not to look at the details, but some little
thing always catches my eye. A dead mouse
curled in a teacup, a headless ceramic dray
horse, a mannequin’s pink severed limbs:
that sort of thing. I have a morbid bent…
He’s staring at me from the kitchen door,
Mr Cathal Flood, three feet taller than usual
because he is standing on a mound of discarded
carpet tiles. This makes him a giant because
he is already a fair height: a long, thin,
raw-boned, polluted old giant. The set of
eyes he has trained on me are deep-socketed
and unnervingly pale: the pale, pale, boreal
blue of an Arctic hound. ‘You had no business
throwing out the cartons and so forth.’
He talks slowly and over-loudly, as if he’s
testing his voice. ‘All my things gone and
I had a need for them.’ I turn to him, breathing
like Darth Vader through my mask, and shrug.
I hope my shrug communicates a profound respect
for his discarded possessions (twenty refuse
sacks of empty sardine tins) combined with
the regretful need for practical living. He
narrows his gimlet eyes. ‘You’re a little
shit, aren’t you?’ I pull off my mask.
‘I wanted to find your cooker, Mr Flood.
I thought we might branch out, give the microwave
a bit of a break.’ He watches me, his mouth
tight with venom. ‘I could curse you,’
he says, with a hint of a sob in his frayed
brogue. ‘I could curse you to hell.’
Love it, thank you. What are you most pleased
with or proud of, with this book?
I think this book marks a transition for me
writing as a third person writer to first
person, but also a smaller cast of characters,
because Himself had quite a big cast. So,
I was really interested to really get inside
the character of Maud Drennan, the care worker
who is the main character, but also in using
these characters and working out the dynamics
between them. So that was a real intrigue,
so I was very proud to do that. But also,
to watch the friendships develop through the
book, which are the core of the book.
Yeah, nice – getting into your characters.
Definitely – obsessed with the characters!
And the lovely My Flood as well.
He’s an amazing character.
With him, I actually set out to write someone
who was supremely unlikeable, and challenging,
but also to unpick the why and the wherefore
of it, and what makes him so complex, and
part of the way of opening him up was using
humour as well, so hopefully make him quite
likeable ultimately through that.
Yeah, nice. Now, would you like to pick a
question from the Cat’s Hat?
I won’t peek. “What else am I doing whilst
in Edinburgh?” Well, I’ve just done an
event with Joanna Cannon for the festival,
which was amazing – fantastic audience,
it was just great. Joanna Cannon’s book
Three Things About Elsie was fantastic because
there’s so much of a crossover between the
two books. Both books have put older people
in the core of the book, the centre of the
book. They also explore marginalised voices,
giving voice to characters, and they both
have crazy road trips, which I quite enjoyed.
Nice. Another one?
I won’t peek again, I sort of did. Oh, “What
have I enjoyed reading recently?” Recently
I’ve just been reading a huge amount of
research materials - I’m writing my third
book, which is set in Victorian London. So
I suppose in that way I’ve been trying to
immerse myself in that kind of genre. I went
back and looked at Michel Faber’s The Crimson
Petal and the White through that, and so I
really enjoyed that, a slightly different
time period but – all of that really. I
think now that we’re in the final stage
of copy edit, once that’s finished, I’m
just going to catch up because I’ve got
a big pile of ‘to be read’ .
The ‘to be read pile’.
So that will be really nice. Yes, definitely.
Nice.
“What are your hopes for your book?” This
is really interesting – I think they’ve
already happened, because, with The Hoarder,
I suppose I did in a way want to put out the
idea of the importance of friendship, and
also seeing older people as vital, complex
members of the community, especially where
they’re potentially isolated and also to
explore hoarding disorder as an entity in
its own right. The response to the book has
been really positive. I did do some research
in terms of talking to people who were receiving
treatment or going to support groups for hoarding
disorder to get a proper picture before I
tackled it, and I’ve had a few readers who’ve
come up and said (well, there’s the side
of people saying you’re either the hoarder
or you know the hoarder) but a few people
have said it’s helped me find a way in to
a relative who might be experiencing difficulties
with this kind of thing. So I suppose the
hope for any book is that it is going to connect
with the reader and feel like it’s going
to chime in their life in some way, and have
some essential truth in there that people
can relate to, so if that’s already happened
then that’s all I want.
Great, how nice. Fantastic. Shall we do one
more?
One more, okay. Oooh, okay, “Where is your
favourite place for reading and for writing?”.
I can pretty much write anywhere, but I like
the first draft of anything to be somewhere
quite quiet. But then editing - there’s
a few cafés in my local area that have just
got the right level of noise that really helps
with the process. And reading – anywhere
as well. But I don’t need to sit down at
the desk, or have a special pen or anything
like that because I think I’ve worked around
jobs and around bringing up my daughter, so
I’ve never really got into that. So, pretty
much anywhere – any place, any time.
Great, nice. And so you have a new book coming
soon?
I do. Yes, the new book is going to be published
in April next year, and it’s called Things
in Jars. So, it’s set in Victorian London,
and it’s been a complete blast to write;
it’s been so much fun. What I was setting
out to do was to again give a really immersive
feeling with some really interesting characters,
a slightly larger cast again, but it’s just
been phenomenal fun to write, so I’m hoping
people like it.
Great, yes! And The Hoarder is, of course,
available now in your friendly local bookstore.
Yes it is, and it’s coming into paperback
I think in October.
Paperback in October. Thank you so much for
coming to see us and talking to us today.
Thank you.
