Q:
It was a brave decision to make the narrator someone who couldn't write very well...
A:
Well the post modern audience is used to conceits such as the unreliable narrator, accounts written in dialect and "difficult" - put that in quotation marks would you - works such as Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. So I thought "why not go the whole hog?!" and make it as realistic as possible. So I decided to make the writing genuinely bad and see if my audience would take the plunge and follow me.
Q:
You seem very keen that this "badness" infuse every part of the writing.
A:
Oh yes, I made sure that nothing of note really happens to my protaganist and all the banal incidents that do occur aren't brought to life - or imbued with any depth or poignancy - by the power of the prose. I wanted to make my narrator a very dull, very uninteresting person - I wanted the audience to question why such a person would even feel she had a story to tell.
Q:
The character is a working class teenage girl. Is this any commentary on gender, class or youth?
A:
I know I'll be accused of misogyny here but it always seems to me women have little of note to say and neither do teenagers. I'm joking of course.
Q:
Quite. Did you feel uncomfortable at all writing this as a man?
A:
No, not at all. I'm a chronicler of life and life as lived whether male, female, rich or poor, young or old.
Q:
So is there any part of you in Chianti?
A:
Well the passages where she repeatedly and ineptly badmouths people for very poorly described and dubious reasons are based on people from my own life. Haha.
Q:
For me the end, in particular, feels very unsatisfying.It doesn't even seem to make any commentary on what's gone before - even in it's own poorly defined terms. The whole piece just seems to be utterly pointless and, perhaps, even a slap in the face for those who've bothered to invest their time in reading it. It just seems to peter out without resolving what little has been explored previously...
A:
Yes, beautiful isn't it?
