Jessica Andrews is a novelist. Her work explores the intersections of social class and gender in relation to the body. Her debut novel, Saltwater won the Portico Prize in 2020 and her second novel, Milk Teeth was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award in 2023. Her work is translated into seven languages. Her stage adaptation of BIFA winning and BAFTA nominated film Saint Maud by Rose Glass ran at Live Theatre in 2024.
She is a Contributing Editor at ELLE magazine and she also writes for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Radio 4 and the Architectural Review, among many others. Her writing has been featured on BBC Front Row, BBC Woman's Hour and BBC Radio 3 and she has given guest lectures at universities across the world. She was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures for writers under the age of 35 and longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2022. She co-presents the literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City University, London and she also teaches at Faber Academy and ARVON, among others.
On 11 September at 12:30 h, Hay Festival Segovia has invited her to join Cristina Ward, Head of Arts at British Council Spain, for an in-depth discussion of her work, exploring the powerful themes that run through her writing. Ahead of their talk, we interviewed Jessica to learn more about her writing and what inspires her to tell stories.
If someone were meeting you for the first time, how would you describe what you do and what led you to become an author, teacher, podcast presenter and lecturer (among others)?
Creating an open space where people feel their words and ideas are interesting and worthy of attention is at the core of my work as a writer and educator. In terms of writing, this has meant focusing on the lives, bodies and voices of people and places that don’t often populate literary novels. In the classroom, I endeavour to facilitate an environment where every person in the room feels they have the right to participate and can speak and be heard.
This belief comes from my own experiences of exclusion growing up as a working-class woman in the north-east of England and attempting to enter middle-class spaces such as university and the arts.
As a writer, my job is often speaking, whether on the page or in front of an audience. The other aspects of my work, such as teaching or hosting the podcast often require careful listening to and learning from others. I have learned so much from paying close attention to the work of other writers, artists and students.
Writing is often solitary and I believe that being part of a community of writers and thinkers is important for development and growth. In different ways, the other aspects of my work allow me to connect with other writers, teachers and colleagues, who both support and challenge me, often pushing me in new directions.
You've often described your work as exploring the intersections of gender,social class and the body. We often think about class as something external hat is imposed by society, but your writing suggests it can be something we carry physically. Do you believe social class can exist in a body? If so, how?
I’m interested in the ways in which external systems such as gender and social class interact with our internal psychologies. My work thinks about how this can be felt in the body, through memory, emotion and physical sensation.
For example, in Saltwater, my working-class protagonist, Lucy, meets some ‘posh’ girls at a drama class. She does not yet have class consciousness and cannot articulate her own difference. Instead, she experiences a physical sensation of ungainliness and uncleanliness around them.
Here, her inferior class position and hyper-awareness of her teenage body, which is a result of being a young woman in a society where women’s bodies are policed and scrutinised, intersect or collide, manifesting as physical sensation.
The discomfort produced by these sensations and interactions causes a psychological fracture within Lucy. She attempts to distance herself from her own body through behaviours such as drinking and restricting her food intake. This leads her to become increasingly disconnected from her body and desires, fracturing her experience of selfhood.
In this way, the effects of social class on the mind and the body are permeating and destructive. The limitations of these structures lead Lucy to place further restrictions on her own life. I interrogated some of these questions further in my second novel, Milk Teeth. I was thinking about how external systems of class and gender create self-policing, and the ways in which we might continue to restrict our own lives, based on class and gender shame, even if we move social classes or our material conditions improve.
In Saltwater, you talk about a young girl named Lucy who decides to leave London and move to her late grandfather’s cottage, much like you did before writing this novel. How did moving from a busy town like London to a more rural area such as Donegal impact your creative process or the way you approach your writing? Did you experience any shift in your sense of time both physically and in your literary work?
I moved to Donegal for practical reasons, but when I was there, I found I had time and space to be with my own thoughts. Saltwater is concerned with memory, and Donegal is part of my own family history and memories. Physically being there allowed me easier access to those thoughts and emotions.
During that time, I was very fortunate to be able to be completely immersed in the world of the novel, without external pressures or distractions, which allowed the work to grow. I didn’t have access to the internet or a car. My life was simple and I read and worked on my novel every day.
I wrote a first draft of my second novel, Milk Teeth, during quarantine in the coronavirus pandemic, in a village outside of Barcelona. I found the isolation more difficult, and while I was immersed in the world of the book, it began to feel like a restriction on my work, rather than giving me the sense of possibility and expansiveness I felt in Donegal.
I’m still working out how to balance this desire for isolation and complete immersion in the world of a story with the necessity for connection with others, and the importance of that for maintaining a balanced perspective on my work. I’m writing my third novel at the moment and I’m trying to live and write in a way that is more sustainable, where I don’t have to shut myself off from other aspects of my life in the world.
You’ve spoken about beginning a novel through memories, feelings and images before fully understanding how they connect. We’ve heard that sometimes you work with fragments arranged across the floor and build the narrative from different timeframes. How do you know when a collection of memories and images has become a story?
I think of this method as an emotional or intuitive intelligence. When I was writing Saltwater and Milk Teeth, I started with the emotional experience of the book, or the ‘feeling’ I wanted it to hold. I had a set of key themes and narrative questions and I allowed myself to write into them through fragments of memory, fiction or observations, which allowed those stories to grow organically. Emotion is a language of the body, and this mode of working suited the form and content of those novels, which both focus on the corporeal.
A novel still needs to have forward momentum, and I always have a linear plot in mind, driving the story forwards. This is often as simple as bullet points that I use as a guide. I have an idea of where the story is going, but these points need to be loose and unrestrictive, so that I have the freedom to write into characters and ideas, which can take the novel in a slightly different direction.
I’m working on a more fictional novel at the moment, and I have a linear plot and a timespan, which I view as the technical elements which will ‘hold’ the story or drive it forwards. Within that, I allow myself to write whatever I feel like, and a network of images, metaphors and sensations arise from this work, which I can then weave into the structure.
There is a lot of editing or refining involved in shaping this work into a novel or story, and I usually end up cutting a lot, but I try to remember that writing is primarily a practice, which means we can only truly learn through doing it and trying things out.
This year’s Hay Festival Segovia will be centred on the pursuit of beauty in the face of the immediate and the superficial. What space do you think literature can hold in a time where immediacy and social media are defining our beauty standards? What do you think it can teach us about understanding beauty from a different point of view?
Novels are often about imperfection, sadness, dissatisfaction or loss. They are spaces where we can sit with nuanced, uncomfortable feelings, and they are concerned with what it means to live fully in the world.
I think that social media, or a focus on the image can reduce our capacity for discomfort, ugliness and nuance. Our relationship to beauty is often defined by loss; there is beauty in joy and friendship because we understand how it feels to be sad or lonely; that is how we know it is precious. I think the novel as an art form has an incredible capacity to hold nuance and conflict, which is a deeper kind of beauty, resisting the appeal of a fixed, flat image.
During the Hay Festival you’ll speak to an international audience that will range in age. What conversations do you hope to spark among attendees?
I hope that people might think about the limitations that are placed on their own minds and bodies, as well as the limitations places on the people around them, and the ways in which these colour our experiences of the world.