The British writer Diana Evans is best known for her novels, including Ordinary People (TLS, June 29, 2018) – which explores what happens to romantic love when it meets domestic drudgery – and A House for Alice (TLS, April 7, 2023), which revisits Ordinary People’s characters a decade later.
But, as we learn from her new book, I Want to Talk to You, back in the mid-1990s Evans was a graduate with what she calls “an inchoate CV” when she got a place on a two-week internship programme at Pride magazine, one of “a host of magazines and newspapers that had come into being as a response to the mainstream media routinely ignoring or misrepresenting black life and culture”. During her second week there, she was pitched in at the deep end when she was offered the role of culture editor. Shortly afterwards, Evans found herself having a late-night heart-to-heart with the American writer Alice Walker, on the telephone:
As the interview ran its course … what I found was that it is difficult to be steely when disarmed by someone. She radiated an expansive stillness. There was a kind of old pain and kindness in her voice. About halfway through the interview, she stopped mid-sentence and asked, “What’s wrong? You don’t sound happy.” It was such a sudden and frank question that I could only answer honestly, and told her that I had recently lost someone to suicide.
I Want to Talk to You is Evans’s first collection of nonfiction, comprising more than thirty articles drawn from Pride, Time magazine, the Financial Times and other publications, together with some new essays, all thematically arranged in three roughly chronological sections. “The Balcony” introduces a few of the book’s key motifs and offers a snapshot of Evans’s early working life as a journalist, interviewing celebrities, then typing up her articles in a hectic office “using an essay-writing process left over from university”. This is counterpointed with her perspective as a novelist and freelance writer of more than twenty-five years’ experience. The book is “a record of the beginning and development of two voices” – one coming to us via fiction, the other via nonfiction.
There are interviews here with musicians, artists and actors including Cassandra Wilson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Thandiwe Newton. (Some of the pieces inevitably feel a little dated.) In one essay, we learn that Evans once dreamt of dancing full-time. Instead, she notes wryly, she got a desk job. After two years at Pride, she embarked on a creative writing degree at the University of East Anglia, where she worked on her first novel, 26a, which won the Orange award for new writers in 2005. “Now much of my dancing is internal”, she writes: partly it is in “the rhythms of language, in the movements made possible with words”.
The section entitled “Writers, Writing” contains short interviews with Walker, Maya Angelou and Bernardine Evaristo, along with longer essays of literary criticism. Writers Evans admires include Dorothy West (who “wrote ‘posh black’ at a time when ‘broke black’ was in vogue”), Richard Yates, Percival Everett, James Baldwin – and John Updike. “Are we to discard him because he got so much wrong?”, she asks. In the standout essay here, “Jean Rhys and the Charisma of Despair”, Evans discusses her experience of writing her four novelsand the challenge of constructing “the scaffolding of narrative structure”.
A significant obstacle during the writing of 26a was how to address the issue of the death of her twin sister at the age of twenty-six, shortly before that interview with Walker: “I did not want to be a public lone twin. I did not want to be compared in real life to the people in my story. I did not want to be pitied. I did not even especially want to write about depression and suicide”. Evans believes that questions about the personal aspect of fiction are asked more often of women than of men, “and it bears a faint insinuation of craft deficiency, a suggestion that the autobiographical nature of a story lowers its social significance”. Reading the fiction of Rhys helped. “Her writing is as visceral and self-absorbed as it is kaleidoscopic and socially representative.”
As well as being tremendously engaging, I Want to Talk to You asks serious questions about the social value of art and the writer’s responsibility. “In the literary world my work has been referred to as ‘post-race’, or too nuanced when it comes to race, not race-y enough”, she writes, “though a crucial area of my interest as a novelist has been how we wear our difficult history”. This issue informs the book’s essays on George Floyd and Steve McQueen’s film Grenfell (2023). There is also a personal piece, “Bad Nigerian Daughter”, in which Evans describes her inability to recreate her mother’s traditional dish of èbà and stew for her own children, and her experience of teaching creative writing at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in Enugu state. Recalling her wish to prove her connection to the place, she was left with a feeling of inadequacy. “A familiar alienation endured, the quintessential, dull remove of the second generation: Black in Britain, British in Nigeria.”
Evans describes the novel form as “the country to which I belong”, while the short story is “a region I dream of inhabiting, like a shimmering, still distant harbour”. Her new story “Broth” has recently been published as a booklet by Fictionable, an online literary magazine, with an introduction by Richard Lea. It opens with three friends, Tanya, Sheri and Elise, talking in the “mist and people and shichimi and chicken stock” of a busy London ramen bar. They first met at university, and laugh about their happy shared memories of the music, men and experiences that connect them. Now, as they discuss politics, relationships and self-image, one of the characters gradually becomes aware of the cracks that separate them.
“I didn’t know you and Ozzy broke up,” Elise said, alarmed and a little crushed. She felt very far away from them, on a remote plane of memory, as though they had already outlived her.
The unspoken threat of illness and death hangs in the air. “Broth” is a beautifully written story that draws together food, friendship, illness and separation, yet – despite everything – shimmers with hope and possibility.
Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge
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