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P.S.About the author 2 A Conversation with Sadie Jones

About the book 6 On Writing Fallout

Read on 10 Author Picks: Books and Plays

That Inspired Fallout

11 Have You Read? More by Sadie Jones

FalloutPS_2P.indd 1 2/10/15 8:52 AM

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A Conversation with Sadie Jones

Can you tell us about your childhood, growing up as the daughter of a scriptwriter and an actress? Did it inspire your interest in the theater world?

Fallout’s central characters are older than I am and younger than my parents which freed me from the sense of autobiography. That said, my earliest, vague, but deeply rooted memories are probably those closest to the world Luke, Leigh, Paul, and Nina inhabit. As a very young child, at the beginning of the seventies, I remember the people who used to visit my parents’ house in World’s End, Chelsea. The area is now very smart and somewhat sterile, but then it was still quite bohemian. The basement kitchen was often full of people; overlapping talk of failure and success, plays put on and films made or, more often, not made— all the reported dramas of the adult world. My godfather is Brian Phelan, a playwright and screenwriter, and his wife, Dorothy Bromley, an actress and founder member of Common Stock, a seminal community theater company. I remember, though not in detail, their stories, and those of my parents and others, and the atmosphere of Gitane smoke, the bottles and the smell of red wine and whiskey as they talked, while my sister and I sat on laps and listened or didn’t listen, before being sent off to bed.


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When I was writing Fallout I did not speak to my godfather or interview my parents or any of their friends. I approached the book as though it were any other world and not close to me. It was partly because I did not want to write an insider’s story. Luke—most evidently—is an outsider, but so are Leigh, Paul, and Nina. Very few people feel like insiders—and I certainly am not one of them. I find, too, that when I consciously visit my own experience, the imagination is inhibited. Denying myself the easy resource of friends made the research for the book longer, and even unnecessarily complicated, but it forced me to be rigorous. I wanted my story to be grounded in, but not by, reality.

You were initially interested in becoming an actress. How did you determine you wanted to do something else instead? When did you decide you wanted to be a writer, and what did you write first?

I always wrote, and took it for granted. I think I wanted to act because I was attracted to the thrill of being part of a creative group, more sociable and romantic than writing alone, and there was probably an element of youthful egotism and vanity, too. It turned out I had almost no talent and was crippled by self-consciousness, which I found out—luckily—quite early on, and abandoned the idea. I would have hated it. I always saw writing as something that would still be there


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when the adventure of living was done with. My ambition as a writer, if you could call it that, came a little while later.

Which of your characters was the most difficult to write, and why? Who was the easiest?

They each had their challenges, but I suppose it was Nina, in a way, mainly because in her conception she was to be Luke’s downfall. I had to empathize with both of them, often within a scene, and her behavior, more than his, was hard to admire. There was a degree of honesty in writing her weakness and her sadness that I found uncomfortable. She was painful to be with. Leigh was tough to write for the opposite reason, because she is so sympathetic, and I feared she would lack depth because of it, but once I knew her backstory and imagined her there in front of me, she was flesh and blood, and the dullness I had worried about dissolved. Luke was just Luke, and once he turned up he stayed very close. I am often surprised when he is described as difficult—everything he did seemed perfectly normal to me. That is the best way to feel about a character, and what I work to have: the feeling that I’m on the inside, forgetting judgment.

Do you have a favorite character? A least favorite? How do you summon such empathy for less pleasant characters, like Tony?

A Conversation with Sadie Jones (continued)


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I liked Tony very much, and felt sorry for him. He is, of all of them, the most lost. He loves Nina, and he does not want to hurt her. The decision not to tell his backstory and to leave the pathways of his damage mysterious was deliberate, because he himself never tells, even to himself, but I knew him.

What does a day of writing look like for you?

I’m very boring, I work office hours. I start around nine and work a minimum of five hours. At the beginning of a book, or when it’s going badly, I do procrastinate and sometimes lose whole days to it— mainly because I’m scared of writing badly or reluctant to force myself out of the real world into a consuming other. But the fear of not writing is always worse than the fear of writing, and housework the worst fear of all, so I tend to be fairly disciplined.


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On Writing Fallout

Each book has its own particular starting place. The Uninvited Guests began with a dream that on waking I realized I had dreamed before— a house inhabited by different people in a different time. The Outcast began with the line in my head, There’s something wrong with him. The resulting preoccupation with who “he” might be led me to find Lewis, a damaged young man coming out of prison and determined to redeem himself. Small Wars was sparked by the stories I was hearing of soldiers who were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the questions I had about preserving humanity when moral certainty is endangered. And Fallout began with love. I am not a reader of romances and I have not often found any book that captures love’s power. Passion in others, in fiction or in life, can look either sickly-sweet or incomprehensible. Illogical. Hackneyed. For humanity’s most celebrated universal feeling it can be pretty hard to relate to. I was fascinated for a long time by a line I heard once: Romantic love is the meeting of two pathologies. I find the notion of people being made for one another vaguely sinister. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I wanted to write a love story, to tell it not as sentiment or romance, but as something that drives and can destroy us.

Each of my books has been almost impossible to write at some time in the


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process—sometimes more than one time. With Fallout that point was at the very beginning. I worked for well over a year before starting to write properly but once I did I had a first draft in about seven months, which is very fast. It was consuming. It had to be, if I was to get it right. I’m not sure words written in detachment can engender anything other than detachment in a reader.

In trying to find the story, the months of planning and exploration, I knew very early that the central line of the narrative was a love triangle and that the ’70s was the right time to tell it. It was an era heady with freedom, but the young people then, like every generation before and since, were living in the fallout of those preceding them. The social blueprint of the past had been torn up but there was no map to follow. Sex, legal abortion, divorce without stigma were presented as freedoms without consequences to the first generation for whom the gratification of the self was paramount. In the 1950s, Love in popular culture was—broadly speaking—boy-meets-girl-innocence and the post-war return to conventionality, and the 1960s was the time when youth ecstatically overturned those precedents. But the early 1970s was the decade “love” grew up. When I was getting ready to write I listened to the music, read the plays, and watched the films of the time. From high to low culture: the songs of Paul Simon, the films of Woody Allen, the plays of Pinter, all, in their different ways tell of a complicated world in which, while


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sex and liberty are taken for granted, their repercussions are freshly examined.

Of the many love triangles of Fallout, the one that I began with was between the playwright, his work, and the woman he is in love with: Luke, writing and Nina. That Luke was writing plays and it must therefore be the 1970s were essential facts, tied to one another from the outset, because his work had to be fundamental—not only to him, but vital in itself. There is wonderful and important theater now, and great writing, but many thinking, reading, apparently cultured people happily admit to “never going to the theater.” (And sadly, even to “never reading novels anymore.”) At that time theater was essential part of life. A good play was headline news. It was not icing, or highbrow and rarefied, it was in schools, factories, universities, and pubs. There were hundreds of theater companies, touring everything from Shakespeare to political propaganda; repertory companies providing entertainment and taking risks, a culture that was powerful and essential. I needed my characters, who are so committed to their art and to their loves, to be in a world that reflected their intensity. Luke, Leigh, Nina, and Paul are struggling to forge their own paths in a landscape shaped by their pasts. Their destinies are determined by the post-war years into which they were born as well as their specific circumstances, but the years have carried on without them. In

On Writing Fallout (continued)


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many ways their story is only partly told. The end of one story must be the beginning of another, if it works, but whether that new story should remain in the imagination is unclear. In a way, it’s unimportant. Fallout’s characters continue through the years I have not yet told and that is reassuring to me, as well as unsettling, because it is a proof of their life.


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Read

on

Author PicksBooks and Plays That Inspired FalloutThe Real Thing—Tom Stoppard

Theatre—Somerset Maugham

Betrayal—Harold Pinter

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan— Kenneth Tynan, John Lahr (editor)


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Have You Read?More by Sadie Jones

THE OUTCAST

In 1957 Lewis Aldridge, newly released from prison, returns home to Waterford, a suburban town outside London. He is nineteen years old. A decade earlier his father’s homecoming at war’s end was greeted with far less apprehension by the staid, tightly knit community—thanks to Gilbert Aldridge’s easy acceptance of suburban ritual and routine. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert’s wife counters convention, but the entire community is shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her.

No one in Waterford wants Lewis back—except Kit, a young woman who sympathizes with his grief and burgeoning rage. But in her attempts to set them both free, Kit fails to foresee the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open. The consequences for Lewis, his family, and the tightly knit community are devastating.

“Sharp and assured, a convincing illustration of the dangerous consequences of a muzzled society.”

—New York Times Book Review


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Read

on SMALL WARS

A major in the British Army, Hal Treherne is a dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. He is eager to lead his men into combat: his wife, Clara, however, is relieved when they are posted instead to seemingly peaceful sun-kissed Cyprus. But war erupts over unification with Greece, the island is consumed by violence—and Hal discovers that his military training cannot help him navigate the minefields of moral compromise that lie beneath every battle he fights. Clara grows fearful of her increasingly distant husband. When she needs him most, she finds the once-tender Hal a changed man— a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come.

“A taut and transfixing novel. . . . Jones is a gifted young author.” —Boston Globe

Have You Read? (continued)


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THE UNINVITED GUESTS

A grand old manor house deep in the English countryside will open its doors to reveal the story of an unexpectedly dramatic day in the life of one eccentric, rather dysfunctional, and entirely unforgettable family. Set in the early years of the twentieth century, award-winning author Sadie Jones’s The Uninvited Guests is, in the words of Jacqueline Winspear, the New York Times bestselling author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries A Lesson in Secrets and Elegy for Eddie, “a sinister tragi-comedy of errors, in which the dark underbelly of human nature is revealed in true Shakespearean fashion.”

“Exhilaratingly strange and darkly funny. . . . The Uninvited Guests will haunt you—but happily.” —USA Today

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