The Human Experiment
Siân Hughes
The poet on poverty, survival, the terrible logistics of being poor, and her debut novel — which takes its title from a phrase that doesn't mean what you'd expect.
Your poetry collection Pearl was received with enormous warmth, but it took ten years to write. The novel — was that a different kind of process?
Completely different. With poetry, every word is load-bearing. You can spend a week on a line and that's a reasonable use of time. With a novel, at some point you have to accept that not every sentence is going to be perfect and just keep going. That was genuinely difficult for me — I felt almost illicit about it, like I was getting away with something. Poems are buildings. Novels are cities. You can't inspect every brick.
Where did the novel come from? Was there something you felt poetry couldn't hold?
The subject matter, really. I wanted to write about poverty in a way that captured the logistics of it — the relentlessness, the specific cognitive load of managing money when there isn't any. Poetry can gesture at that, can find the lyric moment inside it, but it can't do the accumulation. It can't show you the fourth missed bill and the seventh difficult phone call and what those things do to a person over time. Fiction can do that. Fiction can show you the tedium and the repetition, which is a lot of what poverty actually is.
The title — "No Such Thing as Monday" — what does it mean? Because it sounds like a thing someone would say lightly, but I suspect it isn't.
You're right that it sounds light. It comes from something a character in the book says — the idea that Monday, with all its implied fresh starts and new beginnings and the week stretching ahead full of possibility, is a concept that requires a certain amount of financial stability to believe in. If you don't have a job to go to, if the week looks the same whether it's Monday or Thursday or Sunday, then Monday doesn't exist for you in the same way. It's a small observation but it opens something up, I think — all the invisible assumptions built into ordinary language about how most people live.
Is this autobiographical? Are you drawing on your own experience?
It's drawn from experience in the sense that I'm not writing from the outside. I'm not a journalist who spent a year living on benefits for a book. But it's not memoir either — the characters aren't me and my family, the specific events aren't literal. What I was trying to preserve was the emotional truth of it: the particular way money, or its absence, shapes your interior life as well as your external circumstances. The way it affects your sense of what's possible, what you're allowed to want.
There's a tendency in British fiction about poverty to reach for either pathos or polemic. How did you try to avoid both?
By concentrating on the specific rather than the general. The moment you generalise, you're either pitying or arguing. The moment you stay with the very specific — this person, this morning, this problem — you're telling a story. I was very strict with myself about that. Any time the narrative started to drift towards illustration — this is what poverty is like — I would pull it back to what this character is feeling right now, in this body, on this particular Tuesday morning. Or Monday. Or not-Monday.
Do you feel there's a political dimension to writing this kind of fiction?
Of course, but I'd resist being conscripted as a political novelist. I'm interested in a politics that starts with experience rather than argument. The most political thing I can do is refuse to sentimentalise — to not let the reader off with a good cry and a sense that they've been improved. The book isn't asking for your sympathy. It's asking you to look. Those are different requests.
And what next? Back to poetry, or has the novel opened something?
Both, I think. One of the strange things about the novel is that it's sent me back to poetry with new eyes. Writing long has made the short feel more spacious, somehow. I've got a new collection in the back of my mind. And the novel has other things it wants to say — there are characters I'm not finished with. So the honest answer is that I'm not going back so much as forward on both fronts simultaneously, which is either ambitious or reckless and I haven't worked out which yet.