“Start with as little as possible” said Jackie Collins, suggesting the best way to begin a novel. Although Collins seems a surprising mentor, Diana Evans liked her advice: don’t plan; give yourself space to discover; make room for serendipity to come your way. She wrote the words on a Post-it note, to remember them. But it didn’t really work.
Halfway through this entertaining, instructive and often moving anthology comes an essay entitled “All the Notes”, where she demonstrates just how far she departed from that minimalist utopia to which she had aspired. For as artists carry sketchbooks, writers have notebooks.
Evans began with two, each for specific purposes, then four, then six, and finally a plethora of Post-it notes all over her house so that she could “hold on to the hurtling flow of messages from the brain”. She was becoming overwhelmed, almost submerged until eventually, as she began to write, the notes loosened their hold and she realised that there are no rules to writing. You just have to do it.
It helps that Evans is extremely good at it. She has written four successful novels and now, in I Want to Talk to You, are collected many examples of her precise, perceptive, empathetic journalism, in the form of features, reflections, reviews and interviews. Her writing is witty and seductive.
John Updike’s sentences, for example, are “hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky”. Of the blazing young dancer Carlos Acosta, she writes “the visceral flamboyance of Afro-Cuban culture tussles with the linearity and elitism of ballet”, while the “warm and wearily flamboyant” Edward Enninful, is “no stranger to the passing abuses of systematic racism”.
A favourite interviewee was clearly Alice Walker, “one of the fundamental visionaries of our time”, whose writing “remains languid and effortlessly graceful, and has not lost its enormous power to prod at the sorest, most critical anxieties of the human condition”.
It was Walker whose kindness disarmed Evans when, interrupting a transatlantic telephone interview in 1998, she asked her, “What’s wrong? You don’t sound happy”. Evans had just lost her identical twin to suicide, the most seismic event of her life. She wondered what she could have said to her, given the chance, to persuade her not to do it. “I would have told her to hold on,” Walker replied, “until it passes. Everything passes.” She has, she says, remembered the advice, ever since.
She knew she needed to write about that death but she struggled for years to find a way. In the end, it was to inform her first novel, 26a, and it was discovering Jean Rhys that seems to have allowed, or released her to do so: Rhys, who wrote, she said, from a broken heart. The debut novel was shortlisted for seven prizes and won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers.
In among the literary heroes taking up residence in this glorious gallimaufry of a book, there are several autobiographical squibs and snippets, and the occasional controlled rant. She writes touchingly about a trip she made to the Catskill Mountains with her seven-year-old daughter, and proudly about her own life-long love of dancing.
She hasn’t a lot of time for the monarchy, or for Netanyahu, as she makes scathingly clear, but we also learn that she is very good indeed at yoga, that she made seven dresses during lockdown and that she finds herself gently, and happily, loosening the constraints of her own work ethic to drive her elderly mother, once a week, to a seated exercise class.
From that class, her mother emerges “sort of windswept and happy”. This was always going to be a book that grabs you by the lapels and insists on you listening but all the same, you do emerge impressed and better informed — and also kind of windswept and happy.
I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations by Diana Evans Chatto & Windus £18.99, 256 pages
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