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Magazine
FACE TO FACE
Beyond stereotypes
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
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Juggling parenthood and fiction, Helen Simpson writes stories that address the many myths of motherhood.
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A passion for stories: Helen Simpson.
HELEN SIMPSON, the British writer of Mommy Lit, has a passion for short stories. "One short story with a cup of tea," this 47-year-old British writer resolves, would be "to have stolen a march on the day." It's a fitting beginning for a writer who has built her considerable reputation solely on the short story, and who counts Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield as her favourite authors.
We're sitting in Mumbai, where Simpson is visiting as part of a three-day literary festival. She tells me about the short story that begun it all. "I made it all up," she confesses, of the prize-winning, 500-word story of her life that landed her a job at the Vogue. "My life just seemed so dull; I did home work and did more home work." So Simpson invented a colourful gardener of a father, who travelled from Yorkshire to London every morning with his nasturtiums on the train, and parents whose marriage, alas, was in trouble. "For ages afterwards the people at Vogue would ask me, so how are your parents doing? And I never dared tell them that I had made it all up."
The early days
At Vogue, her editor would often ask of her, "But what do you really want to do dahling?" An appropriate question really, considering the young Helen would, during her five-year stint at Vogue, disappear at lunch hour into the church across the road to write short stories. And so it was Vogue that published one of her first short stories entitled "Bed" (later to form a first collection called Four Bare Legs in a Bed, 1990).
And now, 15 years and many awards (Sunday Times Young Writer, Granta's best 20 novelists, Somerset Maugham Award) later, Simpson hasn't lost any of her passion for this narrative form. The writer, who lives in London with her solicitor husband and her teenage children, finds it a form that particularly fits her, as she juggles parenthood and penmanship. "It allows you to take so many points of view," she explains. Multiple points of view are indeed Simpson's special strength, as she writes stories that address the many myths of motherhood. Simpson's women characters span a whole spectrum. She has Dorrie, "never still... always available, a twittering fusspot", Nicola in the delectable "Burns and the Bankers": "she loved her children more than life itself... and so did Charlie in his way; but like him, she preferred to subcontract out much of the work of parenthood".
Between women
The mothers in these stories (like their real life counterparts) can be horribly harsh to each other in a world where "painted nails means a rubbish mother" and "wall-to-wall" nannies are bad. "Women should be kinder to one another," analyses Simpson, of the now notorious Mommy Wars, where stay-home moms are labelled "brain-dead" and working mothers are made to feel guilty of being "selfish". "Really," Simpson continues, as to which model of motherhood works, "the jury's out on that one still. Imagine if Margaret Thatcher had sat at home, do you think it would have done her twins any good?" So Simpson shares her sympathies with both the Nicolas and the Dorries. If Nicola has a self-satisfied streak ("Not only had she borne four children but she also earned as much as her husband"), it's also because "usually she bowed to the tyranny of positive thinking as anything else was not exactly helpful". "Still I have women coming up to me and saying, `you hate that Nicola, don't you?' and I say, `No! I don't'," she maintains.
Critics have accused Simpson of too harsh a portrayal of the whole parenthood thing, pointing to stories like "Café Society". This, a story about two young mothers trying to have a conversation, is an almost savage caricature of the mind-numbing-ness of parenting young children. Then there's the sapping self denial inflicted by Simpson's most liked mother, Dorrie. Sentiments like these are what led a reviewer to refer to Simpson's collection Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000) as a friend's "ultimate contraceptive", sent as a present to friends who were "considering the mommy track".
Complex portrait
Undoubtedly, Simpson, despite her flippancies, is harsh. Yet childlessness, in her book, is clearly not the key. All the women, the stay-homes like Dorrie, the career workers like Isobel and the narrator in "Wurstigkeit", want more children. But certainly in a world where men like demanding husband Max, abandoning husband X, or the boys in Sales (who were rumoured to be adding vodka to expressed baby milk as a joke) simply don't carry their weight, childcare can be frustrating and a "frontal lobotomy".
I ask Simpson about the charge that writers like her, who write about motherhood are often labelled as being dull and domestic. We talk about the great brouhaha a few years ago when Picador's Collection 13 editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith condemned the submissions from women writers as being "disappointingly domestic" having been "injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell". Simpson, whose latest collection, Constitutional (2005), will be released in the U.S. this summer, counters with an example from her book, "The Philebotomist's Love Life", the story of a young couple's day that revolves around the overhanging issue of the War in Iraq. Constitutional is, in many ways, the most dark collection of all, rife with contemporary concerns like cancer, Alzheimer's and death. "This is why when people ask me if I write about small issues, I say, `No, I don't. What I write about is birth, love, sex and death'."
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