Ela Lee, author of Jaded was raised in South London to Korean and Turkish immigrant parents before graduating from Oxfor University. Now, a lawyer, she has published her debut book that follows a young lawyer wakes up the morning after a work gala with no memory of how she got home the previous night.
We corresponded with the author via email to ask her about a wide range of topics that cover her writing process and the challenges of addressing sensitive topics like sexual assault.
I wanted to start with place and how it influences your work. Your bio references South Korea, Turkey, and London. How much did growing up in London and your parents’ home countries influence how you view literature?
I was lucky to grow up immersed in different cultures, religions and languages and it has taught me that identity is really fluid, and has a lot to do with the environment you’re in. As a child, I learned to present myself in different ways to fit different contexts: when I was in Turkey I was loud and opinionated, whereas in the UK I was obsessed with fitting in and not drawing attention to myself, so I tended to be quieter and more introspective. People often exist across a spectrum of different realities. I think that has trickled down into my writing and how I present characters’ shifting personalities. In terms of reading, I love books that explore people that don’t easily slot into any one group, and are somewhat on the outside, looking in.
Identity plays a major role in your novel. Jade was just her Starbucks name. How did names and identities become central to what you wanted to explore with your debut novel?
Jade is a brown woman inhabiting very white spaces, and she has wholeheartedly embodied the model minority. Jade’s method of controlling her world is to shapeshift into the person others need her to be. Her name – anglicised to Jade to make it easier to pronounce– is a manifestation of this burden to cater to other people. I think that’s something many people of colour and second generation immigrants can relate to. But as I drafted the novel, the same questions kept rising to the surface: she has assimilated, but at what cost? How can she form her own identity if she is always curating herself to meet external expectations? I wanted to peel away Jade’s veneer of success, and pick apart all the experiences and beliefs that have caused her to be complicit in her own erasure.
Consent and power are other central themes. How did the perspective you told the story from shape how consent and power were presented?
I think that ‘consent’ and ‘power’ can often be discussed – on the news or in the media – in rather abstract, clinical terms that are removed from the impact on real people’s lives. I wanted to place the narrative in the voice of someone who was living it, in all her flaws and messiness. Jaded is told in the first person throughout, as it was important to show Jade’s day-to-day unravelling, as she navigates systems that are skewed against her. The questions she has about what has happened to her, whether she is going mad or imagining things, what the right thing to do is, are all things we tend to ask ourselves in private. I wanted to get into the head of an ordinary, twenty-something-year-old woman and unpack the creeping, sinister way in which abuses of power play out against her favour.
I’m always curious about writers who write about tough subject matter. How did you manage self-care while writing so deeply about sexual assault?
Looking back, I realise that the nascent weeks of writing Jaded coincided with when I seriously committed to therapy. It wasn’t a coincidence that, within months of putting in the work on my mental health, I felt ready to write about a topic that is so difficult and raw. This was especially important because the line between writing and therapy is rather flexible and, for many writers, particularly writers of colour, there can be an expectation to plumb our life experiences towards our creativity. I found however that therapy gave me the skills to maintain objectivity and distance, allowing me to separate myself from the writing.
There was an interview between Kyle Dillon Hertz and Greg Mania discussing trigger warnings. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. What is your relationship with trigger warnings in literature?
I think it’s important that a writer doesn’t try to prescribe or control a reader’s relationship with the text. As the writer, I can’t know the headspace or context a reader comes to a book with, and they should be afforded the right to make an informed decision about what they consume.
I wrote Jaded with the hope that it would encourage nuanced and candid dialogue about the aftermath of assault, and how such an event can deepen pre-existing faultlines in someone’s life; I’d much rather a reader came to that discussion willingly, rather than it being unilaterally foisted onto them. It’s important to remember that there is a privilege in not being triggered – to read a book like Jaded and feel like it bears no relevance to your experiences.
It’s ultimately a decision that should be made on a case-by-case basis; blanket or mandatory application of trigger warnings is another issue altogether.
Shifting away from Jaded and looking at the future: what themes and topics do you want to explore?
I’m really interested in mundane, domestic stories about ordinary people, that bear commentary on wider social issues. At the moment, I’m working on my second novel, which is set in 2008, post the global financial crash and centres a multi-generational mixed-Korean family trying to make sense of their changed circumstances.
debutiful 