Manny and the Baby author Varaidzo is a writer and artist, whose short story “Bus Stop” was shortlisted for the 4thWrite Prize in 2018. She has contributed to notable anthologies including The Good Immigrant in 2016 and 2021’s Who’s Loving You. Her debut novel Manny and the Baby was published in the U.K. earlier this month and explores what it means to be Black and British.
Debutiful asked the author to answer our recurring “A Life of Books” questionnaire so readers can get to know her better.
Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?
Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series. The princess elements weren’t the main draw for me, the teens in that book are just really cool – slightly geeky and in awe of their own quirks but self aware enough about it that they’re not too pretentious or snobby. They were just such a fun friendship group to read about and it set a standard for the type of fun I wanted to have in my own friendships ever since.
Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or, what’s your philosophy on what children read?
Children perhaps have more patience for discovery than adults when it comes to reading, they’re still figuring out what kinds of genres and stories they like and dislike. So reading the past early, before becoming stagnant, is perhaps my philosophy. I remember really enjoying Noel Streatfeild and Frances Hodgson Burnett as a kid, though I don’t think I’d be naturally inclined to pick up either of those authors now. And I had an English teacher that would read us Sherlock Holmes as nine, ten year olds. The Adventure of the Speckled Band freaked me out for weeks – to the point where I had to hide this toy snake I had in a kitchen cupboard, even – but I was enraptured.
I discovered some of my favorite writers in high school. What writers did you discover then? Either ones that were assigned for class or ones you found on your own.
I dropped out of high school, so I ended up getting my qualifications from second hand textbooks and sitting the exams at a community hall with older learners. This meant all the subjects I chose had to be ones I could teach myself, so one of those subjects was ‘Classical Civilisations’ which basically just means you read a lot of ancient Greek texts and answer questions about them. One work that sticks with me from that time are the first four books of Homer’s Odyssey, or the ‘Telemachy’ as it’s known, the story about Odysseus’ son who he left behind. It’s just a universal coming of age story, powerful in its simplicity, about a young man trying to shake off his boyhood by searching for answers about his absent father. My debut, Manny and the Baby, is a scrapbook imitation of that same, timeless formula.
Are there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book?
I was heavily inspired by Delia Jarret-Macauley’s biography of Una Marson, and the poems of Una Marson herself. Una Marson was the first black woman to write a play that was performed at London’s West End back in the 1930s, and she produced a variety show on the BBC called Caribbean Voices which platformed many Caribbean writers of the mid 20th century like Sam Selvon, VS Naipaul, and so on. She was a true cultural pioneer whose impact may easily have slipped from national consciousness was it not for the deep, invested archival work that Delia Jarret-Macauley did. So the historical fiction elements of Manny and the Baby were really shaped by the climate that Jarret-Macauley explores Una Marson as living in and writing to, and my questions about what it meant to be black woman writing in Britain during the 1930s.
What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine?
Lote by Shola von Reinhold. Like mine, it’s a book that turns its attention to black modernists and uncovering the archives, but in a far more surreal, whimsical and intelligent way than I’ve done with Manny and the Baby. It’s not so much that I wish it was mine, more that I wish I had been as true to my interests with my own debut. It’s phenomenal. I loved and related to every moment of it.
What have you been reading lately that you can recommend to Debutiful readers?
Fast By The Horns by Moses McKenzie. It comes out in May. I’m naturally biased towards novels set in the South West anyway, but it’s a really clean and immersive coming of age story. Reading it made me feel excited about the possibilities of writing, which is a feeling I’m chasing in everything I read.
And, finally, I have to ask… I’m sorry. What’s next? But wait! Only use three words.
Book two, hopefully.