Imani Thompson’s debut novel, Honey, explores the sticky side of what it means to be a woman in a world full of men that functionally disregards women. Yrsa is fed up and bored with her school life, so she kills. At first, because she can, but essentially, because she feels that ridding the earth of the kind of man that makes it hard for women to live here is important work. Men who hurt her, her friends, and women in general. Thompson’s novel is witty, electric, thrilling, and thought-provoking. She blends themes of misogyny, narcissism, race, and class with ease, while assuring that the reader can still see the softness and humanness of the story’s protagonist, Yrsa.
I spoke with Thompson about writing the terrible thing, what community looks like in the literary world, and the rhythm of language and words.
Tsahai Makeda: I’ve got to say, I really love this book that you’ve written, your debut novel, Honey, is wickedly sharp! It’s quick in pace but slow at the right moments when it needs to be. You move through it so well. The characters feel whole and real, like they could be my friend, my sister, somebody I’m working with or just watching from afar. Tell me a little bit about the book. Where did the story come from for you? Was there a particular moment in time or in your life that was the inspiration for the book, or did you pluck the idea from your studies?
Imani Thompson: Yes, I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was little. I’ve just always been scribbling stories. So when I was in my final year at university, I was thinking that when I graduate, that has to be the time that I write that first novel. I was sitting with my mum actually in a cafe, talking through novel ideas with her and I knew that I really wanted to write about what I’d been studying at university. The theory that I’d been looking at, questions I had about being a woman in the world, being a woman of color, those histories. I knew as well, with those themes, that it was going to be quite dark. I was going to have to look at gender-based violence but I was very conscious that I wanted the book to feel engaging. I wanted it to be funny and I did want to make it commercial as well in its premise and pitch, which is why I came up with the idea of this woman who was a serial killer on the hunt for bad men. It’s not something I thought I would write about. It’s not a genre I read loads about but I thought it was a really great way to satirize the university, the theory that I was studying, and make the book funny whilst keeping all of that theory and all of that politics at the core of it. And actually at the time that I came up with the idea, my mum had the idea to call it Honey. So that was the real spark in that cafe. And then I started writing the very first chapter, I think probably that day. The voice of Yrsa came to me so strongly, but I paused on the manuscript until I finished my studies. So it was only when I graduated that I properly started writing it.
TM: And when did you graduate?
IH: It was the summer of 2022.
TM: And then how long did it take you to finish?
IH: I started writing properly after graduation, probably October of that year. I was working full time for a lot of the years and just trying to write when I could, like in the evenings and things like that. By the following summer I probably had about 20,000 words, and then I lost my job. That was so helpful actually, to lose my job, because it made me say, “For three months, I’m just going to burn through my savings and finish a draft of this novel,” which is what I did. I actually did manage to write like 60,000 words pretty fast. I’d had it in my head for so long and I was thinking about it for so many months before those three months so by the winter, I’d finished a draft, got another job, and that’s when I started submitting to agents in the new year.
TM: Okay so you got through the draft, but then when did you say to yourself, I’m done here, I’ve done all that I can do with it?
IH: That would have been winter 2023. I knew that I was done with it because I knew the draft was far from perfect, but I couldn’t see it for myself anymore. I needed someone else’s opinion to get it to where it needed to be. So I sent it to friends and I sent it to family members who were really helpful. I’d already worked on their edits so it was really at the stage where I was like, I need some outside help, experienced outside help. I feel like that’s quite a good gauge when writing if you’re like, I’ve really given it my all here and I like that this is where I stop until I get that editorial feedback.
TM: This is a really, really good story and it’s kind of like micro and macro simultaneously. One of my questions is something you’ve already touched on, we kind of started there. You went to university and you studied sociology, human behavior and its impact on society. Then the novel explores all these big sort of issues like race, misogyny, sexism, all the things that we, as black women, and non-white people for that matter, go through in varying degrees of intersectionality and societal dynamics. While those issues are super heavy, you manage to bring the story to the reader in an engaging way. The throughline is solid and the characters are fully developed and whole. Yrsa is very strong and confident, she knows herself but at the same time she’s still learning, and that’s okay because that’s typical of most humans on the planet. She’s okay with trying to figure herself out and she’s so smart. I think sometimes maybe too smart for her own good to where she gets in her own way. You went to school for sociology, so I could see that coming through the work. A lot of times when we write fiction, it’s this really big thing of saying “I’m the author, I’m not in the book.” But you are writing it, so parts of you are going to be in there, discreetly or not. In Honey, the characters feel so alive, but the situations also; it’s at a university, there are fallible professors, young women trying to find their way in the world, misogyny, racism, all of it together. So tell us, how much of your sociology background did you lean into when you were writing this? How did you navigate between this is make believe and pretend against checking Google Scholar and seeing what you needed from there to propel this story?
IH: I think sociology helped in two ways. Interestingly, I started off studying English Literature when I went to university because of always wanting to be a writer. For me that made the most sense. And then I was four weeks into Medieval Literature and I was like, I think I’ve already made a mistake here. I had friends who were doing sociology and I didn’t really know it was a subject until I got to university and I joined them in one of their lectures and discovered that this is how my brain works. Sociology is all about the deconstruction of why we do what we do, about our power systems, about how reality forms, and to me, that’s what I love so much about literature. The best part of literature is that deconstruction of how characters form out of their culture, out of their society. It was really helpful in terms of building character and building more realistic characters because in a way, it’s like a whole degree in character study and the study of society in that regard. So that was really, really helpful for just the writing itself. And then all of the social theory that is infused throughout the book, that did come from my Google Scholar. It did come from those authors that I’d read at university. What was also kind of interesting about this as well, the theory in the book is when I’d written that first draft and it seems so surprising to me now, because Yrsa wasn’t studying afropessimism for her PhD. I didn’t know what she was studying for her PhD. And as I was writing, I kept thinking, I know her PhD topic is really important but I just can’t figure out what it is. And then my mum actually said to me, “Have you gone to Afro pessimism?” Then when I read that theory, I was like, oh my god, it fits the novel perfectly. Because whilst they’ve done a lot of Critical Race Theory at university, I just hadn’t encountered that strain of the theory. So then in the second draft that all came into the novel but because the plot was already there, that theory just melded so beautifully with the plot. It was really satisfying to add it in. You mentioned that she’s very confident as a person. What I found really fun as well, writing Yrsa in particular, is she’s very aware of how she is socialized. She is, of course, because she’s so smart, super aware of power dynamics, of the political situation she’s in, of what that university represents, what it means to go there, what it means to be a black woman in that college. She understands it all. But because she is on that psychopathic scale, she’s unaffected by it in the way that most people would be affected. So she sees it, but she’s basically such a narcissist so she rides above it all, which was very liberating to write because the things that would emotionally really impact most people, they just don’t affect her in that same way. That to me is where the liberation in her sort of comes in. So I found that really fascinating as well. Again, from a sociological perspective, what does it mean if you have awareness of all of this, but you’re not actually affected by everything around you?
TM: It makes for good storytelling, I tell you that. It really does.
IH: Yeah, because she plays God. That’s what she loves. She is a total narcissist.
TM: I love that. She is a total narcissist, but I like her. Even though, you know, there’s some questionable things that she does, but are we really mad at her?
IH: I took a lot of inspiration from the show, Killing Eve, and Jodie Comer’s villain character in that now because she is such a lovable psychopath. How do I create a lovable psychopath? Because you’ve got to root for her. There’s not really a story if you’re not rooting for her to some degree.
TM: And then it makes you think about your own self. Your belief systems and like, am I this way too, because I’m feeling like he deserved it, you know?
IH: Exactly. I love it when people say, “Oh yeah, when she gets the final kill, I’m really thinking, no, don’t do it.” And you’re like, at the final count? What about all the others?
TM: Right. It’s so good. The characters in this novel are really what carries the story because for me, you’ve written them each in their own respect, so fluidly and flawlessly. Because I write too, when I’m reading, I’m looking for the enjoyment of the story, if this is holding me, but I’m also looking at craft. I picked up on your style of pacing when Ethan comes over finally in the beginning. All of this stuff happens in a paragraph, then we come right into the moment but it doesn’t feel weird. Like, we were going so fast and now we’re so slow. I’m looking at it through the lens of craft but the average reader is going to eat that up because most readers are reading because they want to enjoy the story and they’re not looking for technique and mechanics.
IH: Yes.
TM: But as a writer, I’m looking at those mechanics and noting that you are really good at this.
IH: Thank you.
TM: You’re welcome. It made me think about each character because we get just enough of Ethan to not like him, personally. And we don’t need anymore of him, we don’t actually need to like him because he’s just serving his purpose. And all of the characters are doing that, everyone plays their part well. I want to know, as you’re writing this and keeping track of who’s in the book, who is your favorite? Yrsa is mine. And who’s your least favorite?
IH: Ooh, that’s a fun question. I can’t not say Yrsa, she’s wonderful. She lives rent free in my mind still. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, what would Yrsa do in this situation?” It’s not a good question to ask as well. But I think my favorite character to write, aside from her, was her mother, because her mother revealed herself so slowly to me. And when I gave an early draft to my friend, she was like, the mum’s quite enigmatic. I guess like a lot of our mothers are, but you don’t know what’s going on there. It took me so many drafts to realize that the mum was so integral to the plot and that she knew exactly what her daughter was about and what her daughter was doing. Because I was very focused on that maternal line through her grandmother, who I knew all along, and that her grandmother has probably killed some people herself, but I couldn’t figure out how the mum fit into that maternal line. So by the end, when she had fully revealed herself to me, I was like wow, you’re a cool lady. I know, of course, she’s definitely done some weird things too, but I find her fascinating and I still don’t fully know how, which I kind of love as well. And then my least favorite character…it’s probably gotta be the guy that she kills when she goes to Soho house. Henry. He’s my least favorite because it was also the worst of research to write him. To research him, I went on to those websites where women warn each other and I read through pages and pages of those warnings and it was really horrific. It’s just the violence that is out there, the objectification of women that exist still, it’s just so horrific. So he was my least favorite.
TM: I love that you are able to discern the varying degrees to which you can say, “I rock with this one, that one though, not so much.” And they’re all a figment of your imagination. However, like you just said, your research was to explore these websites where these things are happening to real people in real time, today. It’s so frightening but this type of novel brings awareness. Because even though I’m reading it and I’m really digging it, I’m also thinking, “Could I do what Yrsa is doing? I don’t know. Do I want to find out? Not really.”
IH: Push that boy off that rooftop.
TM: Right. But it then opens up my thinking to now go and do a little bit of research on this topic and be well informed. I have a daughter, she’s twenty-two. I have a niece, she’s thirty-one. I have younger female cousins who are between twenty and thirty. And not that it doesn’t happen to women my age, but these young, vulnerable women in spaces where they wouldn’t be fully cognizant that this is a thing that can happen, telling them to always be mindful. And I love the novel for that because someone’s going to pick it up and they’re going to read the byline and they’re going to be like, oooh, yeah. But then by the time they put it down, they’re going to be like, oh yeah.
IH: Completely. And that was my hope because when I devised the idea of this serial killer, I thought, what if I have her kill men in ways that women are often killed? Not the first two murders, but the later murders, so that’s why you have spiking. That’s why you have this set up with this sexual scene. It’s also why she kills an ex-boyfriend of hers because women are often killed by their partners or people who are close to them. And what I was doing intellectually there was to flip the lens because I’m so sick of seeing so much violence against women on TV that feels very glamorized. So I thought, I’ll do the same thing. But because the lens has flipped, we’re meant to feel uncomfortable because we should always feel uncomfortable about this level of violence that is going on against women in society. I think because we have come so far in terms of feminism, inequality, pay, education, all of these things, we forget how there is so much misogyny and we’re seeing it a lot more now. Donald Trump is elected, the Epstein files coming out, everything that’s going on with the Manosphere documentary that just came out and these real rightwing men on the internet. We’re seeing all this misogyny bubble up in real time, but it’s always been there. And I think we can forget how it’s always been there. It doesn’t take far to scratch below the surface to know this is really terrifying for young women, as you say, for all women.
TM: Incredible, incredible work you’re doing here with this novel. I want to pivot a little bit now and talk about you, as writer, and your practice. We talked about how you got this book out into the world, just from idea to first and second draft and the timeline it took you, but what does your writing practice look like?
IH: I think about this so much because I’m so fascinated by it with other writers. It’s really strange for me because I have done it since I was so little, and it’s the skill that has always come most naturally to me. I don’t know where the skill came from, but I just hear and see these stories in my mind and to me, it’s all about rhythms. The heart of the practice, there’s the rhythm of the story that I’m hearing. I was really pleased when you picked up on pacing because that is ultimately how I write. I know if I’m on beat and I know if I’m off beat, that’s the deep mechanics of what I’m doing. And then in terms of wider practice, like when I write and where I write, I have zero routine. When I lost my job and I was like, hey, these three months, I’m just going to write my novel. That was the first time in my life that I was ever just full-time writing. And I thought, I’m going to wake up, I’m going to take my morning pages, go for my walk, write my five good words. I never did that. I would procrastinate all day long and then it would hit about 10PM and I’d be like, I better write some words. Good day. I probably wrote most of the novel between like 10PM and 1AM. And now that I’m very far into my second novel, I know that that’s still how I am. I can’t have a routine around it. But deep in my brain, I’m constantly thinking, I’m constantly figuring out; where does that scene fit, what’s going on with this character, how does that image tie into this? And then through doing that deep thinking, I’m creating kind of like a song that I’m hearing in my head. And sometimes I can hit farther ahead in a song, but I’m not quite there yet. So when I sit down, it’s all to do with that rhythm and I know it as soon as I’m writing. Where that kind of thinking comes from, I can’t say, I’ve just sort of had it since I was little.
TM: And it works for you. I think a lot of us writers get stuck on this idea that being a writer means that I’ve got to get up at 5AM and I’ve got to get words down. That works for some people. It doesn’t work for everybody. I’m also very much a when I can get to sit down, I can sit down and do it. But you said something that’s very important, which alludes to the next piece of my question, and you’ve sort of answered. You’re always writing.
IH: That’s true.
TM: Even if you’re not at the pen and paper or at the computer. I’m a pen and paper girlie, but even still, I’m always writing in some capacity.
IH: I’m so impressed with people who write with pen and paper.
TM: I have to get that first bit out with pen and paper, but technology has helped me because voice memos, I’m a real fan of them.
IIH: Will you dictate?
TM: I do.
IH: Wow, that’s very impressive. Oh, I couldn’t do that. That’s very cool.
TM: I do, because I feel like we’re always writing, we’re always in that ether in some way or the other. So we’re continuously working on the story in whatever capacity. And when something hits and I feel myself getting too far for me to remember all of it, I’ll stop and I’ll hit record on a voice memo. And there’s something about speaking it out loud that the flow just comes for me.
IH: Yes, the rhythm.
TM: The rhythm. And then I just type it. So, I like how your writing practice looks. It feels very similar to mine. Like when I get to the paper, I’ll get to it, but the idea is always alive.
IH: Actually, that’s it. I realized that eighty percent of the writing takes place off the page, in the mind. And I’ve realized another thing too that sometimes, I don’t know if you have those, but when I come up with a scene I know it’s better for me to delay writing it and to kind of let the ideas like fatten in my head. And then I’ll have this feeling of okay, that’s ready to write now. I think it’s cool and you have to listen to that. It’s a very quiet thing that goes on, but again, that wouldn’t work if I had to be at the desk at 9AM every morning. Whereas some writers say it’s fun on the seat to get up and get to that desk.
TM: Exactly. I love that. I like that you just brought up the way of seeing the story and letting the scene play out in your head because I feel like that’s how the story comes to life for most writers. Now reading this book, you do that extraordinarily well. It’s something that doesn’t often happen for me while I’m reading, I think the last book that happened for me was Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite.
IH: Oh, yes. I haven’t read that one, but I’ve read My Sister, The Serial Killer.
T: This second one is spectacular.
IH: I’ll put it on my list.
TM: I could see everything that’s happening as I’m reading it in Honey. I’m seeing it in real time as I’m going. I love that feeling when a book can do that. So good. And of course, in my head, I’m like, are we going Netflix? Are we going Prime? Is this going to be a movie? I’m already having these thoughts.
IH: My second novel, I’m writing it very much with film in mind. It’s kind of like a film in my head. But Honey was TV. It was in more episodic chapters in my head.
TM: And I’m ready for it. We’ll wait for them to catch up and see, but I’m ready for it. Now, what does your writing community look like and how has that shifted and or sustained you leading up to this debut?
IH: Yeah, this is so nice because I’d never felt like I really had a writing community until really recently. When I was at uni, I had an amazing community in terms of theater and there were so many creatives, but not specifically creative writing. And it was only when I started working at Daunt Books, which is this really beautiful chain of independent bookstores in London, and chatting to my colleagues there, so many people were writing novels, poems, short stories, I was like, this is low-key a writer’s group. This is amazing. I get to come to work and sell books and just chat about craft and writing. So we then said we must now set up a writer’s group and we call it Daunted Writers. And often we do just go to the pub and gossip but it’s so lovely because one of my really good friends from Daunt, she is about to go on submission with her first novel, we’ve shared our novels with each other and we’ve given feedback. Also with the whole finding agents and just like trying to figure out the publishing world, it’s been so great because there’s another writer who has been published, he’s been so wonderful to talk to. With my flatmate as well, because we’re so conscious of that need for community and living in London, it’s such a big city and everyone just lives so far from each other, another thing we’ve started to do is host monthly get-togethers in our flat. We invite not just writers, but visual artists, actors, musicians, and everyone comes and the idea is to come, you just have to share something. Doesn’t have to be finished, it can be totally something you’re working on. And we just are trying to build that sense of community and connection. Honestly, it’s given us so much life. I love it so much because it’s so isolating, a lot of this work, and you can feel like, where am I going? Is anyone else doing this? So, yeah, making those connections has been the best thing about moving to London and was the best thing about working at Daunt Books.
TM: I love that for you. And I’m going to steal that idea because I have writer friends and we try to piece it together, and while I live in New York, I don’t live in the city. I live about an hour and a half from the city and most of my writer people are down in the city. So we try to get together but doing it virtually just doesn’t feel the same as being in person.
IH: Well, I recommend the once a month thing. We do it the first Sunday of the month and it’s like if we can’t make that Sunday, we can come again. But that regularity, I think, is really nice because we don’t often have that within our communities as well.
TM: Right, very true, thank you for sharing that. I love doing these interviews because I get a little piece of something from everyone that I add to my toolkit. You said that in your writer’s group you have one of your writer buddies who’s a published author and he’s been on the journey for publication. Tell me about Nick and how helpful it was to have a friend who’d gone on the journey, and then tell me what your journey was like?
IH: He was writing children’s books. And then he wrote his first adult fiction book. It’s called The Garden and it’s also published in the States. It’s really wonderful. It’s about these two old women who live in this garden and it’s very mysterious, you don’t really know how they got there and they’re sisters. So he’s been really lovely just to talk to. And then my publishing journey, I honestly feel like I’ve had the most blessed journey someone could have into publishing. I finished the draft and I was doing my final edits when my dad kept saying to me, “You should just write to writers and ask their advice.” I was like, I don’t know, I don’t want to bother people. And then I read this pretty great book called The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams and she lived in London and she just seemed really cool. So I wrote to her and I said, “I just wondered if you had any advice and I loved your novel so much.” She was so nice and she sat down with me on Zoom for 90 minutes and answered all of my questions and she herself had worked in publishing. So she said, “What agency are you going to submit to?” So I had my list because I’d been to the bookseller and made my list. And then she gave me more names and she was like, “This person’s really cool. I know these people personally, you should submit to these agents.” And she was like, “Nikki Chang.” So then I looked up Nikki Chang and she became my top choice agent. I then submitted probably to five agents to begin with and of course, when you submit, everyone’s like, forget it. You could wait weeks or you might never hear back. So they’re not thinking about it. I thought, Hey, you have to forget this. I walked to the tube and Nikki had replied, like, honestly, within twenty-five minutes. And she said, you know, I love your first three chapters, can you send your whole manuscript, which I did. I’d sign with her within like three days, within the week. It was just amazing because everyone else that I submitted to initially rejected me as well. So it just goes to show in publishing and with the agents, how much luck can be involved in the timing of all of this. Then I did a really big edit with her. I knew I wanted to work with her because the things that she pulled out of the novel that weren’t working, I thought, yeah, I know they’re not working. So we did a big edit in the space of about a month. I felt like it took me like a year to write the book and then I rewrote it in the space of a month. And then she said, “Okay, I think it’s good to go on submission.” I was so scared, I said to her, “I’m so scared.” She goes, “Yeah, I’m scared too. You just never know how the market’s going to react.” The first deal was Germany, which really surprised me, and I think that can be quite common for the writers in the UK. Then it was gaining traction in the UK and Nikki decided we’re going to send it to the US. And then there was this really surreal two weeks where I was meeting all of these editors on Zoom in my bedroom. Then I was meeting UK editors because it went to auction in both countries. I’m so, so happy with who was publishing the book in both countries. They’ve just been amazing, my editors and publishers. I do feel very blessed with the whole journey.
TM: Oh, I love that you had that really positive publishing journey. Still with its bumps and rolls because you sent it to some people that said,”Not for us”, but then you found the person that’s for you. Nikki’s gonna be a champion for the work, and not just for the work but for you as the author.
IH: Yes, and that’s really important. I mean, the agent is just so incredibly important, that very opaque side of the industry. If it wasn’t for Ore being so nice to me with her time, I don’t know if I would have found Nikki. It’s not easy to suss out the agents.
TM: Yeah, it’s like a gravel-filled road with lots of potholes and you kind of have to walk it and make sure, if I put my foot in there I won’t twist my ankle while also trying to stay on the even path.
IH: How was your journey, I’m curious?
TM: I’m still on it. I’m doing so many things. I’m a teaching artist with a day job as a high school English teacher. I wrote a memoir that I’ve only sent to five people thus far; four rejected it and then there’s a possible. Before I was hyperfixated on getting my book out in the world now now now, and everything depended on that for me in the way I was approaching writing as a career. Then I took a couple of classes on the business of publishing and it shifted my entire perspective on how to build my career. Build it to last. The book is one facet. I took a hard inventory of what the other things are that I love to do? I love having these conversations with other writers and published authors and I love teaching…adults. Figuring out those pieces of my career freed up my mind to not put all my laurels in that basket of ‘book deal’. The book deal will come.
IH: I would say learning about the publishing industry has shifted my perspective in a big way too. I was conscious, before the first book came out, of thinking about the fact that it’s not just the novel. Also now that the book is coming out, it’s such a long process that you have to have other things to fill your life outside your novel because you’d just be sitting around for literally years waiting for your novel to come out. So I feel like, yeah this is happening, but I would also love to teach in the future, so how do you build out not just your novel, but a career? And it’s much healthier, I agree with you, because if that one doesn’t go too well, oh well, I’ve got other things.
TM: And other things still in the same vein of the thing that you love. It freed me up to now look at my second project with earnestness. I haven’t even looked at my memoir because I’ve given it everything that I got and when I sign with an agent, we’ll go to edits and we’ll look with fresh eyes again.
IH: Yes. And also for me, I think you feel the same, it’s a reminder of craft. You love the craft of writing so it’s smart to stay engaged with that and focus on making that as good as it can be. You can’t control the commerciality around how the world’s going to read you and your work, but what you can do is look at, am I writing really good sentences today?
TM: Yes! You see? I get what I need. You’re not just getting a good interview, Imani. I’m getting gems here too. There are a couple of staple questions I ask all the authors that I chat with. First one, what are you most looking forward to once the novel is officially out in the world?
IH: I’m so flipped between so much excitement and so much anxiety. I’m trying to remain in the excitement. I think probably the feeling of release, that it’s out in the world, because I wrote it a long time ago and I had sold it a long time ago. So just the feeling of being able to exhale and truly let it go, I’m hoping will be a nice feeling. I think what I’m most excited for in terms of what I hope happens is that I’ll travel. I’ve already been invited to do a couple of festivals and to do some events in different parts of the country that I’d get to travel and meet people because I love traveling and I love meeting new people. So if my novel took me to different places, that’s a dream come true. I would just be so happy.
TM: It will. Bank on a lot of stamps in your passport coming up.
IH: Oh my god, that would be phenomenal. If I got to go to another country because of my book, wow!
TM: I’m looking out for when you come over here to the States. Now, what’s the last book that you read for fun and the last book that you read for craft?
IH: It’s like whenever someone asks me what I’m reading, I always have such a blank. So for craft, I’ve been doing a lot of research for my second book. I think probably the last that I recently read was The Famished Road by Ben Okri because in my new book I have a Nigerian character and I wanted him to straddle that spiritual world. So the Nigerian realism of Okri, I was really loving to read that book. Oh my god, it’s a long book and it’s only one of three. I don’t know if I’m going to make it through the other two. But it was so wonderful to read though, because you know when you have these ideas, and you can’t piece them together, then you read someone who’s already doing it and you’re like, yeah, that’s the energy that I need from this. That was for craft. And then for fun, I read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish author who has won the Nobel Prize. I read her novel Primeval and Other Times before that. My friend gave it to me because I love One Hundred Years of Solitude, so he was like, if you love that, this is Polish One Hundred Years of Solitude. Whenever I read writers like her, I also feel like it’s for craft too because she’s so great. And what she’s so good at is really pushing form with literature and I feel like George Saunders is the same as this. They really push form and they’re so deep and it’s so beautiful. They just maintain this lightness and humor in how they write and that’s what I really aspire to.
TM: Thank you for those. And a wisdom you’ve learned from your journey, writing and publishing that you can share with emerging writers. Or something dastardly, like, don’t do this.
IH: I think it sounds sort of cynical, but I think it’s helpful to think about because it’s very true that you come to writing because often it’s really in your heart and you have this impulse towards words. It’s so personal and it’s just you, for so many hours, alone with your manuscript. And then you hit big industry if you want to get published, huge commercial wheels that are turning. So I think it’s just trying to think about that whilst you’re working on your manuscript and having an awareness of the commerciality of what you’re venturing into and how difficult that can be. So when it comes to it, it’s not as shocking or as painful. When I finished the draft, I went to the London Book Fair with my mum. I don’t know if it was a very good thing to do because even though I thought about industry, I was like, oh my god, like this is an industry. And you are only one book of thousands. So I think having that perspective whilst you’re working can be helpful when you then enter into that publishing process.
TM: That’s excellent advice. If there was a byline for the class that I took, that would be it. It’s books and it’s writing and it’s craft and you love it and you do it well, but this is a business. And if you don’t understand that, you’re going to have a lot of unnecessary heartbreak.
IH: Yeah, and that’s it. I wrote the book about a serial killer because I knew that that was commercial. I knew that the themes and everything I wanted to write about and positioning a black protagonist as I was doing was not commercial and it was going to be really difficult to get published. So that’s why I combine these two things. So I was tactical in my thinking of the plot that I put together. This is where the sociology comes back into it. I know that the books that do well or art that does well, it’s not just because of the quality of the craft. This is so important; you can’t mess around with the quality of the craft. But it’s culture, it’s what politics wants at the time. And it’s important to think about that in relation to your work, if you want to. If you want to get published, I think it’s good to think about.
TM: You should. You’re right. Good advice. Alright, last question, and you’ve shared a little bit, a little drop here and there but I want you to share what you can on what’s coming next for you. You’re working on your second novel so whatever you can share with us about that.
IH: My psycho novel, it’s funny. I actually feel like my second novel, weirdly, is more me than my first novel. I sat down in Dorset in the southwest of England where I grew up and there was a boat that was housing migrants and refugees in Portland, and it was super dystopian. It was very much like this sort of prison boat on the water. So I was thinking about this and I knew that I wanted to write about a couple who were trying for a baby and who were building a house, I had all these images. And then I thought about this boat and I thought about multiple boats off the coast of England, and from that image, I was like, that’s a novel. So the novel is set in the near future. It’s softly dystopian. It’s imagining an extreme right-wing party who get reelected and then there is a massive drought in the Sahala region of Africa, which is causing a refugee crisis in the UK and Europe. So there are these huge political things going on in the book, but at the same time, it’s this kitchen sink drama about this marriage and a woman who’s very intent on sabotaging her marriage, and the difficulties of them trying for a baby. I’ve done a lot of research into this and it’s funny writing a book in the future because Honey is very of the time and it’s filled with cultural references and this is kind of a novel of no time, but every time. I’m taking Margaret Atwood’s approach of only including things that’ve already happened through history in the novel. So I see an end to it now. This week I’ve been super immersed in the world of it and it’s not too long until an end is in sight, which is nice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Imani Thompson is a British writer with Jamaican heritage. During her time studying sociology at the University of Cambridge, her short stories were published in The Mays and won the Vogue new writer’s prize. She wrote Honey while working as a bookseller at Daunt Books and is now at work on her second novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Tsahai Makeda is a Jamaican-American writer who writes about the human experience and its impact on one’s sense of self in the world. When not writing, she is reading or knitting. She earned her BA in English, minor in Philosophy, from The State University of New York at New Paltz and her MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches workshops at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and has received support for her work from The Center for Black Fiction and The Kenyon Review. She received The Caribbean Writer’s 2023 Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for her short story, ‘For Generations’. Her work appears in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Women Who Submit, Epiphany, Breadcrumbs, REWRITE London, The Caribbean Writer, & Prairie Schooner. She’s recently finished writing her memoir and is in conversations to get it out into the world. She lives at the foot of the Catskills where she writes and reads, and writes some more.