A debut novel that’s shortlisted for the Booker Prize is a rare coup: with May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry finds herself in the company of Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar), and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain). But it’s a well-established nominee who she credits with inspiring her novel. Reading Percival Everett’s The Trees, which she describes as “batshit” in the best of ways, showed her it was possible to write the kind of genre-bending book she aspired to.
With May We Feed the King, Perry works in historical fiction but questions memory, research, and truth. A curator is commissioned to arrange rooms for the 750th anniversary of a palace. She avoids looking at her own past by becoming lost in the mysterious legacy of a medieval king. When the anniversary celebration begins, she implores visitors to consider history elastic and make their own meaning from the artifacts in the rooms.
Genre isn’t the only literary norm Perry played with. We connected via email about her choices with plot, white space, and writing in the bath.
Amanda Nyren: Congrats on being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. You’ve earned honors before for your poetry, and May We Feed the King won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Did this feel any different?
Rebecca Perry: I think having had some prize success in poetry has been a helpful precursor to what has happened with May We Feed the King, but the reality is that the readership for fiction is so, so much bigger so it’s just another level. Winning the Waterstones prize was such a beautiful and unexpected boost, and having the support of that many booksellers transforms the life of the book overnight. Booker is obviously its own thing altogether, though, and nothing quite prepares you for something that readers are invested in on a more global scale.
AN: What drew you to write a novel?
RP: I’d stopped writing poetry and wondered if I might be able to carry the spirit or if, or recapture the feeling of writing it, in prose. I wrote a lyrical non-fiction/memoir called On Trampolining which was sort of a half-way point between the two forms, and it made me feel that embarking on a prose project might not be completely out of the question. I was also drawn to the challenge of seeing if I could write longer form, and enter a world for an extended period of time, and think about place and character and plot (although there isn’t necessarily a huge amount of that in the book).
AN: You’ve said that Percival Everett’s The Trees led you to consider writing a novel. What was it about that particular book? Do you think it was partly a case of “right book, right time?”
RP: I think so. I read it on holiday in Mexico and it just felt like a blast of cold air to the face. I then read some of his earlier work, and the variety is just astonishing – what a writer! I was actually talking to the friend who gave me The Trees as a gift a few weeks ago and said to him that I may not have written May We Feed the King if he hadn’t done that, and how it was funny because our books have nothing in common. His response was interesting because he said, well no they’re incredibly similar in that they’re taking a genre and doing something completely unique with it and remaining totally in control of what is being done. So that was interesting because I’d never thought of it that way before, and I think he’s right. Everett is ultimately pulling off something absolutely batshit in the most convincing way, and that must have struck a chord.
AN: You’ve also said you wrote a lot in the bath. Not to sound creepy, but I need to know details. Did you use pen and paper? Did you ever accidentally lose what you’d written to the water? Was there a certain time of day or ritual? How long can you physically sit in a bath for?
RP: Creep away! So I have a large bath with a tile surround (so I can have lots of bits and bobs around me—water, a hand towel, snacks—as well as my cat sitting on the edge) and I use a wooden tray to put my laptop on. I would generally hop in after work and stay there for an hour and a half—longer on weekends. This setup makes people incredibly nervous and it’s honestly a miracle I didn’t destroy my laptop in the process but I didn’t have even one close call.
AN: How is the novel form like and unlike a poetry collection? In particular, I’m curious if you think about “arc” or character in a poem or poetry collection and how you found this to be the same or different when writing a novel. (I don’t write poetry, so please excuse my total lack of knowledge.)
RP: I think this probably depends very much on the writer and the kinds of books they’re interested in. Some people will write a whole poetry collection on a particular theme, moving from one point to another, and others will write a collection of poems where each is its own distinct piece that doesn’t bear much relation to the other pieces it’s sharing the jacket with, then lots of people do something somewhere between the two. I think that’s the camp I’d fall into—my two collections have been comprised of poems that share some preoccupations but aren’t thematic. I am interested in recurring images, or motifs that weave throughout a collection, and the same was certainly true in May We Feed the King when I was working on the very much not explicit ways in which the King’s world and the curator’s world were intertwined.
AN: The story is told in bursts, episodes that feel perfectly arranged, like words and lines in a poem as well as the items in one of the narrator’s curated rooms. How did you know how to sequence information, events, and description? Was it wholly intuitive?
RP: In a way yes, but I went through many redrafts to get to the final form and structure. To begin with we moved between the two worlds in alternating chapters, then I made the decision that the medieval section needed to be like a standalone immersion. Once I’d settled on that I shuffled things around for months and I understood the characters and the world of the book more, but I never had a plan for any of it so had to just stop once I felt everything had settled into the right place.
AN: Two somewhat contradictory words come to mind to describe your prose: lush but exacting. It reminds me of how in curating, the narrator would prefer nothing to the wrong thing, which might cheapen the room. How analytically do you think at the line and word level? Or do you let things flow from you like music?
RP: When I’m in the flow I try not to edit myself too much as I go, and I love that feeling so much, but then I always go back and pay attention to things pretty much as closely as if I were writing a poem. I think if you start out in poetry, things like rhythm, line, and space will always be important to you. There was a point with this book where I just couldn’t find the right verb for something, so I workshopped options in one of my groups chats (with writer friends) for way longer than would seem reasonable.
AN: How do you balance detail against the bigger picture story? Do you ever get lost in the weeds? How do you pull yourself out?
RP: I get lost constantly! At one point I kept saying to my best pal, ‘Plot is so hard! Does there have to be plot?!’ Obviously the book is pretty plot-light, and it’s not something I’m hugely driven by, but there’s still work to be done in maintaining energy and momentum. I think a fair bit of that happened during the editorial process with help from my editor who was able to point me in the direction of places where things needed a nudge along.
AN: Let’s talk about white space. There are pages that act as buffers, maybe even portals, when the narrative jumps across time. There’s also a blank line between paragraphs. Tell me how you thought about this, as I’m sure you have a lot to say as a poet.
RP: I suppose I think of space in the book as a character of sorts, in the same way as I think of the setting as a character. It’s kind of a living and breathing thing. In the King’s section, the fragmentary nature of the text serves a practical function in that I wanted it to replicate the sense of reading through scraps in an archive, piecing things together, but space also allows text to breathe and offers space for readers to fill in those gaps—with noise or silence, or their own words—if they’re so compelled. It dictates the pace of a book, and it invites a reader to dwell on parts you might want to draw their eye to. On a personal level, I find that if I turn a page in a book and just see two dense pages of text, and then the same again and again, it almost feels oppressive!
AN: So much of this book reminded me of the actual process of writing. I loved how much you leave things off the page—what exactly the narrator is grieving, what happens to the king—and let the reader construct a story. This is more or less good storytelling 101 (aka “show don’t tell”) but it takes on greater meaning in your book as it’s what the narrator does as a curator and it’s also what she encourages visitors to the palace to do (i.e. find their own meaning). Were you thinking about writing and storytelling? Did this theme ever make it difficult to create a complete arc? Do you even worry about arc, or plot?
RP: Yes, I was absolutely thinking about writing and storytelling: who gets to tell stories and how they’re pieced together. The main difficulty/consideration was figuring out how to resist the impulse to complete the story, as it were, to resist the things we so often find satisfying in writing. I thought a lot about how to end the King’s section, what I wanted from that and how to hold on to the book’s intention without a reader feeling somehow cheated. I also experimented a lot with the book’s ending. Initially we didn’t return to the present day and then it became clear to me that we had to. Because I had no idea how the book would end as I was writing it, the arc had to sort of emerge very messily, and I had to pick it out of the mud. Discovering the story as you go ultimately probably isn’t the most efficient way to write a novel, but it was the only way I could do it.
AN: The book is beautiful and also political: it concerns a king’s legacy (several kings actually) and asserts the subjectivity of history and even artifacts and documents, which some might argue speak for themselves. If history and historical records are subjective, how do we reconcile them to make decisions in the present and plans for the future?
RP: A huge question! It’s interesting that people often talk about the need to study history in order to learn from it. But so much of the time it feels like we aren’t learning anything; we haven’t yet freed ourselves from the grip of the ruling classes or figured out a society that works for everyone, we still wage wars, genocides go unchallenged, the vulnerable are oppressed, wealth is grotesquely distributed. Things that have been happening for centuries and will continue to happen despite all of the evidence that shows no good comes of it. I don’t want to end on a super bleak note, but I suppose that subjectivity allows for conversation and connection, and in finding the human in those records. For me, that is what gives life its urgency—it will end, we have proof of that!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. Her first book-length collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, Stone Fruit, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Amanda Nyren’s writing has been published in Sonora Review, The Pinch, and Phoebe. She studied Creative Writing at Northwestern University and lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her on Substack.