Interview

Helen Simpson interview: ‘The great

unspoken subject for couples is probably:
whose job is more important?’
Sarah Crown
The short story writer on tackling taboo subjects, from motherhood
to menopause, and speaking up for women
Sat 24 Oct 2015 09.30 BST

H
alfway through our interview, Helen Simpson begins to worry
about the time. We’d frittered the first few minutes on general
civilities, and squandered several more fiddling with books
and bags and glasses of water. Now the clock is ticking, and
we’re paying for our profligacy. “We’ve only got an hour,” she
frowns. “How far in are we?” She unclasps her watch and lays it on the
table between us. “There. We’re all right. We can see how long we’ve got
left.”

The characters in Cockfosters, Simpson’s latest short story collection, are

checking their watches, too. The men and women who pick their way
through its pages are deep into middle-age, and more or less relaxed about
it: after the heads-down grind of the baby years, they have finally begun
“to crawl up out of their burrows ... and emerge blinking into the
sunlight”. Identities have been re-established; relationships have regained
a degree of equilibrium: there’s a sense of expansiveness, of room for
reflection. But as the characters’ gazes lift, at last, to the horizon, they
notice that it’s closer than it used to be. The stories are filled with markers
of time’s passage: a birthday cake baked year-in year-out for a daughter
who’s now fully grown; the rigid itinerary of a retirement package tour;
the “lime-green digits” of a bedside clock counting down the minutes
until morning. “‘It’s annoying not knowing how long we’ve got left, don’t
you think?’” says Julie in the collection’s title story, as she and a
schoolfriend, now in their 50s, track down her misplaced bifocals to the
last stop on the Piccadilly line. “‘Thirty years,’ said Philippa. ‘Forty!’ ‘Or
ten,’ said Julie. ‘Or two.’”

Simpson brought out her first book, Four Bare Legs in a Bed, in 1990,
followed it up with a second, Dear George, five years later, and a third,
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, five years after that. At this point, the
inadvertent pattern of her publishing began to acquire the look of a
hallmark. Her decision to carry on working to a five-year plan was pivotal,
though it probably didn’t look it at the time; only now, from the vantage
point of 15 years and three collections later, can its real impact be felt.

While the heroines in Simpson’s collections come and go, changing from
story to story, they share crucial strands of DNA. In the first place they are,
mostly, heroines: men step into the spotlight from time to time, but
generally they are there as the foil for Simpson’s astringent depictions of
contemporary female lives. In the second, they are drawn almost
invariably from the metropolitan middle classes: educated professionals
with mortgages and (of course) children. Finally – and this is the part that
gets more interesting with every passing book – their average age mirrors
Simpson’s own, edging up half a decade between collections. Four Bare
Legs’ amorous newlyweds morph into the stupefied mothers of Hey Yeah
Right Get a Life, Constitutional’s (2005) divorcees and outpatients, and,
finally, into Cockfosters’ “sandwich generation”; women who, while
“caught between teens and aged parents”, are nevertheless liberated from
the daily burden of childcare and are feeling out the edges of their
newfound freedom.

With the arrival of each instalment, the impression that Simpson is

engaged in a literary version of This Is England, issuing epochal bulletins
for the baby boomer generation, intensifies. Those who wonder why she
hasn’t tried her hand at a novel are missing the point: while individually
her stories are spare and crystalline, collectively, they have acquired the
breadth and density of a symphony. Over the course of a quarter century,
Simpson has assembled a body of work that delivers one of literature’s
richest accounts of the postwar lives of girls and women.

“Time is the theme,” Simpson agrees. We’re speaking in a tucked-away

room on the top floor of the London Library, where Simpson is a member.
Beneath our feet are nearly two centuries’ worth of books and periodicals,
neatly shelved; it’s an ideal spot to talk temporality. “I’ve always been
fascinated by it, but at this point in life it does begin to move centre stage.
When I was putting the collection together the working title was ‘We Live
In Time’; I ended up slipping the line in here and there. It’s not just me, of
course: all the really good writers know that time is the only true subject.”

Simpson was born in Bristol in 1959. Her mother was a Londoner, forced
out of school by the war at 14; afterwards she trained as a primary school
teacher. Her father’s family were shipbuilders from the north-east; he was
apprenticed in the shipyards and ended up as a naval architect, but left in
his 40s to become a teacher, too. Simpson herself was “the first in my
family to go to university; the first from my school to go to Oxford”; her
education deposited her in precisely the professional middle-classes from
which her characters are lifted. It’s a milieu that only came into existence
in the last half century; a function of history, she believes, rather than
class. “I think I’m very typical of my times,” she says, “and the people I’m
writing about are people like me: those of my generation who, for the first
time, found they could move around, do something different from their
parents and, in the case of women, do something based on their brain.”

So typical was her biography, in fact, that she rewrote it at the first
opportunity. She stayed on at Oxford to study for a PhD, but her heart
wasn’t in it; one day, she picked up a copy of Vogue and saw they were
running a talent contest “in which you had to write your life story in 700
words. My life seemed deeply boring, so I made up a more sensational
one.” She relocated her family from the London suburbs to the wilds of
Yorkshire, gave herself a market gardener father and four paratrooper
brothers, generally amped up the drama. Pure fiction, but it won her a job;
she spent five years at Vogue, writing travel pieces and interviewing the
likes of Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and an aged Lawrence Durrell.

When Vogue published a story of Simpson’s about a woman obsessed with

her new bed, it landed her an agent and a publishing contract. Her first
two collections garnered enthusiastic reviews and respectable sales, but it
was Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, in which, over the course of nine pitch-
perfect vignettes, she ruthlessly exposed the brutal price that motherhood
exacts on women, that made Simpson’s name. While Jay McInerney,
writing in the New York Times, quoted “a militantly childless English
friend who calls this book the ultimate contraceptive”, the response was,
for the most part, ecstatic. “Some of the most sensitive, insightful and
finely crafted stories I have ever read”, said Ruth Rendell; the book was
passed reverently from hand to hand by the same women who, a decade
or so earlier, had exchanged contraband copies of Judy Blume’s Forever
under their desks. Fifteen years on, when you can read half a dozen
unvarnished accounts of the realities of life with children before breakfast,
it’s hard to believe that there was a time so recently when mothers felt
unable to speak out. “I had to be quite brave to tackle that material,”
Simpson says now. “People weren’t talking about it like that at the time;
there was a conspiracy of silence, and it felt very scary to speak up. But it
had to be done. Women were having babies and just disappearing, and no
one was saying anything.”

While the cultural conversation around motherhood has broadened vastly

in the years since, Simpson’s view on the wider position of women in
society remains gloomy. “I went to Suffragette the other night, and it was
upsetting watching it, because it’s still there, the central unfairness,” she
says. On motherhood itself, she is “shocked things haven’t moved on
more,” but relieved that “at least all this is no longer a taboo subject. I
think the current great unspoken subject for couples is probably: whose
job is more important?”

In Cockfosters, Simpson has moved on from maternity to the menopause.

“Arizona”, one of the high points of the collection, features a woman
visiting an acupuncturist for help with migraines. Over the course of the
hour-long appointment, the two women, both on the brink of “coming out
the other side” of reproductive life, engage in a quiet, meandering
discussion of what it will mean to “leave all that behind”: the monthly ebb
and flow, the possibility of motherhood. “A story about the menopause
doesn’t sound like a big seller,” Simpson admits, “but again, it seems to
me that someone’s got to do it. The language around it is so mythic and
fearful; it’s a way of dismissing women over a certain age, just getting rid
of them.” Her characters, however, refuse to be dismissed: slowly, quietly,
they reclaim the territory by naming it for themselves.

“I envisage the new state as being like Arizona,” said Mae at last, opening a
new packet of needles. “Arizona?” said Liz, nonplussed. “Yes,” shruMed
Mae. “What, a desert?” “No, not that. I see it as ... arriving in another state
... brilliantly lit and level and filled with dependable sunshine.” “So that’s it,”
said Liz. “We’re about to emigrate.”
It’s a bright, benevolent vision of a future filled, not with losses, but with
possibilities; as shocking, in its way, to those of us conditioned to the
notion of female old age as dark and witchy, as Simpson’s depiction of
motherhood’s sticky intimacy was a decade and a half ago. “The fact is,”
Simpson says now, “that some people do have a wretched time, but a lot
are fine. It’s like anything else: there are enjoyable bits, too. Old age has
shifted; people expect a lot more of it now. And this has all changed in the
last decade. Children were taboo, then death was taboo, but everyone’s
done death now. Old age – the pleasures of old age – that’s the last one,
maybe.”

And with that, the hour closes; time has run out. We part in a flurry of
coats and goodbyes. Any chance we might meet again in five years’ time,
when the next instalment comes out? “Yes! I don’t see why not. I’d like to
carry on; there’s lots to say, if you’re prepared to say it. Telling the truth is
the main thing: nothing else is consoling. Even if you write something that
seems hard or grim, if it’s truthful, it consoles. You think, ‘yes: that’s how
it is’.” You do.

To order Cockfosters for £12.79 (RRP £15.99) go to

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Topics
Helen Simpson
A life in ...
Short stories
Fiction
features