Waters Talks Crime and Cars

“I speak for I think many people in the audience when I say, ‘Yes, we’re back to the lesbians,’” began author Emily M. Danforth during her conversation with fellow queer author Sarah Waters at the Brattle Theatre on September 18. Waters, who has to date written six highly lauded historical novels—five of which feature lesbians as protagonists—participated in the Harvard Book Store-sponsored event as part of her tour promoting her newest book, “The Paying Guests,” which was published on September 16. Unlike her previous novel, “The Little Stranger,” “The Paying Guests” centers on a lesbian romance—a development that pleased the overwhelmingly female audience at the event, judging by the whoops and cheers that followed Danforth’s quip.

Waters’s lesbian-centric fiction is arguably unique in the accolades it has garnered: she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize twice and the Orange Prize for Fiction once. To a casual reader, then, Waters can seem the sole writer in her genre. She sees the situation quite differently, however: at the time she began writing, she says, various small presses were publishing substantial volumes of lesbian and gay fiction. “It seemed like a really exciting time for lesbian and gay writing,” she says. “And not all of it was fantastically ambitious. But it was exciting that it was there at all…. I felt part of a community of readers. And I think knowing that there was that community of readers enabled me as a writer.”

Waters transitioned into writing from academia: she holds a Ph.D. from Queen Mary University of London that she earned for a thesis on lesbian and gay historical fiction, particularly focused on the Victorian era. It is no surprise, then, that her first three novels are set in Victorian England. “It was in writing my thesis that I had the ideas for my first novel because I’d been looking at late Victorian gay life and also looking at contemporary lesbian and gay historical fiction,” Waters says. For her fourth and fifth novel she moved to the 1940s, a period that was at the time comparatively new for her.

“The Paying Guests,” however, is set in the 1920s. “When I was writing about the ’40s, I was very conscious that [the ’20s] was where my characters had sort of come from, but I knew very little about it,” Waters says. “It was in doing research on the period that the novel emerged for me.” During her talk, Waters provided insight into what this research process looked like. She described how she began researching the period by reading authors such as Woolf and Huxley but was left unsatisfied. “As wonderful as their fiction is, I couldn’t identify with it at all. It just gave me no purchase on the ’20s,” Waters said. “And I realized it was because those novels are about high society people…and I realized I wanted to write a novel about ordinary, suburban people.” Waters instead began to consult records of criminal trials in lieu of novels. “If you look at the transcripts from these trials, they give you this very immediate access into these people’s lives,” she said.

For Waters, however, the research process is not necessarily straightforward; there is naturally a dearth of historical records from the ’20s detailing lesbian relationships. Though Waters does think of her writing as to a certain extent uncovering hidden lesbian stories of the past, at the same time she recognizes that her novels often do, to some degree, change the past. “[I think about] taking on the stereotypes we have about the past or the myths we have about the past and sort of queering them, sort of putting lesbian in them, to…make them accommodate lesbian stories,” she says. During the event, Waters commented on one description of her novels that she liked in particular. “There was a review recently that I loved…talking about the books as being like a queer retro-fitting on a car,” she said. “And I really liked that idea…like I’m taking the chassis of an old car and shoving in a queer engine.”

“It’d have to be a hybrid,” quipped Danforth in response.