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Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

I’m alone in these thoughts, alone in my field. Every one of my colleagues took up the study of suicide with the aim of eventually contributing to its prevention. I’ve come to realise I entered into it with the aim of contributing to its defence.

This is a brave and challenging novel - one I find hard to write about as it strays into painful areas where I've no experience. The narrator, Jessica, now in her mid 30s, is an evolutionary psychobiologist, researching the field of animals that self-destruct for various reasons, specialising in a type of spider where barren females will sometimes bite off their own legs and die.

At this point I should share that evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary biologists � and I say this as an evolutionary psychobiologist � are storytellers. We’re fantasists. Everything we conclude is made up. We observe things, and hopefully the observations themselves are not made up. But the inferences we make are. Of course they are. How on earth can we ever know exactly why animals do the things they do? [...] We can’t. We see the what and we invent the why. And as new observations come in, we hope the new stories we invent might get closer to the truth. But they’re
still stories. I’m not saying we do it deliberately, but when we attribute meaning to an observation, we can only work with what we already know and have experienced. Inevitably our findings will more often than not uphold the status quo, or more correctly, our own beliefs.

So when this auto-cannibalistic little critter was discovered, the male scientists involved decided, perhaps you might argue naturally, that the reason for their suicidal behaviour was that the older females recognised they no longer had a use, a function, a meaning. They were old and ugly and past it and barren, no male spider would ever look at them in that way again, so why not just eat off all of their own legs? Makes total sense.

Except there’s more to the story. After university I joined the group that twenty years previously had discovered this spider’s strange behaviour. Although my work was largely focused on a scorpion species at the time, I found myself becoming deeply fascinated by this special money spider. And only partly because the scorpions and larger spiders in the lab scared the absolute crap out of me. I convinced my supervisor to let me build a few chapters centered around Atypena lentili into my PhD thesis, and I watched them. I watched and I watched. And I found that not all old and barren Atypena lentili females kill themselves. In fact, only a particular type do. That type is the female located close to its female kin, which in nature may not occur frequently, but in the lab often does, and still receiving male attention. Only in these cases does the spider get hungry for its own legs. If no other females are present, she lets the males waste their time trying to fertilise non-existent eggs and carries on living. If she’s surrounded by kin, but the male spiders are ignoring her in favour of those kin, she hangs around to watch. But if she thinks she’s getting in the way of her genes being passed on, getting in the way not by being an old hag, but an irresistible old hottie, she does herself in. Evolutionarily, this makes far more sense than the arguably ageist and sexist initial interpretation. Rather than thinking life is pointless without a man, the older female’s sacrifice actively increases the chances of passing on genes she shares.

Her underlying thesis is that suicide is an altruistic act, designed to ensure the greatest likelihood of the survival of the gene pool to which the individual is associated. Her motivation to enter thi field, and indeed the belief she wants to prove, comes from three acts of attempted or actual suicide, or ultimately fatal self-harm, in which she was personally involved, and relays to the intended reader (whose identity only becomes clearer later in the novel) in harrowing detail. The first of these is the attempted suicide, via an overdose, of her (physically not sexually) abusive father which, many years later, she now actually regrets having prevented.

The trauma of her father's mistreatment of her mother has impacted the lives of her and her two younger siblings in different ways, and while she would claim to be least impacted, it did cause the break up of a long-term relationship with her girlfriend, Jamie, as Jessica was unable to envisage surrogage parenting.

The story is also broken up with chapters in italics, each titled 'A Black Day', describing an event which is clearly a funeral, but whose funeral is not clear.

And the novel takes a more hopeful twist in the latter third (but not without some more dark events to come), as a baby, Savannah, does unexpectedly come in to Jessica's life and cause her to question her choices, if not necessarily her theories.

Now none of this sounds like me, I know. It sounds like someone else, someone normal, someone I admire, someone I want to be. So, who am I now? The calmer past few months have allowed me not only to sleep but also to ponder this question. Am I someone new? Or have I always been this person and I just didn’t recognize it before? Wasn’t I cold and hard and broken and warped and full of regret and obsessed with death and suicide? Wasn’t I a person who couldn’t decide whether saving a life was the worst thing I’d ever done? Wasn’t that who I was until Savannah came along? Or have I been telling myself the wrong story? And if I made choices based on that story, based on who I thought I was, but I was wrong about that story and myself, what about those choices? What about Jamie?

There's a nice spot-the-book book club section as well. (view spoiler)[It's A Little Life (hide spoiler)]

It makes for an odd mixture - both very dark but also redemptive, drawing intelligently on evolutionary science (including the scientific theories behind the evolutionary rationale for homosexuality) but stylistically also close to millennial hetero-female fiction (Rooney, Dolan etc) with a made-for-TV element: there's a bit too much of a 'onimous music plays in background' cinematic foreshadowing with two key scenes with Jessica navigating steep stairs with hot tea, and the reveal of the truth about the 'A Black Day' sections, despite some clues that at first sight suggested otherwise, is the sort of reader manipulation of which I'm not fond.

But ultimately one key test of a novel for me is whether this is something different, and in terms of topic (including the evolutionary psychobiology) this is very original and challenging.

The publisher

époque press is an independent publisher based in Brighton, with connections to Dublin and New York, established to promote and represent the very best in new literary talent.

I'd also add new talent that is approaching the novel, or it's subject matter, from a different angle. I've previously read and reviewed from them: If the River is Hidden, Seek The Singing Fish, Ghosts of Spring, What Willow Says, The Beasts They Turned Away and The Nacullians, each fascinating and adding something to the standard literary fare.