Anna Mackmin: 'I knew far too many children who were having sex with adults'

The novelist has poured her memories of growing up in a hippy commune in Norfolk into her debut novel Devoured, and baked them into an experimental comedy about the me generation

There is something so vivid and truthful about Nearly Thirteen, the 12-year-old heroine of Anna Mackmin’s debut novel Devoured, that I spend the opening half of our interview asking which bits were drawn from Mackmin’s stranger-than-fiction childhood and which were cooked up in her imagination. Like her narrator, Mackmin grew up in a kind of commune in 1970s Norfolk. Both Mackmin and Nearly Thirteen had a poet father, a younger sister and an agoraphobic mother who drove a white Saab. Both were precocious, home-educated and excellent cooks. And both endured the spectre of abuse as they came of age in a rackety era of bohemian self-discovery.

So the passage in Devoured in which Mummy runs out of Swallow’s Farm and bares her breasts in protest at a crop-spraying plane must, I assume, be true. “I made that up,” laughs Mackmin in triumph when we meet near her London home. “There are profound resonances with mine and my sister’s childhood, and massive acres of made-up stuff. I’d never written anything before and it was a visceral pleasure to invent stuff.”

I can sew, I can make my own shoes, I can build a bonfire, I can drive a tractor. Rabbit skinning? Boom! Job done

Laughter is breath, it alters your being, and it allows you to move on, and keep living

Continue reading...

from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yxxP69