Q&A with Fran Littlewood

 

Photo by Lucia Littlewood Begg

 

 

Fran Littlewood is the author of the new novel The Accidental Favorite. She also has written the novel Amazing Grace Adams. She lives in London. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Accidental Favorite?

 

A: I’m one of three sisters and I have three daughters. My younger sister also has three daughters. My older sister - slightly ruining the fairy tale-esque symmetry - has two daughters and a son.

 

My mum is one of three sisters (and a brother), so… there’s some strong sister energy in our family, and I wanted to write it, as part of a wider commentary on womanhood.

 

I saw so many parallels between the way I felt my sisters and I were compared growing up (by family friends, teachers, boyfriends…) because we came as a group, a three, and the kind of scrutiny I was seeing young women - my daughters - being subjected to, amplified more than ever before by social media. The same insidious, toxic, social comparison.

 

I was also fascinated by what’s surely the most damaging comparison of all, the notion of a golden child. The taboo of parental favouritism. It was so interesting talking to people in the early stages of the idea because everyone has a story - their own emotional baggage to unpack!

 

The fact is, we’re all conditioned to fight for our parents’ attention and approval, their love. It’s hardwired, and what particularly struck me as I researched, was that this is something that continues into adulthood. Our childhood experiences cast a long shadow.

 

It’s something people don’t tend to talk about in families, and I wanted to crack open all the unspoken, hidden things. To say the quiet part out loud…

 

So the book opens with an almost-accident, during which Patrick, the father of three adult daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva, inadvertently reveals that he has a favourite.

 

I was beguiled by this idea that nothing happens - the accident doesn’t come to pass, and at the same time everything happens, precipitating the unraveling of the Fisher family. I decided to put the characters in a remote glass house in the English countryside, to dial up the pressure on them!

 

Q: The writer Ore Agbaje-Williams said of the book, “Fran Littlewood has that incredible ability to write minute family dynamics with such insane accuracy and wit that it feels like she’s been observing you and your family for years.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love it so much, it’s such a generous thing to say. It really made me laugh, but also, for me, it’s one of the biggest compliments you can get from a reader, that what you’ve written has chimed with them.

 

It’s one of the reasons I read. For those moments when you look away from the page and think, Yes! Exactly that. I know that, I’ve felt that.

 

I really try to get at the truth in what I’m writing, to write into the difficult spaces - and it’s often not pretty. So it’s brilliant to know I’ve written something that has felt real to someone else.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamics among the three Fisher sisters?

 

A: They’re all, to some extent, grappling with the “scripts” they can’t escape - the clever one, the pretty one, the screwup… And I think there’s a real universality in that, these roles we’re boxed into, by our families - by ourselves.

 

The whole point for me was to try to up-end these scripts, to overturn the stereotyping. So that, for example, Nancy, the middle child, who is regarded (and to a degree regards herself) as the “fuck up,” clearly isn’t. She’s a doctor with a successful life, a truth teller. Certainly no more of a fuck up than her sisters, anyway. They’re all imperfect, as we all are, with layers and nuance and contradictions.

 

There’s a lot of dark humour in the dynamic between Alex, Nancy, and Eva, alongside the usual sibling irritation and long-held resentments, often over the smallest things. And there’s also that pit of the stomach love - they’d do anything for one another, if it came down to it.

 

I wanted to capture the way siblings both validate and invalidate one another, in quite raw and brutal ways. I also wanted to explore how siblings are repositories for each other’s memories, and how unstable those memories can be - the sometimes wildly different versions of the “same” past.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: “Accidental” is a really strong word for me; it asks a question, especially in this context. And “favourite” too, again in the context of family and siblinghood, has an emotive force, something that I felt would strike a chord, as well as nailing the hook of the novel.

 

There’s a particular resonance too, in relation to the narrative as a whole, that I have to be opaque about…

 

I’ve always loved the title of the Ali Smith novel The Accidental. So that would have been something I thought about when I was mulling titles. I should also say that I’m a huge Anne Tyler fan, and madly, the similarity to The Accidental Tourist only occurred to me a couple of months ago. I think if I’d realised sooner, I’d probably have changed it!

 

As it is, I’m really happy with it as a title, it fits the book. In fact, the novel is called something different in the UK, the more streamlined The Favourite. But of the two, The Accidental Favorite is very much my (ahem) favourite…

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have an idea for my next book which I’m excited/slightly terrified about writing. I have the pitch, the over-arching narrative, and I’m in the early stages of trying to figure out the characters, the plot, all the moving parts. It’s a real book of my heart this next one - something that’s both personal and political, so I really want to get it right.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: There’s a LOT of weather in The Accidental Favorite. Chaotic weather. It’s my nod to the climate crisis, which I felt I couldn’t not write into the narrative, just like the long hot day in Amazing Grace Adams, which was doing a lot of metaphorical heavy lifting.

 

It’s analogous too, to the newly-precarious state of the Fisher family. “Eva has seen scenes like this on TV,” the youngest of the Fisher sisters thinks, during a particularly significant “weather event” in the novel. “This is the sort of thing that happens in other places to other people.”

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Fran Littlewood.