Q&A with Rebecca Wait

  

 

 

Rebecca Wait is the author of the new novel I'm Sorry You Feel That Way. Her other books include Cry Havoc. She lives in Buckinghamshire, UK. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write I’m Sorry You Feel That Way?

 

A: My great aunt suffered from schizophrenia, back when the treatment was even more rudimentary than it is now, and I grew up with a strong sense of the devastating impact her illness had not only on her but on her family.

 

Then I was very depressed as a teenager, and became morbidly worried about a genetic link, the idea that mental illness ran in our family. So it had been on my mind for many years, this sense of the ripple effect an illness like that can have within a family.

 

I was also very interested in the dynamics between siblings, and especially twins – there’s such an expectation of closeness there that I thought it would be interesting to explore what happens when the opposite is the case.

 

Q: The story features two pairs of sisters--how would you describe the dynamic between Alice and Hanna, and also between Celia and Katy?

 

A: Both sibling pairs have damaged relationships in the book, and in each case it’s probably more down to the overall family dynamic and circumstances rather than the individual personalities.

 

Alice and Hanna have been pitted against each other by their mother since they were very young; Celia has a need to be everyone’s emotional priority, so she doesn’t want her daughters to ally with each other. She takes a “divide and conquer” approach. Part of the novel’s arc is the question of whether there’s any hope for Alice and Hanna’s relationship as adults.

 

And then, going a generation back, I wanted to suggest how Celia herself was messed up first by the comparisons with her “perfect” sister, and then later, more devastatingly, by the impact of Katy’s illness, which sidelined Celia further.

 

It’s a dynamic that played out in my own grandmother’s life, and the repercussions aren’t confined to a single generation. Everybody is reacting against everybody else, all the time. And of course you can get stuck in those dynamics from childhood, and it derails your relationships as an adult. 

 

Q: The review of the book in The Guardian says that “this sharp, wise comedy explores difficult family dynamics, from all-too-relatable emotional patterns to the inexplicable agonies of mental illness; yet it's also one of the funniest novels you'll read this year.” What do you think of that description, and what do you see as the role of humor in your novels?

 

A: I really appreciate that description (thanks, Guardian). Writing this novel was a strange experience, because I was about halfway through it when Covid hit and the UK, like many places, went into a pretty stringent lockdown.

 

Like most people, I was very anxious. I was worried about my students (I was teaching high school English at the time), I was pregnant and anxious about the baby, I was worried about my mum, who has some health conditions, and worried about my brother, who was an ICU doctor on the Covid wards – I was just a big ball of worry, really.

 

But I noticed that the more anxious I felt, the more jokes seemed to creep into the book. I hadn’t set out to write a comedy at all, but it just got more and more absurd as it became an escape for me, and eventually I was sitting in my tiny, hot flat in London that had started to feel like a prison, staring at my screen, and thinking, “What this party needs is a ferret on the loose.”

 

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

 

A: I wanted a funny title, and I love how this phrase is so steeped in passive-aggression. It captures the dysfunctional family dynamic perfectly.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’ve just finished a novel set in Gloucester, UK, during the 1990s, at the height of the Fred and Rose West investigation – this was one of the largest serial killer investigations in English history. That’s only the backdrop, though. Mainly, it’s an unconventional love story between a Jehovah’s Witness and a sociopathic ward of the state.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: My previous novel is called Cry Havoc and is a dark comedy set in a failing English boarding school. If you like dysfunctional women and buildings on the brink of collapse, it might just be the book for you.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Rebecca Wait.