False Starts and Misadventures: An Interview with Ilya Gridneff
by Luke Dunne
Despite widespread interest from a range of publishers, the novel did not appear in a conventional form for two decades. Your Name Here was finally published by Deep Vellum last year. Ilya, now the Financial Times correspondent for Canada, fielded my questions about the book via email and Zoom. We spoke about reader-friendliness, Plato’s Cave, t/here slippage, the Iraq War and Sir Mix-a-Lot.
One of the things which makes Your Name Here unusual is that there are some things in the text that the reader will almost certainly ignore — e.g. the AOL advertisements at the bottom of the emails — and other things the reader can choose to ignore or to engage with fully, as they please — e.g. the Arabic lessons. As a reader, it felt like I was being prodded into recognising that I wasn’t totally passive in the writer-reader or writer-reader-text relationship, that I can choose what to pay attention to. Was that the intention?
I originally wrote a long response — referencing Derrida and Bergson and some other clever stuff about absence and the abject, then I got distracted and revisited this response — weeks later — and thought it sounded awful. The reader can decide if the deleted content is a loss or a win for them. Maybe that gesture in itself illustrates the book’s central tension: what we choose to notice or ignore. And, perhaps, a better way to frame a response is to say, we have been, or are always, fractured via a past, present and future. Memory is entwined in this but duration offers no assurance of authenticity to authorship.
I think it is fair to say, this fracturing is accelerating or amplified via competing technologies, nowadays, or more specifically social media that was touted as a connecting agent rather than fracturing the self into a spectrum of online entities or identities. Passivity now comes from consuming, from swiping right or scrolling, or 140 character tweets, sound bites and short videos. But this fractured attention is not entirely new, Plato thought writing was a way to shallow wisdom, the Gutenberg printing press mediated distractions or challenged the church’s power-knowledge and the prevailing orthodoxy of the day, the same can be said about TV and passive entertainment. What’s changed is our comfort with the velocity and impact. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death analysis springs to mind but now fracture is our baseline, our preferred mode of engagement.
Your Name Here was written, or collated/assembled, in the mid-2000s on the precipice of the social media explosion. It was Iraq War II (remember that The First Gulf War Did Not Take Place, according to Baudrillard) and now as our book comes out, I walk down the street and see ads for the latest Apple iPhone and its “visual intelligence” capability to help you grasp Ulysses, and recently I saw an ad on TV for TikTok promoting book clubs and reading, so who knows what to believe as all this, to me, seems antithetical. Remarkably, I think the book mirrors this reality.
How far does all of this stuff about paying attention / not paying attention relate to your work as a journalist, particularly when working in places where some momentous and terrible things are happening and nobody in Europe or the US is really paying any attention.
Your Name Here came well before my so-called 'serious' journalism and a time when I was immersed in pop culture and reading a lot of critical theory. The book took shape in the mid 2000s, like 2006, while I was working as a tabloid journalist and chasing celebrities for the National Enquirer while trying to make sense of the world during the US-led Global War on Terror then PM Tony Blair's decision to send UK troops to the US invasion of Iraq. It was hard not to pay attention to what was going on in the Middle East and the ephemera, or absurdity, of the paparazzo life seemed to align with some of the authors I was reading like Bataille, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Agamben's Homo Sacer at the time was being passed around in my circles and that sadly seems very relevant today, especially with Blair now touted to help in restructuring Gaza. My curiosity about how power dehumanises, or erases, continues but in a less chaotic, and albeit fatter mid-life fashion with a wife, two kids and two Labradors. I think the harder question is not about knowing — or not knowing — but what can be done to change a world mired in exploitation and violent history. Any advice is welcome.
I’ve noticed a pattern in the reviews so far where they’ll say something like, 'Your Name Here, brilliant book, tough read though!’ What do you make of that reception?
Right, ‘it’s crazy,’ ‘it’s bonkers’. I understand this response because it is not a plot driven book, or not a traditional narrative – but it’s not that radical or outrageous, just a bit different from what exists in the mainstream. I used to read a lot of Perec and would point to the Oulipo group as experimental writing but there’s a lot of really accessible stuff that’s weird, like House of Leaves, by Danielewski that was a cult hit in the early 2000s. I am currently reading Nabokov's Pale Fire, which plays with form and structure and was written 60 years ago and there’s also a lot in the Dalkey Archive worth checking out.
There is a review where the reviewer did not know whether I was a real person, or just another character in Your Name Here. Something about that I really liked. I think it encapsulates a lot. While I don’t think it was intended, I liked this idea very much, as it adds another layer or mythology to it all while making an illustrative point, for what is real? And similar to the previous question, you can ignore, skim, or dive deep in Your Name Here. In doing so, the reader becomes both active and passive, shifting between control and surrender, the same tension that defines how we now consume and distribute information today but not normally in a prolonged book form. Overall the book has been well-received for its politics and brio and ambition and getting generous attention, which is far more satisfying than being ignored as faced by difficult or weird books.
Why did it feel important to make money, or lack thereof, an important part of the book?
I guess it’s a central trope or running joke. The ultimate quixotic conceit, to get rich from writing. At the time we were writing it, I was working as a tabloid journalist, living this ridiculous life, getting paid to create a false reality, phantoms and fantasy, and thinking a lot about the kinds of stories I was writing about these people who may or may not exist. I mean, physically they do but what I was creating or part of which are of interest to others did not seem real. It also taps into the ethos/mythos of the KLF pop group, making then burning a million pounds as an art piece in the mid-1990s.
Anyway, these big celebrities were brands, and identity was transitory. There was something perverse but also pleasurable about operating in that space and ultimately it was all just about money. Or a money machine, a cycle of selling, or consuming. But at the same time, I was hanging out with a lot of artists (who also wanted money), and academics, and we had loftier ideas. There was a sense there was something more or better I could be doing but it all came back to money. There’s a kind of cliché of the literary artist as being impoverished, living in a garrett or whatever, and certainly Helen was having to do a lot of that – temping, etc. So this was on our mind.
How did the co-writing process work in practice?
In terms of the practicalities of it, we didn’t sit down and work in long sessions co-writing together. Well, we tried doing that once or twice, but it didn’t work. Especially in Helen’s Berlin flat that regularly ran out of coal for the heater. So it was more like an assemblage — Helen had Lotteryland, which was kind of an unfinished manuscript, I had the emails and some other text I’d collected along the way, some vignettes written after we’d started, and we pasted it together in a pretty ad hoc way, and then a structure emerged out of that. We spent a lot of time discussing it, ultimately, it was Kaffeklatsch.
Am I right in saying that neither of you edited the others’ sections?
That’s right. There was a bit of editing — back and forth — and then some more when we finalised the manuscript with Deep Vellum, but that was more cleaning up.
There were a few changes made for the sake of ‘reader-friendliness’, reassuring potential publishers, etc. I was curious about how substantial those changes were, and whether you thought the crazier versions of Your Name Here were, in some sense, a better or truer version of the book?
Certainly the book’s form — the dialogue between two authors, a book within books labyrinth, chaotic emails, splintering alter-egos, Macguffins and unreliable narrators/authors — made publishers wince with comedic incredulity. Even now explaining Your Name Here to people is tricky. But, to be fair, publisher rejection, or disinterest, or comments were never crude like, ‘can we make it a romance novel.’ It was more that publishers, at the core of it, wanted another DeWitt book, and their comments, or audible gasps and distaste, only added another layer to this metafictional loop/goop. Some of them said an epistolary novel would never work, others didn’t like the pictures, or it being co-authored or said that it was too messy. There were many false starts and misadventures — like a publisher turning out to be broke — that prevented publication.
To respond to the more pragmatic essence of the question, at its heart the book began from a simple, even misguided, motive to make a quick buck. Helen hoped it would launch my writing career and free me from the tabloid world that was funding my nomadic life. So there was never a rigid artistic purity to the project, never a ‘not one word can change,’ but rather a much more permissive, or flexible, pragmatic desire to get a (quick (haha)) book deal by any means necessary. In many respects, metafiction does lend itself to an eternity like Matryoshka (Russian dolls) endlessness, and the story behind the story of getting the book published is ripe for a sequel — or film — considering its own chaotic process.
Editing conversations and the editing process, or lack thereof, occurred in the later stages with Deep Vellum and/or Dalkey, who took on the book in 2022 and did not change much. An agent took on the project in 2020 during Covid after Helen put it on her website as a PDF in 2008 for like 10 bucks. Having said that, there was always some debate about length, and it is interesting to see this play out now with the lit-Twit crowd, whereby now a 600-page plus books is divisive in today’s digital world, and/or a flex like some macho-phallic libidinal boast. I like big books and I can not lie, to misquote Sir Mix a Lot.