Jo Hamya embraces the gray
Hamya digs into the the nature of art, who gets to create it and what it means with The Hypocrite
I have had a hard time writing a compelling introduction to this interview with Jo Hamya. I’m not so much at a loss for words because I have a lot of thoughts about her novel The Hypocrite. A lot of them. But, none of them are clear enough for me to pontificate. And I think that’s actually one of the things that this book does so well. Hamya leaves the reader stuck in limbo trying to make sense of her story.
The story a daughter putting her father, an absent and aging father who is also a famous writer of books (and outlook on life) that have not aged well because they’re of a past generation where sex and misogyny were praised, on “blast”, as The New York Times review says, merits a lot of thinking because Hamya doesn’t make her story clean or clear. Instead, she settles into what she has called “the grey” and written a novel that asks important questions about who gets to tell what story and how they get to tell it. It’s a generational story that settles into the uncomfortable with great ease.
Honestly, I couldn’t put down The Hypocrite because it propels and pushes its reader, upending expectations with each new section and storyline. Instead of falling into an easy trap of good vs. bad, Hamya writes fully realized characters who deserve our scrutiny, but also some empathy. And that’s a beautiful and difficult thing to do today as we’re programmed by our politics and social media feeds to only see things in two dimensions.
Jo Hamya is the author of The Hypocrite and Three Rooms.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The book takes place in London, so what were you able did draw from London? Why use it as the backdrop?
I think in England we have this very unfortunate state of affairs where most in our arts industry come out of London. There have been various pushes to spread it out around the country, particularly north in cities like Manchester or Liverpool or Birmingham, but the fact is that if you are doing an arts job and you want to meet people and talk to people and effectively network, then London is sort of your best bet. So the creative temperament, especially the kind of conservative creative temperament that the characters in this book live in and espouse, could really have only come out of London. I think if they were writers and artists in Manchester, they would've maybe had more noble pursuits than petty family squabbles on the West End.
I think it is an interesting point and perspective to touch on with this book and the characters in it because they remind me of New York City group, where our little New York media world and writer world is in its own place and it has its own little fights and groups. So when you start this, did you know it had to be in London?
Yes. I mean, I think also I have an attachment to London. It's where I was born and it's where I've got the most profound part of my literary education, and it's the most familiar place to me. It's probably the only sort of place in the world that I could walk around without a map, more or less.
I had a lot of other challenges, formal challenges and character led challenges, in the book, so being on familiar ground for half the novel sort of helped. It was good to start from an easy place.
What were some of the formal challenges? The structure of the book is fascinating. The multiple characters we follow and storylines we follow, and also the narration of it. The narrator is so omnipresent and so strong in their ideas and also kind of what they know and what they're handing out. It is very clear that you are in control and the characters are not in control.
The first one is the one that made me want to start writing a book, which was the father's predicament: that he is having the worst day of his life. I mean, truly awful, but he's having it in a theater where he's not allowed to speak or react. Because it's his daughter putting on the play, he’s compelled not to leave up until a certain point, of course. It was really interesting to me that I would have to somehow convey how much horror is going through him, but he wouldn't be allowed to say a word and he wouldn't be allowed to move, or the point at which he does start moving, it comes quite late, which felt really significant and it was hard to keep holding off that point and finding different ways for him to think, because that was the other thing was that a large part of his consciousness was going to be taken up watching this play. So how could I smoothly and realistically segue from him observing what was on stage to him, reacting to him thinking through why this is so terrible?
I think there were a lot of things that I knew I wanted to do in this book that I hadn't done in my first one. My first one was sort of linear and in some ways uncomplicated. It had a linear and uncomplicated structure. It was slightly polyphonic, but it was all being screened through a kind of first person narrator, so pulling voices in and out wasn't so difficult because you went with the character. It wasn't a book that rested on reader's sympathies, so I could just hand out whatever I wanted. Whereas this one, I think I was really conscious. I'd gotten really fascinated with the kind of current readerly impulse that seems to say a book is good or bad because you could empathize with a character and you liked that character. If it was bad, you didn't like this character. And I wanted to know whether I could turn that on its head.
One of the things I did find fascinating was the idea of you are not doling out judgment on any of the characters, really. You let us know what they did, but you don't ever say in the book what they did was wrong or right. It's fascinating to me that we judge books that way. And I was struck by the idea that you're not accepting any answers for this. You've decided you have your own viewpoints, but you're also like, I'm not going to tell you how to feel about everybody.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that is a little bit baffling to me about the idea of, I suppose it's a form of affective valuation where if you like a character, it's because they're telling you something that emotionally resonates with you, or you can translate into some kind of philosophy of life, but I don't fully understand that. I think there's a limit to how useful that impulse is because it's not real. You are holding a work of fiction, and I always think of books as thought experiments more than as sort of emotional conduits.
Part of the narration is sort of taken up with this kind of second person descriptive, and there's one at the very beginning where the narrator, or the presence that's guiding you through the book, takes you through the theater backstage and shows you the costume department and the corporate offices and points out to you all the things that make this theater run. I wanted that bang at the start of the book because I wanted the reader to be aware that they were holding a novel, not a diary. I think music is something that you can credibly sublimate in an extremely emotional way, but the novel is not that.
I think it was doubly important for me to then have Sophia's father at the end go through that same experience of walking backstage through the theater and seeing that all of it is made up. All of it is false. I think my ideal reader takes that cue and kind of holds the book at a distance, which is a really difficult. I mean, it's not fair of me to ask that because I hope what it's done is sort of play on that idea of readerly sympathy, but sort of bounce it around a bit from character to character. At the beginning you're told there's going to be a point where you have to step back and think about it dispassionately and calmly and think about your reaction. I think if readers are going to have that kind of really emotional response to character or to moralistic aspects of plot, then it's far more interesting to me rather than discussing those emotions, discussing where they come from, why you have them. That, I think, is a more useful way to approach the novel.
I took those sections that first walkthrough as a nod that this is also a production and somebody is trying to get something out of this. Art is still commerce and a production of something, so when somebody tells you this is a moralistic story and they're selling that to you, they're selling you something and they're creating that feeling. So does that make it genuine and does that make it real and does that make it any better or any worse than anything else? I thought it was a fascinating way to bring that through, that somebody's point of view is still here and now it's being changed by everything around it.
That's one end of the spectrum, but I think often these things aren't mutually exclusive because I sold this book, people have bought it for $20-something — I don’t know how much it costs in the states — and I am definitely using my advance.
Which you should. It's not a bad thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing.
No, of course not, but I guess I hope I have slightly more of a thoughtful approach to it, but I can't pretend to be exempt from that category because a lot of this book comes out of points of personal interest or frustration. And I might not, in this case, be instructing readers to make or have a general response or come to a particular conclusion, but I am very clearly, I hope, instructing readers to think because that's what I think is lacking at the moment.
I think my favorite art make me not so much uncomfortable, but does make me wonder and makes me think about it later. You can have this reaction to saying a movie and be like, I didn't like that, but then if you're still thinking about it a week later, did that movie do something correctly? And I think it is important to think about these things when we make art, when we judge art. What is the purpose of it? What is it? And if it's bad, well, why are you so viscerally upset by it? Was it on purpose? Was that doing that to you? And I don't think we give things enough credit for that.
Was it a challenge for you to write something today, where everything is black and white, and you give every character a lot of gray or color, not gray, and specifically did you get any pushback from anybody that read it about the father?
No, I mean hopefully I think he's not set up as a kind of that concept of an art monster. It was very important to me that he was a father, and I think everyone understood him perfectly. When I first thought of the book, I kept thinking about what his relationship would be to this playwright who would give him the worst day of his life. And I think one of the reasons that him being a father is so important is because as much as you witness him saying terrible things or being cruel sometimes to his daughter, you also witness these extraordinary moments of love and desperation that arise out of his relationship to his daughter. I mean, I think the bit that probably no one cares about, but that really sort of locked me into him was the idea that Sophia might not necessarily call him often enough for his liking and that he wishes that she would. However absent he may have been in her childhood, he just wants to know what's going on in her life. He did his best to know what was going on in her life.
There was no pushback, I think, because I was very determined not to make anyone in this book a bad person. Actually, if anything, the only pushback that I got was for Sophia for a couple of drafts because my publishers felt she was underwritten.
I had a very hard time, I think pushing her on the page as persuasively as him, purely because I think there's so many moments in that book where she's a teenage girl or a young woman that, as horrific as they are, I've just sort of taken them for granted now. And I'm like, yeah, bad happens to everyone. I can just write about this awful encounter she had as a 16-year-old girl with a boy much older than her, and everyone will understand that that's bad. It took a bit more sort of coaxing out.
That's fascinating. That section was to me was disturbing because it made me think about going to high school and specifically early 2000s — even the movies — and older boy hits on younger girls. Freshmen girls were treated as something not human.I remember being a freshman and being like, why are all those older guys gawking at these young girls? What is this? It is very unsettling, but it is a thing that happened and I hope has stopped.
And that was a moment of a dad is missing it. He can't see it because it's also something he's done and seen and is doing in a way at the same time to other people. It was a really well written section.
So let's talk briefly about not just the play, but the actual events of how the two characters are seeing these events too. I mean, why Italy? Why an island? Why a vacation like that? What gave you the idea for this?
It was a couple of things. I think the book that Sophia's father writes while there on holiday is based on a real novel, it's not sort of an exact copy of that novel, but it's based on a real novel called The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, which takes place in Italy. It's about a bunch of kids sort of figuring out how to have sometimes consensual and sometimes non-consensual sex with each other. I remember reading it for the first time and being struck by the kind of, I don't know, I guess the sort of creative and intellectual freedom you'd need to have to spend — I think it's more than 400 pages long — on intertwining together the concerns of these young people trying to shag each other with a history of the English novel, which is what that book does, and then say that it was basically a kind of remedial exercise to second wave feminism. It was remarkable to me and not entirely in a bad way. And it was, I guess, the kind of creative freedom that I imagined Sophia's father would've had.
On a purely kind of plot based level, I needed somewhere that was the opposite of England, but still with a kind of Euro sensibility. So I needed it to be hot and a little bit uninhibited and sweaty so that these characters could really unwind. I think I also needed for the boy that Sophia meets to have a kind of version of masculinity that is, if Sophia's father is kind of quite genial and pleasant, all the while that he's perpetuating the harm that he does, very similar kind of model to that for Sophia when she's on holiday, a kind of pattern. This is a generalization, I know a lot of perfectly lovely Italian men, but I also needed a product of a kind of particularly masculine Italian culture, which is very charming and forthright and bold and sometimes a little bit hammy. And I needed a boy from a country who could credibly sort of be brilliant and awful all at once, but also presents Sophia with another kind of very subtle moral challenge, which is: they're in the south of Italy and he's not necessarily had the advantages that she has had in life either. So it was a number of different reasons.
When did you start this?
I had the idea for it in 2020 just after I sold my first book.
I usually spend a year thinking before I start writing, so I started writing January, 2021. I finished around April, 2021. I think there was some sort of logistical behind the scenes publishing things and then when I think it sold in 2023. And then I spent a month rewriting it because it was very clunky. I managed to put down everything that I needed, but it was very unwieldy and I wasn't happy with it. So a friend of mine lent me her art studio and I spent a month taking the tube there in the morning and taking the tube back at night, rewriting it pretty much from memory. I read it sort of once over. It's really weird to me now that I think about it because I essentially did what Sophia's father does in the book where he's kind of trying to rewrite his book that he doesn't like from memory.
That's not an uncommon thing.
There are a few bits I think that survived. I think I had four or five or six drafts of this in all, but the bit that survived that I remember really clearly writing the first time around was when Sophia's father, near the end, is in a grocery store and it's kind of just one long unbroken chain of this deluge of catastrophizing that he does. There were some bits that I carried forward because, in a kind of vain way, I felt very proud of the writing.
Wow, your editor must have been really happy with you when you said, “I'm going to rewrite this whole thing.”
Oh no. She really wasn’t. I think she was really happy with what she had and she didn't really, I don't know, she didn't react, but I don't think she necessarily thought it was an amazing idea. And the version I gave back to her was sort of like, it had an extra 10,000 words that came from somewhere, I don't know where. She said, “I think we should cut 20,000 of these.” And I was like, “that's insane.” So we compromised. I cut maybe about five thousand.
That's crazy. Usually it's the other way. I'm always like, yeah, sure, let's get rid of it. Let's go. You had confidence in yourself. That's good.
Well, she knows when to put her foot down. The original title of this book was The Amanuensis, and she was like, “no one's going to buy that, Jo.”