Tessa Hadley on What Decades of Failure Taught Her About Writing

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2023

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

The New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley in 2002. Titled “Lost and Found,” it described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood. Hadley’s fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale: tight dramas close to home. She captures, within these relationships, an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its thirtieth story from Hadley—a higher count than any other fiction writer in recent times. That figure is particularly remarkable because Hadley had such a late start to her career, publishing her first work of fiction in her forties. She talks with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman about her long struggle to stop imitating the writing of others, instead telling stories authentic to her own experience and voice. “I was just a late developer, and I was trying to write other people’s novels for all that time,” she says. Treisman also asks Hadley about why her work has been labelled “domestic fiction” by many critics. The term is disproportionately applied to female writers, and “tends to have a bit of condescension to it,” Hadley says. But she is willing to at least consider whether her work is too focussed on certain kinds of bourgeois-family relationships. “I almost completely accept the challenge,” she tells Treisman. “I think one should feel perpetually slightly on edge as to whether your subject matter justifies the art.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.9	In 2002, the New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley, titled Lost and Found,
0:19.9	The Story Described a Friendship Between Two Women
0:22.3	Who Had Been Close Since Childhood.
0:25.2	Hadley's fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale,
0:29.1	tight dramas close to home.
0:32.0	But within these relationships,
0:33.4	she captures an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion.
0:37.9	The New Yorker recently published its 30th story from Tessa Hadley.
0:41.6	That's more than any other fiction writer in recent times.
0:45.0	She spoke recently with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
0:48.9	So I want to talk to you about your new story collection after the funeral,
0:56.0	which I think is your 12th book of fiction. But before we launch on that, let's go back to your first accidents
1:05.8	in the home, which was published in 2002. And a lot has been made of the fact that you published your first book
1:12.7	in your 40s. So what happened in the years before that, before accidents in the home?
1:21.2	Lots of writing and failing, lots of trying to do it and getting it really wrong.
1:28.1	It wasn't like a slow, gradual build-up,
1:31.6	and then I started writing something that seemed truthful and okay.
1:36.9	It was like, it's not like falling off a cliff, it's the opposite.
1:41.3	It was like I was under the cliff and just treading water and not
1:45.3	getting anywhere. And then I don't know quite what happened in my 40s that made that. The connection
	...

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