The success of Anna Burns's Milkman is quite something. Since winning the £50,000 Man Booker Prize, sales have gone through the roof, far beyond expectations of the sort of "Booker bump" a winning novel receives.
Burns has achieved the rare hat-trick that turns a literary novel into a bestseller, being loved by the holy trinity of booksellers, book buyers and reviewers.
Milkman has now sold to 23 territories, with the deal in China the biggest ever for an English-language debut. The novel has just been released in the US to mostly glowing reviews. Mostly, because of the nagging dissenting opinion that has dogged the novel from the beginning. Even on its Booker win, the chairman of the judges referring to it as "challenging", though worth it in the end. The New York Times last week said it "requires so much effort".
There's a lot of press attention on Burns when we meet in a Dublin hotel. She's flown in from East Sussex for the An Post Irish Book Awards, where Milkman had been shortlisted for Novel of the Year (losing out to Sally Rooney). The interview starts with her explanation that she can't sit down due to back pain, but that she doesn't want to focus on that.
We have plenty to talk about. We were both born in the same small area of Belfast, Ardoyne, and both set our debut novels there during the same time period, the Troubles, which is when we grew up.
Although those from north Belfast recognise places described in Milkman, from Carlisle Circus and Clifton Street Cemetery to the Antrim Road's Waterworks, Burns doesn't name them as such.
“I’m not writing autobiographically. I just write what comes,” she says. “There are areas that I describe in the book and I guess they are autobiographical, but even the cemetery is two mixed together. I’m not setting out to write history. I’m following the logic of the book.
Little quirks
“A lot of the characters don’t speak like people from Belfast do. Take the two women talking in the bar, they wouldn’t really speak like that, but these women do, it’s the diction of this fictional world and not just of the main character. They all have these little quirks, these archaisms. I liked that. I thought it fitted with the world. And it came to me, I didn’t decide it. There’s Belfast vernacular as well. I’m not interested in capturing that world as it was.’
With the brutality, the poverty, the intolerance of difference, I spent my childhood in fear, desperately planning to get away from Ardoyne. I ask Burns if she was the same.
"Yes. Like the character in Milkman, you were expected to get married, as young as you could, and have babies. I always knew I wasn't mother material. I was aware of this pressure, often unspoken, this expectation, but often my mum would ask me who I was courting and I would never tell her about men.
“I thought ‘this is what you have to do in Ardoyne, so I have to leave’. I didn’t know where, I just wanted out. The fear you’re talking about, that fear came after I left. At the time I didn’t know how frightened I was.”
Ardoyne was like an open prison, streets patrolled by armed police, army and paramilitary vigilantes. We lived under a microscope, where you could be reported on to the IRA by your neighbours. Burns and I were both loners, both singled out for being different, her for her love of reading.
Our secondary schools didn’t allow us to take O-Levels [poor Catholic kids from Ardoyne were supposed to be stupid]. It’s extraordinary and very telling that Burns convinced her teacher to let her do an exam for a subject she wasn’t even studying at school; accounting. “I don’t know where it came from, something inside must have guided me.”
After leaving school she went to the College of Business Studies in the city centre. I recognise it now as the night school in Milkman. She hasn't been home for 15 years. But when she does return, she wants to find her English teacher, Pat McCann, and thank him for inspiring her.
Private person
While we’re deep in conversation a stranger interrupts to shake Burns’s hand and congratulate her, before saying he hasn’t actually read the book. We exchange bemused looks after he leaves. Along with her vigilance during the interview about discussing her family and friends – “that’s their story” – it seems fame will take some getting used to for such a private person.
I ask about Milkman's difficult journey to publication, and how she coped with rejection.
“I was alright. I always am if something’s finished,” she says.
It wasn't the rejections that bothered her, it was the publishers who didn't even bother to acknowledge her submission. Considering her previous success, (two well-received novels, with the first, No Bones, shortlisted for the Orange Prize) it seems shocking that she would be treated this way.
Even more shocking was the big publisher who claimed to have read the first chapters (though clearly not her covering letter) who said she showed promise and if she sent them £2,000, they’d put her on one of their courses.
After trying some agents, who also failed to get back to her, she decided that “it looks like it isn’t going to get published, but I love it”.
I wonder where that strength comes from. Burns says she knew publishing had a short-term memory. “But my writing takes as long as it takes, and that’s all there is to it. I’m not to hurry it because it wouldn’t stand for it, and it would just stop.”
But she didn't give up. Eventually she got a bite from an agent, David Grossman, who seemed genuinely interested.
By this stage Burns was in such serious financial difficulties that she was essentially homeless, using food banks and didn’t even have the money to post the manuscript. For months the novel sat on her computer. All the while she was living with constant, excruciating, debilitating pain, the reason she was suffering financial hardship.
She eventually bit the bullet and wrote to Grossman, asking if she could email the manuscript, which is quite unusual. Luckily, he agreed. By the time he asked her in for a meeting and told her how much he loved Milkman, she was feeling defeatist and kept waiting for the "but…"
Even then she had that underlying confidence or certainty, telling herself, “I’m not going to change a word. So if he asks, I’m just going to tell him it’s not going to work. When the ’but’didn’t come I was raging I hadn’t paid more attention to the compliments.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Disadvantages
Has being from Ardoyne, from poverty, brought disadvantages, restricted her access to publishing?
“I’ve always been poor,” she says. “Even when I got a good deal for my first two books I was still poor. I didn’t start writing until I was in my 30s but that was mainly because I had been an alcoholic and that’s when I got sober.”
I ask if the alcohol had been drowning her creativity.
“I guess it was, but it was also serving a purpose. It saved me in some way. I started drinking as a very young child, as a lot of people did in Ardoyne. There are lovely people there, but it was savage, such violence and such brutality. Lots of young people died, there one minute and then gone from the earth. I guess the drinking was protecting me from all that reality.
"Being poor has delayed my writing, but I've never thought it would stop me writing. My struggle is with the physical pain. And the packing up and moving again."
Her homelessness earned her the nickname Mrs Two Suitcases. But it never stopped her writing. Something else entirely did that, something she hasn’t discussed in detail until now.
“I’m afraid to talk about it because I feel like I’ll explode with rage,” she says. “And because it’s easier to let the press say it’s back pain. It protects me because of how much I can collapse when I go into it. It takes so much out of me to talk about because of how distressed I am, because of what was taken from me.”
Underneath the story of the novel’s journey, there is another. Following a routine surgical procedure, one that, she was told later, she could have lived without, for two years she had to lie on her side.
“It was agony standing up. It was agony sitting down. I got muscle wastage. And I had always been quite fit – yoga and hiking. Friends had to bring me food and I used all the money I had left.”
It delayed the completion of Milkman, and the financial strain of being unable to work, spending all her savings on pain relief and cures, had an impact on her sending the book out. It's also denied her the joy of finishing the book – "that click you get" – and the opportunities she's been offered since. Flying is excruciating.
Nerve damage
Burns had a local acupuncturist and a masseur who could provide relief, but she’s now found a French and German team who deal with her multiple nerve damage. She’s lucky, she insists. “I only have it one side.”
She is awaiting treatment, which gives her a glimmer of hope to focus on. She desperately needs that hope. “Since the surgery I have written nothing on the other two books I have on my computer. Nothing for 4½ years. The experience has fundamentally changed me.”
Burns can’t write because she can’t sit and that is how she writes.
“I loved doing it. Even with all the uncertainty of writing and not knowing what comes next, because I don’t plan, I loved it. But now my whole routine has gone. Sitting at my desk, it was this delicious experience. Opening myself up. Letting myself.
I know if I follow the visuals, I'll lose the energy, what the main story is
“I would mess around and play and see what energy comes and follow it, but it did involve sitting at my desk for this huge amount of time. And in the evening I would go out for this long walk with my Dictaphone. I would get extra material because the characters would come back. One character would pop into my head and say ‘I meant that when I said that’.”
I’m interested in the way these characters seem to interact with her, and wonder if it’s like a director/actor relationship. Are her characters like co-authors?
"It's more I can't do it without them," she says. "I need their input. For the second book [Little Constructions] we had meetings. I've two books on my computer and in one of them these characters turned up and they were awfully boisterous. But they weren't the characters [from the book], it was like they were actors talking about the characters. My other books didn't come like that.
“Sometimes I do get a big visual scene but I know I’m not meant to write that scene. I know if I follow the visuals, I’ll lose the energy, what the main story is. I can see the whole thing, but when I’m writing I say ‘don’t go there, the energy is here’. I feel like I must do what they say or they’ll go away. But you have to not grab hold because that is desperation.”
Different routine
There is a little glimmer of something recently, she says. “I think ‘maybe it will happen, Anna, don’t give up, you’ll be able to write a different way, find a different routine’.”
That guiding voice sounds rather like the way her characters talk to her. It reminds me of the unknown voice that guided her to take a subject they didn’t do at her school, that told her to get her teacher to let her take an O-Level, that stopped her drinking, that kept her going through all those rejections and that was not prepared to compromise her art.
It seems the "massive grief and anger" at the loss of her writing has created a thick fog, and so has the powerful medication. But there is a determination in Anna Burns, and nothing has beaten her yet - not alcoholism, not the publishing industry, not the Troubles.
I think if she follows that voice her certainty will return, and so will her writing. There are those two books on her computer, and those boisterous characters won’t stay silent for long.
Paul McVeigh is author of The Good Son
