Helen Walsh is no stranger to controversy, but her admission that she found motherhood 'frightening and strange' may whip up even more unrest than her semi- autobiographical debut novel about a hard-living, raunchy 19-year-old student, writes Louise East
WHEN HELEN Walsh's first novel, Brass, flounced into the public domain in 2004, no one knew whether to hail her as a genius, denounce her as a pornographer, or call social services. The heroine of Brass, Millie O'Reilly, is a 19-year-old student who takes copious amount of drugs, has dirty sex with female prostitutes and curses like a sailor.
Coming from a young, macho male, it would have been provocative, but from an angelically pretty 26-year-old, it was deeply unnerving.
The first wave of attention was largely positive - reviewers everywhere, from the Times Literary Supplement to Vogue, pointed to the brilliance of Walsh's writing, and judges on several award panels agreed. Then came the backlash, led by feminists of various hues, who questioned whether a female of such predatory appetites and fluid sexuality as Millie could really exist.
Stung, Helen Walsh let it be known that much of Brass was autobiographical - after leaving school at 16, she worked in Barcelona, fixing punters up with prostitutes, and when she returned to university, she was fond of blowing her student grant on lap-dancers. If pretty Helen Walsh could do it, why couldn't her heroine? The third wave, which is perhaps the most shocking, came some two years later, with Walsh still doing publicity tours to promote her successful book around the world. Routinely, journalists would turn up to interview her with bags of cocaine.
A photograph of a book-signing in Germany depicts nothing but a long line of men in shabby macs. One hack completed his questions by driving her to a brothel and offering to hire her a prostitute.
By that point, Walsh no longer took drugs and was in a relationship with novelist Kevin Sampson, with whom she now has a seven-month-old son, Leo.
She was also, unsurprisingly, on anti-depressants. What had started out as a ground-breaking, if somewhat naïve, post-feminist treatise on female sexuality, had somehow ended up with Walsh as the subject of an unhealthy amount of lads-mag titillation.
"When Brass first came out, I was terribly vocal about sexuality and gender because it was really high on my political agenda, but two years later, I felt I'd said everything I wanted to say. I don't really want to dissect my sexuality any more, not because I'm embarrassed by the choices I'm making, but because I'm just done talking about it."
In person, Walsh is completely endearing, with an agile grasp of gender politics and a candour which is remarkable given her past experiences with the press. Sweetly, she checked with her mum and dad before she did this round of interviews, making sure that they didn't mind her talking about her childhood.
Once Upon A Time in England, Walsh's second novel, is an altogether different book from Brass. It's not a tumbling, first-person confessional, but a closely-observed portrait of Irish-born Robbie Fitzgerald, his Malaysian wife, Susheela, and their children, set over the course of 13 years. At heart, it's a good old-fashioned family saga, albeit with acid house, British Movement skinheads and failed Elvis impersonators thrown in.
Yet this book is, if anything, even closer to home for Walsh, who is the child of a nurse from Malaysia and a trucker-turned-drummer of Derry descent. While much of the story is fictional, the experience of growing up as the only brown face in Persil-white Warrington is not.
"When mum first arrived in the early 1970s, people would come and touch her because they'd never seen dark skin before. When she married my dad, local reporters were there."
Growing up, Walsh showed a passing interest in the "romance and myth" of her father's people. "The Irish community in Warrington and Liverpool is really fêted. It has this mystique to it."
Her mother's family, on the other hand, hardly got a look in. "My mum made that decision to assimilate and quickly. She ditched her saris. I think it was a conscious effort to protect my brother and me, and not draw any untoward attention to her family."
The result was that Walsh and her brother entered school blithely unaware they might be perceived as anything other than English. "We had no understanding of my mother's culture at all and because we were so very anglicised, it was weird to go to school and be told we weren't. It was only then that I became aware of my singularity."
Later on, it was her family's social background which made her feel out of step with her classmates. "Class took on a real significance when I started high school, because I got a scholarship to a private school. I was suddenly aware of being working-class, in a way I wasn't before."
Then, at the age of 13, Walsh flirted her way into the nascent acid house scene on the outskirts of Warrington and found herself a whole new society to join. "I don't know whether the reason I went off the rails was because something magical fetched up on my doorstep, or because my gender, my sexuality and my race were neutralised by the delirium of the dance floor. For once, I wasn't a Paki. I wasn't working class."
SHE TOOK her first ecstasy pill at 13. By 16 she had dropped out of school and racked up enough drug debts to make Barcelona, and a job as a fixer in the red light district, seem like a wise choice. When she eventually returned to the area, it was to attend Liverpool University, where she completed a degree in sociology.
"When I went to Uni, I felt pressured into defining myself. I wasn't sure about my sexuality, I wasn't sure about my gender, and also I was mixed-race, yet I always felt pressured into being something neat and compact, even in the gay community."
Her professors steered her towards the work of feminist theorists such as Judith Butler; Walsh ended up with a first-class degree and a passionate interest in the politics of sexual identity. Brass, written at her mother's kitchen table over the course of nine months, was the result.
"I don't think a man could have got away with writing that book. What I did with Millie was make her sexuality as apolitical as a man's."
Feminism is something still dear to Walsh's heart, although exactly what form that feminism takes is constantly in flux. She tells a disturbing anecdote about being commissioned to write a television drama for Channel 4 and going into a meeting heavily pregnant. "One guy was really scathing. He said, 'I can't believe you got pregnant. We wanted the Helen Walsh before she got pregnant when she was young and gutsy.' And that was it. I'm not saying that was why they didn't make the drama, I'm just making the point that it came up at all. He was suddenly seeing me as a pregnant woman with no shelf life."
Walsh found motherhood a tricky proposition to come to terms with. "That maternal bond which happens for most women, just didn't happen for me straight away and I was terribly depressed because of that. I'd be the first to campaign for women's rights to breastfeed in public, but I don't know; I just found the whole thing incredibly frightening and strange."
Motherhood being one of the major shrines at which our age worships, this confession may well prove more controversial than any about her hard-living past, yet Walsh decided, after consultation with her partner, to write a piece about her disquiet in a broadsheet newspaper. The easy route, it seems, holds no appeal for Helen Walsh, and for that, we should be thankful.
Once Upon A Time In England, by Helen Walsh, is published by Canongate (£14.99)