Frank Tallis is a novelist, nonfiction writer and clinical psychologist. He has held lecturing posts in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London. He has written horror fiction, a series of detective novels featuring the fictional detective Max Liebermann and four books about psychology, including Changing Minds, a history of psychotherapy. The Incurable Romantic, an account – told through case histories of his patients – of a life spent investigating obsessive love, is published on 7 June (Little Brown).
This is the second book you have written about the nature of love. What draws you to the subject?
Its universality – and the fact that falling in love is the one experience that most people have in their lives where they can say, for a short period of time, they have flirted with madness. All of us can empathise with this strange state, where we begin to lose touch with reality and think in an entirely different way.
Do you really believe falling in love is a form of mental illness?
That is, of course, a metaphor, and one could take it too far. I don’t actually think falling in love is the equivalent of madness, but it does resemble and overlap with a number of clinical conditions. And the emotional extremity of the experience can destabilise people who are already vulnerable. That isn’t terribly contentious, because poets and doctors have been making the same observation for thousands of years. The connection between falling in love and requiring medical help was made in ancient Egyptian poetry. So right from the very beginning of civilisation people have noted this connection between love and madness.
Which of your patients’ stories has the most resonance for you?
The story of the barrister’s clerk, Megan, who suffered from De Clérambault’s syndrome and was convinced her dentist was in love with her. What resonated was her apparent absolute ordinariness, sweetness and stability in contrast with the extraordinary nature of her condition. It strikes me as a fantastic demonstration that, while we can all subscribe to the illusion that we are not vulnerable to mental illness and extreme psychological states, no one is immune. There really wasn’t anything in her life to predict that she would suddenly experience this intense, mystical, unrequited love. I found it very striking and terribly sad.
As well as being a clinical psychologist and writer of nonfiction about psychology, you write horror novels as FR Tallis and crime fiction set in Freud’s Vienna. Is there much overlap between your different careers?
I don’t actually see my work as a novelist as being that different to my activities as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. I often feel when I write fiction that I am just doing psychology in another way because there are such massive parallels between my clinical work and the business of solving crime.
Such as?
They are both forms of detection and problem solving. Not with all patients, but it is often the case that a patient comes in with a problem, the solution to which is not available to them. It is in the unconscious. So there is a process that takes place whereby you follow clues and, instead of finding a serial killer or a pepetrator of a crime at the end of that process, you find a repressed memory and that is part of – or can be the whole – solution. It isn’t always that neat by any means, but every now and again it actually is.
What books are on your bedside table?
Two books that are Portuguese, and there’s a reason for that. Whenever I go to another country I invariably read the literature of that country. I’ve just been to Lisbon so, while I was there, I started reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago, which I believe he won the Nobel prize for and so far is a terrific read. The other very famous literary figure associated with Lisbon is Fernando Pessoa and I’ve been dipping into the Book of Disquiet, which I think is an extraordinarily great achievement in terms of modernism, up there with Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust.
Which novelists working today do you admire the most?
Ian McEwan, particularly the dark early work and, understandably [because it is about De Clérambault’s Syndrome], Enduring Love. Patrick McGrath I like a great deal, too. His last book The Wardrobe Mistress was excellent. He’s a profoundly psychological novelist. And Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace are fabulous. Actually, if she’d only written The Handmaid’s Tale and hadn’t written another thing, she would still be one of the great writers of our time. In nonfiction, I’ve just read To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell, which I thought was intellectually exhilarating, a very exciting read, written beautifully and with humour.
Which genres do you particularly enjoy reading?
I love reading science fiction, horror and weird fiction, but I find it difficult to find new writing in these genres that I can enjoy for its technical accomplishment, so I tend to read classics rather than more recent work. I love JG Ballard, books from when he was at the top of his game like Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise. I think he probably was our most visionary and greatest late 20th-century writer. When science fiction is good it really can say things about the human condition that other genres can’t say.
What’s the last really great book you read?
It is a rare thing, as you get older, to discover a book that blows you away like you were blown away by books in your teens or 20s. But I have just discovered Ice, a brutal novel set in a frozen post-nuclear dystopia by Anna Kavan and it is just the most magnificent book. The author is someone who has been utterly neglected, largely because she lived rather a tragic life. She was a heroin addict and had lots of psychiatric problems. None of her books received proper critical acclaim, although Brian Aldiss recognised she was great. Within a couple of months of reading Ice, I had to read it again. It is hugely enigmatic, a genuine novel of the unconscious and a masterpiece. I feel very passionate about it, as you can probably tell.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
I didn’t read books as a child. There weren’t any books in the house I grew up in. My dad had never read a book in his life. My mother was forced to read books at school, but I never saw her read a book either. I went to school in Tottenham in the 1970s and, if you know anything about schooling in working class areas at that time, then you will know that I didn’t receive anything remotely like an education. As a consequence, I didn’t start to read until I was about 13 or 14, when I discovered there were lots of science fiction films that I liked and I wanted more of the same. Initially, I read quite indiscriminately, but I very quickly found classics in the genre that I liked – Brave New World, 1984, books like that, which pressed all the right buttons.
Is there an author to whom you always return?
Yes. Sigmund Freud. I was brought up in a culture where everyone, including all my clinical psychology teachers, thought Freud was nonsensical. It was only later that I explored him fully and developed the respect for him that I have now. I think he is an extremely fine writer. A book like The Interpretation of Dreams works on so many different levels – part memoir, part dream-diary, part technical manual. It’s an extraordinary, monumental work of modernism, which transcends what he thought he was doing. The other writer I keep going back to is PG Wodehouse, whose humour I just love. They make a rather odd pair, don’t they?
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