There is something so vivid and truthful about Nearly Thirteen, the 12-year-old heroine of Anna Mackmin’s debut novel Devoured, that I spend the opening half of our interview asking which bits were drawn from Mackmin’s stranger-than-fiction childhood and which were cooked up in her imagination. Like her narrator, Mackmin grew up in a kind of commune in 1970s Norfolk. Both Mackmin and Nearly Thirteen had a poet father, a younger sister and an agoraphobic mother who drove a white Saab. Both were precocious, home-educated and excellent cooks. And both endured the spectre of abuse as they came of age in a rackety era of bohemian self-discovery.
So the passage in Devoured in which Mummy runs out of Swallow’s Farm and bares her breasts in protest at a crop-spraying plane must, I assume, be true. “I made that up,” laughs Mackmin in triumph when we meet near her London home. “There are profound resonances with mine and my sister’s childhood, and massive acres of made-up stuff. I’d never written anything before and it was a visceral pleasure to invent stuff.”
At this stage Mackmin is best known as a theatre director, acclaimed for productions of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa and a version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, as well as new plays by the likes of Amelia Bullmore and Charlotte Jones. Bullmore’s Di and Viv and Rose tackles themes of women and work, and it was when Mackmin became a mother seven years ago, adopting a child in her mid-40s, that she turned to writing.
“I stopped work thinking, ‘Great, now I’m going to be a mum’, and I woke up the next morning thinking ‘Urrrgh, I am my work,’” she says. “This bomb had exploded in my heart – who was I if I wasn’t working?” Writing, she says, “was the rope that I threw myself – clambering up this slippery wet rope out of the horror of it all”.
Mackmin had been “pretending” she was going to turn her “crazy childhood” into a novel for years and now, having a wakeful child, she began writing in three-hour nocturnal bursts. “I know this sounds very unlikely and pretentious but I really didn’t imagine a single other person reading this book,” she says. “I just knew I had to keep doing something in all those awake hours that was properly me.”
It is Mackmin’s fourth creative career, and all have been self-taught except her first, acting, for which she studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She and her sister Scarlett, a choreographer to whom Mackmin remains very close, then became clothes designers, successfully teaching themselves to make wraparound clothes that fitted both their contrasting body shapes. Mackmin believes everyone is creative, but her fending-for-herself childhood bequeathed her a bewildering array of practical skills. “I can sew, I can make my own clothes, I can make my own shoes, I can build a bonfire from nothing, I can drive a tractor. Rabbit skinning? Boom! Job done. Disgusting but I can do it,” she laughs.
She took the same approach to writing as directing. Mackmin says she always knew she wanted to direct a new play if she read it and could visualise exactly how she would do it. She pictured Devoured this way too. Throughout the novel, the narrator, Nearly Thirteen, looks down upon herself, as if she’s directing herself. Speech appears before the speaker is identified, and sentences are staccato short. This style is as experimental as Mackmin’s childhood, and she isn’t sure whether to attribute it to a lack of formal education or her dyslexia. “There was an urgency of breath and rhythm in using short sentences. When I read it out to myself, I felt, ‘That’s. What. I. Thought. Like’ as a child.”
Its originality ensured it was rejected by dozens of cautious publishers until it reached Henry Layte, the Norfolk-based publisher and bookseller who discovered and co-published Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. “He gave one absolutely brilliant editorial note,” says Mackmin, suggesting “one big tweak. I will be grateful forever. He’s my kind of person. He’s funny and he’s direct to the point of almost rudeness which gives me enormous pleasure.” By coincidence, Layte lives a mile from where Mackmin grew up and loves cooking as much as she does.
Devoured is rare among novels for being studded with recipes for everything from homemade glue to “chocolate idiot biscuits”. “They are all very good recipes,” says Mackmin – all from her childhood. Just as in Devoured, Mackmin’s father and mother and assorted friends were too busy making poetry or pots to cook for their children. “I could cook a six-course meal easily by the age of 10,” she says. “We didn’t know that we were running the house but we wanted to eat. Why would you not, if the ingredients are in the fridge and you’re starving and everybody else is too drunk or stoned?”
Of all Devoured’s excoriating comic portrayals of wayward hippies, Nearly Thirteen’s Mummy – a matriarch who challenges norms of work, motherhood and marriage – is the most nuanced. One day, Nearly Thirteen hears a noise coming out of her bedroom like a lorry reversing. “Eurngh eurngh eurngh”; Mummy is sleeping with other residents of Swallow’s Farm.
Mummy is “a literary creation” says Mackmin, but her own mother, who recently died after developing Alzheimer’s, “inspired it, utterly and totally”. Two weeks before her mother died, Mackmin had a conversation with her in hospital. “I told her: ‘I’ve written a book, you are in it, it would’ve never happened without you, and I am so very grateful.’ She gave me one of those laser looks right to the back of my head, nodded, and turned away to carry on looking at an old bloke covered in trifle.” Could she have published Devoured if her mum was still alive? “I don’t know. Fortunately for us all, life doesn’t work like that. The origami shape of life allows things to be folded round a corner that you’re not quite sure about and then – ‘Oh look, I’ve made a swan.’”
Devoured portrays a time when a generation of parents were preoccupied with their own liberation at the expense of providing children with the space or safety to be children. It is a funny book but an angry one too. “Yes, I have been angry but I’m not blameful,” says Mackmin. “I don’t blame my mum. My mum and indeed my dad were victims of that moment in history, of supposedly women’s emancipation and the psychotherapeutic generation – ‘oh me, me, me’ – putting themselves at the centre. Despite this ideology, they were still dragging behind them an idea of women where their bodies and sexuality were really the only thing that had any currency – and that’s what I was interested in.”
Without giving too much away, one hippy befriends Nearly Thirteen in a way that today would be called grooming. I’m surprised when Mackmin says it’s not. “He’s doing what those adult children were doing – working out who he is by saying what he thinks in the moment. All of them are feeling themselves – feelings, feelings, feelings are everything. ‘I feel this and therefore I am,’ rather than ‘I feel this and therefore I’m going to think about it, and the cake I make out of the mix of those two will lead me forward.’”
Did she experience abuse in her childhood? Mackmin speaks carefully. “I was around a reckless level of lack of care from the ‘adults’ to the children. I knew of too many children who were having sexual encounters with adults, far too many, and yes, it impacted upon me.”
Mackmin believes she was saved from trauma by work, not therapy – and perhaps laughter too. She has poured all her good jokes, and knowledge of theatrical comedy, into Devoured. “Laughter is breath, it alters your being, and it allows you to move on, and keep living. I hope people find it funny but I hope they see that’s the point – it’s laughter as its most important function. It’s not just ‘ha ha ha, crazy hippies’, it’s ‘laugh or you’re going to end up full of bitterness and blame and picking the spot of your childhood forever.’”