Yorkshire author Fiona Mozley: 'I wanted to write about the early 2000s - history now'
Last time Fiona Mozley released a book set in Yorkshire, she was shortlisted for The Booker Prize. Elmet was her debut in 2017 about life on the margins in the wilds of the region, and the power - and limits - of family loyalty.
Mozley was 29 and working part-time in a bookshop when she started writing the tale, the setting having come to her on a train journey after visiting her parents, who re main in Yorkshire, where she grew up. These days, she’s based in Edinburgh but Mozley will always have a fondness for the city of York, which she called home from the age of six. It’s in part why she has chosen to set her latest release in the area.
“When you grow up in a place, it’s always in your mind,” she says. “I set my first novel in the countryside between York and Doncaster but I hadn’t really written about the city at all. With this book, I wanted to uncover what life was like in the 2000s for teenagers and people coming of age and it made sense to set it in my hometown, the place I know intimately.”
In Awake Awake, Mozley’s protagonist is a woman in her 30s called Mary who is struggling with her memory. She does not have too few recollections but too many, including some that are downright absurd. To decipher fact from fiction, Mary goes back over her life, sorting through her childhood and adolescence with her three friends in York, through an adulthood accustomed to tragedy. Most of the action is set in the early 2000s when Mary and her schoolfriends get involved in political debates surrounding the Iraq War.
"There was a place in York called the ‘Peace Hotel’ - a group of sort of political activists kind of squatted there for a while,” recalls Mozley of her own youth. “I was never involved in it, but I remember seeing it from afar. I kind of wanted to write about it and write about the moment in history too – thinking about how the early 2000s are history now, which is very strange.
“I wanted to write about the process of of coming of age at a moment when you felt like everything was going to get better – the world was become going to become more peaceful, everyone was going to become more prosperous, it was an economic boom time. And then one thing after another happened and life didn't turn out that way.”
“I hope that a lot of people who are millennials will connect with that period and remember their own teenage years growing up, the music of the time and some of the events and personalities of the time,” Mozley continues.
"But I hope they’ll also think about the way we look back on the past, particularly when it’s our own lives and the way we remember things almost as we want them to have been and not necessarily how they are. It really is a book about memory, how we remember our own pasts and world history as well.”
- Awake Awake, published by John Murray Press, is out June 4. An Evening with Fiona Mozley is taking place at Waterstones York, also on June 4. Visit www.waterstones.com/events