Ep. 4. The Animal Channel, Sexuality, Neurodiversity, and Pigs with Matilde Pratesi

In this episode, I was in conversation with Matilde Pratesi, author of Caledonia Novel Award-shortlisted Pig, about big passions, the animal channel that opens up during the writing process, and the strange experience of having her dreams come true. 

We talked about:
💘 Romantic female friendships that can turn toxic.
🐷 Writing from the perspective of a neurodivergent character with a passion for pigs.
🖊️ The possibility of fiction to rewrite narratives of repression.
🌈 Writing about gender and sexuality.

Matilde's ceremonies for writing are:
⚡Finding an animal channel.
⚗️ Using writing to alchemise her inner and outer worlds.
🗂️ Researching everything there is to know about pigs.

Matilde grew up in Italy and moved to London in her early twenties. Once there, she immersed herself in the literary community, writing in forums that met online and around the pub table, taking courses in local community hubs and working men’s colleges.

After postponing the second year of her MA in Creating Writing at Birkbeck University of London because of the inset of the Covid pandemic, she decided to try her hand at writing a novel.

If writing fiction fills up her evenings and weekends, it’s copywriting for the advertising industry that fills up her weekdays. And when all the writing has been done, she enjoys exploring the countryside around London with her wife and daughter.

Her Twitter handle is @1Matilde.

Transcript:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Laura Joyce:

Welcome Matilde, it’s so good to speak to you and to ask you some questions about your recent experience of your writing dreams coming true, and for better or worse.

I want to ask you about the process of writing your first book. The experience of getting your first agent and then about the book itself and some of the things that have gone into that novel that are important to you.

So, today we'll talk about all of those things it will be up to you which direction you take the conversation but I'm just really keen to hear everything you'd like to share.

Matilde Pratesi:

Thank you for having me, Laura. It's very exciting to be here.

Laura Joyce:

I'd like to start with a question which is Maybe it's a bit of a big question, so answer it however you like, but what does writing mean to you?

Oh, writing to me is something that I can do where I feel like I am totally free. And free to express myself, I think. I've dreamed about writing, and I've thought about writing and for so many years I've done everything but writing because in my mind I was so scared of not being a good writer that I just thought that if in my head I'm a fantastic writer, and I never do it, I stay a fantastic writer because I can do whatever I want in my head.

But if I actually go ahead and do it and I am a mediocre or bad writer then the dream is over, and I'll never get to be that fantastic writer of my dreams.

So, for a very, very long time. I did everything I could not to write. And I was very content with making my job about writing. So, I'd write other people's words or I'd kind of translate people's technical writing into something more palatable and I was able, for a few years, to fool myself into thinking well I'm making a living out of writing this is as good as writing my own books and writing the fiction I would love to write.

But it didn't last very long and so I think. I finally made the step, and it was a very difficult one because there's a lot of fear tied into it, but now that I've made it when I actually go back to writing after I haven't done it for a day or so, it just feels like something unleashes.

It feels like there's a connection between my innermost thoughts and the page.  My inside world and my outside world are connected, and I don't think anything else can do that in my life but writing.

Laura Joyce:

Wow, that's really beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And I think that's so important – the idea of the inner and outer world and I think for so many writers there isn't another way to do that. There's a kind of alchemical process in the writing that almost makes those two aspects of ourselves kind of connect in a way that nothing else does and so I love hearing you describe it that way.

And I think the other thing that's really powerful is that idea that if you don't write you can't fail. I think it's such a big problem it's one of the blocks that writers can have. That you've got the perfect version of you as a writer in your mind and anything that you do can actually damage that perfect image. So, I really appreciate you sharing that and I'm so glad you've got over it.

Matilde Pratesi:

Yes, me too, I have to say. I didn't I just thought it was one of those things that you just dream of that you never actually do. I just thought one day in my seventies I'd wake up and start. And the fact that I've started doing that in my sort of let's say mid-thirties means that I have hopefully decades ahead of me to do plenty more and make up for lost time. I'm really glad because I feel like I've given myself a chance to fulfil that lifelong dream.

Laura Joyce:

Yeah, it feels so good to hear you say that and just that idea of, What's yet to come? Because of course we're talking about your first book. But hopefully it's the first of many more and there's the excitement of seeing what comes next so really love that as well.

So, talking about the first book I wonder if you could first of all tell us the name of your book and a little bit about it and just how it came into being.

Matilde Pratesi:

Yeah, so my book is called Pig. And I've been trying very hard to find a way to make it sound interesting when I tell people. Sometimes I tell the very basic story and then the question I get asked is, Oh is it is it for adults or for children? and I feel surprised every time because it's very much not a book for children.

Every time I try and formulate a better way of talking about it, but I think essentially it's the story of a woman called Valé. And her life between her childhood and teenagehood in Rome in Italy and then her adulthood in London.

And she is an interesting character. I don't ever say out loud in the book, but she is on the autism spectrum which gives her a unique perspective on the world, and on the people around her.

And sometimes some challenges in how she relates to the people around her.

She also has these very, very big passions and her big, big passion from the beginning is pigs. She loves pigs. She knows everything there is to know about pigs – she reads up on them and she loves sharing those thoughts.

But she soon finds out that other people are not as interested. In fact, they think she's odd because of it so she kind of hides it, but it does isolate her until she moves to the big city. But then she finds herself even more isolated away from her beloved pigs in the countryside.

She meets another girl who is a much more sociable person who has plenty of friends, but the two of them somehow form this bond. They become good friends, and this friendship offers Vale what she's always wanted, which was to be “normal”.

To have a life like she sees all the other people her age around her. And this big friendship kind of goes through a rocky patch which kind of blurs the lines of between friendship and romance which I found I felt like it can often be with teenage, especially female friendships.

Just very often there can be an obsessive element to it and also a romantic element to it. And whether it's something that the people involved in are aware or not this kind of throws Valé into a bit of a spin. She decides to leave Italy, and she moves to London where she finds more like-minded people.

But the past catches up with her and things go from bad to worse. Pigs are a very big element of the story, but really, Valé is the main character. Valé is someone who is searching to be accepted for who she is to find happiness in her own mind and with the people around her and for that freedom to be herself.

She's very happy being herself. But it's the people around her that aren't happy with who she is a lot of the time and so, there's, it's all about kind of that reconnection and hopefully finding happiness and maybe romance along the way.

But the story itself has been a story in the making for a few years I think I think that's the same for a lot of first books, you know, you have the luxury of thinking of the idea for however long you want really you could take up fifty years if you wanted to refine an idea. Because there's no one there's no one waiting for you and no one asking you to do anything so you can just take that luxury. I began thinking about it maybe two or three years before I started writing it.

I did lots of creative writing classes, courses, kind of groups around the pub table. Working men's colleges, you know. I very much lacked the confidence of going to a more serious class.

I just thought those kinds of free groups out and about in London would be amateurish enough to accept someone like me, so my confidence was very low.

And then, slowly, I kind of started to shape this this idea. And the people around me started to respond really well to it. And so that confidence slowly grew from the responses around me. But the idea for Valé as a character in the story. Well, first of all, I've myself always been a big fan of pigs as an animal. I always found them fascinating and misunderstood. I really like them. I always have. Growing up, my signature was always a little drawing of a pig, so it just felt like a very kind of a close subject, and they always say write about what you know so when I was thinking of something valid to be passionate about because I really wanted her to be single-mindedly into one thing and I wanted that one thing to be a natural thing, part of nature.

I first thought bees because of course bees are wonderful and fascinating. Then trees because again so much variety and so much meaning and life and all of that and then I just thought Let's just make my life easier. Like why would I research a topic that I have no idea about? Let's just write about pigs because I know about pigs and they're great and I won't mind researching more and more stuff about them for the next however long. However many years. So, it ended up being pigs.

In terms of the character of Valé. I met on holiday a few years ago, a friend of my mother who was this Italian woman with crazy like with wild, curly hair who was quite fascinating to me. My wife and I both met her together and we got this very strong feeling that she was someone who was very unhappily in the closet, but in such deep denial about it. And that she was kind of over-compensating.

So, first of all she was very uncomfortable around us. And then also she was very openly flirtatious with this friend's husband in a way that didn't feel real. She came from this really suffocating family – like the traditional Italian family – and she was the only child and was going to be in charge of taking over, you know, the family possessions once the parents were, you know, gone. She had this kind of very oppressive life.

I started thinking about sexuality in a place like Rome and repressed sexuality and I started thinking, Well, what would happen if this person had had at some point a breakthrough earlier on? I felt like she was in her fifties and maybe there was a chance you might never have that breakthrough but

what if there is a character that we see in her childhood and teenagehood and going the way this woman went but actually what if things don't go like that for her?

I felt like the woman I met would was the sad version of what Valé could have become if she had stayed in Rome and pushed her feelings down and her instinct down and instead I thought, well, what, if I take her when she's young and put her in a different setting and see what happens.

And I have also been very interested in the concept of these very close and enormous romantic female teenage friendships and how for so many queer women, their first experiences of crushes and loves and are often with friends and often you don't really realise that that's what that is you just think oh you know we're friends for life best friends we love each other, and you didn't really

realize until maybe years later that actually that was your first crush or that was someone that you felt romantically about.

So, that kind of all happened at the same time. And then I just threw in loads of personal experiences and memories mainly about the sensations of living in Rome and the oppressive nature of what I felt growing up as well as the oppressive nature of the summers in Rome. They're hot, they're smelly, there are people partying and then and we used to break into abandoned buildings or the Roman ruins, you know, a long time ago when I was young.

It was less touristy for starters and also there's a lot less barriers, you know, you could break into an old Roman ruin because you could just go and jump over the gate and smoke a spliff on the lawn next to like, I don't know, like an obelisk or whatever. You know, you could do all those

things like ride your moped around the dark streets at 3 am and be so hot and that would be the only way you could kind of cool down by just kind of whizzing around the streets on your moped.

All of that kind of very physical sensation of living in Rome, growing up in Rome, I've put in there and that's I think where my kind of my personal experience comes in as well as I worked in a bookshop in London for a long time and in the book Valé works in a bookshop. I found working within those walls very soothing and I just imagined what would be a safe and comforting world for her to live in. She can get overstimulated by the outside world. People can sometimes be very scary for her. I thought about what would be a job that would also feel like a cocoon and a way for her to feel safe and secure and so automatically my thought went to the walls of a very old bookshop, and it helped because I could draw from personal experience.

Laura Joyce:

Thank you so much for that really rich answer. And I can't imagine anyone wondering after that description if this was a book for adults or children!

It has so many themes for adults looking back at those younger years, those adolescent years, those young adult years and just trying to sift through them for meaning.

And like you say, one of those things could be, Was that a friend or was that a crush? I think many if not most people have had an experience like that, and I think there's something very relatable about Vale in this book. On the one hand, she's a singular character – she's her own person and she has these obsessions, and she has these specific experiences. But on the other hand, I think how you bring her to life both as an adolescent and as an adult and there are so many things that are universal, or at least recognizable, for people just struggling with love and loneliness and friendship and, Am I happier in the city or the country? You know, just these questions that I think hunt and plague us as we're trying to build a life of any kind.

I say this is someone who has read the book several times, having worked with you on it, that Valé is a unique character. I've never read anyone quite like her and I think she's going to be a very powerful character for readers when your book does come out. So, I'm excited to see how the response goes.

One thing that I just wanted to pick back up is this thread about sexuality and being closeted and that kind of experience that you had where you met a specific person and you could almost see that whole life experience just in that one meeting, that weight of history, that weight of family, that oppression, and that specific Roman context that you talk about so beautifully.

But then also that idea that someone who is closeted always has a chance. To come out and to live in a way that is authentic to them, but it maybe gets harder as time goes on.

And I love the way that you decided to almost rescue Valé from that alternate fate by the gift by meeting her when she was younger and giving her that space to explore that part of her life.

But I wondered if, if you could say a little bit about, you know, the themes around gender and sexuality in this book and, you know, how it has felt to write about those things as a queer woman yourself.

Matilde Pratesi:

For me it was very important to write a book that touched on those subjects. And I think there are plenty of stories being written about those subjects, but I don't think there's still enough.

I think it's something that is such a shared experience, but I think has been a very kind of hidden experience for a very long time.

I feel like nowadays we ask to have more of a language for it, which is very exciting, which means that we know how to talk about it, how to speak about it a lot more but also people are starting to realize and understand and put words to those feelings that for a long time they might not have understood. So, there is a growing hunger for it, which I think is very exciting.

And for me, there was no other way. I think it was very healing in a way for me to frame this character in a reality that that was mine for a long time and I think I had no idea about any of that stuff about myself when I was back in Rome, and it took a long time, and it took some distance to realize for me.

It was very exciting to give Valé an idea of that and a realization of those confusing feelings while she was still in Rome and while she was still with those friends because that would have really thrown a bomb in my life if it had happened back then. You know. So, I felt it would be inspiring.

There are multiple strands of those themes. There is, obviously, Valé’s feelings around her sexuality. There is also person that she has a romantic interest in at some point – without giving too much away – who is a gender non-conforming person. So, there is a point in the book where the whole sort of they/them pronouns are being introduced to Valé that's something that's very new to her and I think the people around her react in different ways and I found that a fun scene to write because you could see different generations kind of dealing with it in different ways or trying their best but being very awkward about it and not really understanding that she, he, they thing. 

The younger generation or sort of more queer generation finding it really easy and just what's the big deal, Jesus, like, get over it already.  

And then Valé herself like Listening and trying to understand this concept for the first time and really just kind of accepting it almost like a child would accept that there can be two mummies and there could be two daddies and a child going okay, great and then just kind of moving on with their play. It's almost the same thing for Valé she's like okay cool.

And then the biggest theme really, I think the thing that I found the most complex but the most exciting, is the relationship between Valé and her childhood friend both in teenagehood and in adulthood and when the two of them gravitate back towards each other as adults. There is so much buried just under the surface and there's so much that is kind of coming from Valé. It is clear to the reader that Valé has always wanted more, and she is happy with the scraps that are given to her and it's enough to keep her hanging in there.

But I think her friend's motivation is a lot harder to understand. Again, this is not linear. I think sexuality and gender is just never linear and I think you can feel a different way depending on the time in your life, depending on your experiences, and depending on internal things like internalized homophobia or societal pressures. I think we have these two people who are in different places in their lives and at different ends of the understanding spectrum. I think they're both growing a lot. And I think they're just they're not meeting each other in the middle and I think they cope with the inner turmoil in very different ways. For Valé it comes out in a certain way and for Clara, her best friend, it comes out in a very different way.

I guess we could call it a very toxic combination of characters and experiences.

Laura Joyce:

Yeah. That's such a lovely way of putting it that it's about, almost, their dualling subconsciouses that are causing this toxicity. I mean, again, I would say that, and you know, if once people read the book, they will be able to sort of make a decision on the characters. I wouldn't say it's straight down the middle. And there is a kind of form of exploitation there that's more than subconscious I'd say as well as some of what's happening subconsciously.

But your novel really explores that kind of line between friendship and romance and then all the ways that not communicating can lead to disastrous consequences. I think that's something that's so interesting in fiction because we've all had an experience like that in our lives and it just gives us a way to kind of navigate those ideas and those questions around gender and sexuality.

I wondered actually if you felt there was a connection between Valé being neurodivergent and her understanding of the whole spectrum of gender in a way that might be different to someone who was neurotypical or if you thought that that was kind of a separate issue altogether.

Matilde Pratesi:

So, I think I would say there probably is a difference in terms of so much of our understanding of gender is driven by society and by outside influences and I think the way Valé sees the world is a little bit different and she isn't quite so influenced by societal pressures and cultural norms which in my opinion is beautiful. I think the way she sees the world, the way she looks at animals, and the way she observes human interactions is quite unique and I think she probably wouldn't be quite so influenced by what the crowd would think about a gender expression. I think she would see it in perhaps a more factual way or maybe from an animalistic point of view, a nature point of view which to me is probably a bit of a fresher perspective.

And so, she potentially wouldn't be aware of those kinds of centuries of cultural conditioning that perhaps non-neurodivergent people might feel more pressured by.

Laura Joyce:

That's really interesting. It's something that I picked up on my reading of Valé when reading the novel is just her freshness of perspective throughout. It's almost as though some forms of bigotry or bias just don't make any sense to Valé, and I think there's something very powerful about that because it then holds up a mirror to those attitudes and asks where have they come from, you know, they're not natural they've been built somehow. Why have they been built in that way? Who do they serve? Who do they not serve?

And I think that's a really powerful aspect of having Valé as a point of view character and I think it’s worth recalling here something you said a little bit earlier about the way that it's not Valé that has the problem it's the world around her that's causing her distress. And I think that's quite a common way of understanding autism, and other forms of neurodivergence, that the issues that that people experience are not because of the neurodivergence, it's because of the world being built in a hostile way to those ways of experience.

So, I really feel that all these threads in your book come together in such a beautiful way and make me at least think about how the world could be set up differently if we collectively chose for that to happen. So, it's very political even though it is one person's story.

Matilde Pratesi:

It was very important that to have the first-person perspective because I think for the reader to be in Valé’s mind was key to be able to empathize and understand her point of view. And so to be able to see the world through her eyes. As a bystander you might see this kind of thing as Oh, she's just wacky, you know, she's just does wacky things and talks about pigs, and I really didn't want that distance. I wanted the reader to be right inside. And, and understand and see the world and how people behaved through her eyes and really to stress how strange that seems to someone that doesn't have that conditioning.

And if you, still must kind of if you strip back centuries of cultural conditioning, not that that's obviously what her experience is, but you know, if you don't have that kind of you know, this kind of mental arithmetic that sometimes we do as kind of non-neurodivergent people to just kind of justify bigotry and justify hatred and that kind of stuff. What's left?

And I think, and I think from Valé’s point of view it doesn't make sense. It's wrong and it doesn't make sense. Pigs wouldn't behave like that. Animals wouldn't behave like that. Why would humans do that? It doesn't make sense, and I think it's probably also why she finds them superior animals because they're a lot easier to understand for her. The fact that they are often misunderstood as an animal makes her identify with them to a certain extent.

Laura Joyce:

The pig theme is just so interesting, and I think and having an obsession with pigs is just so fun. It's just such a fun part of the book and I learned a lot about pigs reading the book. And I hadn't really thought of them, you know, they were misunderstood by me, certainly, and I imagine by so many people.

And I think that, you know, of course, I don't want to make any generalizations, or say, all autistic people will have this experience, or you know all queer people will have this experience or anything like that, but I do think there's something about v Valé’s particularity that can speak to broader questions and that you draw that out really beautifully.

I think that those are some of the reasons why you ended up both being shortlisted for a prize for your book and then subsequently signing with an agent. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that experience. Of getting the agent and what it feels like to have these literary dreams realised in this way.

Matilde Pratesi:

Yeah, I mean looking back is still it all feels very crazy still. And I always told myself that if I was able to sign with an agent that would be the dream realized. I wouldn't even think about the potential, like, of publishing. For me, the idea of an external person who wanted to invest money into my work would feel like the ultimate prize.

I think I felt like with all the courses and everything, it was always me paying for someone to like give me feedback. And I just always felt well if someone's actually willing to pay, you know, to invest money into me, that would be the ultimate test of belief.  

I thought if I'm paying someone, they're always going to give me like good feedback because, you know, they're getting paid. And so, I always felt like the only honest feedback I would get would be from someone that I'm not paying. I don't know why. In hindsight, it's a bit silly, but at the time for me was the ultimate goal was to sign with an agent.

And so, following your advice, I had a shortlist of, I think it was about up to sort of ten ideal agents that I researched. And I saw that they were looking for contemporary fiction so that was the main thing you know obviously the kind of fiction that I write, and they were looking for with a special interest in psychological interests or female friendships for example, so a lot of them had LGBTQ issues.

So, I kind of shortlisted those potential agents based on what they were looking for and their interests and so I emailed them all with like a you know like a recap of what the book was about, a little bit about me, and the first three chapters.

And then you know you just kind of send it off and you just wait and wait and wait and so at the same time I just thought you know what I know that there's plenty of competitions out there let me just see as I already got these three well-refined chapters that I'm sending to agents. Let me just do the same and enter a few competitions. I heard back from the competition first before I started hearing back from agents.

I was longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Prize, and then about month and a half later I also found that I'd been shortlisted and that felt incredible. I mean, I think that year they had about 564 applicants from all over the English-speaking world and the shortlist was down to seven authors. So, it was, I mean, it was mind-blowing.

I got, like, fancy photos done and everything, which felt very professional. And then a little bio and yeah it was brilliant. An extract of the book was published on their website, as well as my bio with the photo, which again was wonderful. And you know that almost kind of felt like plenty even if I'd never heard from an agent again, it would be fantastic.

But. I heard from a few, I had a few noes, so a few agents got back to me and said, look, this sounds interesting or quirky or whatever but it's not for us. I have to say every single person that got back to me was very polite about it and no one gave me in-depth feedback, but, reading between the lines, you know, Valé just wasn't their kind of thing. Obviously it hurts every time, but it's also completely fine.

I would never want to work with someone who didn't believe in my little pig book as much as I do, and I think you either get it or you don't. It's not an airport book, it's not a completely easy sell and I think you have to kind of believe in it. It is a bit different, and I needed someone to kind of really buy into it and then and I found her eventually.

I signed with Susanna Lea Associates and my agent, Therese, really believes in the book. We had our initial chat and, and we just spent hours just talking about Valé and talking about Clara and talking about the characters as if they were real people. As if you know they exist and, you know, they never existed beyond the work that you and I did. They’ve always been in my mind and to just hear someone that I've never really met before discussing them as if they were real was just an incredible experience.

Yeah, it was wonderful and now we've just gone through around a couple of rounds of edits, and we should be submitting to a shortlist of potential publishers in a few weeks’ time and I'm really excited to see what's going to happen.

Laura Joyce:

Oh, I'm so excited for you. I am it's I know how hard you've worked and how long you've worked on this book, and it's been such a pleasure to see it grow and see it develop. You know, I think it's so well deserved, both the competition and the agent. What I really loved about the way you described that is that you didn't just want to go for the first person that contacted you or agreed.

You really thought about who was going to be a champion for the book. And who was going to love Valé and the pigs in the way that you did and that's something that can get lost, I think, sometimes, that you know, writers can feel that it's up to an agent or it's up to an editor to make a decision, but the decision is always yours as well because feeling that you're working with the right person is so important. You've spent however long crafting this book. And you don't want it to end up somebody's kind of tenth priority. So, I really am so pleased for you that you found the right person to work with and I'm really excited to see what happens in the next few weeks.

Matilde Pratesi:

Thank you. Me too. I think this I feel like the biggest journey has been my confidence journey. I think I just started out never believing that I could be here. I mean, I'm not a native English speaker to start with. So, I that was already something that I felt was going to hold me back and then on top of that I just you know when you want something so much you just almost don't dare to think that it's going to ever be real.

And now I feel like I'm quite close to it being realized and then I also already have ideas for a second book and hopefully my agent will believe in it as much as she believes in this one and then we can just you know this could be the career that I've always wanted, you know, the dream and it's almost too much that the to think about because it's so exciting.

It makes me very, very happy. It was lots of hard work, but. It, it was also fun. It was also really fun, you know, you almost kind of go in a state of trance when you when you write or at least when I do I'm sure it's the same for many other writers, you know, are going to a state of trance and time just kind of goes and there's this sort of animal channel between the head and the hand and it's wonderful.

The result is not always great, but I've learned to sort of not let it affect my confidence in the work because it can always be revised and moved. As long as the story is clear in your head, it’ll find its place on the page.

Laura Joyce:

I really like that description of the animal channel. That's so evocative. That is what most people that I've talked to do experience: there is a trance state ­– there is a place that's between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind and it's really lovely to hear you describe it that way.

And of course that's what edits are for. You get the work out and then you, you know, work on it in a kind of editing sense and you can just keep repeating that. So, yeah, I love that description. Thank you. So yeah, thank you so much. It's been so great to speak to you again and just to see how far you've come, how far you've come on your journey.

Matilde Pratesi:

Thank you. So much. I'll definitely keep you updated. I absolutely wouldn't be here without you.

So, it's, yeah, you're coming along with me on this journey whether you like it or not.

Laura Joyce:

Oh, yeah, well, I definitely want to come, so that's great. Okay, thank you so much!