Helen Oyeyemi / Features / Untitled Books

'It started to feel like I was writing the book for my life’

Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi wrote her first novel The Icarus Girl in seven weeks while studying for her A levels. Now still only 24, and writing her forth novel, she has already achieved what many writers might expect in a whole career. The writing doesn't get any easier though, she tells Viola Fort.

'I thought, well, let’s have her living in a racist house, because that will be fun.'

Helen Oyeyemi looks right at home in the British Library, which is like a great, silent hive the morning we meet, full of hushed industry. She could be mistaken for any one of the hundreds of students milling around, but for the fact that at 24 she already has to her name three novels, two plays and an Oxbridge degree, achievements that she carries lightly, as though not quite reconciled to them. she is ambitious and at times boldly experimental, but in person she appears self-conscious of her articulacy and intellectual curiosity; her conversation is studded with deprecatory 'ums' and 'like's, and her answers frequently trail of with a shy, 'so...' , in attempt to play herself down. She speaks quietly, so quietly in fact that her words are frequently swallowed by the echoing canteen, but if a little guarded at times, she is also warm and unfailingly polite. Her publishers call her The Great Oyeyemi and speak of her with protective affection.

White is for Witching is Oyeyemi's third novel, and like her first two, The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House, is steeped in disquieting mischief, the realm of spooks and spirits. The book was conceived in a fit of fever while doing volunteer work in South Africa after leaving university, and it replicates perfectly the close, confused, distorted atmosphere of delirium. 'I was staying in the dark wing of this house with the woman who helps the volunteering agency out,' she remembers, 'and I started reading Dracula quite closely and intensely, probably more intensely than usually done, and I started thinking about the vampire novel and what it is, about monstrosity and what it means, and I thought it seemed to be about fear of the foreign and unnatural appetite.' Her huge eyes glitter at the memory, as though nothing delights her more than such gothic preoccupations.

She had found her time in South Africa difficult, 'it was kind of really racist', she says, frowning: 'Everyone was talking about race; that's all that was on everyone's mind.' She revisits the experience on her characters in White is for Witching, which tells the story of twins Miranda and Eliot Silver, who live in a guesthouse in Dover with their French father and the memory of their dead mother. The book is ambitiously structured with a number of different viewpoints, including that of the 'xenophobic house', whose affection for Miranda ('Miri') and ardent protection of her become increasingly sinister. 'The house is in love with her', Oyeyemi laughs. Miranda suffers from Pica, a rare disorder that compels sufferers to eat non-foods. She snacks furtively on bits of plastic, soil from the garden, chalk sticks kept neatly hidden in cigarette packets. 'I knew about pica because I'd been planning to write a short story about that for ages. I have this book of medical disorders, and pica's one of them,' she explains. 'This impulse to eat things that don't nourish ties in with the idea of unnatural appetites, and then I thought, well, let's have her living in a racist house, because that will be fun. That's how it came together, just ideas of vampirism and strangeness and hostility to outsiders.'

Oyeyemi is drawn to madness, female madness in particular. She delights in her characters' unravelling, and the claustrophobic tenor of White is for Witching leaves you wondering about her own sanity. She admits that for the whole time she was writing she was plagued by recurring nightmares: 'There was one where I was in this room full of people, and there were two girls in dirty dresses standing in the corner, speaking this language only me and them could understand, saying, 'we're going to kill you', and I was saying to everyone, 'can you hear these girls? They're going to kill me!' And that was the recurring dream that was White is for Witching; it was hard to kind of pull myself out of sleep, work on the book, go to sleep again... and that was basically my life for the first couple of drafts. It started to feel like I was writing the book for my life', she says.

She had not expected to find writing so hard: after all, she bashed out her first book in only seven weeks, while sitting her A-Levels. The Icarus Girl, which attracted international attention because of the author's age and rumours of a £400,000 book deal, grew out of the short stories she had written for herself 'for years'. She had a cast of characters waiting ready in her head, so when she came to write, 'it just came really, really easily.' She sent the first twenty pages to Robin Wade, an agent who she'd found in the Writers and Artists Yearbook, telling him she'd written a hundred pages (she hadn't). To her great surprise, he got in touch the next day and said he wanted to see the other pages. Her teachers were sympathetic, and presumably over the moon. 'I went to my English teacher and showed her the email from [Robin] and was like, 'well, there's this agent interested in the story, can I have the next couple of weeks off homework?', and she was like, 'yeah'. My other teachers let me off too, and I just wrote like mad.' She giggles, and then shrugs, 'It was just the fact that he was interested that sparked those other pages.' Such instant validation must have been overwhelming for someone for so young. At an age when most teenagers still don't have a clue what they're going to do and who they're going to be, Oyeyemi was being confirmed as an author, a weighty vocation for anyone, let alone a schoolgirl.

By the time the book was published, she had embarked on a degree in politics at Cambridge University. 'The whole experience of the publication of Icarus girl was just completely surreal because I would be studying, and then I wasn't very good at my degree, so I would just end up reading lots of novels, and then things would happen, like I remember Teen Vogue came to my college and did a shoot, and everyone was kind of like, 'what is going on?', and then the BBC would come and film me pottering around college.' She must have felt very exposed at a time when everyone is just trying to fit in. 'In a way I was just grateful for the fact of being at college and having that structure to keep me dwelling too much on reviews and all that, because I had to get essays in. So that was grounding,' she smiles warily.

The disarming thing about Oyeyemi is that despite the fact that she continues to write, she gives little impression of ambition - perhaps it is because she has already achieved so much. However, unlike so many published writers, she seems to regard her work as an author as something she does, rather than something she is. More likely, it is modesty. She writes, she writes well, but she is still figuring out her territory and the terms of her craft, and she is wary of being celebrated for such juvenile achievement. While quite clearly a talented writer, the best of her achievements lie ahead, which at 24, is exactly how it should be.

Monday, 20 July, 2009