W


e meet the protagonist of Harriet Lane’ s unputdownable third novel, Other People’s Fun, at a time of personal crisis:


her husband Robin has left her and life as she knew it is falling apart. Her job is going nowhere and her daughter is on the cusp of leaving home. “I wanted to write about being left,” Lane tells


me, “about that state of free fall and assembling a different sort of life. It’s about a woman at a turning point, someone who finds, completely unexpectedly, that her life has been changed and she’s quite powerless to do anything about it, and who maybe finds a new avenue of agency.” The novel opens with Ruth attending a


school reunion where she bumps into vivid, self-assured Sookie, who never gave Ruth the time of day when they were teenagers but who suddenly seems interested in striking up a sort of friendship. Slowly, Ruth – described by Lane as “pent up, as if there’s stuff that she can’t quite bring herself to address, and rage as well” – becomes enmeshed in Sookie’s life and comes to realise there’s much more to Sookie than she would have people believe on her perfectly curated Instagram. As Sookie embarks on an affair with an old


teacher whom both she and Ruth had been infatuated with, Ruth becomes even more insinuated in Sookie’s life and an intricate web of power dynamics, envy, artifice, motivation, appearances and performance is woven. As the novel builds to an explosive finale, Lane explores the uncomfortable, vertiginous clash between the people we once were, the people we are now and the people we thought we would become in a story about being seen and watched, and where time, selves and the stories we tell ourselves and others concertina – all amplified by social media. Lane says adolescence is “a big theme


with me, this sense of the social hierarchy and the complications of teenage friendship, the expectations that you have of yourself” and explains that it was, as in her two previous novels, something she wanted to explore. In some ways, it is a mirror of the “free fall” and identity crises Ruth and Sookie are experiencing, when things have not yet fully solidified; an edgy, exciting, scary period. Lane knew she would have to tackle social media but says she was, for a while, “a little bit nervous”. “But then I thought, this is a novel about friendship and social lives and who you are. I can’t write a contemporary novel without addressing that, without doing that, because that’s so much the way that we socialise now, so much of our lives happen online,” she explains. “What I really find fascinating is, by


broadcasting the amazing contentment and style of your life, you really do make yourself such a hostage to fortune. That’s the weirdest thing for me. By setting it all out, what do you do when stuff goes wrong? If people have come


Her W&N, £8.99, PB, 9781780220024


Dubbed “as seductive as it is thrilling” by the Observer and an “exquisitely sinister” psychological thriller by the Daily Telegraph, Her was a Waterstones Book Club pick when it came out in 2014 and sees a friendship turn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.


25,718 TCM copies sold


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to your feed every day for feel good, gorgeous tablescapes and meadows and river swimming and parties, then what do you do when you get a diagnosis, or your partner leaves you, or your kids go off the rails? I’m fascinated by that clash. “I think with all my books, I like to do some-


thing on the surface and then something under- neath. Technology allows you to connect, but that brings all sorts of advantages and terrible disadvantages, and I think of the surface-ness of the way that so many social interactions happen now, the superficiality of it, there’s just so much more going on underneath the surface.”


L


Alys, Always W&N, £10.99, 9781780220017


“A suspenseful portrait of the outsider and a satisfyingly bitchy send-up of literary London,” said the Guardian of Lane’s 2012 debut, which sees sub-editor Frances’ colourless existence disrupted when she happens upon the aftermath of a car crash and hears the last words of the driver, Alys.


24,098 TCM copies sold


ane’s previous novel, Her, came out in 2014, and in the same year Lane wrote in the Guardian that her eyesight had been deteriorating since 2008 and that she is


blind in one eye due to an extremely rare autoimmune condition. She said at the time of writing fiction, “I found another way to be free” and that “it’s the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy; a good thing to do with the time and sight I have left”. “Maybe this is what I have done with the fear: perhaps I have collected it up, a great dark tangle of dread, and worked it into my books. Both novels [Alys, Always, and Her] seem to be powered by a low-level anxiety, an underlying sense that something’s not quite right,” she wrote. She tells me her sight has, thankfully, been


“pretty much stable for quite a long time now, possibly 10 years” and that “I don’t think about it every day. I don’t have a panic about it.” “My life is different, I’m registered blind, I’ve got a stick. I can read on Kindle [but] it is hard work. Reading is a great loss, actually, because it’s not the effortless thing, like breathing, that it used to be. I’ve gotten into audiobooks a lot more, but I still find that with fiction, I want to see the words on the page,” she explains. Her experience of sight loss has nevertheless informed Other People’s Fun. “I was thinking about it in terms of envy.


This book is a lot about envy and resentment. And I think I write about envy quite a lot because I do try to avoid it in my everyday life. I remember, there was quite a clear moment when I looked at everybody else’s lives going on, everyone seemed so fortunate, and I remember having a sense of a turning point. I was like, yes, I could really dig into that now, and that could become a defining part of my life, a sort of resentment about people whose lives were so wonderful to me, and uncomplicated, and they didn’t even know it. But then I thought: where’s the point? I refused to let myself get caught up in that. So I do think I’ve probably bundled a lot of that up and I put it in the books. It’s a thing that interests me, but it scares me as well. Because once you start to compare yourself with other people, it’s never good, is it? I think I deal with it by writing about it in a sort of detached way.”


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BARNABY CRITCHLOW


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