Imani
Thompson Honey
that racism will only end with the end of the world, gives the novel its intellectual spine. “I kind of agree with it,” Thompson says, “but is it helpful day to day?” Thompson grew up in Devon
‘I
promise I didn’t kill any boys,” laughs Imani Thompson, reassuring me that her Cambridge experience diverged
from that of her debut novel’s protagonist. Do not be fooled by the serial killer premise. Snared in a 10-way auction in the UK and a nine-way auction in the US, Honey is a stylish, sensual campus novel that doubles as a feminist polemic, a dating satire that smuggles in Critical Race Theory and a pitch-black comedy about a young woman who decides the best way to deal with bad men is to murder them. “My editor said I’d Trojan-horsed these themes into a popular genre,” says the 27-year-old over video call. “That was the intellectual challenge I set myself: can I make it academic and a book about a serial killer?” The idea arrived during Thompson’s final year at the University of Cambridge, where she had switched from English to sociology after medieval literature left her cold. She wanted to explore the history of being a woman of colour, the intersections of that identity and gender-based violence, but it did not seem like a fun package. The serial killer genre offered a way in – with, crucially, a chance to be funny. Her protagonist Yrsa – a name
meaning “she-bear” or “furious”, lifted from the poet Yrsa Daley- Ward’s book, which sits on Thompson’s shelf – is a jaded PhD student who starts hunting men who mistreat women and killing them in ways that women are typically killed. It is a deliberate inversion: Thompson was sick of seeing anti-female violence on screen and wanted to flip the lens. In dialogue-heavy prose that is irreverent and propulsive, lyrical, yet spare, Thompson situates the reader in Yrsa’s charismatic
and Dorset, the daughter of a Scottish mother and a father of Jamaican heritage. Her grand- mother came to London from Jamaica at 18 on a Commonwealth nursing programme and never returned. Her mother, her first reader, is pursuing a PhD in histori- cal fiction under the supervision of Bernardine Evaristo. Writing, it seems, runs in the family. Zadie Smith has been a huge influence since childhood, both her work and in terms of breaking down barriers for writers of colour. She inspired Thompson’s desire to go to Cambridge – a setting that comes alive in lecture scenes featuring the microaggressions, tone-policing and debates around “wokeness” that she witnessed there. A first-year politics syllabus featuring no women of colour is drawn from life. Yet, although Cambridge is in some ways an insular, traditional world, Thompson met many radical think- ers there. She pushed boundaries, submitting non-written work in an effort to decolonise the university – and was awarded a first. After graduating, Thompson
third-person perspective, engag- ing our sympathies and making us complicit in her actions. Honey was born out of a deep
frustration with male behaviour in a throwaway dating culture. Most of Thompson’s friends have had sexual encounters where consent has been crossed, some- thing that is too often normalised. “You’re made to feel like it’s your fault, and it’s only when you step back, you go: ‘Oh no, this is the patriarchy.’” But Honey is more psychologi-
cally complex than its pitch suggests and it subverts the trope of the “angry Black woman”. Thompson quickly realised that Yrsa is not driven by rage – an emotion often attributed to female characters in contemporary
fiction – but by addiction. She is a thrill-seeker, intoxicated by power and deception, who gives lip service to justice and redemp- tion, “but that’s all it is”. Researching the psychology
of killers, Thompson wanted to avoid giving Yrsa stereotypical childhood trauma. Instead, she has an ostensibly happy, middle- class family – with a seam of inherited violence running down her mother’s side. Caribbean food is a recurring motif, connecting Yrsa to that maternal line and infusing the prose with heat. “What I find most interesting
about Yrsa is that she becomes everything she accuses her oppres- sor of being,” says Thompson. Yrsa’s thesis on Afropessimism, a theoretical framework arguing
burned through savings writing a draft, then took a job at Daunt Books, where the bookselling staff served as a “low-key writers’ club”. The role also opened her eyes to contemporary publishing after student years spent reading “mainly dead authors”. Despite being “routine-less”,
Thompson wrote Honey in a year and is two-thirds of the way through a second novel: a near- future dystopia inspired by the Bibby Stockholm, a barge housing migrants off the Dorset coast. It follows a couple trying for a baby and offers a way for Thompson to work through her questions around having children in a world threatened by climate crisis. With her timely ideas and fresh, subver- sive vision, Thompson is clearly a vital voice here to stay.
REPORTING Madeleine Feeny
The Borough Press, 14th May, £16.99, HB, 9780008759773
09
TOBY MADDEN.
Debuts of the Year Author Profile
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