Breathing someone else’s oxygen
Drawing on her own experiences growing up in rural Norfolk, Christine Pillainayagam wanted to do something about the lack of representation in children’s literature, and ended up writing Ellie Pillai is brown for her 15-year- old self. The YA Rom Com covers some big themes, but maintains a joyful and optimistic message.
CHRISTINE Pillainayagam’s debut novel follows Ellie Pillai as she looks for a way to find her own place in school (and the world), while remaining true to herself. It’s a Rom Com, so there’s teenage love involved. And Ellie, like Christine, is the daughter of immigrants to the UK – hence the title, Ellie Pillai is Brown. Christine admits there are similarities between Ellie and herself, but says the book is not her life.
Christine’s parents were both Tamils from Sri Lanka – her father, who passed away recently, was a GP and spent 40 years working in the NHS. He arrived in the UK in the 1970s without a job, but found work in rural north Norfolk. Christine’s mother and older brother then moved to the UK to reunite the family. Christine and her older sister were born shortly afterward, spending their childhood in Norfolk.
She says: “North Norfolk is right out on the edge of the country, so it is not a place that people ‘pass through’, and a lot of people tended to stay for a long, long time. We came across lots of people who had never left Norfolk, and had never seen a person of colour. It was quite a strange childhood, and I thought it was quite normal to be stared at all the time, or to have all these little micro- aggressions directed towards me. “Ellie Pillai is Brown is definitely an own-voices story, but Ellie and I are very
Spring-Summer 2022
different. It draws on my experiences of being a first generation immigrant, growing up between two cultures. In my case, I grew up in an area that was very white and because we didn’t have a lot of family in the area we also felt quite isolated. We had family in London, but I never really felt as though I was ‘Tamil enough’, and at the same time I didn’t feel quite ‘British enough’ either. I considered myself to be British, but I was always being asked ‘Where are you really from?’. “So that experience of not quite fitting into either camp was something that I wanted to get in to the book – that sense of otherness, where I felt I was British, but everyone else thought differently. There are parallels in the book – she is growing up in a similar community with similar attitudes, but fundamentally she is a very different person.” Christine, who is a mother to two boys, says that she actually identifies most with Ellie’s mother. In fact, it was a conversation with her eldest son that ignited the desire to write Ellie Pillai is Brown. She says: “In 2016, my eldest child came home from school and they had this conversation at school about Trump being elected as President. There was all this playground chat about him closing US borders to people from Muslim countries and someone had said to my son that your mum won’t be allowed to go to America, you won’t be allowed to go. We had this conversation and it was really
quite difficult. It made me realise that there was not enough out there for me to have that conversation about race or identity. There weren’t the books out there, and there was a real lack of diversity on bookshelves. “At that point, I said to myself something has to change. I want him to be able to walk into a bookshop and see a version of himself on the shelves. That got it ticking in my mind to want to write this book.”
Christine had grown up without that representation in the books she read, and to see it still happening with her own children was enough of an incentive to get writing. She says it took a few years to actually begin, but says that once she did “it just poured out of me”. She spent another year working on edits, before approaching agents. Faber picked it up in a two-book deal and Christine says that moment left her feeling “validated”.
“The reality is, I wrote the book for the 15-year-old me. It’s the book I would have liked to have at that age. I felt that people were not interested in my story, because you just didn’t see stories like mine – I’d either have to watch Bollywood films, or we’d be background characters. “When I got the deal it felt like ‘someone wants to hear my story’, and I felt validated by that. It was really energising to feel that someone
PEN&INC. 9
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
