Q & A With Susannah Wise, Author Of Okay, Then, That’s Great

Marnie's life is a powderkeg of confusion – visions of her long-dead sister, dreams of being a man, and a turbulent friendship with a woman who may or may not be Katherine Mansfield. Add a chaotic family life, an unreliable therapist, and quantum entanglement to the mix, and Marnie’s hands are very full indeed! Will she ever find clarity?

“I originally called my story The Peculiar World of Marnie Rose,” Wise reveals, “but it was at a time when everyone was releasing books with women’s names in the title, and it felt very generic. I wanted a one-word title that was all words that ran into each other, and it came out of one of ... (Marnie’s) daughter’s bad habits of running these words together. Also, I felt it reflected Marnie’s rushing brain and (habit of) shutting things down because no one was listening to her. The title also has a ‘keep calm and carry on’ vibe about it”. But Wise rightly points out that “Marnie most definitely isn’t ‘keep calm and carry on’! She wants to be normal, and a lot of the book is about women who can contain themselves. But Marnie is uncontained. She’s like a colander. Everything leaks out.”

The story focuses on a middle-class family: they shop at Waitrose and have an electric car, Marnie’s father has carpal tunnel syndrome from years of grinding an elaborate pepper pot, and her mother visits regularly to borrow her Syrian rice cooker. “They say write about what you know,” Wise says, “and I was reflecting the world I know. I am middle class. If I’d written a book about working-class people in the first person, I probably would’ve had a lot of kickback. It’s difficult as a writer. You’re supposed to write about what you know, but that’s boring. Conversely, if you write about something that you’re not and get it even a tiny bit wrong, everybody will pounce on you because you’ve dared to step into somebody else’s experience. It’s hard not to stay in your lane. That said, the book has middle-class layers, yes, but it deals with universal themes”.

Marnie suffers from writer’s block. Many writers have written about not being able to write. “But I’ve never had it,” Wise confirms with relief. "I know lots of writers who have – mostly playwrights – and it’s horrendous. But I have writer’s incontinence! The book is very stream-of-consciousness. I wanted to write about feelings of anxiety but not in a traditional way. Anxiety can take different forms.” Wise confirms that Marnie’s breakdown has been a gradual process, “like a tap slowly turning off”, triggered in part by the death of her twin sister, Perdita. “She feels like half a vessel, like she has nothing to say, and that what she does say is of no value to anyone.”

Marnie has also been experiencing penis envy. Everything else in Marnie’s life is up in the air, so why not her sense of sexual identity as well?! Wise confirms these experiences represent “creative impotence” on Marnie’s part and the fact “she doesn’t feel she has any power or potency. The only way she can see out of her situation is to become male.” Wise admits to some genuine curiosity as well on her part. “I just wondered what it would be like to have a penis for a couple of days, and I thought I’d explore that in a safe place!”

Twins are referenced throughout the story: Marnie is one of twins, she has twin daughters herself, and she goes to see The Comedy of Errors, a play about twins. Wise explains their significance: “There were twins at my primary school. I remember one of them being told off and the other one crying. I’ve always wanted to have a twin. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that you can have a carbon copy of yourself. Someone who is but isn’t you.”

Marnie has also been seeing dead people, notably the ghost of Katherine Mansfield. An interesting casting decision. “She went to my actual school,” Wise clarifies – “the one I use as the basis for Marnie’s old school in the novel – and I’ve always been fascinated by her. She was a maverick, one of a kind. I love her writing and just wanted to explore ‘a version’ of her.”

There is also a science fiction element to the story. We learn that Marnie may be able to step into alternate realities. “I’ve always been interested in quantum mechanics and time,” Wise reflects. “I don’t feel like time is fixed. I may write another book specifically on this theme in the future.”

Was Marnie’s predicament real or just a product of her imagination? We never find out for sure; Wise leaves the answer to speculation. “I didn’t want to provide a tidy ending; I wanted to leave the reader with more questions than when they started. Sometimes there is no closure. That’s part of losing somebody. There is no solution. It goes on forever like an ever-widening path.”

Wise has considered writing a follow-up to Okay, Then, That’s Great. “Not a whodunnit,” so Perdita’s killer, sadly, will remain unmasked, “but it would include some of the original plot elements. One option would be to write a book from Perdita’s perspective, but it would have a different tone and would be at a very different metabolic speed!”

Several reviewers have described the book as ‘raunchy’. But Marnie is anything but sexy. “Okay,” she answers in a flat Schwarzenegger monotone when invited by her friend to make love. Sex is handled in a very comedic way in the story. “I love the idea that you can have comedy within a sex scene,” Wise says. “It can be both erotic but also ridiculously silly. Certain people get it right in literature and films; others just have candlelight and a fire crackling. That doesn’t add anything to my experience. I don’t see the point of it. What am I supposed to be feeling there?” Indeed, romance behind closed doors isn’t always the stuff of movies with perfect dialogue and direction. Wise’s writing in this sense is very true to life.

Interestingly, Wise describes Marnie’s sexual encounters as “yellow” in nature. Yellow recurs in other aspects of the novel, too, notably Marnie’s poems and reminiscences. Wise confirms this is a significant colour for her. “So often, sex is described in pinks and reds – as in the red-light district. I wanted to get over how raw and present it feels, like being in a sunbeam, feeling happy, and having hope. It might be something from my subconscious. If I go to a safe place, it always involves sunlight or lowlight.”

The book is very funny in general. Marnie herself is an appalling punster and finds it difficult not to make a joke out of everything, particularly when under pressure. “Why so blue?” she asks her editor one day, riffing on her editor’s choice of outfit. Wise admits we’re seeing a lot of herself here: “I can’t help making jokes. I love absurdity and silliness. I find my jokes from the situation, and I find my humour from life.”

There is also a great deal of postmodern Fleabag-style breaking of the fourth wall. Marnie regularly steps aside from the narrative to analyse her syntax (or lack of) and freely admits she’s a poet who’s bad at grammar! “Originally, I had much more of this,” Wise elaborates. “In an early draft, Marnie conversed with me, and she hated it! The story was going to be much more meta. But I took this scene out, fearing it might be too alienating for the reader. Putting me, the author, into the book might’ve been a step too far. When I was writing this in 2018, the idea seemed wild; now it’s de rigueur.”

By Wise’s own admission, Okay, Then, That’s Great is “a bonkers book”. In quick succession, Marnie goes from seeing her deceased sister on a street corner to having her crotch examined by Katharine Mansfield, to uncovering Roman treasure in her mother’s garden. “It’s like a massive brain fart,” Wise laughs. “I didn’t plan it. It was stuff that came out of my imagination piece by piece. I had a first draft that was very different, but I had to go back, unpick it, and fix a few things. There was a lot of band-aiding before it made sense!”

Wise’s next project is something altogether different: “Book three is about a British-Korean woman who loses her wife. They share two teenage stepchildren – a boy and a girl. The will requests that the protagonist, Annie, take her children up to a tiny village in Cumbria to live near her grandparents. The in-laws are Christian pig and sheep farmers – very posh, white, and conservative. Annie feels like a fish out of water and struggles to settle in. Then it becomes apparent there’s some weird stuff happening in the village. It’s not a mystery novel, more in the vein of Jonathan Wyndham, with folk horror elements. The tone is quite 70s, and I wanted it to feel slightly campy. It’s set in the modern day but within the bounds of reality. And there’s a lot of rain!”


Okay, Then, That’s Great is published by Gollancz. More information here