Emerging Writers Series: Tilly Lawless
Image credit: Ellen Virgona, originally featured in Worms.
“I just wanted to show what it was like to be a teen country girl in the early days of the internet, and how that world of isolation overlaps with freedom, and wildness. It felt like a story I've wanted to tell for a really, really long time.”
You may recognise Tilly Lawless from our previous Emerging Writers interview where we discussed her debut novel Nothing But My Body (2021).
It was an absolute pleasure to sit down with Tilly again to chat about her second book Thora (2024): a magical realist coming-of-age narrative set on the NSW Mid North Coast which explores family dysfunction, queer love and the importance of friendship.
Tilly and I spoke about the trappings of genre and the delights of fan fiction, creating complex female characters and writing things that bring you joy.
Congratulations on the launch of Thora! It’s published by Worms, who focus on experimental genres and women/non binary writers. How did your relationship with them come about?
Worms published my first book in the UK and I had such a good experience with them. Then when I was struggling to find a publisher for this one in Australia, I reached out to Clem who runs Worms and asked if she would be interested in publishing a book here. So it was their first time publishing something here and for me, it was my second time working with them.
Did you feel like you were pushing the boundaries of what a teen book could be?
I didn’t think of it as a teen book. I was just told that once it was written and it went to more traditional publishers they would say that basically anything about teens is a teen book. I was also told that it was too explicit to be young adult fiction. So from their point of view, it fell between two genres, which was why no traditional publisher wanted to publish it. They either wanted me to tone it down, or shift the perspective to be more from the point of view of the adults.
And I was like, wait, why are we so restricted to genre as a construction? Rewind three hundred years ago and genre wasn't even a thing. The book world is still so tied to genre, when in the music world, for example, we're really seeing a shift beyond genre. I'm hoping eventually that books will move in the way music has – and in the way film and TV has as well – where genre will be less of a discussion.
Growing up, all the young adult stuff I read was not reflective of my life at all. I feel like so many teenagers turned to fanfiction online because young adult books didn't answer our needs, or a lot of us ‘read up’ with books that were for people in their twenties rather than for young people. I wanted to write something that was reflective of a country queer teenager; I didn't think about whether or not it would be marketable. I think genre at the end of the day comes down to marketability.
That's an interesting point about fanfiction, because it’s like an alternative genre that isn't concerned about marketability at all.
Well, I wouldn't even call fanfiction a genre, it’s more like a mode. But totally, it's not concerned with marketability. The beautiful thing about fanfiction is it's expansive. It can exist beyond any rules, so you can do anything you want with it. With creativity, there's always that bristling between whether you are writing what you feel like writing, or whether you’re writing to have a career – and if you're writing for a career, you have to think about what sells.
Did you read much fanfiction growing up?
Oh yes. Harry Potter fan fiction, Lupin and Sirius, sex stuff, just so much fan fiction. I also read so many books too, but to be sexually pleased I would read fanfiction and use Tumblr as well.
How did writing this book differ from writing your first book Nothing But My Body?
The first one I wrote in six months over lockdown. I would write about 500 words a day and it was a very slow process. This one I wrote in six weeks. Then there were years of editing, but the first draft I wrote so quickly because it was just so much fun to write. Once I had the idea in my head and I sat down and started writing, I was sometimes writing 6,000 words a day.
When I was doing a speech at the book launch, one of the things I said was that I don't know if this is a good book in any way, but I think it's a fun book, and I think it's escapist and nostalgic, and I think they have their own value. I'm not saying, “Oh my God, I've mastered my craft and writing.” I just wanted to show what it was like to be a teen country girl in the early days of the internet, and how that world of isolation overlaps with freedom, and wildness. It felt like a story I've wanted to tell for a really, really long time. Even if it's not good in a literary sense, it's still a book I'm proud to have written.
It does feel like something of a love letter to the region where you grew up.
I felt like I needed to write that story of growing up there so I could stop being so homesick for it. I needed to write a Bellingen story and now that I've done it, it's not going to be haunting the rest of my writing forever.
The book is dedicated to girls with complicated relationships with their mothers, and I feel like the complex, often fraught mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. How did you explore this through the protagonist Rhiannon and her girlfriend Vee’s different relationships with their mothers?
I don't have a good relationship with my mum, and I haven't spoken to her for almost thirteen years now. It's not something I've ever wanted to write about, because it feels too raw and I feel too exposed by it. But by moving this into the magical realism genre, it felt like something I could write about, because it felt more separate from me – it was existing in a fantasy realm, I suppose. When you don't have a good relationship with your mother, there's a lot of shame around that which I feel like people with bad relationships with their fathers don't have. When you don't have a relationship with your mother, people often ask, “Oh, what did you do?” If you say you have a bad relationship with your father, people take it for granted that men suck, that fathers suck, right? No one goes, “Oh, what do you mean, you don't speak to your dad?” They just accept that you have a bad dad. When you're a daughter, there's expectations that you should have a special relationship with your mum, and when you don't there's a lot of criticism and shame levelled at you.
That was really important for me to explore, but I also didn't want a bad mother-and-daughter relationship to overpower the book. I have so many friends who have really beautiful relationships with their mothers, and I have become close with some of my friend’s mothers, so I also wanted to respect that reality. With Vee and her mum, I wanted to show what it was like to have that parent-child role reversed – where you're sometimes looking after your parent rather than them looking after you – but I wanted to show it in a way where you don't hate or resent them for that.
Rhiannon’s best friend Ellie has a very different and loving relationship with her mum Sasha, who gives the girls a lot more freedom. Why did you choose to write a character who was both a mother and a sex worker?
Firstly, when you're a sex worker, people always want you to write nonfiction about sex work. As a sex worker, I wanted to write in a genre that wasn't nonfiction, but I also wanted to have a sex worker character in the book where the focus of the novel wasn't her work in any way. People often ask me, “how would you tell your children about your work?” So I guess I was writing my future into her as a character and answering people's queries by saying, “Here's a sex worker that can be a good mother, and here's how you can be both a sex worker and a mother.” So that was kind of my own reckoning with that. Interestingly, my dad was a parent who really respected the fact that I was a person in my own right and gave me a lot of independence growing up. So Sasha, as a parent, is based on my father.
The book is also about Rhiannon’s first love. Why was it important to you to centre a young queer love story?
I don’t think I was consciously centring it. I never dated men: my first relationship was with a girl at that age, so it was what I instinctively wrote. I did like the fact that what saves Rhiannon’s life, I suppose, is a lesbian relationship, the sex worker mother of one of her friends and the friendship she has with her best friends. The three things that have made up my community are my lesbian relationships, the sex worker community and the queer community. I honestly feel like it was me writing what I would have liked to read for my teen years. If I could have waved a magic wand and have my teen years look a certain way, that's how I would have done it.
I noticed Rhiannon identifying with Vee’s mom Isla (and perhaps selkies in general), towards the end of the book: she understands her isolation and longing for home, and they both choose quite self-destructive methods to cope with abuse, such as drinking and cutting. What first drew you to the selkie myth?
I've always wanted to write a selkie story because I just love selkies; I think they're so sexy. What I was going to write originally was just a sexy selkie story with someone falling in love with a selkie. Then I started to write and I realised actually what I found most interesting about the selkie myth is that it’s a story of women's entrapment by men. The way it usually goes is that the man gets the sealskin and locks it up, and he forces the woman to be with him for decades. She has children, and then in her old age, she eventually finds the sealskin and she escapes back to the sea to die. It's always a very lonely story. And I thought, what if I modernise that myth? What if it's a story of women's entrapment and how other women come together to help each other in these situations? I wanted to write a sexy selkie story and I wanted to write a story about my hometown and originally they were two different things that then merged as I began to write.
You mentioned you’ve always been a big reader. What were some of your favourite books in high school?
I've always read so much. Obviously, I loved Twilight, as did everyone, and Harry Potter. Even though J.K. Rowling's fucked, she's a TERF, I still kept Harry Potter references in the book because it was such a part of our upbringing. It would be untrue to that time to have no Harry Potter references. I loved Oscar Wilde. I loved Colette. I read the Obernewtyn Chronicles, Lord of the Rings and Kate Forsyth’s The Witches of Eileanan trilogy. I read a lot of fantasy that comes from Scottish and Celtic mythology. I also really loved adventure stories, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Alexander Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo and Three Musketeers. That is probably what influenced the idea of a quest in Thora because I did feel like these characters were coming together for a quest or a purpose.
What are you working on next?
At the moment, I'm just gonna write things that I enjoy writing. I'm working on a series of short stories similar to Roald Dahl or Angela Carter.
Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.