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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Underneath the narrative is a dark tribute to Liverpool, the city that Millie loves but ultimately has to leave in order to redeem her life. It's also the city Walsh herself had to return to in order to write her book. Walsh talked about Liverpool with me by phone, before moving on to prostitution, pornography and why she won't read aloud the sex scenes that made her famous.
What prompted you to write "Brass"?
It was a few things, actually. The first was that I'd been in Liverpool at the time; I'd just finished university, which is actually the same university Millie goes to in the book. It's set in the heart of the red-light district, and I've always been very much in love with that area. But I was also very frustrated with Liverpool. I found it very claustrophobic and unsophisticated and crude, and the underworld there is very ingrained in everyday life. Everyone has a neighbor or an uncle who's a Tony Soprano. I wanted to move somewhere else that was sophisticated and [where] you could get nice food and the shops stayed open after 11 and that wasn't such a dangerous city, and so I moved to London.
As soon as I moved, I knew I had made a mistake. I was immediately pining for Liverpool and all the things I'd hated about it. I came back after nine months. And I remember getting off the train with all my bags and suitcases and seeing the city, and it was like seeing the city for the first time ever. It just looked so beautiful, so amazing.
I wanted to write a book that captured all those things about Liverpool. It's a very full-on, hedonistic city that really does live for the weekend. It's very consumptive, and I wanted to capture that in a character, or two characters, Millie and Jamie. Millie is very much colored by my own experience, so she was already a part of me. It wasn't a long, conscious journey of discovery. It was sudden. It literally happened when I got off the train. I had a job to go back to in Liverpool, but I gave up work, moved to my mum's and wrote the novel from the kitchen table.
"Brass" is the Scouse word [i.e., local slang] for prostitute. Yet Millie, your main character, never quite descends to that level, though she does hire a couple of hookers herself. So why the title?
It's a word that's used in a particular area of Liverpool, which is south Liverpool, which is where the novel is set. Liverpool's really split into north and south, and Millie grows up in the south, and that's where the book takes place. "Brass" is the word used by hookers themselves and also by all the people, whether it's the urchins, the drug dealers, the people who hang out in the clubs and the streets of that area. It's a word that binds all those people together. And it's also a word that's very gender specific. A woman, a normal, everyday student or a female worker, they would always use the word "prostitute." "Brass" is a male gangster term, and that's why Millie uses it. It set the theme, the kind of conceptual background for Millie's relationship with Jamie and with the street and with men. The fact that Millie uses that term says a lot about her character, about the area. But I suppose reading the book from outside the U.K. it's kind of difficult to penetrate that.
You have denied that the novel is autobiographical in other interviews, but there are a number of similarities between you and Millie -- she's a smart, young bisexual girl who's interested in sociology. She takes too many drugs, and she doesn't fit in.
My rite of passage was very similar to Millie's, though mine happened a lot younger, between the ages of 14 and 17. Millie's actually a young woman; she's 19. She's not actually bisexual -- that's something she would militate against. She never actually describes herself, though, and she doesn't subscribe to any kind of sexual-political group. She describes herself as a "sex-crazed, genderless freak." That was pretty much my understanding of sexuality when I was growing up. I never signed up to any of the camps of lesbian or bisexual -- I was always kind of free-floating, freewheeling -- and I liked the idea that you didn't have to. There were certain pockets of resistance in Liverpool and other U.K. cities where you didn't automatically have to proclaim your sexuality. If you wanted to, you could just be different people at different times. And that's the parallel between Millie and I.
