I absolutely loved The Glittering Art of Falling Apart and named it as one of my top reads of 2015, so I am delighted to take part in the blog tour. On this stop of the tour, I have a guest post from Ilana Fox detailing how she researched this fabulous book.
HOW
I RESEARCHED THE BOOK - ILANA FOX
Despite
hanging out in Soho with my grandparents in the 1980s, I don’t
really remember much about it, so I had to rely on speaking with lots
of people who’d been
there and done that to truly capture the essence of Soho at that
time.
Everyone
I spoke to was incredibly generous with their time and I am touched
that they trusted me with their stories. I would never name them, but
the people who helped me write this book were the people who used to
go clubbing in Soho in the 1980s, people who still battle heroin
addiction on a daily basis, and the women who used to sell their
bodies (if not their souls) in Soho at that time.
I
also spent a lot of time with Soho residents - the real locals - who
have seen their Soho being regenerated inch by inch, and I read more
about Soho than one could think possible. If anyone’s
looking to read an out-of-print book about Soho, I probably have it
and you’re more than
welcome to borrow it!
As
a child of the 1980s, it kind of freaks me out that a novel set in
this period is now considered ‘historical
fiction’, but because
it’s historical I
wanted to get it absolutely right. There were some points I needed to
get right for my own obsessive attention to detail; countless people
who I don’t know on
Twitter helped me when my questions got more and more obscure - from
telling me their old Basingstoke phone number in the 1980s, to if one
had to put the coins in a phone box before or after a call was
connected, to what people drank when they went out dancing.
Of
course, THE GLITTERING ART OF FALLING APART is a novel, and is
absolutely fictional, but the London in which it's set - the London
from the 1960s to the present day - is very much real. Anyone who's
ever lived in London sees ghosts of themselves in the areas in which
they once lived, in the pubs they once drank in, and in the alleyways
in which they got up to no good. This is a novel about that London;
the London that is created from all of our memories
While
I was writing the novel - over the course of three, very long years -
Soho changed markedly, not least because of the Crossrail development
(which saw one of the music venues I spent a lot of time at during
the 90s, the Astoria, demolished completely). Change in cities is
unquestionably inevitable, but rather than building around what has
come before, developers are scrubbing and scouring at layers of
history to make way for new-build, luxury apartment blocks. In doing
so, Soho not only loses its memories and its glitzy, grubby beauty,
but it also loses its people: the local traders, the musicians, the
lovable reprobates and the raconteurs.
It’s
really hard to stop this sort of change (although a fantastic
lobbying group, Save Soho, is doing its best and I support them
whole-heartedly). However, if we can’t
prevent places like Walkers Court from being redeveloped, I hope that
novels like my own - ones set in Soho - can capture some of the
spirit that is being stamped upon and wiped away.
