Helen Oyeyemi: Yet another brilliant outing

“I’d be in a room full of people and in the corner there would be two girls wearing dirty dresses and holding hands. They kept going, ‘We’re going to kill you . . . we’re going to kill you,” she says, leaning forward, big eyes widening, a smile playing on her mouth. “I’d ask the […]

“I’d be in a room full of people and in the corner there would be two girls wearing dirty dresses and holding hands. They kept going, ‘We’re going to kill you . . . we’re going to kill you,” she says, leaning forward, big eyes widening, a smile playing on her mouth. “I’d ask the other people in the room, ‘Can you hear what those girls are saying? It’s terrible!’ but nobody else could understand. They would always be like, ‘What are you talking about?”
She sits back in her café chair beside the Thames and sips her green tea. If there’s not exactly a hint of pride in her description of these episodes, there’s at least a sense that, well, they’re just a hazard that comes with the territory.
Her debut novel, The Icarus Girl, was coloured by beautiful disquiet and The Opposite House earned comparisons with Poe when she was 23. White is for Witching should establish Oyeyemi as an ambitious voice in modern macabre; master of the light, lyrical touch and dark, half-hinted suggestion.
Her works explore isolation, hysteria and secret struggles. But when people discover that she’s a novelist and ask what kind of books she writes, she tends to just reply “spooky stuff . . . and then they stop talking about it,” she laughs. ‘OK’, they think . . . ‘she’s weird’.”
Oyeyemi is not weird. Nor is she haunted. Her back-story runs thus: born to teacher parents in Nigeria, her family moved to London when she was 4. Living on a council estate and discouraged from socialising with local kids, she read precociously and played with Chimmy, her imaginary friend, who “died” — hit by a car on Lewisham High Street while out buying a sausage roll — when Oyeyemi was 9. (“It was traumatic at the time, but seemed sort of suicidal on his part.”) School was difficult — disruptive behaviour and suspension dovetailed with bouts of clinical depression, culminating in an attempted overdose on pills at 15. After time spent with relatives in Nigeria, she began The Icarus Girl (involving a young British-Nigerian girl who encounters a secret companion), and earned a book deal with her first few pages, writing it on the sly while her parents assumed she was wrestling with A-level coursework.
She studied social and political sciences at Cambridge and wrote The Opposite House (involving a pregnant Afro-Cuban singer from London, and featuring Yoruba folklore.
The story played tricks with space and time. “That was an odd book,” she frowns. “A difficult one. I just felt pleased to get through the experience of a second novel.”
She’s through her experience of depression too, she says. After years of being “very adamantly ‘no!’ towards medication”, she “chilled out and took some” in her final year at Cambridge. Combined with a gradual lowering of her guard that came with constantly discussing herself on the promotional trail, she has now “rejoined humanity . . . I think I’m much more sociable.”
Oyeyemi neatly summarises White is for Witching as the story of a “starving girl and a xenophobic house”. In it, Miranda Silver, her twin brother, Eliot, and their French father run a large guesthouse in Dover, the building itself a sentient if deranged soul. Miranda suffers from pica, a condition that compels her to eat only chalk. It worsens after the killing of her photographer mother in Haiti and she goes into psychiatric care.
(“Female craziness is something I’m very interested in,” Oyeyemi says, “how it can manifest itself, what it means, what pressures force someone into these behaviours. I’m pretty much obsessed with madness.”) Several voices recount the ensuing events: Miranda gets into Cambridge. She falls in love with a black girl. She vanishes. 
“I wanted to write a vampire story,” Oyeyemi explains. “After I graduated, I volunteered in South Africa for a few months. I was staying in this town called Paarl, and everyone wanted to talk about race all the time. I started to feel strange . . . I got this flu-like illness and spent a lot of time in bed with Dracula in the dark wing of this big house. I was feverish. I started thinking that vampire stories were a lot to do with the fear of the outsider, because you’ve got this foreign count with this unnatural appetite,” she says, building momentum. “I thought, what’s an unnatural appetite? A girl who eats chalk, but probably with a desire to eat something else.” The result is not a conventional vampire story; there are no fangs, bats or archvillains.
Much of what occurs, though compelling, is open to interpretation, and readers thirsting for tidy conclusions will be disappointed (Oyeyemi admits that even she cannot account for everything that happens). What does emerge, as with her other books, is a sense that she has immersed herself in every moment detailed.
“I think you can get too into it. You’re just making stuff up for hours at a time. When you first have an idea, you think, ‘Yeah! This is going to be an awesome story!” she says. “But if you want the story to be as real and true as possible, you have to be in it, even when not-good-things are happening. You have to force them to happen, and you have to really feel and experience it.”
Can she describe what that is like to someone who hasn’t written a novel? First, she says no. Then a long pause. “This will sound too dramatic,” she starts. “But it’s as if every day you have to put a worm or something really wriggly on you, and let it crawl all over you, and then at the end of the day, you can take it off. It’s weird. It’s self- torture.”
She laughs again. She has already started a draft for her fourth book, and it’s not been so traumatic this time. She’s getting better as a writer, so this might have something to do with it. The book will be a take on the Bluebeard story and “the whole idea of there being a secret between husband and wife that turns the husband into a murderer when discovered. In the German version, in order to get away from him, the wife goes insane,” she says, before catching herself and sighing. “See? There we go with madness again.”
TimesOnline.co.uk