Alice Winn on her acclaimed In Memoriam: ‘I wrote the novel because I felt alone in a grief from another century’

Your debut novel, In Memoriam, won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and its Novel of the Year Award. What’s it about and what was your motivation for writing it?

I was trying not to write a novel when I wrote In Memoriam! When I left university, I decided to write a novel a year until I wrote one that was good. I wrote three in quick succession, none of them good enough, and gave up hope. It was while I was working on other things that I stumbled upon the student newspapers from my old boarding school. I had been thinking about the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who went there, so at first I read the old papers searching for traces of him. (There were almost none. He wasn’t keen on the school, as it turns out.)

The papers were brutal in a way that is difficult to describe. They sucked me in: I ended up reading every issue from 1913-1919. They were written by the students, for the students. The boys were thrilled when the war broke out and enlisted in droves. They wrote letters about how jolly it was not to have to wash. Then, of course, they began to die.

To begin with, the In Memoriams – written, usually, by teenage boys for their slightly older brothers and friends – swell with astonishing patriotism. “He died a soldier’s death on the field of honour,” writes one obituary, about a 25-year-old, recently married, who was shot in the stomach and abandoned in a trench for more than 12 hours before finally dying in a cave that was being used as a hospital. “He was a very gallant fellow . . . ” the In Memoriam goes on, “They had never seen such bravery – it was marvellous!”

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But as the war continued, the tenor of the In Memoriams changed. There are some pieces of writing which are such a pure distillation of suffering that to read them is to be wounded. How do you move on from the heartbroken, sentimental poetry of a teenage boy after the death of one of his friends, and then the poet’s own death a few months later?

I felt crazy as I read, I felt desperate to communicate the sorrow I found there, because the only thing that seemed to bring any of them comfort was the idea that their tragedy would never be forgotten. This is something I find so poignant about the literature of the first World War: how desperate they are for future generations to learn from their grief. When I tried to describe the newspapers, people didn’t understand (and probably thought I was being boring and morbid). I wrote the novel because I felt alone in a grief from another century, and I wanted other people to feel as I did.

You were born in Paris to American parents but educated privately in England. Did this inside-outsider status help you as a writer?

I’m Irish American. I imagine Irish people must be tired of Americans claiming this! But I’m immensely grateful to my Irish citizenship. I treasure the time I’ve spent in Ireland – shout-out to Spleodar, the Irish immersion camp in Connemara I attended when I was 17!

In my novel, one protagonist is half German, and the other is Jewish. Both feel as if their identities are conditional: they’re only as German or English or Jewish as other people say they are. I’ve felt this way myself because I grew up moving constantly – I’ve never had an easy answer to the question of where I’m from. I used to really worry about it until a friend told me it was much less interesting than I thought it was and I should get over myself. Harsh! But actually quite good advice, in the end. Still, I can’t seem to help writing about outside-people looking in, wishing they could belong.

[ Rebecca Ivory: ‘I don’t know if I’d be a writer if I were born into a different family’ ]

You describe anti-French prejudice among British troops. Did you come across anti-Irish prejudice too?

Sassoon describes an otherwise friendly old captain as virulently anti-Irish: “‘If you want my opinion,’ he grumbled, ‘I believe those damned Irish had a hand in Kitchener being drowned. I’d like to see that fatuous island of theirs sunk under the sea.’ Barton had an irrational dislike of the Irish, and he always blamed anything on them if he could. [. . .] since the Easter Rebellion in Dublin it wasn’t safe to show him a bottle of Irish whiskey.”

Robert Graves was Irish. He tells an anecdote about how his ancestor, Moira O’Brien, was forced to marry one of Cromwell’s henchmen and later murdered him. Graves is sympathetic to the Irish, but even so when he was stationed in Limerick after the war he did everything he could to escape: he described it as looking “like a war-ravaged town” and specifically feared staying in an Irish hospital (he had the Spanish flu).

Most of the war writers I read, however, had remarkably little to say about Irish politics. It’s hard to even make out their opinions on the Easter Rising, because they refer to it so fleetingly.

What is the best writing advice you have heard?

There’s a lot of great advice out there, but I really like what Thomas Morris has to say on titles: “Does your title expand the meaning of the story? Or does it make the story smaller?”

In Memoriam is published by Penguin