English author Benjamin Myers is gently mocking himself over a Zoom call from his home in Yorkshire. “I do think that writing is some sort of product of mental health episodes. Most of my novels are the product of a weird outpouring. Mental health gets a bad rap. I think good things can come out of these periods.”
Myers is a prolific author who has published 11 novels across multiple genres and categories, including crime, historical fiction and nature writing. His most recent novel, Cuddy, the story of St Cuthbert, the unofficial patron saint of the north of England, won the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize. He describes his commitment to writing as “beyond compulsion” but it is also something that has taken a toll on his health.
Over the past decade, Myers has published seven novels, one non-fiction book and three poetry collections. In 2019, he suffered an episode of exhaustion and anxiety so acute he ended up in bed for weeks. “Sometimes I finish a book and I’m completely burnt out and just feel terrible and drained and empty. But writing is the only time I feel in control of anything and it’s the only time anything makes sense really.” It’s also the thing he loves doing most. “I love it and I never want anyone to think that I’m moaning about being a writer. Like most writers I live in fear of having to get a real job.”
Myers has always written fiction, even when he was working 70-hour weeks as a music journalist with the now-defunct music weekly Melody Maker. “For 10 or 15 years I wrote fiction without publishing any of it because no one was interested. I’d finish a novel, it would be rejected everywhere, but by the time those rejections came in I was on to the next one.”
It was his childhood dream to be a novelist but he was busy with “other more interesting teenage pursuits” when he should have been studying for his A-levels and subsequently failed his exams. He was rejected by 110 universities before finally securing a place in Luton University. It was there that he started freelancing for Melody Maker, where he later became a staff writer. “I did it really because I wanted to write novels and I thought this would bring me closer. I was always more interested in the people who made the music than in the music itself.”
The challenge for me is writing something that actually might make people feel a little bit better or give them a bit of hope without being crass or sentimental
Now that he no longer works as a music journalist, music has found its way into his fiction. His latest book, Rare Singles, tells the story of a forgotten American soul singer called Bucky Bronco. Bucky is widowed and addicted to opioids, when he is contacted out of the blue and asked to play at a music festival in England. In Scarborough, Dinah is stuck in a loveless marriage, working in a supermarket and escaping through her passion for music. The story follows the two as they get to know each other over the days leading up to the performance.
Myers first had the idea for Rare Singles 15 years ago. “I saw some footage of an American soul singer performing at a northern soul weekender in front of about 200 people at a Yorkshire seaside town and there were grown men with tears running down their faces. In the back of my mind I had this idea that I always wanted to write a story about this person.”
The book is a quiet and gentle meditation on friendship, community and the power of music to unite and uplift. In this way, it is a bit of a departure from much of Myers’s pervious work, which has often been dark, gothic and violent. “I realised it’s very easy to fall into a pattern with writing and just be the guy who’s writing these shocking stories. A few years ago, I just thought I can’t do this. I backed out of a book deal which involved me writing a book that was going to be really bleak and dark. It’s actually a challenge today to write something that makes people feel slightly better rather than slightly worse. The challenge for me is writing something that actually might make people feel a little bit better or give them a bit of hope without being crass or sentimental. That was the intention of the novel.”
Much of Rare Singles illustrates how small gestures of everyday kindness can make a huge difference in people’s lives. ”We live in an era where people go around saying ‘be kind’ but then you go and look at what they’re saying on Twitter and it’s the opposite. I always think you can sit and talk about politics all day with someone on the left and someone on the right and they could argue but then they go home and they eat the same food and they watch the same TV and are living the same lives, you’re just doing what everyone else is doing. There was a temptation to write in some racist characters [into Rare Singles] but I thought, no, I’m going to celebrate or illuminate the more positive aspects of society. I’m not one of those #BeKind #BeNice people. I’m a sarcastic, cynical bastard but I’m not embittered or jaded. It’s just my way of coping with the world really.”
The character of Dinah is the passionate, empathetic heart of the novel. “I think everyone knows someone like Dinah in their lives. On one level she is very normal, she works in a supermarket, she’s in an unhappy marriage, she has a waster of a son, but at the same time she’s holding the house together. She’s got these hidden strengths and I tend to think that that is reality because for me in life, as in writing, I’m supported by women like that. My wife, my mother, I’ve got three agents who are all female, my editor is female and I’ve come to realise that’s not a coincidence. Women are easier to work with, they know how to handle men in a way that men don’t know how to handle men. I’m generalising vastly here,” he laughs, “but I just wanted to celebrate that from a male perspective by writing someone who’s leading a relatively small, quiet, domestic life but she’s got these hidden passions and desires.”
Myers cleverly uses Dinah’s passion for music to explore the theme of ageing and how we sometimes feel we have to retire our youthful passions once we get past a certain age. “I’m 48 and I still love music and go to gigs. I don’t drink, so I don’t take part in that hedonistic side of the music world.” He gave up drinking in his 20s after he began vomiting blood. “There’s no sobriety story,” he shrugs, “but I do think if I continued it wouldn’t have ended well. I’m still enjoying the things I enjoyed. I just think growing up is really overrated. People do lose that zest or zeal or enthusiasm. That’s part of Rare Singles. Dinah is not going to let go of the things she loves just because she’s getting older. Why would you?”
Myers is regularly described as a working-class writer but that’s often by people who conflate the term “northern English” with “working class”.
“We’re obsessed with class in England. I get asked all the time about being a working-class writer. When I go to London events I am this mysterious figure from the north who has come down from the hills. It’s really weird. And to some people I’m posh because my parents were together and had jobs, so I don’t know where I fit in. I don’t know who I am. Again, that’s part of the reason I write, to work out who am I in the world.”
It’s also one of the reasons he mainly sets his novels in the north of England. “It’s because I’m from here and because there’s not much contemporary fiction from the north of England or if there is it’s usually set on a council estate showing some sort of poverty situation and the north isn’t like that entirely. On a practical level, I’m trying to bring a bit more money to the north of England through adaptations and productions and providing jobs for people.”
Despite episodes of exhaustion, Myers shows no sign of slowing his intense writing pace. Rare Singles has been optioned by a film company. Another novel, The Offing, is being filmed next year with Helena Bonham Carter. He has three other novels in mind, two larger literary projects and a novella about the German actor Klaus Kinski ready to go. He’s often criticised for writing across genres and not staying in his lane but he doesn’t see it as a bad thing.
“I’m just writing books. All I’m trying to do is connect in some small way with people out there who may feel similar things. I get emails from people in Australia or Canada saying they’d cried or felt sick at something I’d written. To me that feels like some sort of weird dark magic, that you can make someone cry in Melbourne having never met them. But it’s called spelling for a reason, isn’t it? Words can cast a spell.” The northerner in him obviously cannot let a sentence like that stand unchecked. “That’s the pompous way of seeing it,” he laughs. “The down-to-earth way of seeing it is, I love writing and telling stories.”
Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury Circus
