‘Earning a living doing the thing you love is kind of sexy’

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Kamila Shamsie. The Pakistani-British writer, 49, is the author of seven novels, including Home Fire, which won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her latest is Best of Friends.

“I used to think that it was a terrible thing to have had that much political exhilaration and hope at the age of 15.”Credit: James Brickwood

POLITICS

“All writing is political.” Discuss. Yes and no. All writing is political in as much as we live within power structures. If you really dig into writing, somewhere there’s a power dynamic at play. There are writers who stay away from being what they think of as political, and there are those who jump in.

And where does your writing fit on that spectrum? I’m really interested in how politics gets into people’s lives. It’s an inescapable fact of having grown up in Pakistan. One of my earliest memories is being four years old and going to visit my uncle, who was a political prisoner in Abbottabad under house arrest.

Wow. Tell me more about your uncle. He was a pro-democracy politician at the beginning of a period of military rule [which lasted from 1977 until 1988], so anyone like him was either in prison, in exile or under house arrest. So I’m interested in history, I’m interested in the consequences of history, I’m interested in politics.

Best of Friends is about two childhood friends whom we first meet as teenagers in Karachi in 1988. Why did you want to start the novel – and their friendship – there and then? The novel starts in the last days of a dictatorship that the girls have known all their lives. It ends in August 1988, when the president is killed in a plane that explodes in the air. Within four months, a 35-year-old woman, Benazir Bhutto, becomes prime minister, voted in by the people. I wanted to write about it because it was one of the seminal moments of my life. The girls in the novel are 14; I was 15. I used to think that it was a terrible thing to have had that much political exhilaration and hope at the age of 15 because, of course, only disappointment will follow. Now I think it’s very useful to have lived through a moment where history turned.

Tell me more about the disappointment you felt. You go through every kind of emotion. When Benazir was alive and being disappointing, you felt the disappointment. Then, when she was assassinated – I was in my early 30s – you stopped and thought of what it actually meant for her to come to power, and the forces that were always against her. Now I’m living in London, in a post-Brexit, post-Trump world. As I was writing the book, I was aware of the fragility of democracies everywhere.

There’s a line in the book that says, “You can’t let politics get in the way of friendship.” Do you believe that? Anything can get in the way of friendship! [Laughs] People’s political views are not separate from who they are as human beings. How you see the world, how you think people should be treated, that says something about who you are.

BODIES

Tell me why writing is good for you. It gives me the ability to do the thing that allows me to feel most myself. Or, as a friend of mine once put it, “When I’m writing and it’s a good day, I feel at home.”

Tell me why writing is bad for you. It can be physically bad because you’re sitting at that bloody desk! About four years ago came the moment when I felt, “Oh, middle age has arrived.” Over the course of about three months when I was 45, I got reading glasses, dyed my hair for the first time and went to an osteopath for the first time. The osteopath diagnosed that my problem was writing – just sitting at that writing desk.

How does all this leave you feeling about your body? I’m turning 50 next year, so I’m aware that a different chapter is starting. These are kind of my last years with a familiar body before the menopause hits. One’s 40s are interesting because you aren’t old, but you’re not young any more. You’re aware that if you hurt yourself, it takes longer to heal. You’ve gone past the point where things are going to get better. It’s like, “Well, let’s enjoy now while everything’s still relatively okay.”

It seems that writing is one of those professions where age invites reverence. Is that true, or is there a premium placed on youth and freshness? There’s a premium placed on youth and freshness, but I think there’s also a certain something that comes from having been around for a while. What’s particularly nice is that there’s now a younger generation of Pakistani writers coming up. The other day, I was at an event at Brown University in the US and this young woman, who was about 20, came up to me; she was born after I started writing. She said, “I’ve just published my first novel, and I want to say thank you for paving the way.” I just thought, “Oh, god, I’m so old!” But it was also really lovely.

SEX

Readers often assume that authors’ lives must be sexy. You write, you travel the world, you speak at big events. What’s the reality? In South Asia, we very much have a concept of indoor clothing – the really comfortable clothes you’d never be seen outdoors in. A lot of my life is spent in indoor clothing looking at a screen. But I think the idea of earning a living doing the thing you love is kind of sexy. Actually, I don’t think of it as sexy, to be honest, but it can be wonderful. Sitting at your desk, writing … it can be horrible, but it can also be really pleasurable. But it’s a very different kind of pleasure.

In any case, I’m sure someone out there has a kink for writers in indoor clothing sitting at their desk developing back pain and needing an osteo.

Someone has a kink for anything.

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