Divine invention

Maddie Mortimer has made waves with her unorthodox, lyrical first book, about a woman’s terminal illness. Library books helped her reach into its deeper themes of religion and sexuality

Photography by Catharina Pavitschitz

“I’m a bit of a purist,” says Maddie Mortimer, one of three debut novelists on this year’s Booker longlist. The 26-year-old author can often be found among some of St James’s oldest bookshelves. “I’m at The London Library; I’m going to soak up as much Woolfian atmosphere as I possibly can.”

The Victorian Back Stacks are where she normally works, and where she edited the manuscript of Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. It was published in March this year – The Telegraph called it “radically creative” – and won the Desmond Elliott Prize in July. Earlier, there had been a tussle with a fellow Library member over a desk in the Writers’ Room. “It got pretty intense,” she says. “No words were exchanged, but there was a lot of energy in the room.” She realised her irregular start times would never lead her to victory.

She loves the fiction aisles, and says her reading tastes are “restless”. Her desk might be piled up with works by Proust, Wordsworth, Dante and Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, of which the Library has a large collection. “A nightmare for the librarians at the end of the day,” she says, but good for creativity. Dipping into other’s worlds “reminds you to keep things fun if you’re stuck or feeling too heavy in whatever you’re writing”.

A page from Mortimer's novel

Mortimer started Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies in 2019. Over 432 pages, it tells the story of Lia, who is dying of breast cancer. When Mortimer was 14, she lost her mother – the writer and journalist Katie Pearson, to the same disease. In 2010, Mortimer wrote the final few entries of Pearson’s column, ‘The Wee Beastie’, for The Times. Her experimental novel is as much revisiting this time in her life as it is questioning the form that a novel can take, and purism is out the window.

Lines and words are unbound from the grid of the page, in the manner of Anne Carson and Max Porter, prose poets who break the boundaries of form. Mortimer quotes Kierkegaard and Auden, as well as artists Edward Hopper and Goya. She taught herself how to use graphic design software Adobe InDesign to make her text undulate or bend upwards as if ascending steps. (She needed help to turn the words “Who the f*ck are you?” into an exploding firework.) She was inspired, she says, by the time-jumping structure of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Interstellar; in Maps, there is much pacy dialogue. “I was always really excited about trying to make something that felt ‘plotty’ and propulsive while maintaining some of the poetry of meditative prose,” she says.

Through Carson, Mortimer also came to one of the more unconventional mid-20th century thinkers, Simone Weil. Weil taught philosophy, worked in Renault’s car factories to experience the suffering of working people and embraced then renounced Marxism. An agnostic Jew, she became intensely religious from around 1935 after experiencing spiritual ecstasy – once in a Portuguese church and once while reading poetry. She died in 1943 in England at age 34, having refused to eat enough, either in solidarity with France’s victims of war or as an ascetic impulse to draw close to God, or both.

Mortimer started borrowing Weil’s works from The London Library during the pandemic, and she became a big influence. “[She was] a kind of genius akin to that of the saints” according to TS Eliot, and “Camus said she was the only great spirit of our time,” Mortimer says. “She writes beautifully about God, and the self and embodied experience.” Mortimer quotes Weil’s book Gravity and Grace in Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, in which faith and sainthood is a constant motif. Lia’s father is a priest: a young man arrives in the night to their home and washes the young Lia’s feet — and doesn’t mind when she throws up on him.

Sexual power is also a theme in the book. Mortimer sees something erotic in Weil’s mysticism. “This idea of monotheism being such a masculine force, being something that forms Lia – and Simone – and how masculinity in religious women’s lives forms their heterosexuality was something I was really interested in interrogating,” she says.

Mortimer on the Library steps

Much commentary on the new novel covers its treatment of illness. There are passages in a mysterious voice that rampages through Lia’s body and mind. This inhuman narrator is also fun; Mortimer said she based it on the children’s antihero Eloise, a naughty six-yearold created by the actress Kay Thompson in the 1950s.

“I still find it slightly uncomfortable when people say it’s ‘narrated by cancer’,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s many things. If anything it’s Lia’s creative processing of her own illness. It’s the worst of her. It’s cellular. It’s so much more and less than the voice of cancer. I read Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag. I’m aware of the very fraught, difficult space that kind of discussion occupies, I guess. And you have to be careful, don’t you? Because cancer is something that affects so many people.” But marketing is what it is. “No one’s going to put my spiel about the Jungian trickster archetype on a blurb.”

While Mortimer’s background is faith-free, religious studies was one of her favourite subjects at school. In one class, her teacher asked every atheist in the room to raise their hands, and the sea of responses panicked her; everyone’s belief “that the world we live in is the only one”. She got upset, her classmates were confused – her hand had also gone up. “It felt like a real moment.”

Reading the notes and diaries she wrote shortly after her mother’s death, she was shocked at her certainty in an afterlife. “It must have guided me through some of the grief of it all. And this book must have come out of those assumptions dissolving a bit and me needing to find a way of preserving an energy that no longer remained in my life. Like fiction being the closest thing that we have today to religion… It’s what it does to our brains. This commitment and belief in things that aren’t real, that don’t exist. I don’t think anything else in the world today fills that space.”

The American novelist Marilynne Robinson is another fixture on her overstuffed Library desk, although they are formally worlds apart. Robinson is someone who “writes grace so beautifully”, Mortimer says and her novels set in small towns including Gilead (winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction) and Home are key texts. “That’s the thing that I‘m most interested in trying to write; a sense of awe and wonder, and how the most domestic scenes or settings or moments can be sublime in their own ways, trying to bring some of that magic into the everyday.”

Mortimer studied English at Bristol University. While she refined the first manuscript of Maps, she split her time between the Library and working in a vintage clothes shop in Covent Garden. She is also a TV and film screenwriter: 2018’s coming of age short film The Words picked up nominations on the festival circuit. The readability of Maps might owe something to this training, but she plans to write more fiction. She likes its draw on her emotions and instincts. “Screenwriting is a bit more of a science,” she says.

A second novel is underway, which she calls “Little Women meets American Psycho meets Beckett”. After such a personal first project, Mortimer wanted to make her next one small, more straightforward and less complicated, but 30 pages in she had three timelines on the go. Perhaps something epic, and possibly sublime, is emerging once again from the quiet stacks of the Library. •

READING LIST

Four books inspired by Maddie Mortimer’s explorations in theology

GRAVITY AND GRACE BY SIMONE WEIL (1943)

All Weil’s major works were published posthumously. This was the first, a collection of writings not originally intended for publication, compiled by the leftist Christian philosopher Gustave Thibon. Weil lived with him and his wife for a year, working at his vineyard, before fleeing to Morocco with her Jewish parents in 1941. She left him her assorted notebooks. Brief texts about spirituality and ethics engage with ancient Greek, Egyptian and eastern philosophies, with a troubling chapter about Judaism.

THE NEED FOR ROOTS BY SIMONE WEIL (1949)

Weil’s best-known work was written in 1943 while she was working in London for the Free French organisation, led by Charles de Gaulle. Starting life as a report about the regeneration of France that might follow the German occupation, Weil’s thesis covers authoritarianism, the French Revolution and the link between physical labour and spirituality. De Gaulle was not impressed, but many have praised its humanity. Albert Camus said it was “impossible to imagine the rebirth of Europe without taking into consideration the suggestions [it] outlined.”

BEYOND GOD THE FATHER: TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION BY MARY DALY (1973)

From this radical critique of Christianity, Mortimer quotes the line “if God is male, then male is God”. Daly sets out to link the rise of monotheism with that of patriarchal societies, and in reclaiming a feminist theology she recasts the story of Eve’s “fall”. She writes: “The women’s revolution… has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality, which some would call God.”

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOOD BY IRIS MURDOCH (1970)

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was among Weil’s admirers. Here she “borrows” Weil’s theory of attention “to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent.” To “attend” our fellow humans completely, Weil believed the will and ego needed to be discarded, mirroring God’s love. Murdoch’s view of morality is more secular, but leaves room for spirituality.

Rachel Potts is a writer and editor based in London

→ Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is published by Picador