Recently named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023, K Patrick is undoubtedly a writer to watch. Their luminous debut Mrs S focuses on a powerfully erotic affair between a boarding school matron and the wife of the establishment's headmaster and in this exclusive piece, the author discusses the books that inspired the novel's writing.
You can’t, I don’t think, set a novel in a boarding school without reading Sweet Days of Discipline. Jaeggy’s genius novel distills desire, working through a schoolgirl’s obsession with her mysterious classmate. Its absolute honesty, I think, is what makes it beautiful. Occasionally chilling, too, although I think that is because an obsession, when fully exposed and admitted to, shows a wonderful human underside. We’re all capable of sinking into the same feeling as Jaeggy’s protagonist. Each one of her sentences is cut diamond. She so perfectly articulates queer longing and how early we become experts in it. Desire is an abyss and we teeter on the edge! It’s an acute and consuming pleasure.
When I first set out to write Mrs S, I’d hoped for a ‘straightforward’ (ha) love story. I wanted heat, to show off a butch sexuality. In my mind, it would had a classic beginning, middle and end. The end, of course, would see their silhouettes holding hands against a sunset. Only a few hundred words into the first scene and I realised that it couldn’t be so simple. In order to explore queer desire, I’d need a corresponding framework, one that was free of cis, heterosexual tropes. The first book I grabbed from my shelf when I realised was Giovanni’s Room. An exploration of shame, its root, the shape it can inevitably take. More importantly, the novel’s structure, which ignored conventions of time: Baldwin sculpted his novel so it could reflect the affects of its content. He’s so agile with tense, suspending the present tense to amp the devastations of romance, lancing childhood, and even gives shame a perspective - we begin in the future, the protagonist already drowning his sorrows. A work of genius.
Of all the short stories written by Proulx, and possibly by any author in the last fifty years, Brokeback Mountain is the most famous. Immortalised on screen by Ang Lee, the characters of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have become sexy shorthand for a specific kind of cowboy fantasy. I kept this piece close as I wrote Mrs S, obsessing over the ways in which Proulx entangles body and place. She has a kind of specificity that I would find impossible in my own work. A watchfulness, too. I must have written out this section fifty times, wanting to take apart her structure to find each mechanism. She makes every word an engine. ‘There were only the two of them on the mountain, flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk’s back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours.’
This is one of those books I recommend to just about everybody. It is a furiously written account of one woman’s life, a kind of autobiography, endorsed by none other than Simone de Beauvoir (who was also the long-term object of Leduc’s own longing). I often, when talking about this book, quote from the introduction, written by de Beauvoir, in which she quotes a line from one of Leduc’s many letters: ‘I am a desert talking to myself.’ La Batarde charts an enormous inner landscape, an excruciatingly excavated interior life. It also has scenes of a consummated boarding school affair. Her writing is alive. It has rhythm, a heartbeat. She puts the physical body into her work. I wanted the same thing for Mrs S, to find a way to let the text rise and fall like a chest.
A line I wrote out over and over again when starting Mrs S was taken from Margery Kempe, Gluck’s ‘nobody knows what I put into my waiting’. I was interested in queer fantasy, not the genre but the experience, the way we map our desires. In Margery Kempe, Gluck charts his own love affair with ‘L’ against a re-writing of the real life Margery Kempe, the author of a medieval manuscript in which she describes fucking Jesus. The sex-writing, I think, is the very best. Gluck, not unlike Violette Leduc, has an essential understanding of rhythm, that the erotic is often borne out of pacing. There’s detail, too, he allows room for the questions that sex arouses, the self left horny, doubtful, satisfied and therefore cursed to want more satisfaction. At one point he asks ‘Is my love amazing because it exists? Does it verify my existence or are my tears merely the faulty plumbing of an hysteric?’
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