A Conversation with Hanna Thomas Uose
Who Wants to Live Forever is a novel that pulls across time and place after a drug known as Yareta is introduced into society. Its effects? Living forever. Through an ensemble cast of five characters, we get a glimpse into how Yareta affects their lives and tears apart relationships. Blending together science fiction and romance, with resounding and artistic literary prose, Who Wants to Live Forever is a fantastic work of speculative fiction.
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What drew you to tell this story? Can you recall having any distinct inspirations?
It’s sort of a strange one, because I kind of don’t know. I don’t remember really having the idea. I think it just arrived one day, and I became very preoccupied with this question: How would it affect society if a drug like this was widely accessible? What inspired me in that sense, then, was my work in progressive activism and social change. I think I am really interested in what the world could be in either direction, for better or for worse, and all the complex, different ways it would be affected. As soon as I had that question in my head, it just had a momentum of its own.
I started wondering ‘Wouldn’t this happen?’ or ‘What if this happened?’ and started noodling on that question for quite a long time, but I wasn’t really considering writing a novel because I had never tried. It was strange, I was thinking about it so much and saying to people, ‘Don’t you think this would be a great book? Or a great film?’ that eventually I thought, maybe I should have a go at this, because I had looked for books like it and I couldn’t find anything at that time.
I know that you did a Master’s in Prose Fiction. Was Who Wants to Live Forever a product of your degree or something you’ve been working on for many years?
It’s something I’ve worked on for many years. I had the idea at the end of 2017, and then I tried to write a version of it in 2018 – it was awful, so I put it to one side. In 2019, I started again but with a different cast of characters. Because it was my first attempt at writing a novel, I didn’t even know if I would finish that draft but, by the time I applied to my MA at UEA, I had an incredibly shit first draft of 45,000 words. But by that point, I had enough confidence to know I would finish the draft. I knew the story and knew enough to write a bad book, but I thought it would be really nice to write a good book!
In lockdown, it just struck me that maybe it was a good time to apply to do an MA. I applied in 2020 and then I had a deferred place. By the time I started in 2021, I think I had 70 or 80,000 words. I had the bulk of a first draft, a readable one, when I started the course, and the whole MA process was really helpful in terms of honing it, revising it, editing it, and learning more about the craft [of writing] itself, which was everything I wanted to do.
I saw that in your acknowledgements, not only did you thank your lecturers, but also your entire cohort, which I found really sweet. I wondered if I could ask a bit about your background. Would you consider yourself a natural storyteller? Have you always been drawn to literature and storytelling?
Yes! When I was younger, I was a HUGE reader, a huge escapist. Very much an autodidact when I was a kid. I had an attic room in my house and just spent all my time there. I read anything I could get my hands on and watched every old film up in the attic.
I ended up doing Classics as my undergrad. That covers all kinds of things, but there’s a lot of literature covered in that degree. And then I went to drama school for a year because my aim when I was young was to go into acting. After that, I realised it wasn’t for me. From then, I became more politicised and more into campaigning for fifteen years. But I think that creative flair has always been there. Campaigning and activism do need that muscle for storytelling, maybe in a more persuasive and targeted way. So, I definitely practised and honed that creativity in different ways.
The impulse to go back to something more creative in a pure sense was to liberate myself from the agenda of trying to make anyone think a particular thing. I think I do have an opinion about the book and what I would like people to take away from it, but I do understand that I’m not in control of that. There are so many viewpoints and people are invited to, I hope, come to their own conclusions.
Who Wants to Live Forever is a contemporary literary fiction novel that dips into a myriad of genres. We get a glimpse of everything from speculative fiction on the ongoing state of our current society to horror, romance, and dystopian, science-fiction elements. During the writing process, were you consciously trying to write in one genre or were you writing freely? Where would you place your novel (genre-wise)?
I consider Who Wants to Live Forever a speculative novel—and I’m not comparing myself to these authors but, like Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro who write literature that takes place in a near approximation of our world, I considered it a speculative novel and I wanted to take a literary approach. I love speculative writers. Like those two I mentioned, and also Emily St. John Mandel. I was really inspired by Station Eleven through the writing of the book. I also read some sci-fi and was obsessed with The Three Body Problem. I love an idea-based story, but I can’t say that I was trying to fulfil any genre structure. Brazen have done an amazing job of situating the book, but I do think we wondered, ‘Well, is it this?’ or ‘Is it that?’.
It's a bit of everything!
Yeah! And I think I’m sort of starting to understand a bit more that I wasn’t really keeping genre in mind when writing. I would say that, when we were editing, Sam and Yuki came in a lot more to the fore. The relationship was always there, but it was much more of an ensemble novel with the five characters. I think foregrounding Sam and Yuki’s relationship pushed it into more of a romantic drama – it didn’t start off with that overarching story. In the earlier days, everyone had a bit more equal weight.
That’s really interesting! And why did you settle on focusing on the plant-based drug, Yareta?
The drug was called ‘The Regimen’ in my first draft, but readers said it sounded like a fascist regime or something, so I changed it! When I was thinking about what I could call it, I was thinking about all the companies that name themselves after natural phenomena, like Apple or Amazon. And I knew that that’s exactly what would happen, that they would name it after some long-lived natural phenomenon. I was already aware of the Yareta plant, but then I did some more research, and in the end, I did a corporate branding exercise with myself, where I was looking at how to market the drug, what colours would work, playing around with the name, etc.
The narrative jumps from 2025 to 2039, 2022, 2018, and everything in between. Was this the same structure that you had in your earlier drafts, or is this something that came after in the editing process? How did you find it, writing across time, jumping back and forth the narrative?
That came during the editing process. My early drafts were all linear and chronological. Interestingly, each section was broadly in the same-ish order. My editor, Romilly, was the one who put this forward, and she was right! She wanted the novel to have a dynamic feeling, especially because it focuses heavily on time, so she thought this should be reflected in the structure of the novel. When she first gave me that note, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to go away and think about it’. I made this absolutely massive spreadsheet with the timelines, which is how my brain works, and we went back and forth with the order. It took ages because we did three rounds of edits and, in every round, I was getting rid of chapters and writing new ones. A lot of the ‘back and forth’ chapters were written during that editing process and then sliced in.
Also, it’s not just the order, but the balance of the characters. I didn’t want readers to wonder ‘Where’s Yuki?’ or ‘Where’s Frank gone?’, or for them to get distracted and lose the thread. It was really complicated. At one point, my whole room was covered in piles with the different chapters on the floor and I sat there trying to reorganise things. It was a pretty mind-expanding task! But I am really happy with where the novel got to and, looking back, I think that the linear, more chronological structure just meant that the story was cranking up a bit too slowly at the beginning.
The majority of the novel takes place between London and Japan, but then we get passages in the Bay Area, Paris, South Wales, among others. Are these places that you are familiar with, or did you travel to these places when writing the novel?
Yes! So, I live in London, and Sam and Yuki’s story takes place in South London, where I have lived previously. And Tokyo is where I was born. It’s where my father lives. When I started writing, I hadn’t been back for some years and then lockdown happened. But in 2022, I took a research trip, and we went to see the Meoto Iwa (‘wedded rocks’), which I had already written into the story. It was amazing. I’ve also spent quite a chunk of time in California, mainly because I used to work for an American-based organisation, and I also went back to do a writing retreat, nosing around San Francisco where I took a cab down to Palo Alto—where all the big pharmaceutical campuses are. I had a nose about and that was so useful.
The novel has been described as The Substance (2024) meets Normal People (2020), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2023) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). I am interested to know what sort of media you were consuming at the time that you were writing to help you get into the headspace? Are there any sort of films or literature that were really informative to your writing process?
What I read for pleasure tends to be speculative, meditative, first-person auto-fiction. Works by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, On the Calculation of Volume, which I absolutely loved. I can’t get enough of them. For this book, I reread Station Eleven and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. In a dream world, my book would sit alongside those.
In the editing process, we wanted to bring more of the romance to the fore. I dipped in and out of David Nicholls, so I could figure out how to sustain that tension between a couple. I also read Circe by Madeline Miller. There’s something really special about that story: she’s on her own for so much of it, but there’s something romantic about it. I was writing this book in lockdown, and because I was living alone, I was very isolated and, in the earliest drafts, the majority of the characters were on their own.
I was thinking a lot about how in today’s day and age, we’re exposed to every skincare product, technique, and surgical procedure under the sun to reverse aging and ‘enhance’ our physical appearance. We could very easily replace the word ‘Yareta’ with Ozempic, buccal fat removal or Botox and we would get a very similar outcome to the one in the novel. Were these systems you were aware if while writing the novel, and would you describe your novel as a commentary on today’s beauty standards?
Yes, I mean, Ozempic didn’t exist when I first started writing it. I think when it crashed into consciousness a couple of years ago, I was definitely aware. When I was researching [for the novel], I think I must have been dimly aware that there was longevity research going on. I think I absorbed it by osmosis. But as I read more about it, I was like ‘Oh god. This is something that will exist in 15 years. I’ve got to fucking finish this book!’ Then I felt I really had to get a move on, that there must be other people across the world writing this novel. So, I felt a sense of urgency, in terms of the social commentary.
The preoccupation with bodies and appearance, I think, honestly, that stuff comes through my own personal experience of a woman who is getting older. You know, the various things that you think you’re supposed to do to maintain a certain appearance. In terms of the social commentary aspect of the novel, I was trying to explore the disparity in our experience of healthcare more consciously. I’m having my launch party tomorrow and I realise it’s been exactly five years since the first Covid lockdown. And that, to me, is hugely alarming. How a drug like Yareta will only enhance every single inequality that we experience. I mean, we’re already seeing that with Ozempic and the shortages, and we are already seeing it happen in different ways.
So yes, I think there are two sides to what I was writing. There’s the political consciousness regarding social inequity, but also the preoccupation with appearance and getting older, which has come from my own experience as an elder millennial.
That’s so interesting. This is something I’m constantly thinking about, and I think that’s partly why I found Yuki so refreshing. She doesn’t want to stop her ageing, she didn’t want to have any more time or go against the natural process, she was just embracing it. I think that’s really important representation to have nowadays, someone who is ageing gracefully and going against what’s becoming the new ‘norm’.
Yes! I think of ageing so much. Every time I look in the mirror, I’m like ‘Ah!’ but I love inspecting my face and thinking, ‘What’s going on?’. I feel like it’s such a privileged form of self-knowledge to see your own ageing face. I think it would be very odd to deny yourself the experience of seeing your old face, you know? That’s what freaks me out about all of the attempts to radically alter or maintain one’s appearance because you’re ultimately denying yourself a really important part of the human experience.
Going back to the title, was this always the title that you had in mind? Is this a direct reference to the Queen song?
Originally, Yuki was called Akiko, except my aunt is called Akiko so I couldn’t really call her Akiko, and the first title was actually ‘Akiko and the Circus’ because I wanted to have this feeling of her being at the centre of this madness. And then I changed it to ‘More Time’, but, funnily enough, I had already written the scene where Yuki goes home in the cab and ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ by Queen comes on. A couple of years in, I was reading through the book, and I felt so stupid because the title was right there! At first, I didn’t know if the song was trademarked and if it could work as a title, but it was fine and it works. Choosing the title was kind of puzzling but I think Who Wants to Live Forever works so well as there are so many characters and it does quite a lot of heavy lifting to tell you what’s in the book.
Music is also a significant part of the novel – in Sam’s career aspirations, the songs throughout. Are you also interested in music, or was this an interest you developed for the character?
Yeah, I’m very into music. I’m part of a choir called Lips, which is a trans-inclusive women’s pop choir in London. I’ve also been quite involved in a charity called Spark the Noise, which works with young girls, non-binary and trans youth to help them build confidence through learning how to play instruments. It’s been an amazing project to have been a part of, and through that, I’ve learned how to play the drums and be in bands myself.
While you were writing, what sort of music did you listen to? And if you could describe the novel as a series of albums or songs, what would they be?
I actually have a Spotify playlist for this! I made this playlist, and, for me, different songs represent certain characters from the book. I just added Sharon Von Etten because she’s just released an album and one of the songs on there is called, ‘Live Forever’, where she just repeats this refrain of ‘Who wants to live forever?’ which is so freaky! John Fahey’s ‘Sunflower Blues’ really reflects Sam’s character and his noodling around on the guitar. Poppy Ajudha’s ‘PLAYGOD’ is kind of about Frank, for me. Adrianne Lenker’s ‘terminal paradise’ and Weyes Blood’s ‘God Turn Me into a Flower’ have really beautiful lyrics, and these songs for me, represents that sort of transformation Yuki undergoes.
While I was writing, however, I think I mostly listened to film soundtracks. I was trying to give myself a sort of cinematic feeling, maybe.
Going back to your characters, what is your writing process like? I know some writers have to really get to know and envision their characters as people doing everyday things and making their way through the world. What was your experience like when crafting these characters?
To begin with, I was much more interested in the world they were living in and the rules of that world. I thought about that for ages. The original cast of characters in the first draft were different from the ones in the book. There were always a couple affected by the drug, but it was different. There was also a doctor as part of the ensemble and an older woman. It was a bit higher drama, but I found it very hard to find a way into it.
In terms of reading the book from an outsider’s perspective, I share the most with Yuki. I’ve put a lot of myself into Yuki. Having this closer study was my way in and I was able to loosely plot the characters around her. The other characters I had vaguely based on people I had come across and then I’d just mould them. I did do some character profiles and the more I wrote, the more I got to know them. The process definitely got easier as I went along writing and also finding delineations between myself and them, as well as differences between each character.
Since you put so much of yourself into Yuki, do you think that made it difficult in the writing process to detach yourself from her and let her react differently?
Yeah, I think it was difficult. When people read her at first, they maybe didn’t understand what she was thinking or why she was doing things like I did. But I just wasn’t objective enough. I share a lot of my worldview with her so, in a way, I think Yuki needed the most work at one point.
Is there a character and scene that was the most fun to write?
I really enjoyed writing Paige’s character, but in the end, she only has two chapters as we whittled down a lot of it. I found her the most fun and happiest to write. I also enjoyed writing the scene where Frank is in the desert and takes magic mushrooms, the whole hippie commune section in California and having Paige in that environment.
I enjoyed how you gave us multiple people’s perspectives and well-rounded experiences about what you could and couldn’t accomplish if a drug that extended your life indefinitely was around. Without giving too much away, you demonstrate how some people make use of this ‘extra time’, while others don’t use it to its full potential. I particularly wanted to know why you think Yuki is so against Yareta and why she never budges even though Sam starts taking it?
This is a good question because I don’t know if I’ve examined it in that way. I think, partly, it’s the sense of humiliation. If Sam had approached her and had that conversation completely differently, then *maybe* there would have been a way forward. But I think it was the sense of humiliation and secrecy, this sense of it being so unknown. It becomes clear that this man doesn’t know her enough and she doesn’t know him, or what’s about to happen. It’s an utter betrayal, on a par with an affair or something, in the sense that you still love the person but have no clue how to repair this.
I think Yuki has a different philosophical underpinning to Sam. But there is a lot of me in Sam, especially with feeling the pressure of ‘achieving greatness’. As I moved along, I began to identify a lot with his midlife panics and wanting to achieve a lot in this lifetime. His feelings of: ‘Am I capable of doing all of the things I want to do? There’s not enough time!’ He’s someone who has failed and can’t quite see the path forward. Whereas Yuki doesn’t care about that stuff. In the culmination of her life, she just wants a family and children, and she’s already lost that, so she’s beyond it. That question was answered for her, so she viewed the world beyond what one can achieve. whereas Sam couldn’t follow her. The value of life has a different meaning based on each person’s experiences.
I will admit, I felt very frustrated by Sam’s character. I found that he would get so in his head sometimes that he didn’t let himself achieve his full potential. I could connect with him, as a complex character, but I just felt like Yuki deserved better!
I think that a huge driving point for the novel was the idea of potential. Our own perception of what we’re supposed to achieve and that is different for everyone.
In regard to Maya, I love how she takes Yareta to ‘even’ the playing field. As a corporate baddie, taking an immortal drug seems to be the only way that, as a woman of colour, she can climb up the corporate ladder and access the same opportunities that her male counterparts are already achieving. However, as she comes to realise, taking a drug that indefinitely extends your life does not erase the systemic issues that are currently in place both in the fictional and real world. As a woman of colour, she has to work twice as hard just to get by, but because all of the old white men who dominate the corporate system are no longer retiring or dying out (as they can work and live forever). What were you trying to communicate through the character of Maya?
I wrote a short story version of this story in 2019, and Maya was there. I kind of wanted to present someone in the story who was experiencing Yareta differently to Sam. I envisioned Maya as a foil to Sam, because, like you’ve said, time expands for him, but he does nothing with it. Whereas she’s someone who is trying to make the most of everything, and her experience is very much informed from my own.
Before going freelance, I was in a leadership position at a big non-profit, sort of tech adjacent, so I came into contact with a few ‘tech bros.’ Despite the fact that I was running the product team, had a budget, and institutional power in this role, some of those men would speak to me like I was an idiot. I would really have to lobby and advocate for myself. That drive that Maya has and that feeling of having to prove yourself at work is something I really identified with.
Her identity is really important and so is her family history. For instance, the respect that comes with having beautiful things. She’s always so expensively dressed and has the status, alongside the financial freedom. And I do feel for her, but at the end of the day, she is still someone who is operating within a questionable capitalist system. The question of ‘Can you change a system from the inside?’ really comes to mind. I don’t know if she can, but I appreciate her impulse and wanting to try.
Did you face any challenges while writing the novel?
The biggest challenge was getting going. I felt really delusional at the beginning and kept thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’. It felt very counterintuitive. You’re putting so much time into something that you have no idea will work or have positive outcomes. I felt like I was having an existential crisis. I think the whole writing process is quite hard—it’s a tough task to write a novel! Even on the MA, I was able to understand more about it and get feedback, but then you had to understand the gaps between what you mean vs what people read. It takes quite a lot of self-examination to be like, ‘Why aren’t I being understood here? What do I want to say?’ Writing becomes quite a psychoanalytic process and moves beyond what you want to write and if that’s good enough for someone else – you come to understand how you communicate in general.
One of my favourite aspects of the novel was your ability to weave various mediums and forms throughout the narrative. Like Eliza Clark, Sally Rooney, or Beth O’Leary who weave newspaper clippings, emails, podcasts, text messages, and other media within the prose, I really enjoyed the way you merged Reddit threads, texts, Facebook comments, and interviews within the narrative. Is this form of writing something you always wanted to do or did the structure come after, in the editing process?
That was something I always brought in. I didn’t realise I was writing a meta text, but it was natural to the writing process as it’s just how we experience the world. I’ll be going about my day and engage with social media. I really loved writing the Reddit thread. That was so funny. I loved writing the celebrity gossip comments too. It was really fun to reproduce that stuff. It made the world of the novel feel more real because I had to think about what was happening and how people were responding on every level: online, in person, etc.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Did you ever imagine an alternative ending for Sam and Yuki? Or did you know exactly where they were headed from the beginning? What made you decide on that ending?
In the short story version I wrote in 2019, I had a similar version to the end scene. I knew I wanted it to end with Sam sitting on a bench playing the guitar, just repeating the same refrain over and over again. He’s noodling about and still can’t commit to finishing one song. Whereas Yuki’s ending, that was the last thing I wrote during the editing process. I felt I had to revisit Yuki one more time. I like that her ending in the book is with Midori. It felt very satisfying to revisit that and it was nice.
I did feel guilty writing Yuki’s ending. I didn’t want people to think I was punishing her. To me, it isn’t a punishment because she’s part of this great cycle of life that the others don’t quite get to experience.
I wanted to talk about the painting of Izanagi and Izanami. These images recur throughout the novel, like the thread that binds both of these characters and the thread that binds the wedded rocks: from Yuki and Sam’s bedroom to the temple where Yuki sees the painting with the tour guide, and then the painting in Yuki’s house again. Is this image one that you consciously weaved through the narrative or one that you subconsciously came back to time and time again? Additionally, what does the painting symbolise for you?
Yes! This was definitely a conscious decision, and one that came naturally when I decided to set part of the book in Japan. Part of the reason was to show the contrast between how a different culture might react to the drug because of their philosophies and religion—Shinto and Buddhism are Japan’s two major religions—and I wanted to contrast attitudes towards the effort of wanting to live forever. In Japan, for instance, there is a different understanding of the afterlife.
Initially, I thought of taking an approach like Ursula K. Le Guin does, where she folds in legends and myths into her work. But effectively, I didn’t know how to do that without being too overambitious in my first novel! I did read a lot around Japanese myths though, which led me to Izanami and Izanagi and later the wedded rocks. So, it all started to come together. For me, Sam and Yuki’s relationship is represented by their story and the rocks: they were once living together in one plane and then were split into two, and how there’s no way back from that, and yet they are always connected.
I read on your Substack a bit about your process in designing the cover with the green, white, Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ hands reaching through. Could you tell me a bit more about the process?
This is all of Mel Four’s brilliant work. She’s the designer at Brazen and a complete genius. I’ll admit I was really scared because I didn’t see the cover until they had their final design, but I love it! I think it represents the two planes Sam and Yuki inhabit perfectly. The cover communicates that so well and so I hope it will appeal.
Do you judge a book by its cover?
Yeah, of course. I pick up things that have cool covers. There are some favourite books of mine that I HATE the cover of. It’s a real disservice. That’s partly why I was so pleased with the cover I have!
If you had to summarise your motivations for writing this novel, what would you want to be the biggest takeaway for readers from the book?
When I first started writing it, I’d really hoped that it would be a conversation starter and I wanted it to provoke people to think deeply about these questions, if they haven’t already, because of the world we’re living in. Can we escape? My hope would be that people interrogate the book’s understanding of the human condition but also the attempt to transcend it, be it through the drug-based technological approach or through nature and getting in touch with the metaphysics of it all. What are we connected to on a universal level?
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