A Conversation with Lucy Rose
Firstly, I loved The Lamb! You’ve crafted such a beautifully vivid world that is provocative and haunting, but also somewhat refreshing in its commitment to subverting feminine ideals. Similarly to the work of Angela Carter, it is clearly a novel inspired by folk stories, fairy tales and horror movies, but it’s such an original re-working of well-trodden themes. How did you come up with the premise?
I first started writing The Lamb as a series of what I thought were unconnected flash fictions. I’ve always said that flash fiction is perfect for horror because it allows for such short bursts of terror and it’s the perfect place to experiment with tension and dread. Then I realised about 15,000 words into these almost-vignettes, these short bits and pieces, that I was actually writing about the same family. In some versions they ate human flesh and in some versions they didn’t, but that was where the idea started in terms of the writing process. I always knew that I wanted it to feel like a folk tale. I’m a huge lover of oral tradition and it was a huge part of my life growing up because I grew up really rural in the arse-end of nowhere - can I say arse-end?
Yeah, I love it!
[Laughs] Okay, well I didn’t have a TV growing up either so oral stories were a huge part of how I interacted with the world in lieu of television. So I kind of fell into it by accident, really.
The influence of oral tradition is clear but I also think it’s a very visual novel. You’re also a filmmaker. How does your expertise in that area inform your vision when writing a novel?
I think what my film background has given me is an understanding of all the different pieces of storytelling. When I was trying to set the scene in any given chapter in the book, I channelled my production designer, Poppy, who is just the most incredible production designer in the world. Every trinket she places in a space is placed there with such intention, not just the object but how it’s placed. She spends a lot of time thinking about specific objects, how they’re made, where they’re made, how the character would have come across the object and she’s very thoughtful. Space in a novel is so important because in a film, it’s just there, it’s just a backdrop but in a book it is something you feel, you don’t necessarily see it. So it was about channelling all of those other experiences from working in film that I have been, honestly, very privileged to have and using those experiences to strengthen the world of the novel. I think world-building is such a huge part of the book, because it’s from Margot’s point of view and is so vivid because she is quite young, so that had to be really believable for everything else to land in the way that it does.
Nature serves almost as an accomplice or friend to Margot, but the landscape is far from pastoral. It is both comforting and predatory - it has a dark centre. You spoke about growing up in a rural area. What is your own relationship to nature and what role did you want it to play in The Lamb?
Nature is so beautiful, but it’s also so powerful and so scary and so reactive. I don’t know how you feel about climate change and how we’re seeing it have an impact first-hand, even the flooding that happened yesterday in Manchester, the really erratic temperatures - it’s such a reactive force. I wanted the nature to mirror the experience of a teenage girl and how much power teenage girls have – they can unravel a man with a single look – there’s nothing a man hates more than a teenage girl and I love it so much because they’re just so powerful! They lead a lot of core consumerism trends as well. They have a huge impact on what is happening in the world, if you think of things like Twilight and Shadow and Bone and all these phenomena that are caused by teenage girls. And yet at the same time, they are just seen as pretty things that aren’t powerful. That’s how I view nature, as well, as something people love to admire but actually there’s this darkness and power to it. I think a lot of women can identify with the personality of nature.
I’m reluctant to categorise novels because it can be quite reductive but The Lamb fits so well into the recent rise in fiction written by women that foregrounds the grotesque and doesn’t shy away from female bodily functions, as a rejection of idealised, domestic feminine archetypes. In this manner, The Lamb reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and Monica Ojeda’s Jawbone, among others. Why was it important to you to depict the grotesque and how do you think such details aid a feminist perspective?
I just set out to write a book where women are just people and everything else happened through osmosis. A lot of these novels that are deemed as “grotesque” are just presenting women as complex, three-dimensional human beings. But I also think a lot of women feel something at the minute ... The world is very complicated and we seem to be making steps backwards rather than forwards. There’s a steady creep back to the representation of women and trends in female beauty standards focusing on outdated values. Women are experiencing this drawback to “look nice and be silent.” I want women to feel like they can just be human beings. Human bodies, regardless of whatever gender identity you belong to, are honestly just quite disgusting; they stink, they rot, they grow, they stretch, they secrete, they do all sorts of really nasty stuff. That’s just nature. It’s what all bodies do. All these things that are normal go against the beauty standards. I really wanted to write about women who are just unapologetically human without capitalism and patriarchy being able to dissect them and erode them and diminish who they are. These characters I’m writing are feminine women but women without specific patriarchal femininity attached to them. I just wanted them to be people.
I love the use of lipstick in The Lamb. I love the image of Mama dragging lipstick across her bottom lip and how that is contrasted with her bad teeth. There are so many indications in the novel that both Mama and Eden desire to strip away any form of performative femininity and return to a more animalistic nature, but lipstick is the one thing that Mama uses to appear to prey like a conventional woman. It is almost like a mask.
The thing I really love about Mama – I don’t love it about her as a person but I loved exploring it because it was fun and it helped me learn a lot about culture at the moment – is how Mama uses her femininity to manipulate others. Particularly how she manipulates men with her use of traditional femininity was just enormous fun to play with because they fall for it, hook, line and sinker and I know that they do in real life as well. She is fascinating to write about because I am not really like Mama in real life. I shy away from conflict wherever possible, I hate it. I’m not as bold as her. So writing about this woman who is such a femme fatale was an exciting experience for me. But I also enjoyed injecting a lot of my own frustrations about patriarchy and the world into her because I think that’s where I found common ground with her, through her frustration with why the world is the way it is.
Mama is clearly a psychopath, not a likeable character at all, and yet in conveying her you also manage to explore the ways in which she has been dealt a bad hand by patriarchy. Why was such nuance important to you?
I have an answer to this because it’s something that I really care about. Society and culture are obsessed with this idea of the perfect victim and, particularly with women, if you are not society’s idea of the perfect victim, then you are not a victim at all. There’s no complexity, no multitudes, it’s so black and white. Unfair and unjust things can happen to bad people and it remains unjust - that is something people are uncomfortable with because it is not simple or straight forward. If a woman is a victim of something and makes one tiny slip-up, the feeling around her situation in terms of getting her justice just dissolves. It absolutely disappears. No human being is perfect. Obviously, victimhood doesn’t absolve someone of their wrongdoings, but it also doesn’t mean that we should be weaponizing systemic misogyny towards women who are bad. I really wanted to explore this idea of the perfect victim because you see it so much. It infuriates me because when we do this it means we can’t look at a woman in all her humanity, our prejudices strip it away and I think that’s such a repugnant thing we do as a culture.
I’m really interested in how horror, a genre with a history of misogyny, can be subverted into a device to explore feminism. What do you think you can do with horror that you can’t do with other genres? Why do you think it is such a good vehicle for exploring patriarchy?
Horror is a great genre for this specifically because you can push things to their absolute extremities. [The Lamb] for example, could have easily been just a drama about a mother and a daughter. It could have been just a drama about this family’s relationships and their relationship to food and they could have had normal meals, normal meat, but with horror you can just take it that little bit further and be like, it’s people meat! It’s a genre that is so allegorical and curious. Even films that are dismissed as not being high-brow horror - movies like Scream - have such an interesting meta-commentary on consumerism, how we’re consuming media, what popular culture looks like at any given moment. I looked at things like The First Omen and Immaculate which both explore the concept of forced birth and they both came out within months of each other. They both have really high concepts in the vein of Immaculate Conception and that’s not a down-to-earth premise at all. Horror films tell you so much about what people are feeling at any given moment en masse. I really, really like the genre because of that and that’s why it feels like such a safe space for me and why I think it is for other people as well because it allows people to explore all these fears and anxieties in a space that is controlled. It’s like therapy – really, cheap therapy – and that’s why I think, specifically, a lot of women are drawn to it at the moment.
What you say about it having quite a misogynistic history, I do agree with. That’s not to say that men can’t tell stories about women’s traumas but it was just happening so much and so exploitatively. I feel like now is a moment women are able to voice their own stories. I kind of make a point to prioritise horror movies and horror novels by women where I can, or horror material from minorities.
Any recommendations for good horror made by women?
I mentioned it before but The First Omen is brilliant. Other female horror directors to watch out for are Rose Glass, Ana Lily Amirpour and Prano Bailey Bond. In terms of fiction, look out for Kirsty Logan, Julia Armfield, Amy Twigg, Eliza Clark, and Jessie Elland. There’s a countless number of women out there making really scary stuff.
Both The Lamb and your movie Taste are based around the theme of cannibalism. In both projects cannibalism appears to be symbolic of unhealthy power dynamics and toxic relationships. However, in The Lamb cannibalism appears to be inextricably entwined with carnal desire. This offers up some interesting readings of how women are ostracised for their sexual appetite. Do you think that female sexual desire is still a taboo subject?
I think at one point it was becoming less of a taboo subject and then recently we’ve seen these big trad wife trends where women are stripped of any kind of sexuality or agency or autonomy - especially in America and also more extremely in Afghanistan where women’s rights are so extreme it sounds like a horrific and defiled work of fiction. I think there’s a lot in The Lamb about female sexuality but that’s because the novel is about autonomy. Every single character in the book has some kind of challenge or conflict with autonomy. That’s where the cannibalism metaphor is at its strongest because there’s just so much to explore within female autonomy, whether it’s the choices we’re making, our sexuality or our relationship to desire. Our autonomy is so controlled, even in terms of our relationship to food. Girls who want things are “greedy” and “nasty.” They’re not ambitious, they’re not creative, they’re just nasty, greedy little things and I just really wanted to explore this idea of women wanting things, whether that’s a good lay or a nice meal or whatever, because society has such a problem with women wanting things, it doesn’t matter what it is that they want. That’s the thing that really piqued my curiosity.
It is Margot, not Mama, who suffers the most from the family’s ostracism. How did you manage to convey that little girl’s isolation so well?
It’s probably just a bit of lived experience. When I was younger, we lived so remotely that there weren’t even buses to get into the nearest town. When nature is all that you have, you become accustomed to being lonely and isolated. I’m autistic as well, just to double up, so I struggled forming relationships with other people. I didn’t really have any real friendships until I was in my twenties and learned properly how to develop real connections. But, I also think in terms of the prose, the technical writing, there’s something about writing from a child’s perspective which changes everything about how you write. It challenges everything that you throw at a character and every situation that you put a character into.
Conflict happens in a scene where you have two or three characters together that are all different. What I found really fun was putting a character into a scene and making that conflict a sense of disconnect. I think so many people can understand what that loneliness feels like and what it is to want to connect with somebody and to feel like there is something physically in the way. For Margot, that thing is Eden. Eden is a very physical manifestation of that inability to connect despite trying so, so hard. I really loved writing Margot because she was such a therapeutic character. Also, she’s so brave. I really wanted to tell a story about somebody who is brave and somebody who says the right thing even if it’s difficult and for Margot, the stakes are if she disagrees with her mother, she’s more likely to be eaten, or to be punished. In a time where it’s exhausting, difficult and also sometimes punishable to wake up every day and choose to do the right thing, to speak up even if it's hard, Margot’s courage to constantly stand up for what she believes in makes me want to do better.
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