From the first line of Nicola Griffith’s latest novel, Always, it’s clear that the reader is about to go on a potentially lethal – but exhilarating – journey: “If you walk into a bar and there’s a man with a knife, what do you do?” The answer, according to the book’s narrator, Aud Torvingen, is: “Walk out again. If you can.”
Always is Griffith’s third novel about Aud, a wealthy, well-connected lesbian from Norway and former Atlanta cop. The Village Voice described Aud, who first appeared in Griffith’s 1998 novel The Blue Place, as “a woman who loses herself in the beauty and balletic control of pure violence yet seeks salvation,” but what they neglected to mention was that Aud is just plain sexy.
Griffith recalled: “I remember when my agent – the first time she read The Blue Place – she’s a straight woman with a husband and two or three kids – she said, ‘Oh my God, Nicola, I would throw my knickers at her! I would give up my husband for Aud.'”
Born in Yorkshire, England, Griffith left home at 18 and did all the things a young dyke might do: fronted a band, learned karate, hung out in bars. After she experienced a violent assault one night, she also learned that knowing martial arts wasn’t enough. She took self-defense lessons, then began to teach it herself. While teaching, she began to write, eventually traveling to Michigan for Clarion, a six-week writers’ workshop where she met her partner, author Kelley Eskridge. The two will celebrate their 19th anniversary in June.
In the first two Aud novels, The Blue Place and Stay (2002), Aud investigated crimes in the dense heat of Atlanta and the cooler climes of Norway, but Griffith doesn’t think that her books necessarily fit into the crime fiction genre. “I really think of [them] as novels of change,” said Griffith, “about this woman who’s learning to be human and kind of becoming a hero in her own way.”
In Always, Aud travels to Seattle to check up on one of her real estate investments, and soon becomes embroiled in investigating a poisoning on the set of a TV show being filmed at a warehouse she owns. She is also instantly attracted to the production’s caterer, a former stuntwoman named Kick. In a parallel story line set in Atlanta, Aud teaches self-defense to a group of women – an endeavor that brings up a whole host of issues about power and women’s roles that Aud never expected.
The two strands of the novel come together in the end, but the process of writing Always was not a smooth ride for Griffith.”I’ve written this book three times,” she said. “The two-strand [version] is the fruit of about three years’ work.”
Griffith at first wrote the novel with only the Seattle story line, then in a second version added in two additional threads – including the Atlanta-set one – and ultimately wound up with the third, published, version. “Every time I write a book like this I think, OK, this time there’s gonna be the big chart,” Griffith said of her writing process. “In fact, I made a chart. I put a chart on the wall, and then I never put anything on it. I’m basically incredibly lazy. … I just trundle along and keep my fingers crossed.”
Some of the most vivid scenes in Always involve Aud’s visits to the set of a television show, but Griffith said that she has never visited one. “I’ve never been on a film set in my life,” she admitted. “I just made s— up! I love any research I can do at home, but I hate going out to do research. I don’t know why. I like to use my imagination. That’s one of the joys of writing for me, is going to play in places where nobody’s ever been.”
Before writing the Aud novels, Griffith wrote two science fiction novels: the Lambda and Tiptree Award-winning Ammonite (1993), and the Nebula Award-winning Slow River (1995). “I really like to help people visit slightly different worlds, even this world, just to see the world differently,” she said. But the process of writing science fiction does differ from writing the Aud books.
“For example, writing Ammonite … you have to explain how things work without bringing … the narrative to a screeching halt,” she explained. In Always, writing the self-defense portions was also challenging. “I did my best to explain exactly what was going on without making it an instruction manual.”
Her efforts paid off: The self-defense chapters are among the most evocative and suspenseful ones in Always. “Writing the self-defense was in fact so much more exciting than I thought it would be,” Griffith said. “I had the best time.”
Griffith taught self-defense for five years, but she says that her teaching methods differed from Aud’s. “Aud’s an innocent in a very particular way,” Griffith said. “She’s always cruised through life without any trouble, and she thought, well, I’ll just show them how to kick things.” Aud didn’t understand the extent to which women have been programmed to think a certain way about the world.
“If there is a way that you could look at the world and see the way women are brought up as being programmed, being brainwashed, being immersed in a cult — the cult of the patriarchy if you like,” Griffith said dryly, “and Aud’s job is to deprogram these women, and that’s a hard thing. Because everything that we have learnt, that we’re taught, is to be afraid all the time. … and Aud basically says, ‘What a load of crap. You’re strong: Look how hard you can kick, look how hard you can punch. Here’s how you can pop a boy’s eyeball without any effort at all; what’s your problem?'”
Aud’s attitude is a shock to the Southern ladies of Atlanta. Griffith recalled one experience of her own in which her students had some difficulty sorting out their own feelings about defending themselves. “There was one session in my real-life teaching when I was teaching the Union of Catholic Mothers,” Griffith said. “I was talking about body language and taking up space, and one of the women said, ‘You don’t expect me to shave my head and wear big boots and look like a man, do you?’ I said, ‘Well, you think I look like a man?'”
Griffith laughed at the memory. She explained to the Union of Catholic Mothers why she dressed the way she did — “because I think I look great” was one of her reasons, but another was that having no hair meant no one could grab it in a fight — and then told them that she was merely giving them options; they could make their own choices.
“And they just started hammering at each other,” Griffith recalled. “They took sides, you know. ‘We don’t think she should teach us anymore ’cause she’s a big old dyke.’ And then other people saying, ‘No, no, no, what she’s saying is useful.’ And I just sat there for half an hour while they persuaded each other that it was OK for me to teach them this stuff. It was like a huge consciousness-raising session. It was intense.”
After Griffith met Eskridge and began traveling regularly to the United States to be with her, she encountered intense experiences of a different sort — struggling with immigration. “It was terrifying,” Griffith said. “Every time I came through … there was always this same immigration officer in Atlanta, and she was a right old dyke, and she’d look at me, and she’d see Kelley waiting beyond the barrier … [and] she said, ‘Purpose of your visit? Business or pleasure?’
“I’d say, ‘pleasure’; we’d give each other a look like ‘I know what you’re about.’ And then she’d stamp me and let me in but, you know, she could have refused me each time, because it was clear I was a dyke; it was clear that I had no gainful employment; it was clear that I was basically illegal, but she let me in.” Griffith concluded with a laugh, “Thank God for the dyke funny handshake.”
At the time, it was illegal for lesbians and gays to enter the United States, but Griffith and Eskridge sought the help of immigration lawyers anyway. They were told that unless Griffith was wealthy or famous, there was no way she could get a green card to stay in the U.S. Griffith remembers telling the lawyer: “‘There’s no way I can get rich … but give me six months and I’ll bloody well get famous.'”
By 1992, she had sold Ammonite to a publisher, and it received favorable reviews and won several awards. In 1995, her second novel, Slow River, did even better, and she approached another immigration lawyer who told her that under a new immigration provision, the national interest waiver, it would be possible for her to get a green card if she could prove that she had an extraordinary talent that would be in the national interest. “The only snag is that they’ve never given that to a lesbian or a gay man before,” the lawyer told her, and Griffith was asked if she would cover that up.
“I said, ‘No, I’ve been out since I was 16 years old, I am bloody well not hiding now. I said, ‘All my fiction is about dykes; I’m a dyke,'” Griffith recalled. “I’ve practically got ‘dyke’ stamped on my forehead,” she added, laughing.
Ultimately, with the assistance of letters from Governor Zell Miller of Georgia and poet Alan Ginsberg — “I had to be very un-English and just tell people that I really needed their help … people were very, very kind” — she managed to gather enough documentation about her extraordinary talent to be given a green card. Her admittance to the United States made national news; the Wall Street Journal reported on it as an example of the country’s questionable moral values.
At the same time, Griffith was dealing with another development in her personal life that she had never expected. In 1993 — the same week that her first novel came out — she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “Happy March, that was,” she quipped. In Always, for the first time in print, she writes about a character with MS.
“It’s a bit disturbing, but it’s probably time to start talking about it,” Griffith said, “because it’s so large in my life.” These days her health is variable, but MS does limit her. “I’ve been diagnosed 14 years now. I’m doing pretty well … but you know, having MS really sucks. I can’t do aikido anymore. I can’t teach self-defense really. I can’t travel nearly as much as I would like in support of my books.”
Those limitations, though, don’t stop her from writing. She envisions the Aud books as a four- or five-book series: “I have a notion of where I would like to leave things, that she wouldn’t be dead, by the way. Not like all the other bloody action heroes who get killed off. … But I don’t think I’m ready to do any more Aud just yet.”
In the meantime, she has other ideas she’d like to explore, including a fantasy novel and a historical novel set in seventh-century England, but she admitted that every time she changes genres in fiction, publishers aren’t quite sure what to do with her. She has been asked if she will write noir now, as the Aud books have been categorized as noir, but Griffith sees them differently.
“Noir to me is very claustrophobic; it’s kind of like the horror fiction of the crime genre,” Griffith said. “You know, everybody loses in the end. … I can’t be dealing with that. Aud isn’t like that. Aud’s full of hope.”
Among Griffith’s favorite books are Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, Mary Renault’s historical novels about Greece, and some of Sarah Waters’ Victorian novels. “Sometimes when I read, honestly, I want vivid and burly and fun,” Griffith said.
“I don’t always want to read about anguished people. And the thing about something like Always is Aud does get anguished, but she has an enormous amount of fun — I mean, all the aikido and the food and the sex and the — you know, to me, the Aud books essentially are a blast … hopefully a meaningful blast, but very much a ‘Woohoo, look at that.'”
The action-packed nature of the Aud books, Griffith thinks, would make for a “killer TV series,” but though she had serious interest from a television network last year in the Aud novels, the financing fell through. “I think my books are just a bit frightening for Hollywood. You know, she’s a big old dyke, and there’s no excuse for it.”
That one parallel between Griffith and Aud — being lesbian — may partly explain why Griffith is often asked whether Aud is, in fact, Griffith herself, a question she has grown quite tired of. “Blatantly, people have said to me, ‘So Aud is basically you then?’ I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, sure, if I were gorgeous, insanely rich, six feet tall, didn’t have MS and was Norwegian, yeah!'”
Griffith paused and then added, “But the thing is, she kind of is. She’s the road not taken.”
For more on Nicola Griffith, visit her official website.
