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Author Eli Goldstone
‘I wanted to turn something that I was obsessed with, negatively, into art’ … Eli Goldstone. Photograph: Jamie Drew
‘I wanted to turn something that I was obsessed with, negatively, into art’ … Eli Goldstone. Photograph: Jamie Drew

Eli Goldstone: 'I can’t think of many great books that aren’t funny'

This article is more than 6 years old

Strange Heart Beating is the story of a grieving widow, but the debut novelist explains how she has found humour ‘in unusual places’ to tell it

Eli Goldstone’s right arm is adorned with a tattoo: a tombstone that reads “Bad Times”. She got it, she explains, to commemorate her bond with a Canadian friend who had to leave the UK and has a matching tattoo that says “Bad Vibes”. “It means ‘no more bad times!’ That’s the end of those for me,” she laughs.

Goldstone, 31, seems like someone who knows how to laugh at herself and the darker parts of life, and does so often. “Six-year-old me would be really confused that it’s taken me this long [to write a novel], because I thought I was going to be the youngest person to ever write one,” she jokes. “I was always sitting in front of my typewriter starting the Great Childhood Novel.”

When reading Goldstone’s debut, Strange Heart Beating, it feels like she is often laughing at – not with – her characters, particularly her main protagonist, Seb: a thirtysomething Londoner who ruins dinner parties with his ruminations on Nietzsche, and is grappling with the recent death of his wife, Leda, who was killed by a swan.

It is at times absurd, but Strange Heart Beating is also an often tender exploration of loss, following Seb’s investigation into Leda’s past after he discovers a stack of unopened letters from a mysterious man she’d never mentioned. Previously uninterested in Leda’s Latvian origins – “I encouraged her to embrace her identity as an adopted Englishwoman. ... I felt confused and alienated by her foreignness” – Seb travels to the Baltic country to understand his wife better, telling himself that “she, and everything she had ever done, and ever would do, belonged to me as much as it belonged to her”.

While researching “bizarre deaths” to illustrate the trend of unusual deaths among the women of Leda’s family, Goldstone came across the real story of a woman drowned by a swan. “The motif of the swan became really important to me. I like seeing repetition throughout art, I find it quite comforting,” she says. This symbolism permeates the novel – starting with the title, taken from a 1923 WB Yeats poem that describes the rape of Leda, a queen of Greek myth, by the god Zeus, who comes to her in the form of a swan.

Seb’s quest doubled as a way for Goldstone to deal with what she calls her “death phobia”. “I wanted to turn something that I was obsessed with, negatively, into art. It’s the only way that I can cope with those obsessive, intrusive thoughts. I think it was sort of like emotion therapy for me,” she says. “I also find the idea of meaninglessness quite comforting. All of Seb’s attempts to try and find meaning and try and situate himself within that chaos just made it so much more apparent to me that that’s not the way.”

Goldstone’s dark humour is sprinkled through the story, and is clearly a cornerstone of her persona. “I can’t think of many great books that aren’t funny. I think to me it’s a prerequisite for a great book to be funny in some way. But I can find humour in unusual places,” she says. As an extrovert, she says she finds writing in solitude “awful” . “Everyone expects you, as a writer, to be this introverted, quiet, brooding soul – and I’m not, I’m just obnoxious and annoying! I’ve lost countless days to hangovers and felt awful because I should be working on my projects but I can’t because I’ve fallen foul of my addiction to socialising.”

As a child, before she could write, Goldstone would “dictate stories to people in the house and make them write them down for me”. The daughter of two scientists who “were both hippies”, her reading was eclectic: from enjoying Anaïs Nin at 11 – “I had these really deeply private erotic moments with literature and I used to hide it under my bed” – to reading “the usual suspects” as a teenager: “I read lots of Hemingway and Bukowski and decided that I was going to write like an angry white man.”

Later, she discovered Lydia Davis and Lucia Berlin. “It’s funny the things that you accept when you’re younger. This masculine world that you grow up in, and think that’s the way things should be, and you don’t see yourself represented,” she says. “I’m so glad that I found [Davis and Berlin] and so grateful for them. I wish that I’d read them when I was a teenager, because I had absorbed a lot of misogyny without realising it.”

Goldstone herself has Latvian – and Lithuanian – origins, and the idea of the novel materialised when she travelled alone to Latvia for the first time during her creative writing MA. “It was an impulse based on an idea I had of the place,” she says. “I would dream about it, and I felt like I knew what it would feel like and look like.”

However, this was after Goldstone had already written 30,000 words of another book that wasn’t working, to the point that she “decided that I might be incapable of writing a novel”. That novel had also featured Seb, but was missing Leda’s voice.

“I think there are probably enough books written about sad men who have had bad things happen to them,” she says. “And that’s why the other novel had been such a failure for me: I just didn’t really care too much.”

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