No Such Thing as Monday shares uncanny similarities with Pearl in the themes it explores, such as the long-term impact of childhood trauma, isolation and grief, the unreliability of memory and mental illness. What draws you to these themes?

It is really difficult as a writer to understand what your common themes are because you tune in to different narrators, and you think you’ve gone somewhere new. It’s only later that you realise that there are so many things in common with them. Both my narrators, Marianne [protagonist of Pearl] and Steffie, have very serious long-term damage, but that only occurred to me afterwards. And yes, this is a massive thread of interest to me: what happens to your memory, to your relationship with your own memories, when some sort of serious trauma has disrupted your relationship with yourself.

With Steffie, I wanted to think about growing up in a situation where you are constantly in denial. I remember something my cousin, who’s very clever, said to me: that denial is the strongest human emotion because it’s the only thing that can wipe out your primary data, removing that access to what is in your head. What we are trying to explore in Steffie is that, because of this, she doesn’t have a strong sense of her personal narrative, the ability to see the future, to believe in her own storyline, to plan, and not to behave in a self-destructive way.

Author Siân Hughes

Could you tell us more about Steffie’s origins?

The idea of the invisible middle-aged woman was really important to me in this book. I worked for quite a long time with an organisation called The Choir with No Name, a charity here in the U.K., that runs choirs for people affected by homelessness. I ended up understanding a lot more about homelessness through that job.

When we say homelessness, a lot of the time, we think of people sleeping rough with no roof. But statistically speaking, it’s a tiny, tiny minority. Many homeless people just live in very insecure, poor housing, which they often have no right to. With someone begging on the street or living in a tent by the roadside, the crisis is visible. But there’s also a vast sea of invisible suffering and insecurity above that, and Steffie is part of that society.

Many aspects of her story emerged from work that I’ve done in small charities, ones that do not attract a lot of funding since their causes are not “cute”, unlike those that work with puppies, kittens or babies. I wanted to open up people’s eyes to those hidden corners in cities where somebody’s doing very good work, helping the most vulnerable people, but they’re just doing it very quietly, very unassumingly.

Both No Such Thing as Monday and Pearl are inspired by the 14th-century anonymous ‘Gawain poet’. Can you tell us more?

It all comes from the same medieval manuscript, which contains three poems: ‘Pearl’, ‘Patience; and ‘Cleanness’. I do really love those poems; they are insanely structured, ridiculously tied up in knots and obey so many rules that you can’t help but be awestruck by them. And I’ve always wanted to write a response to all three of them. This is my response to the one called ‘Cleanness’ or ‘Purity’, which is nobody’s favourite poem. It’s a bit of a sort of rambling mess of a long poem, all about preparing your soul for heaven and washing yourself clean of sin.

But in fact, it’s all about laundry, really, the thing that Steffie gets from her mother, who also earns a living as a laundress. I wanted that really powerful, resilient female thread. Of how her work, the thing she brings from her mother, is what keeps her going and constantly rescues her.

As a poet, for whom every word in a piece needs to be earned, given the economy and precision of the form, was the transition to prose a challenge?

I had to learn to try and let go of some of those poetic habits. I’m not a very good formal poet, in that I’m not great at metre. But I do really, really love structure and visual shape. I also like counting everything and putting everything in exact order.

With my first few attempts at Pearl, I was trying to put it together as a poet would, making every single piece fit perfectly into a pattern. I wanted a specific number of chapters and a specific number of sections within each chapter. Everything was so codified, so tight and tied up that I kept ruining the story.

I had to, at a certain point, let go of that poet’s urge to make everything add up perfectly. To allow your characters to take a life of their own, you have to let go of the tidiness, something I found quite difficult.