Claire Fuller never thought she would be a writer. Raised in a small Oxfordshire town, the award-winning novelist has “no real memory” of books in the house and recalls an outdoorsy childhood – living in cottages her father would do up, using outdoor loos, raising chickens, and “pigs that we killed and ate”. (“We named them as well,” she says over video call from her home in Winchester. “They were called Johannes, Sebastian, and then they disappeared one Christmas and we had pork for Christmas dinner.”)
From a young age, visual art was what she saw herself pursuing. She went on to gain a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art before embarking on a successful career in marketing.
Then, sometime around the early 2010s, Fuller and the man who would become her second husband embarked on a series of art projects based on Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s 2007 book of creative prompts, Learning to Love You More. Some of the assignments were easy: take a photo of under your bed. Others, such as the prompt to stage a one-man protest, saw them stationed in the middle of the traffic in Reading as he held up a placard that read “Less Driving, More Walking!” and she took photos. It was a terrifying rush, and both fled the scene fairly quickly. But the experience stayed with Fuller.
“Having done all those assignments from the book, I learned that I enjoyed the feeling of having done something that was really difficult and outside my comfort zone,” she says. “I was looking for that feeling again.”
Fuller had at that point never written creatively. Newly emboldened, she decided to sign up for a story slam at her local library.
“I was kind of discovering stuff about myself and what I liked doing,” she says.
She wrote a short story, read it out and caught the bug. Soon she had signed up for a master’s in creative writing at the University of Winchester. Two years later, she had the manuscript for what would become her debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days.
“I had absolutely no idea how a book gets published,” she says. “I learned that on the course. I sent the manuscript to agents, an agent took it on and offered to represent me straight away. We edited the book and it went out to publishers. Then three publishers wanted to buy it, so the book went to auction, and Penguin won. It was like [she pulls a stunned expression] I didn’t even know I wanted to be a writer, and all this has happened!”
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Fuller was in her forties at the time. In articles and interviews, much was made of her age.
“I think that came from publicity, and I was kind of happy to go with it,” she says. “It is quite a nice story, perhaps not about me being in my forties, but that you can change careers, whether that’s changing to writing or something else. You can make this big shift. If you’re unhappy in what you’re doing, then maybe you should think about doing something else.”
Now 59, Fuller laughs that “mid-forties feels really young”. She’s long since ditched the marketing role for full-time writing, and is about to release her sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst, loosely a coming-of-age tale about friendship and belonging, but also a haunted house horror that threads true crime and visual art elements.
Alternating between 1987 and 2023, the book tells of Ursula, a young woman who has spent years in and out of the care system, and later an acclaimed artist, who performs a dark dare that haunts her life thereafter. At its centre is an intense friendship between Ursula and Sue, a young woman she meets working in the post room of a local art school.
“I’ve always read a lot of spooky stories – not necessarily horror, but things that are unsettling,” says Fuller when asked about the germ-cell of the book. “I had it in the back of my mind that at some point I might write something that becomes darker than my other books, which all have some kind of dark element, but this one kind of pushes that.”
She wrote a short story for a competition, in which a group of colleagues are out for a steak dinner in a local inn when one colleague accuses another of having been brought up by animals. The story didn’t place in the competition, but it became an early scene in the book, in which Ursula’s colleague, Vince, speculates that she’s been raised “by monkeys or gorillas”, or perhaps, considering all the rare steak she’s just eaten, “wolves”.
“I’ve always been interested in feral children, or children who supposedly have been brought up by animals,” she says. “I read and reread Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, where the daughter becomes possibly a feral child, possibly brought up by wolves. It’s a book I love and that scene had stuck in my head.”
I write messages to myself in the middle of the text in square brackets that say: this is crap, that’s okay, keep going, close brackets
— Fuller on her writing process
Like Johnson, Fuller walks a line between the real and the hyper-real. It is never quite clear if what we are reading is true or a figment of the subconscious, if our narrator is reliable or unreliable.
Much of the book takes place in a squat Ursula moves into, The Underwood, which has been left empty after its owners met a terrible end. Fuller says she based this on a real-life squat she lived in in the 1980s.
“I was doing a lot of thinking and remembering about this house. I lived with another girl. The owner had gone off to Australia to visit his family and had just decided never to come back. So, we just stayed in his house with all his stuff, which was really weird. Before I got there, the girls who were living there told me a story about one night where they had all been in bed asleep and someone knocked on the window. Because it was a bungalow, they’d been able to go around the whole house and knock on every window – just terrifying. But still I moved in because it was free.”
Her own experience in art school was also fodder for the book. The unnamed art school in Hunger and Thirst is modelled on her alma mater, the Winchester School of Art, while her background in sculpture came in handy when conceiving of the imaginary sculptures Ursula makes (such as the prizewinning Lithopedian, an enormous bear carved from wood, with a human face, and bearing a stone adult foetus within).
“The art was such a delight to write,” Fuller says. “To be able to write a sculpture, rather than have to make it, which is really hard work … You can describe anything. And for Ursula to be a very famous, successful artist was kind of fun, because clearly I am not – that never worked for me. So, to kind of be it vicariously was fun.”
Hunger And Thirst by Claire Fuller
While prizes in the visual arts may elude her, Fuller is no stranger to literary accolades. She’s twice been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2017, and Bitter Orange, 2020); she’s won the Desmond Elliott Prize (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2015), the Costa Novel Award (Unsettled Ground, 2021), been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize (Unsettled Ground, 2021) and the Encore Award (Swimming Lessons, 2018). Do prizes set a certain expectation or put pressure on the next novel to be good?
“I really try hard not to think about that,” she says. “I’m just writing a manuscript. I’m not even thinking I’m writing a book that is going to be published, often. I think I find it so hard to write – although they do come out, these books, they do get written. But I don’t enjoy the processes. So, I tell myself that it’s not a book. I’m just playing around.”
Indeed, Fuller admits at various junctures that writing is not exactly something she likes to do.
“What I really like when I’m writing a book is the editing. I don’t really like the writing. I like the polishing, I suppose; the making sure that everything works together, that the right word is in the right place. I think finishing a sculpture can be like that. You’re looking at everything in the round. If you look at it from this angle, does it still work? But the difference is that when you’re sculpting, you are given or find the lump of stone or piece of wood, whereas with writing, you start with nothing.”
Something that helps turn the nothing into something is being part of two writers’ groups. Every two weeks, participants share 3,000 words or so of a work-in-progress.
“I’m not one of those writers who just wants to keep it all secret and not let anyone see until it’s finished,” she says. “It’s helpful for me [to have] people comment on it as I go along.”
The deadlines are useful for when she gets stuck, though she also says there is “a bit of me that makes me do it”.
“I tell myself that I’m allowed to write crap. And I write messages to myself in the middle of the text in square brackets that say: this is crap, that’s okay, keep going, close brackets. Somehow it lets out that little voice on my shoulder that’s saying: ‘This isn’t any good. Why did you do this? No one’s going to read this.’ It lets it out on to, actually, the page, and then I can keep going.”
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller is published by Fig Tree