Tessa Hadley on What Decades of Failure Taught Her About Writing
The New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley in 2002. Titled \u201cLost and Found,\u201d it described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood.\xa0 Hadley\u2019s fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale: tight dramas close to home. She captures, within these relationships, an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its thirtieth story from Hadley\u2014a higher count than any other fiction writer in recent times. That figure is particularly remarkable because Hadley had such a late start to her career, publishing her first work of fiction in her forties. She talks with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman about her long struggle to stop imitating the writing of others, instead telling stories authentic to her own experience and voice. \u201cI was just a late developer, and I was trying to write other people\u2019s novels for all that time,\u201d she says. Treisman also asks Hadley about why her work has been labelled \u201cdomestic fiction\u201d by many critics. The term is disproportionately applied to female writers, and \u201ctends to have a bit of condescension to it,\u201d Hadley says. But she is willing to at least consider whether her work is too focussed on certain kinds of bourgeois-family relationships. \u201cI almost completely accept the challenge,\u201d she tells Treisman. \u201cI think one should feel perpetually slightly on edge as to whether your subject matter justifies the art.\u201d