This month will see the release of Poor Ghost!, the debut novel by English Wahlberliner Gabriel Flynn. It tells the story of a young literary man named Luca, who returns from an aborted academic stint at Harvard to try and start anew in his home city of Manchester – a difficult place bedevilled by poverty, austerity and gentrification. Crashing with his responsible schoolmate John, Luca reflects on his ill-fated love affair with a successful older poet, the class dynamics of academia, and the memory of his physically and mentally ill father.
I have a hunch that you can only really write well about aspects of yourself that you are ready to leave behind.
He finds himself taking a job ghostwriting the memoirs of an older man with progressive MS named Andy, determined to share his story of adversity and triumph with the world. As tensions grow between the two men, Luca struggles to find a foothold in the city that he always thought was home. We caught up with Flynn, who grew up in Manchester but has lived in Berlin since 2021, to discuss his tender, darkly comic book.
How did the idea for Poor Ghost! come to you?
It arose from a few different impulses coming together. One was that I had been doing a fellowship at Harvard the year of the Covid pandemic, and that represented the highest point of a certain kind of class mobility for me. It was far away from the world I’d grown up in, and it was unexpected, and it came relatively late in my life. It felt absurd to me to be having this experience of class awakening and shock at 28, when I was already made.
I had this sense that I had belatedly discovered some things about the world that I really ought to have known sooner. It was an embarrassing experience, and it set me off in a very reflective mood about the world I’d grown up in, and about all its codes and customs, which had been invisible to me because they were all I had known. When the pandemic shut down the Harvard campus, and everyone suddenly went home, I didn’t know what to do. A childhood friend was visiting me, and so we flew together back to Manchester and moved into an apartment that he’d just bought in Salford, a working-class part of the city.
The contrast of going from Harvard to a Salford tower block within a week just meant that I saw these worlds more clearly than I ever had before – not just how different they were, but I could see each of them for what it really was, because they held a mirror up to each other. That gave me the idea of writing a novel that could contain both these worlds, making them reflect one another.
Did you always know you would write about it in this shape?
When that year came to an end, it put me into a personal crisis that had been coming for some time. I found myself spending a lot of time alone, unemployed, writing, and this put me in the mood of trying to reckon with my life. It was a really turgid and downbeat mood to be in. I was also trying to do what I had been putting off for years, which was writing a novel, and it just felt that this personal stuff was all I could draw on.
So I found myself writing these scenes based on my childhood, family life and so on, and every time I did, I’d see myself trying to account for things and work things out. I wanted to get away from all that, but at the same time, it was the only impulse I seemed to have. And that was where I got the idea of taking a character who is introspective in this way – who is trying to work out who he is – and putting him into dialogue with another character who takes that same principle to an extreme. Luca senses that Andy has something he himself has been missing.
And Andy has this drastic need to account for himself and give a coherent story of his life, to get it in exactly the terms that he wants, so Luca sees his own impulse reflected in an extreme form by Andy, who in the end drives him away from that desire. So it was these tensions – between Manchester and Harvard, between wanting to write something personal and wanting to not write something personal – that provided the genesis of the novel.
You have certain similarities to Luca. But you’ve chosen to write neither memoir nor something that’s obviously autobiographical or “autofiction”…
I had a sense that the conversation about autofiction – look, I understand why people talk about it, but at the same time, I think there’s an error that everyone makes when they do so. Which is that, in the end, whether you are drawing from personal experience or inventing, everything still has to go through the art machine – everything has to be subjected to the rules of the form that you’re working in.
So it doesn’t really matter if it’s personal. Everyone has an idea about embarrassing autofiction, but at the same time, someone’s un-worked-through fantasy or sci-fi is just as embarrassing if it shows all of their desires and needs and wishes that they want fulfilled. In the end, you can do anything with a form if you take it seriously.
I think Garth Greenwell is an interesting example as someone who very much seems to be writing about personal experiences and about characters just like him, but what’s so good about his work is that nothing gets through, nothing appears in his work that hasn’t been rigorously subjected to the demands of the form. That’s what I was trying to do.
That subjecting, that working-through: what does the process look like on a personal level? Does it involve self-criticism, self-ironising, some kind of critical distance from your past?
I have a hunch that you can only really write well about aspects of yourself that you are ready to leave behind. When I wrote this novel, I’d been doing psychoanalysis for two years. And one of the principles in analysis is that you don’t cure your symptom, but rather you exhaust your relationship to it so you’re no longer interested in it in the same way.
I think something like that has to happen when writing a novel; the big active concerns that you are so mired in are not going to be good material for you to work with, whereas the parts of you that you’re bored of, parts that are really ready to die, but you are dragging them around like a second skin – those, I think, make fruitful material for a novel.
Once you write a novel about something, it’s dead, in a way. And it would be embarrassing to walk around talking about the same things earnestly in your personal life that you wrote about in a novel several years earlier. You have to be ready to actually say goodbye to it. For me, a big part of the novel is Luca’s reckoning with his father’s suicide – which is something I drew from my life, and for a long time that was all I could write about, often at the expense, I felt, of being able to get at subjects I really wanted to write about.
One of the things I wanted to do in the novel was to finally give it an appropriate form such that I could, if not move on from it forever, then at least say “I’ve written about it now”, and be able to turn my attention elsewhere.
Both Andy and Luca are very connected to Manchester, which is, like them, preoccupied with the past. How does the city come into the novel?
Manchester has a claim to being the world’s first real industrial city, possibly also one of the world’s first post-industrial cities. By the 1970s, it was very poor and depressed after all of its industry was shut down and nothing replaced it. From then until the early 1990s, this post-industrial depression and decay gave way to a flourishing cultural scene where you had the rave scene, the Haçienda, and all these famous bands like Joy Division, The Smiths, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses.
There was nothing to do, and a lot of free former factory and mill space that you could get for nothing or very little, so people had time and space to practise. After that, Manchester became an experimenting ground for urban regeneration: a lot of money was put into the urban centre, trying to attract overseas investment and so on.
Today, the city is really unrecognisable. And much of that earlier era’s culture has been driven out, made unaffordable; all those mill and factory spaces have been turned into apartments and office buildings. But the image that Manchester made of itself during that time – a feisty and independent city with a strong spirit of innovation – has now been co-opted by the new corporate Manchester, as a brand.
So you get this sense of a place that has reinvented itself superficially but is still, in fact, really quite blighted by the poverty that has always been there. The city hasn’t substantially changed, but it has changed enough that it can present itself in a new way, and it insists on the ways in which it’s special. Part of what I was trying to do with Luca and Andy is to embody this particular mixture of depression and pride and reinvention and staying the same.
Is Manchester another thing that you always felt compelled to write about?
Yes. The challenge for the novel was to find something universal in that – because most people in the world haven’t been to Manchester and are never going to go. But there’s a more universal element in the city that speaks to where we are as a culture in Europe and the US more generally. There’s this moment of stagnation, especially cultural stagnation, with everything now being a remake of things that were popular in the 1990s. And there’s a sense of being fixated on the past at the expense of the future.
Characters in the novel also speak explicitly about recent austerity politics, even naming former British Prime Minister David Cameron at one point – is that an important part of the foreclosing of the future for Luca’s generation?
Absolutely. One thing about being back in Manchester during the first Covid lockdown in 2020 was that, when many people had left and gone back to their parents’ places or whatever else, what was left was the same Manchester that’s always been there – before all the regeneration, the new money, the young professionals who moved there.
In a way, it was like a concentrated kind of microcosm of what has happened generally, which is that austerity hit poorer places much worse. After 2010 there was a much sharper dropoff in some places than others. The austerity of the Conservative-Lib Dems coalition definitely felt like the beginning of the cancelling of the future that has now become a kind of default mood for our generation.
One of the specific experiences I was trying to describe in the novel is that, if you were born in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you live today in this strange condition of having grown up expecting a world that then disappeared right as you were coming into it. And you entered a world that you never expected, that you feel constantly frustrated and disappointed by.
Luca failing a PhD and getting kicked out of Harvard might seem like a somewhat niche case. But, in another sense, we are a generation who never had more university education but never had less economic opportunity and potential for class mobility.
Class seems a majorly undiscussed topic in the anglophone lit world, even as the book trade has turned towards other big questions of politics and identity. Do you have a theory as to why?
Class is by no means a new subject – in the long sweep of history, it is really one of the evergreen subjects for the novel. But I agree that it’s been less of a concern for recent anglo literature. And I think it is related to the dream people our age grew up in, of a classless world, or at least a vision of the world where class would no longer be a fact of society, but rather something that you could choose to navigate or not to navigate depending on your own innovativeness and willingness to take on entrepreneurial spirit.
So I think the recent contemporary literature probably just reflects a dying away of interest in class in favour of some other framings. But I think class is back in our lives! And that sense of class awakening – a kind of belated sense of understanding oneself differently – was something I was trying to get at in the novel.
Now you’ve put Poor Ghost! to rest, what can we expect from you next?
I’m writing a novel about the German-speaking exiles who settled in Los Angeles during the 1930s and 40s. All being well, it will be published in 2028.
- Poor Ghost! is out from Sceptre on May 22, details.
