Chapter 53
Mallory
COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE
Articles: AUTHOR PROFILES: MALLORY MADDOX
Written by Callie Harper
Before the publication of Mallory Maddox’s Slay in August – her comeback novel after nearly eight years away from writing – she sat down with me to discuss her literary heroes, making a home for oneself and how her new book has reshaped her life.
We met in a quaint café in Crouch End, where she formerly resided.
‘It’ll be nice to go back,’ she said over the phone when I pitched it to her. ‘In many ways, I’ve missed it.’
To say that a lot has happened to Maddox this year would be a gross understatement, and she has remained, for the most part, absent from social media and the press.
This, she tells me, was something she needed.
But on this warm summer afternoon in June, in the quietness of a leafy back street in the north of London, tucked behind a gift shop, she decided to let her guard down.
As I poured a second sugar into my oat milk latte, I looked at my watch.
Maddox was going to be late. I was a little frustrated, and momentarily I formed an opinion of her: that she had become a cliché, an author on the brink of something big, with a newly formed arrogance and little regard for the time frame of a busy journalist. Just as I was conjuring the image of a Miranda Priestly-style monster in my mind, I looked up to see her entering through the door.
Immediately, I was stunned. I was wrong.
She appeared completely... Normal.
Sure, her hair was different to the photographs I had seen of her – now cut short into a neat little bob – but other than that, she was the opposite of severe.
There was something so unassuming about her.
With her Sweaty Betty leggings and tote bag slung over her shoulder, she could have been any of us.
This was, I decided as our conversation went on, the appeal of her. Her ordinariness.
‘How are you?’ I asked, as she rolled up the sleeves of her cashmere sweater.
I knew from first glance that the sweater was from Zara – I happen to own one myself – and it shocked me.
I had heard rumours about the size of her American advance (yes, only rumours – but the publishing world loves to talk and often gets it right) and wondered, if it had been me in her position, if I would be wearing something more...
expensive. It gave me pause for thought.
‘Well...’ she said, with a slight exhalation that said so much.
‘I’m doing OK,’ she continued, brushing a loose hair out her face, then taking a sip of her decaf latte.
She was off caffeine. Off alcohol and cigarettes too, so she claimed.
She said she had been going through a major reset.
I was envious and nervously hid the two empty sugar sachets that I had loaded into my coffee.
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, noticing.
‘I’m still eating bloody sugar!’ She leaned towards me conspiratorially. ‘Let’s order cake...’
I immediately warmed to her. We could be friends, I thought.
I could be friends with this woman.
The conversation began with us discussing her love of Virginia Woolf.
I had read Shallow Embers as a teen (if you don’t know it – you should) – a genre-defining YA coming-of-age story about a girl on the run from her family, and from herself – and was always a little surprised by the puff quote on the front of the book likening Maddox to Woolf.
I understood the vague similarities, the stream of consciousness, the inner thoughts, the bleak outlook, but her words seemed so much fresher.
‘Why do we have to keep likening authors to other authors?’ I asked her.
‘Sales,’ she said frankly. And she was right.
‘I don’t mind the quote now,’ she added, in a reflective haze.
‘But at the time I just felt like such a charlatan.’ She went on to tell me all about Woolf’s home.
‘She lived in Monk’s House in East Sussex with her husband, Leonard, until the day she drowned herself in the River Ouse.
Tragic, yes. But on a more positive note, Monk’s House is the most beautiful house I have ever seen.
Have you ever been?’ she asked excitedly.
Her flippancy was refreshing, and her enthusiasm infectious.
I was ashamed to say I hadn’t been.
‘You must go. The whole cottage exudes a creative energy. In the spring, the gardens sprawl, and roses climb the back of the exterior, reaching up to the slatted roof. There’s something about the building that makes it look both solid and fragile at the same time, as if the heavy weatherboard could topple in a particularly strong gust of wind.
It almost leans and creaks with the weight of the genius that lived inside it.
Leonard designed the gardens himself.’ She spoke so effortlessly.
So beautifully. Again, I was envious. ‘Tulips reach up through a sea of wild flowers in its borders, causing this incredible patchwork of colour that surrounds the lawn. There’s an orchard, reachable via a cobbled pathway.
There’s also a vegetable patch. Inside the house, nothing is straight.
Every line is curved or tilting. It is off, but it feels right.
Correct in its imperfections. It is poky, but there is an expansiveness too as you weave your way through the rooms. The lounge is my favourite.
The walls are a very particular shade of green – a shade that could very easily be the colour of bile, but the way the light hits it, it looks nothing less than chic.
There are bookshelves. The brown spines, neatly lined up together, perfectly contrast with the mismatching armchairs.
It is maximalism, but effortless. Gives new meaning to higgledy-piggledy.
And the beams. Oh, the overhead beams. Dark wood that looks like treacle is coursing through the veins of the building.
Virginia had her own bedroom. A Room of One’s Own.
It had a fireplace, surrounded by tiles that her sister Vanessa gave to her. ’
At Cambridge University, where I studied English, I wrote a fairly unconventional essay called ‘The Charm of the Bloomsbury Set’.
Maddox had the same breezy, idealistic charm.
A slight darkness underneath, haunting the beauty.
She would fit right in with them, I thought.
They would have loved her. ‘I’ve taken inspiration for my new place,’ she said.
‘You’ve recently moved, haven’t you?’
‘I have,’ she said. In respect for her privacy I agreed not to print the exact destination, but she now lives somewhere on the British coast, and it sounds utterly divine.
Maddox said she doesn’t want people knowing where she is now, for various obvious reasons.
‘It’s been so joyful doing the house up,’ she said.
‘Making a home for myself is so important. I really understand that now. Especially after...’ She trailed off.
I knew immediately what she was referring to.
‘Your marriage ended...’ I finished for her, tentatively. I had cleared with her publicist that we could mention it – it is relevant to the book in many ways, as you will see when you no doubt read it – but I was still nervous to ask.
‘Yes,’ she said, with an air of resolve that took me by surprise. ‘My marriage ended.’
‘Are you OK?’ I asked again.
‘I am,’ she said. ‘Yes. I really am. I am adjusting.’
She nodded her head in a way that let me know that was all I was going to get, and I respected her for it.
It was enough to know she had been able to leave the marriage that had kept her caged for so long.
I had wanted to ask Maddox if there was anything she wished the readers to know about her experience, but I knew the answer.
It’s in the book.
The answers are in the book.
‘So this book is about a woman trying to help someone, essentially. She is trying to find herself by helping another. What would you say to people out there who feel lost?’ I asked her. ‘Who are in need of that help, and feel completely stuck?’
The ending in the book is brutal. I won’t give any spoilers, but be prepared.
‘Oh, that’s such a tricky one,’ she said, looking out of the window.
I noticed the evening sun getting low in the sky, and I realised that we had been talking for over two hours.
It was like two old friends catching up.
This is the magic of her words. Of her writing.
You will see it in Slay. You will feel like you have known the characters forever.
‘I think I would tell those people that there is always someone out there that you can connect to. Always. There are good people on this planet, and most of us, actually, are. We just lose it, the older we get.’
‘Have you always written?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve always loved to write. Since I was little.’
I imagined this ordinary woman sat before me as a child, much like the rest of us, and it is inspiring. We, too, can grow up to be like Mallory Maddox.
Because there are people in their Zara sweaters and their Sweaty Betty leggings everywhere. There are people just like Mallory Maddox everywhere.