The self-loathing of the working class writer

I’d have been shy about calling myself a ‘working class writer’ a decade or so ago. Which is ridiculous, with hindsight – because what else am I?

The stories in my last collection, Municipal Gothic, and in my upcoming book, Intervals of Darkness, are mostly attempts to process my experiences as a working class kid.

But if that working class kid could hear me, a university graduate and professional, referring to myself in these terms, he’d be furious.

“How can you call yourself working class?” he’d ask, “with all your privileges and relative comfort in life?”

Back then, I thought being working class was a binary state.

I read and admired books by people like Alan Sillitoe but also hated them for moving to London, or France, and becoming part of the literary establishment.

How could they write about working class life when they weren’t living it?

I was an idiot, of course.

How would Sillitoe have found the time and energy to write if he also had to do night shifts on a production line, you know, to keep his hand in?

And how long did I think it took to become middle class? It’s not an overnight process.

What I came to realise is that you don’t ever really shed working classness. It’s baked in. It shapes your attitudes to life and your perspective on the world. In the negative sense, the scars are permanent.

For the first twenty years of my life, I was steeped in my working classness, even through four years at a not-very-working-class university.

Sure, I got a desk job, wore a suit, and stopped worrying quite so much about money – but working classness continued to affect my ability to connect with people, to get promoted, and to experience basic human happiness.

If I experience the slightest financial shock – an unexpected bill, for example – I completely flip out, and revert to being an anxious child. Even if, once I’ve taken a breath and counted to ten, I can easily afford to deal with it.

My dreams were, and often still are, set on council estates and in council houses. My stories always drifted back to those same settings – pubs, terraced houses, small towns, factories… Even if I wanted to write middle class fiction, I’m not sure I could.

The characters in my stories are often aspects of my late dad, his brothers, or my mum and her family, or of people I knew growing up.

And sometimes they’re versions of me. A clue to that is if the character in question is uptight, bewildered, and slightly detached from their surroundings.

What makes a working class writer? In my opinion, they’re someone with personal, first-hand experience of working class life. (Not someone whose grandfather was a miner.) And whose writing, consciously or otherwise, attempts to make sense of that experience.

Often, perhaps too often, that can feel limiting. What if you don’t want to write grim social realism? What if you don’t want to constantly confront your own experiences of poverty? Or, on the flipside, to feel obliged to write inspiring stories about the power of working class community.

Personally, I don’t want to be a Working Class Writer. I want to be a writer. I want to write what I want to write.

And I don’t want to agonise constantly about whether I’m presenting my working class characters with sufficient nobility, or making the right political arguments.

So, sometimes, I might get it ‘wrong’. But it’s not out of stupidity or ignorance, it’s because I’m battling my own subconscious, or attempting to exorcise a ghost of my own.

Intervals of Darkness will be published as an eBook and paperback on 7 September 2024. You can pre-order the eBook now.