Akoya’s Marketing and Publicity Director, Ruth Waldram, caught up with Morgan Day about her debut novel The Oldest Bitch Alive.

Congratulations on such a bold, inventive and just plain enjoyable novel. The whole team at Akoya loves the book. It’s so unique and in some ways hard to describe. How do you go about explaining it to friends and family before they  read?

Thank you so much. I usually tell them that the book is about an old French Bulldog who contracts parasitic worms and awakens to a natural world around her and within her, one that she’s been closed off from throughout her life. I warn them that it’s a bit strange and takes an unconventional approach to narrative and form, primarily focusing on non-human perspectives.

Could you tell us about when you first started writing the novel and how you came to Gelsomina’s voice? 

I began writing the novel in 2022 while living in Berkeley, California. My partner and I were renting a studio apartment that overlooked a garden where one of our neighbours would paint. Each of us had a desk on either side of a window through which we saw his in-progress canvas, and the landscape paintings he kept tucked between bushes and against trees. I bring this up because the foggy setting where I started writing the book felt mystical. The first draft was a fairy tale that was more so focused on a family of human characters. It wasn’t until we moved back to the desert a year later that the book more closely resembled its final shape, shedding some mystical and human elements to centre on non-human life. 

Gelsomina’s voice followed a slow progression. At first, she didn’t have one. At that stage, I felt that the book was missing a feral nature and attitude. I thought that language must have the capacity to somehow fill this void, but the words and sentences would have to stray outside of the rigidity of our grammar. Gelsomina’s words were selected gradually and intentionally, with the aim to explore her scale and lens, and the different ways in which she might engage with our objects and architecture. The hope was to create a voice that was communicating meaning while remaining atmospheric and textural. 

We love the title, how did you come up with it?

Oh, thank you! It was a joke that stuck. In addition to finding it funny, I also thought that the title captured the idea that Gelsomina has knowledge and qualities that are both new and ancient. Once I found an agent, and realised that the book might be closer to getting published, I worried about the title, and had considered changing it to ({i}), which would have been challenging in other ways. I’m happy that people have been receptive.

 

There are multiple perspectives in the novel. Not just Gelsomina, but her owners, John and Wendy, the new puppy playmate and Gelsomina’s replacement, Zampanò, the worms inhabiting her and an omniscient, worldly consciousness. How did you approach writing these different perspectives and how did you decide upon the structure of the novel?

When I allowed the book to sideline the human perspective, possibilities for non-human consciousness started taking over. In addition to the chapters in Gelsomina’s voice and the two worms inside of her, I also had chapters from the perspective of the glass house and various pieces of furniture. It was all getting out of hand. I condensed the book to the lens of the omniscient narrator, the French Bulldog, and the two main worms. The omniscient perspective was challenging in that I hoped it could come across as truly all-knowing. For the worms, I wanted their chapters to feel like a myth – which is why their language is formal – one that could be removed and stand on its own. The arrangement of the chapters came together organically, and changed often, until I landed on what felt right. I intended to move the narrative along through each perspective, while also giving different vantage points of the same spaces and scenarios. 

The novel touches upon topics like our relationship to the natural world, how we live and the architectural structures we navigate, as well as bigger philosophical questions. What draws you to these themes?

For my day job, I work as a writer for architects, landscape architects and urban planners. I help them communicate their design philosophies and the narratives behind their projects, ranging from single-family homes to concepts for new cities that will be built from scratch. These projects are almost always unknown to me, I’ve never visited them and most of them haven’t been built yet, so they operate as fictional spaces. The amount of detail, time, thought and effort that must go into a built structure, let alone an entire city, is unbelievable. They have taught me how to think critically and generatively about the material and living worlds. It’s something that I wanted to explore in this novel, and I feel there’s so much left to probe and uncover in the relationship between language, the novel and built forms. Alongside this, I’ve been interested in various ecological theories that claim that all matter retains its own narrative, a text that’s inscribed upon each surface, a framework that has always confused but interested me. I wanted the book to be a vehicle for parsing that out. 

This is  something of a clichéd question to ask a debut writer, but is there any advice you have for budding writers, or to your past self, as you were embarking on the novel?

I love this question because there are so many writers whose work gave me the permission to write what I wanted, like Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, Toni Morrison and Julio Cortázar. My advice would be to read often and widely, especially books that are ambitious in their structure, storytelling or language. I think that through reading, I’ve been able to develop my own instincts for my writing, so that I have an innate sense of what’s working and what’s not, relative to what I’m hoping to achieve in the project. These instincts have helped me write in a way that’s true to myself and what I like, rather than the taste or expectations of other people. I would also suggest pushing a project to its fullest extent. I’ve found that there are many acceptable drafts of a novel before it reaches its best and truest form.

In the office, we are always recommending and talking about what we’ve been reading. Is there anything you’ve read recently that you would recommend?

I really enjoyed and often think about Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai (translated into English by Polly Barton). I highly recommend it.