You’ll have had a chance to sink deeper into The Water Cure and, as a way to encourage you back the surface, we have a Q&A with none other than Sophie Mackintosh herself, the author of this dystopian, glorious novel. I know, right?
Sophie is a 31-year-old London-based writer who grew up on the coast in beautiful south-west Wales (a future version of which is where The Water Cure is set). She’s been writing full-time for just over a year now, and before that worked in PR, social media management and copywriting. Sophie spent most of her twenties writing every spare second she could get around her day jobs. She says “I wish I had more some cool adventures and stories I could share, though I have spent a fair amount of time running madly around this wonderful city with friends and strangers (nostalgic for this now, given the current situation)”. Sophie has mainly been spending lockdown cooking elaborate meals with her husband-to-be and working on her third novel.
Q: What inspired you to write The Water Cure?
Sophie: Earlier drafts were much different from how the final version turned out, but I always knew it would be a story about three sisters at its heart, and a world somehow changed. I’m fascinated by sibling relationships - they’re so primal and complicated - and am drawn also to isolated settings (originally it was set on an oil rig). I wanted to explore what could happen to a family unit that turned sour in a dream-like setting. I was inspired too by traditional Welsh fairy tales (I was educated in Welsh until I was 18 and speak it fluently still). In these fairy stories, the border between the real world and the magic world is blurred; nature is alternately seductive and malevolent, and things are never what they seem.
Q: There’s a strong theme of toxic masculinity that runs throughout this story. What made you decide to explore it in this book?
Sophie: I knew some kind of catastrophe needed to have happened to the outside world that required the sisters to be kept sequestered and ‘safe’; at first I thought this could be a flood, but this idea wasn’t quite landing, my heart wasn't in this disaster. I was writing the book throughout 2016, a year when many things changed and many things that had seemed impossible swiftly became reality, and also a year in which I was coming to terms with the violence that had been inflicted on so many of us. It occurred to me that perhaps the disaster was already happening in our world, and I could transplant it allegorically to the world I was creating.
Q: The three sisters - Grace, Lia, and Sky - all tell their own stories throughout the book. Why did you decide to approach telling this bigger story in that way?
Sophie: It originally just started out with Lia, but I wanted to show the other sides of the story, as the setting was so small and claustrophobic. I wanted to show how things could be seen from the different angles of Lia and Grace particularly, those who are so different, and who have their own distinct reactions to the events in the novel. I was also inspired by the ‘chorus’-type narration in The Virgin Suicides, where a group of boys watch a group of mysterious and beautiful sisters but wanted to do it in a way free from the male gaze. Only the women get to share their stories in this novel, and that was deliberate.
Q: ‘The King’ leaves the book as soon as it begins, yet remains present throughout. Why did you decide to make his exit so immediate?
Sophie: Logistically I wanted the sisters and their mother to have built up this strange, feminine world with no men, a world based on the principles they had always been taught about how men (apart from their father) were dangerous, so that when the others arrived we really, really felt their intrusion and the strangeness of it. Without the ‘protection’ of their father, they had to improvise; they had to create their own world and own rules. But his presence looms over them; he was the architect of their strange world, it’s hard for them to escape him.
Q: What do you want readers to feel, think and do as a result of finishing this book?
Sophie: I want people to find beauty in it, and hope - I know it's sort of a bleak book (possible understatement!), but there is tenderness in the relationship between the sisters, there are moments of brightness and joy among it all. Creating vivid images is important to me - I had a very strong aesthetic sense of how it should look, and how it should feel. Ultimately it’s a love letter to the women in my life, a book about women can hurt each other but also love each other, help each other, and move together into the light.
Q: Your next novel, Blue Ticket, is due out later this year. Tell us a little bit about what we should expect from it.
Sophie: It’s an off-kilter road trip set in a place similar to our world but not quite; a place where on the day of their first period girls are sent to a mysterious lottery centre, where they pick a ticket from a machine. A white ticket means you can have children and a family, where a blue ticket means you can’t, and this decision then dictates the path of their life. Like in The Water Cure I’m not interested in exploring the reasons behind the lottery, because the reasons are not the point. It’s very much more about the personal journey of the main character, who decides she wants to have a baby anyway despite picking a blue ticket; a philosophical dilemma where she’s forced to think about whether being a ‘good mother’ is an intrinsic moral state. She has to fight her own impulses and ideas about the kind of person she is, to reckon with her body and her desires. It’s more personal than The Water Cure too, I think, which is a little nerve-wracking to think about! But I’m excited for people to read when it’s out in August.
Thank you to Sophie for sharing her insights and wisdom; you definitely inspired me to look at the world differently and question more of what I see. We’ll be talking more about The Water Cure on Wednesday 8th April at 7 PM GMT (3 PM EST) on Zoom. You can join us here.