Looking for Leaf Arbuthnot: Life post-Cambridge
CW: Discussion of COVID-19.
Liv Bonsall
Cambridge French and Italian graduate, Leaf Arbuthnot, is a freelance book critic, journalist and novelist. She has written for The Times, The Daily Telegraph and Vogue, among others. In May 2020, she released her debut novel, ‘Looking for Eliza’.
Image: Leaf Arbuthnot.
Liv Bonsall
Thanks so much for joining us, Leaf. The first question I had for you, since the world has changed a lot recently, is what are you up to these days, what does your career look like?
Leaf Arbuthnot
Yeah, it's changed a lot. I started the year 2020 as a freelance culture writer. I did a weekly podcast column, as well as lots of interviews with film directors and theatre actors. And as the art world shut down, I discovered that a lot of my work kind of squeezed - I think a lot of freelancers in all kinds of creative industries have really been hit by Covid. So I took a job as the features director of the magazine, Tatler, which involves commissioning writers and writing myself, trying to make sure that all the copy is beautiful, following on time and trying to shape the magazine in an exciting, new way. I'm also doing film reviews for the magazine, which I’ve never done before, but I’ve always wanted to be a film reviewer!
LB
How did you get started in the world of journalism?
LA
Well, it all started at Cambridge, really. I didn't feel like I’d really found my tribe at my college. People were really nice, but I felt like I was just going from Magdalene college, to the faculty, to Sainsburys and back. So I got involved in journalism. I began Cambridge in 2010 and the Cambridge Tab was just starting up. It was a really exciting place to work because it was just starting to become a thing. I did a lot of food writing and weird features, like a horoscope - just stupid stuff, but fun. In my first year, I had this great fear that I wouldn't be employable and that no-one would give me a job, ever. So I became obsessed with getting work experience and internships, as a kind of therapy for my anxiety. And it was actually extremely useful because it meant that I saw the insides of a lot of magazines and newspapers. Now, I've got a sense of how publications work; even if I only spent two weeks at The Week magazine, I still remember exactly what all their deadlines are like, and how they put it together. Then, on my year abroad, I went to Paris to study, but I also did lots of journalism on the side, and I also went to Rome to work on an English coverage newspaper. I was keeping up the two tracks of journalism and academia, because I was unsure about whether I should become an academic or not. I then got a scholarship to Yale for a year, and again, I did loads of journalism there, which was really fun. So, by the time I finished university after five years, I felt like I’d built up a chocker young journalist’s CV. I hadn't really written very much for the national press, but I then got lucky; I got an internship at the Financial Times. Someone there told me that there was a job going at the Sunday Times; it was the most junior features job ever. It didn’t even have a title, actually. I decided I needed one, so I’d call myself the editorial assistant, because that felt legit. I was hired by Josh Glancy, who’s now the Washington correspondent of the Sunday Times and who’s a great, great journalist - and that launched me. Ever since then, every so often, I ask myself if it's the right career because it's a really difficult industry to be in; it’s a hard wave to surf. For now it really is the right career for me, because it's so much fun. It gives you all sorts of opportunities to meet people, to ask people questions you’re burning to ask. But it's also quite a white knuckle ride at times.
LB
Yes, I think it’s a career you really have to love.
LA
I think there are lots of grandiose people who say ‘I wanted to be a writer from the get go’. For me it was more that no other jobs twinkled at me, I couldn’t think of anything I'd rather be.
Image: Leaf Arbuthnot.
LB
And of course you’ve also written your debut novel, ‘Looking for Eliza’, which must have been your highlight of 2020! Did you face any challenges in publishing it then? Was that a conscious choice or was it always supposed to come out in May?
LA
Obviously the decision had to be made at some point. The date was set as May the 14th, 2020, from the very start. So it always felt absurdly far away, and obviously you can’t imagine a pandemic coming along. I didn't have any kind of concerns about the release date, but then in February and March, things took a turn for the worse. We did talk about pushing it back, but there was all this worry about whether it would get lost in the noise if we pushed it back to autumn. And actually I think that’s held up; there was one day in autumn when 600 books were published, because books had been delayed from spring to autumn. It meant that review spaces squished and therefore maybe the book wouldn't be reviewed at all and it would have just been a deafening silence. So, it was sort of sad releasing it in May because for debuts to do well, they have to be supported by lots of activity around them, like conversations in bookshops, talks that I was planning on giving, bookshop window displays and TV appearances. I was sad not to be able to meet readers and do all that promotional work, but in the end, I think it was the right call to just rip the plaster off and publish it. It got lots of reviews, so I was really lucky. I thought the launch was going to be fairly standard, you know, in a bookshop, people turn up for an hour, and then everyone gets pissed. But it just ended up being a zoom call, sitting in my parents house and drinking their champagne. But it did feel incredibly special and overwhelming. It was a brilliant day, in the end.
LB
It seems to have done really well regardless, maybe partly because people are reading more now. I feel like people really need it at the moment. In fact, one of the main themes in the novel is loneliness and isolation - why did you want to explore this theme in particular?
LA
It's funny that the loneliness theme has swung into relevance this year. It's something that people have been struggling with for a lot for a long time, but it's really been front and centre of a lot of people's experiences of the pandemic, across the generations. Obviously, Looking for Eliza is about a friendship between two women, but it's also about two women's very different experiences of isolation. But I think sometimes in the chatter around the book, the emphasis is placed too much on that hopeful aspect rather than on the granular detail and why they're both quite so cut off. I suppose I wanted to look at loneliness partly because I think that we talk about it a lot as something that older people experience. You know - if you Google Image loneliness, you'll get pictures of older people sitting on a bench by themselves. And that's not really how the people that I know who are lonely are experiencing it. I've gone through periods of loneliness that felt really searing and difficult and I wanted to write about that in the hope that maybe it would resonate with other people. I also think you can take something good from loneliness. It makes you a more complicated, empathetic person. The story itself is quite a hopeful one about these two people who are really ensconced in their experiences of being so alone and feeling so alone. So there was a sense of wanting to write about and provide a slightly fuller picture of loneliness, and also explore how it can be a similar experience across the generations.The reasons for your loneliness might be different to someone else’s but the actual texture of the experience can be quite similar. The story is partly trying to explore that space and its possibilities, what you can build between people whose experience is actually fundamentally quite similar even if they're different ages.
LB
One of the things that brought the two characters together was the writer, Primo Levi. Why did you choose him as a central figure in the book, and did you consider choosing any other writers before settling with him?
LA
You know, I didn't think of any other writers. He was central to the book right from the start. I did a dissertation on Primo Levi at Cambridge. I'd always found his writing to be very comforting - it’s sort of a bit of a saccharine way of putting it, but it feels like his writing has brought me so much companionship over the years, he's got such a warm voice. I mean, some of his books are really bleak; this is a man whose history is pretty grim. But there's so much humour in his books as well, a kind of warmth towards the acceptance of human fallibility and silliness that I found really charming and reassuring. I was particularly struck by an account of him making these beautiful little wire figures. There are lots of books that have used objects as some way of pulling a story together and I saw lots of potential in those wire figures. I also thought that sometimes, if people in the UK have heard of Levi at all, they tend to think of him as a Holocaust survivor, as quite a bleak figure. And I wanted to try and round that out a bit by drawing attention to another aspect of his work and personality - it was much more hopeful and playful.
LB
How have you been cultivating your creativity in 2020; are there any new books in the making?
LA
I went back to live at my parents house, since they've got a big garden. I read way more than I have before. I read lots at Cambridge, but there's been a boundlessness to my reading since the start of the first lockdown, which has been really great because I've had all this open space and I’ve been reading in the country. There's a really good chair I found in the forest up a tree where I read. I've always found that my own creativity is really stimulated by my engagement with other writers - they're completely bound together. So that's really how I liked using the enormous swags of time that a lockdown forced upon me and on most of us. Also, at the start to lockdown, I took the opportunity to do this really strange serialised book thing ... I had a newsletter sending out a big chunk of one chapter a week. That lasted for 10 weeks, and by the end, I had about 55,000 words. That was a uniquely lockdown-y creative experience. I think at that early stage, it felt like the world was turning on its head, for many people. That's why I decided to launch that story. Book-wise, there's a couple things I'm working on. I'm working on a book about insomnia, because I've always had bad sleeping issues. It’s about an insomniac in London in the 2008/2009 period. I'm also working on a play at the moment, about a piece of legislation called the Magnitsky Act. It's a play about Russia and its descent from the 90s to the present day into a pretty terrible state. So those are my two big projects.
LB
One more question. If you could invite an author to dinner, aside from Primo Levi, who would it be and why?
LA
I'm just going to go with my gut instinct and not worry about snobs. I think it would be JK Rowling, because she's so elusive. This is also the journalist in me; I've always wanted to meet her and talk to her. She had a big influence on my life, and lots of others’ lives. She's also obviously quite a controversial figure at the moment. I maintain that she's given so much more to the world than she's taken away, and she's an enormously interesting woman. And so I’d probably choose her, because I'd like to talk to her about how this whole crazy trip has been - like, Harry Potter... just mad.
LB
Thank you, Leaf. It’s been a pleasure to chat to you and I hope readers will check out your debut novel!
You can buy Leaf’s debut novel, ‘Looking For Eliza’, from major book sellers such as Waterstones, Audible, Hachette UK and Google Play.
