Andrew McMillan’s beautiful debut novel Pity is an elegant, affecting exploration of what it means to be young, queer and working-class in a northern town that is rarely talked about in the national media. One of his protagonists, Simon, is a call centre employee with two very contemporary side hustles: doing drag shows and making OnlyFans content. Simon’s partner, Ryan, is a shopping centre security guard who sometimes finds these revenue streams difficult to deal with.
McMillan was born and raised in Barnsley, where Pity is set, but now lives in Manchester – a city young LGBTQ+ kids have flocked to for decades. “It felt important to tell a queer story that isn’t about leaving – that shows Simon and Ryan can build a life together in this town, that they can be accepted there and feel artistically fulfilled,“ McMillan says when we talk over Zoom. Though Pity is his first novel, he has previously written three poetry tomes, including 2015’s Physical – the first collection of poems to win the Guardian First Book Award. He also co-curated, with Mary Jean Chan, the gorgeous 2022 anthology 100 Queer Poems
Less poetic and more episodic, Pity is a story about generational legacy and the ways in which a place’s history can shape who we are. Simon’s father Alex is grappling with his identity as a single middle-aged man; Alex’s brother Brian is being encouraged to look at his community in new ways by a group of visiting academics. In sections written in the style of field notes, McMillan crisply captures the visitors’ forensic and sometimes condescending tone. Pity also examines Margaret Thatcher’s lingering impact on Barnsley: in the 1980s, she brutally closed the coal mines that were once this – and many other towns’ – lifeblood. She also enacted Section 28, a cruel piece of legislation that forbade the so-called “promotion“ of homosexuality in schools. We’re still feeling its shockwaves today.
McMillan deftly weaves these voices together in an overlapping, slow-building way he likens to a collage. The result is a deeply empathetic portrait of a misunderstood community and contemporary queer life generally. “Hopefully this book feels like permission for people to write their own version of where they live, especially if that place feels slightly disconnected from the big national centres or queer culture more broadly,“ he says. With this in mind, he has founded The Tempest Prize, which will give one LGBTQ+ writer based in the north of England a £1,000 bursary plus mentoring with him.
Entries for the prize open this month following the publication of Pity. But for now, let’s dig into McMillan’s remarkably evocative novel.
Nick Levine: Would you say Pity, at its core, is a story about community?
Andrew McMillan: Community and narrative. Who owns the story of a place – and who gets to tell it? Obviously for any place, the answer is that there are multiple stories. That’s why I liked putting the visiting academics in there, because they have an outsider’s perspective but also certain assumptions about the place that either get confirmed or not confirmed. One of the real motivations for me, I think, was the fact that people don’t really understand places like Barnsley. We have a certain kind of national narrative for them and this is just one attempt to push back against that and tell a different story. That’s why in the novel, we see Simon’s dad, a former miner, actually being proud of the fact his son does drag. He struggles with going to the drag shows because of various other things he’s dealing with, but ultimately he’s proud. It’s a different story from that clichéd “no son of mine is going to do that!“ view.
NL: How did the novel’s distinctive structure with multiple overlapping voices take shape?
AM: For a long while, I was trying to write quite traditional literary fiction, but it always sounded like I was taking the piss out of that voice. But then a professor at my uni, an ethnographer, showed me some field notes she had written about Barnsley, and I was like, “That’s one of the voices for my novel.“ So I guess, in a way, the collage structure with different voices arose from my failure to tell a linear story. Also, the experience of growing up young and gay in Barnsley, to me, carried this feeling of being constantly surveilled and looked at. Whether it’s in your head or not, you do just feel hypervisible. And so by having scenes where a character watches another on CCTV and even the OnlyFans scenes, I could convey this sense that they’re constantly aware there’s a gaze on them.
NL: As well as doing drag, Simon makes OnlyFans content. Is that his way of trying to assert some control over that gaze?
AM: That’s a really interesting way of putting it. I think it offers him control because it’s another income stream for him, but also in terms of the scenarios he’s devising – it’s another creative outlet for him. What’s always struck me about that kind of content is the sense that the people creating it can never fully lose themselves in it. They’re always very conscious of being filmed and checking their body is angled right for the camera and that the other person is in shot. For that reason, I didn’t want those scenes to feel erotic or even sexual, necessarily. I wanted that sense of slightly awkward intimacy – performed intimacy – that is maybe different from the way Simon [and boyfriend] Alex are when they’re not being filmed.
“One of the real motivations for me was the fact that people don’t really understand places like Barnsley. We have a certain kind of national narrative for them and this is just one attempt to push back against that and tell a different story” – Andrew McMillan
NL: Simon wrestles with the idea of sending up Thatcher in his drag show because it could look like a cliché from someone in a former mining town. Did you also have this internal dilemma when it came to discussing Thatcher in the novel?
AM: Yeah, and I’m willing for that [critique] to be levelled at it – “oh, it’s a novel set in Barnsley; of course it’s about mining and the pits.“ But I was thinking a lot about the idea of cliché when I was writing this novel. Everything we think of as cliché comes from a certain grain of truth, but I also think the word ’cliché’ can be used as a way of dismissing things that do still need to be talked about – just talked about in a different way. So on the one hand, I did wrestle with the idea of writing a novel set in Barnsley where Thatcher kind of haunts the story. But on the other hand, through the drag performance and the interrogation in the novel generally, I wanted to find a new language to talk about her impact so it isn’t a cliché. That sounds very grand, doesn’t it?
NL: Not at all – and we can never have enough mentions of Section 28 in books and art generally. I’m constantly amazed it isn’t talked about more.
AM: It’s remarkable. When I became aware of Section 28 retroactively, suddenly everything made sense in terms of how I moved through school. When I was in year ten, I went to lunch and left my phone in the classroom – there were no locks in those days, so somebody read these quite explicit text messages I’d been sending to a lad my age. When I came back, it became obvious everyone had read the messages and I remember breaking down crying. I was a nerdy student, but for the first time ever I refused to go to class. Then a teacher took me to his office to find out why I was upset. I always remember he took a breath, said “fuck Thatcher!“ and then carried on helping me. All of that only makes sense now in retrospect, and I actually give that bit of my own story to Simon in the book. I also think that we [as a society] need to talk about how cyclical these things are. The rhetoric being used now against young trans kids – all the scapegoating and fear-mongering – is the same rhetoric Thatcher used in her 1987 speech where she talked about kids being taught they have “an inalienable right to be gay“. It’s absolutely horrifying to see that rhetoric coming back.
Pity by Andrew McMillan will be published by Canongate on February 8.