After nearly a decade, Tilly Lawless is ready to step away from Instagram. The Australian writer and sex worker, who has over 50,000 followers on the social media platform, first made her name as a writer with her longform, brazen confessional captions about friendship, sex work, queer nightlife and romance. But like many other artists and writers struggling with the platform’s myriad pitfalls, Lawless stepped back from the app during the pandemic, citing a number of factors: a lack of privacy, online criticism, parasocial relationships, and the fact that her Instagram kept getting deleted without her consent.
Seeking refuge in the novel instead, her debut book Nothing But My Body was published in 2022, a visceral, stream of consciousness recounting eight days in the protagonist’s life as she navigates brothels in Sydney, drugs in Berghain, and the horror of the 2019-20 Australian bushfires (her inspirations for the book included Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway). Nothing But My Body was marketed as autofiction – that equally lauded and reviled literary term that captures a blend of autobiography and fiction, popularised by the likes of Chris Kraus, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti – although Lawless says today that she is firmly against genre, insisting that these categories are invented by publishers to sell books. Despite the ever-shifting sands of literary trends, Lawless has always marched firmly to the beat of her own drum, demonstrating an utter refusal to be boxed in by anyone (nowhere is this more clear than in her 2017 Ted Talk, where she paces up and down the stage wearing a red plunge dress and black stilettos, waxing intellectual about about sex work and feminism).
Lawless’s new book, Thora, is further proof that the author will never do what is expected of her. A sensual young adult novel with shades of magical realism, the book centres on Rhiannon, a teenage girl in New South Wales (a uniquely verdant part of Australia) during 2009, as she navigates high school, friendship, drugs, a lesbian awakening, and a dysfunctional relationship with her mother. A nostalgic ode to Lawless’s own youth and hometown, Thora is defined by the pursuit of pleasure, with the characters seeking out sex and nature in equal parts. When Lawless first pitched Thora to Australian publishers, they tried to get her to censor the sex and drugs in the book, which she staunchly refused. In the end, she opted to publish the book in all its graphic, sensual glory with London-based publisher Worms. “I wanted it to be explicit, partly because I think the ‘young adult’ genre is too sanitised for teenagers,“ she says, citing shows like Heartstopper.
Below, Tilly Lawless talks about stepping away from Instagram, working against sanitised mainstream depictions of teenagehood, and her dislike of the term ‘autofiction’.
Violet Conroy: How did you first begin writing on Instagram?
Tilly Lawless: I was writing long, involved stories all through my childhood years and teens, from the age of seven. I tried to write my first novel when I was 15, and I later started writing on Instagram when I was 22. One day I wrote a caption explaining how a photo had happened, and a friend said she really liked it. It was before anyone was writing long captions on Instagram; it was when people were just doing Valencia filters and food photos. That’s when I started using it as the equivalent of a blog or a diary, which is now funny to think about because in the ten years since then, it’s shifted to people mainly writing long things.
VC: Has writing on the internet influenced your own writing stylistically?
TL: It actually improved my editing skills because the word limit was so small, like 400 words. I would write something in half an hour and then spend an hour editing it. It’s probably similar to the training that people get in journalism when they’re having to work within a very specific word limit. It definitely purified my writing, and that was really helpful for me.
“People conflate follower count with power. And sure, it brings you social capital, but I don’t have political sway. Also, I don’t make any money off Instagram” – Tilly Lawless
VC: You wrote recently in a post about stepping away from writing on Instagram. How come?
TL: I was getting so much criticism online that it was just a little bit insane. I didn’t want this kind of attention, so it’s partly about protecting my privacy. Also with the pandemic, I felt so oversaturated with screens and online life that I wanted things to be physical. My Instagram got deleted a few times – I managed to get it back – but I realised it was not the place to have my craft and my creativity because it can be deleted.
I want things to be in print because it’s the only sense of permanence you have in any sort of writing. On top of that, I was ageing and having a different relationship to myself and the world around me. I’ve slowly stepped back from Instagram since 2020, and now I hardly post at all. I’ve stopped feeling the need to.
Some of my relationships were also becoming quite parasocial too. People were interacting with me in ways that were so inappropriate or bizarre, and I didn’t want that for my future.
VC: In what way?
TL: Women would hit on me in ways that were completely inappropriate or, when I was out at a club, obviously on drugs and having a fun time, people would tell me about the time they were raped while we’re on the dance floor. I understand it’s because they feel they know me and I’ve opened up online, so they want to open up in return, but they’re not considering whether I want to hear that in that moment.
VC: So there’s almost a danger to confessional writing?
TL: Yeah. People were using me as an outlet for their own anger about things. I’d become representative of something for them – a symbol – and because of my follower count, they no longer viewed me as an individual. People conflate follower count with power. And sure, it brings you social capital, but I don’t have political sway. Also, I don’t make any money off Instagram.
VC: With Thora, it feels like you’ve moved away from the autofiction of your earlier book, Nothing But My Body.
TL: Well, they both have as much of me in them, it’s just that the genres are different. I didn’t choose [the term] autofiction for Nothing But My Body either, that was something the publishers chose for me. I think the fiction, non-fiction debate is so silly, because even in non-fiction, you’re shifting things around to make the narrative work better. And in fiction, it’s all informed by who you are. It’s such a melting pot; you can’t untangle it. That’s why I think it becomes reductive.
VC: Thora is very sensual in terms of both the nature and sex scenes. Both are about the pursuit of pleasure; do you see a link between the two?
TL: At the end of the day, humans are animals. I think our tie to nature is also about these tactile parts of us and these drives that we can’t really understand. No matter what we do to try and control them, they still overcome us. Sex, like hunger, is one of those basic drives. I like to revel a bit in those physical aspects of us. It’s about that really deep-down thing in us that makes us alive, and I think that same energy charges through nature as well.
VC: You’ve spoken about your struggles with Australian publishers, who tried to censor this book in order to sell it in the young adult market. Tell me more about that?
TL: It’s only young adult because publishers define anything that’s about teenagers as young adult. Young adult is just a category to sell stuff. It’s not like when books were first written there were even genres. When the novel was invented, with Samuel Richardson in the 1700s, people weren’t thinking about genre. As time has passed, we’ve decided to categorise them, but that’s mainly to sell things.
The publishers tried to get me to censor the sex and drugs because I guess it wasn’t appropriate for teenagers, but I wasn’t interested in doing that, so I published it with [indie press] Worms. There is nothing in the book, sexually or drug-wise, that I wasn’t doing as a teenager. I also think it comes down to a class thing. Publishing is generally dominated by upper middle-class women, because there’s not much money in it, and they viewed the lives of these girls as dysfunctional, when to me, they were just normal teenage girls’ lives.
“When the novel was invented, with Samuel Richardson in the 1700s, people weren’t thinking about genre. As time has passed, we’ve decided to categorise them, but that’s mainly to sell things” – Tilly Lawless
VC: So you went the niche publishing route instead of adapting it for the mainstream.
TL: Yeah. I wanted it to be explicit, partly because I think the ‘young adult’ genre is too sanitised for teenagers. When I was a teenager, I either read adult books or fan fiction online. And the reason you go to fan fiction is because young adult stuff is so saccharine. It’s like that TV show Heartstopper – it’s sickly sweet. What teenagers are living like this?! I’m sure some are, but that’s not my teenagehood.
VC: So, in your opinion, most depictions of teenagehood in popular culture are too sanitised?
TL: 100 per cent. I think a good depiction of teenagehood – or something that I could relate to – was How to Have Sex. For some reason, people allow that darkness a little bit more in film than they do in books, because it’s still so genre-divided. In music, there’s now a reaction against things being genre-divided. Someone like Billie Eilish is across genres. And I think films are allowed more of that movement too. But if you walk into a bookstore now, it’s still so traditional, and that comes from the publishers.
VC: What are you working on next? And how are you balancing sex work with writing these days?
TL: I don’t do brothel work anymore, I only do private escorting now. I have more time so I’ve been writing more, but I’ve also been getting more writing work too, like my Prospect column. Next, I want to work on a series of short stories, like dark, gothic, fairy tales. The Bloody Chamber type stuff, but all set in a brothel.
Thora by Tilly Lawless is published by Worms, and is out now.