“And it’s sort of been interesting seeing the dialogue around the book, because some of those things stick.”Īt the same time, readers have been astute in picking up the ideas and allusions to “the problem” inside the fiction. Other people assume things about her.” Her class background, for example, or her feelings about her boyfriend she says nothing about them, so others fill those gaps. She’s very passive and doesn’t really change anyone’s actions by whether or not she’s there. “I wanted absence to be what defined her. She moves between them like a puff of smoke. They give us whatever information we have about the narrator through what they say to her and what they do. She approached the story, she says, by writing all the secondary characters first. ‘She’s very passive and doesn’t really change anyone’s actions by whether or not she’s there. “I thought that would be screaming out!” says Brown, laughing. Autofiction is all about the authorial voice, but this woman has no voice. Apart from what she does for a living and the fact of her colour, we know nothing about her.

The reason it surprised her, given the obvious parallels between her central character’s life and her own, is that her nameless heroine is a virtual blank. And yet it is language that is Brown’s real subject – specifically, the inadequacy of the language we have to discuss or even name the problem looming behind Assembly’s slender story. This is her story.” Like her protagonist, Brown, a guest of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, is black British and, until recently, did something high-flying in a financial institution she doesn’t want to name.Īssembly is a sliver of a book – only a hundred pages, and effectively less than that since it is mostly written in fragments or short essays broken up by a good deal of white space – but it nonetheless became the most sensational debut of the last Frankfurt Book Fair, commanding six-figure sums from British and American publishers. I don’t see a justification for why people feel she owes them life and owes them a particular story. “There is so much pressure put on her to perform a struggle, almost for our entertainment. “But why should she?” retorts Brown sharply. That does not tick the right box: her expensive private doctor is aghast. And yes, she also has cancer which she is refusing to have treated. The story pivots around her visit to the family pile for what promises to be a lavish garden party. She has a boyfriend, the scion of British landed gentry, who expects in due course to glide into politics and a position of influence. She has an immigrant family she can afford to help out. This anonymous heroine’s life ticks a few other boxes. Natasha Brown says “other people assume things” about her protagonist in Assembly.

Assembly book natasha brown