Queenie, a young Black woman living and dating in London, is 'complex, funny, broken, fun'
- Written by Melanie Saward, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Queensland University of Technology
Early in the pandemic, I looked after my niece because she had conjunctivitis and couldn’t go to daycare. Despite my best efforts, I caught it. My infection morphed into tonsillitis and I became very sick. I couldn’t read or watch TV properly – which everyone knows are the only pleasures of being sick. So I downloaded the audiobook of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams and listened in bed with my eyes closed.
Before long, I found myself pausing the book to leave myself croaky, semi-lucid voice notes as I fell in love with Queenie Jenkins. (I should have known, in the middle of my PhD on rom-com, I’ll never read commercial fiction solely for pleasure again.)
Read more: Friday essay: romance fiction rewrites the rulebook
Bridget Jones meets Americanah
Popularly billed as “Bridget Jones meets Americanah”, Queenie is the story of a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, working at a national newspaper, and navigating life after a messy breakup with long-term boyfriend Tom.
Queenie opens in a gynaecologist’s office with a nurse performing an internal exam. It’s got a real chick-lit feel to it – for two paragraphs. But when the nurse brings a doctor into the room for a second opinion, you can feel the shift that indicates this isn’t just another fluffy, formulaic rom-com.
Candice Carty-Williams says most fiction by black authors gets pigeonholed into literary fiction.
Hachette Australia
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Living and dating as a young Black woman
Throughout this book, Queenie navigates dating as a Black Woman, living in a Black body, and what it’s like to straddle two cultures while never really feeling as though you fit.
It explores the complications of accessing mental health care when your culture doesn’t believe mental health is an illness – and it explores sexual health, too. It deals with young women not knowing how to say no, or express their boundaries. It deals with some really, really unhealthy dating habits. And it does not gloss over the pain and the politics of life as a Black woman.
“I was in pain,” Queenie thinks at one point. “This is what you get when you push love away. This is what you’re left with …”
Sometimes it seems as though commercial fiction suffers from lack of complexity: if characterisation strays too far into reality – especially the reality of living in a racialised body – it loses commercial appeal.
White women no longer want to read it, because the aspirational appeal has gone. They can’t see themselves in the protagnoist.
With that tagline, Carty-Williams has made sure Queenie, with all her complexities, will make it into the hands of every reader. And those complexities are why she added a disclaimer to her tagline, in an interview soon after the book was published:
everyone has made the comparison to a black Bridget Jones. That’s how I thought of her in the beginning, too. But this book is also naturally political just because of who Queenie is. She’s not Bridget Jones. She could never be.
Though there’s a lot of darkness and pain in Queenie’s life, the book is funny, and joyful too. And its status as commercial fiction allows a wide range of readers to see that.
Queenie has some amazing friends, and her family is bonkers and loving – even though you want to throttle them at times. Like when Queenie tells her grandmother she’s not feeling well, clearly having a panic attack, and her grandmother’s solution is to force her to eat fish fingers and soggy toast – feeding being the family’s “unofficial motto”.
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry, I said have you eaten?”
Queenie is the sort of person I could see myself being friends with. She’s the sort of character I’d like to write someday – complex, funny, broken, fun – and that’s why I love her.
“I saw a cleaner mopping up some sick in the hallway, why don’t you get him in here to have a look as well?” Queenie asks as two doctors and a nurse peer inside her during a gynaecological exam.
The book’s tagline is something else entirely. When I started work on my own rom-com novel, someone told me that in the future it probably wouldn’t be sold by publishers as rom-com. It’s Blak, it’s bisexual, the main character is fat. “It will probably be sold as literary fiction. Or maybe queer romance,” they said.
I think I’m going to have tagline powers written into my own contract. “Manhattan Dreaming meets the Baby-Sitters’ Club” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Authors: Melanie Saward, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Queensland University of Technology
Hashtag.net.au
