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he idea that Graham Rawle's dazzling new novel might end up stacked among the novelty books at Urban Outfitters (Boring Postcards; The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook) is upsetting. The concept for the book sounds, if ambitious, a bit gimmicky: an entire novel constructed from words cut out of women's magazines from the early 1960s. But Woman's World is no gimmick. An addictive, zigzagging narrative as beautiful as it is demented, it succeeds on the truism that the more confining an artist's limitations, the more brilliant the resulting work. Rawle didn't simply type up a novel, then replace his words with identical clippings from magazines, word for word. The magazines themselves inflict a unsettlingly sunny prefab vibe upon every sentence.

The story is set in a London suburb in 1962. Its protagonist, Norma Fontaine, is "a typical modern woman attending her daily duties." Everything is picture-perfect, as the era preferred, and Norma is determined to blend in like everyone else, but the fact that she's a transvestite makes it frustratingly difficult. Aided by Rawle's assembled magazine-speak, she tries to assume a feminine pose, and the friction between his writing method and her attempts at womanhood provide a stunning undercurrent of electricity. At 437 pages, the novel took five years, a thousand magazines and 40,000 fragments of text to create. Rawle spoke to Hooksexup about the strange compulsion that drove him to do it. — Will Doig

This project suggests an author with a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Absolutely.

When I heard about the concept, I was skeptical. It sounds like a gimmick.
That's the thing that concerned me the most, that people would look at it as a novelty rather than a novel. For me, if the story doesn't work then it's quite a spectacular waste of time.

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So with the editing process, we had to be as ruthless as you would be with a straight novel. My editor would say, "We should cut chapter thirteen," and I'd have to go, "Okay. Well, that took eight months to make, but that's fine."

Tell us about your process.

Early on, I let the narrative be driven by what I was finding. The problem was that it would quickly go off the rails. I realized the only way this was going to sustain a full-length novel was to sit down and write it as a proper book. So I forgot about the collage aspect of it and wrote it, but at the same time I was collecting fragments of text from women's magazines that I thought might be useful. Then, little by little, I replaced my text with the text I'd found, scrubbing bits of what I'd originally written and replacing them with an approximation of what I'd intended to say. And from that, Norma's narrative voice emerged as something that sounded very much constructed out of women's magazines from that time.

How much did the text from the magazines change what you'd originally written?
A lot changed. Not lots in the sense of what went on, but the language, quite a bit. So I might have had a sentence like, "She stormed out of the room," which then became, "Red rage rose within her like the mercury in a toffee thermometer until she reached the boiling point of fudge." [laughs] There was a bit where it originally said, "He stared blankly," and I found a phrase that made it, "His face was a table cloth of plain and simple design." It forced me to be more inventive in the way I constructed sentences. It's one of those things that's always true of the creative process: if you place rigid restrictions on it, it enables you to kick against it.

Some of the descriptions are so bizarre, but it's somehow perfectly clear what you're trying to convey. "A little smile danced a cha-cha across her face" — you might never think of it on your own, but it works.
Exactly. I think my writing improved enormously from just seeing something and thinking, "I'm going to use that." In my original there's a part where she's supposed to say, "That's nonsense." And it got changed to, "That's all tosh and table margarine," and I don't know what that means at all.

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I assumed it was a British saying I'd never heard.
No, those were just made up. But you realize how those kinds of idioms come up. I think it's in France where instead of, "He laughs in your face," they say, "He laughs in your nose." It means exactly the same thing, and there's no reason it's sillier than what we say, but out of context you think, that's a great line.

How did you organize all the clippings of text? Did you have a system?
I catalogued all the bits in these scrapbooks, and transcribed everything into a computer so I knew where it was. So if I needed a bit about going to the doctor, I could do a word search for "doctor" and see that that bit is on page 1,047 of the scrapbook. Then maybe it's, "You go to the doctor to buy some medicine," so then I'd search for "to buy" or "to purchase," and go back to the scrapbooks and find that. Sometimes you find a word that's very precious, and you drop it on the floor amongst ten million other tiny bits of paper, or a gust of wind comes through the window, and you go, "Oh no! My treasured word is gone!" I would sometimes spend the whole day looking for one word. The process was unbelievably tedious.

Was it ever enjoyable, or just pure hell?
Absolutely enjoyable. It required a low level of concentration. It's a bit like doing a mosaic. You'd start at the top of the page and you'd find all your little bits and pieces, stick them down, and then that one was in the bag. That kind of thing.

Why did you decide to make the plot center around a transvestite?
If you look at women's magazines from that time, they're very prescriptive. They're kind of an instruction manual for how to be a woman. So you imagine yourself as a transvestite reading it, and it's like, this is how you do it, this is how you walk without flashing your stockings, and stuff like that. The idea was that he composes himself as a woman through these magazines.

His speech is also pulled straight from the magazines, yet it doesn't sound phony at all. You can honestly imagine women in this era parroting what they'd read, so it comes off as strangely realistic.

"She stormed out of the room" became, "Red rage rose within her like the mercury in a toffee thermometer until she reached the boiling point of fudge."

Yeah, that kind of peppy wisdom of women's magazines from the time, household tips and how to look beautiful — his entire syntax is built on it.

Is that why you chose to use 1960s women's magazines for this project?
Yeah. They have such a strong voice, this slightly barmy, crazed sort of optimism. And they're very dogmatic about what a woman should do. You're supposed to be making light shades and polishing your light bulbs. You think, who's ever cleaned their light bulbs? Do light bulbs get dirty?

But these magazines weren't considered conservative at all. They suggested that by doing these things, you were being a progressive, powerful, modern woman.
Exactly. It's implied that you're in control of the household, but the adverse side of that is if you're cleaning your light bulbs all day, there's no way you're going to go and get a job. And in post-war Britain, of course, the idea was to encourage women to do that, because there weren't enough jobs to go around.

This book is an extremely realistic portrayal of what I imagine goes on in the heads of many transvestites. Did you do any sort of research?
Well, I'm not into cross-dressing at all. I read a lot of transvestite magazines, and people would write in to discuss what it's like and what their needs were. And of course, being photographed is one of the most important things. Many transvestites have a huge photo collection of themselves dressed as women — not looking coquettish and sexy, necessarily. Most of them are just dressing the female part, doing a bit of cooking, or pushing the vacuum cleaner around the living room. Something about the pictures is so sweet. And that kind of marries with the idea of Woman's World, that idea of domesticity, just going about the housework, making a sausage roll or something.

Today, a lot of people look back on that era as a sinister time, with a veneer of prosperity and convenience technology and good housekeeping hiding its seedy underbelly. Do you see it this way?
I think so. With this book, it was the idea of something secret that appealed to me. I like the idea of a secret you've kept all your life, and the fact that it just goes on year after year, and mum doesn't say anything, and somehow — it's like people who have children and adopt them as their sisters when in fact it's their daughters. It's the secret that goes on and on, the one that's maintained for such a long period of time, that intrigues me.  

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To order Woman's World, click here.

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