Making It: A Novel - Softcover

Kay, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593470079 ISBN 13: 9780593470077

Publisher: Vintage, 2024

Synopsis

From the author of Wild Things comes a heartwarming and relatable queer coming of age story about an isolated young woman whose artistic celebration of her pet chinchilla suddenly launches her into the professional art world, reality TV fame, and first love.

"Brilliantly and truthfully rendered friendships, flirtations, and workplace dramas . . . but also a truly nuanced, sensitive, and warm-hearted portrait of living with mental illness." —Emma Hughes, author of No Such Thing as Perfect

Isobel's life is small: just her, her mum, and her pet chinchilla, Abigail, in their council flat on the Kentish coast. After mental health troubles in her teens, Issy, now twenty-eight, has kept things that way on purpose, only deviating from routine when her part-time job at a paint-your-own pottery studio demands it, or when she's inspired to create art of Abigail: knitted Abigails, sculptural Abigails, delicately rendered paintings of Abigail.

When the Abigails earn the attention of famous artist and reality TV star Elizabeth Staggs, Issy is awestruck and a little alarmed. These emotions compound when Elizabeth makes Issy an unexpected offer: move to London and work for a year shadowing Elizabeth as she produces her hit arts documentary series. Terrified but determined, Issy agrees, and soon finds herself sharing a flat with a crew of boisterous roommates who welcome her into their queer enclave and attempt to mentor her in the city's wide world of romantic possibilities. Issy can't help but wish that one roommate—gorgeous and cool aspiring actress, Robin—might make her mentorship a bit more hands on...even while, at work, she struggles under the guidance of Elizabeth's harsh and exacting young producer, Aubrey.

But when Elizabeth seizes on Issy's idea to structure the upcoming season around a group of outsider artists, Issy finds both her work and love lives growing more complicated by the day, whether she's ready or not. Making It is a nuanced and life affirming look at living with depression and of finding, as we all deserve to, self-acceptance, community, and love.

About this title

About the Author

LAURA KAY is a writer living in East London. Her journalism and personal essays have been published in The Guardian, Diva Magazine, Stylist, The Metro, and The Bookseller among others. In 2018 she was selected for the PRH WriteNow scheme where she developed her first novel The Split, which was longlisted for the Polari First Novel Prize. Making It is her fourth novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

“We can’t all be the main character,” I said, my voice raised, battling to be heard over the sound of the radio and the motorway traffic.

“What?”

My uncle Pete has selective hearing, and he had been selecting not to hear me for most of the journey.

“I said, we can’t all be the main character, otherwise who would be the sidekick? Or the audience? Or the reader?”

“What the bloody hell are you on about?”

I sighed. I don’t know why I even bothered trying to make conversation. We were listening to talk radio, and there was a woman on as a guest—who two men were shouting over—talking about “main-character energy” and how you can “manifest” whatever you want if you try hard enough. And if you buy her book, I guess.

Uncle Pete was the one who had turned up the volume in the first place, trying his best to look meaningfully at me while I stared resolutely ahead.

I couldn’t see him properly because I had a huge cage on my knee, the white metal bars all the way up to the roof of the van. I was extremely aware of him though because he kept offering me his bag of mini Kit Kats through the bars like he was my keeper at the zoo.

“I just mean maybe it’s OK that I’m one of life’s observers rather than being an active participant,” I said. “What if I was just fine staying at home, living with Mum, working at Glazed for the rest of my life?”

I was meant to be making a hypothetical point about the dubious premise of this woman’s book, but my heart lurched involuntarily when I said it. The longing for home I had been barely allowing myself to feel ripped through me.

“Well, it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?” Uncle Pete said, his mouth full. I just knew he was spraying wet crumbs all over the dashboard. I was starting to feel nauseous.

“You know what your problem is, Issy?”

That I think too much.

“It’s that you think too much,” he said.

I clenched my teeth.

“Maybe you don’t think enough, Uncle Pete. Did you ever think of that?”

He snorted with laughter. More crumbs. More nausea.

“Maybe that’s why I’m so happy and you’re always in such a bloody grump, Wizzy.”

“Issy,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Don’t call me Wizzy. I’m twenty-eight years old.”

“Our little Wizzy,” Uncle Pete said, ignoring me. “Always bloody grumping about something.”

Always bloody grumping is not quite the term I’d use to describe, quite literally, clinical depression.

Uncle Pete turned up the volume on the radio again before I could protest any further, the men now shouting at each other about a political landscape none of them seemed to understand. I wrestled my phone out of the top pocket of my jacket and groaned when I saw that we had forty-five minutes of the journey left. The cage was heavier than I’d realized; I had stopped being able to feel my legs before we reached the motorway.

I rested my head against the window of Pete’s van and let it vibrate against the glass. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mum standing in the doorway of our block of flats in Margate, waving us off that morning with her cardigan wrapped around her tiny frame. She had clearly not slept all night. Uncle Pete, her younger brother, gripped her shoulder just before we left and said something to her, but I don’t know what it was. It might have been “I’ll take care of her,” but it could just as easily have been “Get a bloody grip, love.”

Just when the satnav was telling us we were ten minutes away from our destination, we drove into the car park of a twenty-four-hour superstore.

“Careful!” I yelled, as Uncle Pete pulled into a tight parking space and slammed on the brakes. I clung on to the cage as I was thrown back in my seat.

“It’s fine, babe,” Uncle Pete said.

I still couldn’t see him clearly, but I heard the effort of him slithering out of the driver’s side door, grunting and wheezing, trying not to scratch the car next to us. Uncle Pete is not a small man.

I placed the cage gently onto the driver’s seat and began the process of slithering out of the van myself. Maddeningly, I could hear Uncle Pete wincing, watching as the passenger door knocked against the car next to us, as if he was not entirely responsible for where we parked.

“Back in a second,” I said through the window I’d left cracked open. The news kept saying it was “unseasonably warm” for September—or, put better, perhaps, by Uncle Pete it was “absolutely bloody roasting.”

“It’ll be fine,” Uncle Pete said, slapping me on the back when I emerged from the gap between the cars.

“Not it,” I said, “she.”

When we got into the shop, Uncle Pete pulled out his phone and a pair of reading glasses with floral frames. He doesn’t think he needs glasses but pinches my auntie Jan’s every time he leaves the house. He held the phone as far away from his face as he could, and I saw that he was studying an essay-length text. He kept scrolling, and it kept going and going.

“What’s that?” I asked, straining to get a better look at his phone as he picked up a basket and passed it to me before taking another one for himself.

“Shopping list,” he said, without looking up but moving the phone farther away from me.

“For you?” I said.

“For you, you daft cow. What am I coming all this way to do my big shop for?”

Uncle Pete’s voice was loud, and it carried. I smiled apologetically at a woman who glanced at us in alarm, disturbed from her task of pretending she wasn’t squeezing all the avocados next to the sign asking customers not to squeeze the avocados.

“I don’t know! But I don’t want a big shop! What if no one else did a big shop before they got there? I don’t want to turn up with . . .”

I glanced over his shoulder at the text again.

“Twelve tins of tuna!”

“ ’Course you do,” Uncle Pete said, putting a container of strawberries in my basket, which I immediately removed because I am severely allergic to them, something he has known my entire life.

I can’t even tell you how many times he has nearly killed me.

“I don’t like tuna! I’m trying to be vegan now, remember?”

“Vegans eat tuna,” Uncle Pete said confidently. “I was listening to a program about it.”

“Did Mum send you the list?” I asked.

He paused before answering.

“Yeah,” he said, frowning as I picked up a box of posh granola. Not on the list.

“Is she very worried about me?” I said, a knot forming in my stomach. More than usual, were the unsaid words we both heard.

“No,” he said firmly. He stopped, slap-bang in the middle of the world food aisle. “She’s not very worried; she’s a normal amount of worried. You’re not to worry about her being worried, do you understand me?”

I nodded. My brain understood. My writhing stomach, my jelly legs, the tingling in my fingertips did not catch on.

My body is always one step behind.

“Do you think I should just . . . ,” I started.

“If you say ‘go home’ right now to me, Isobel, I’m putting these Twixes right back. No Twixes for you.”

“I can’t eat Twixes anyway,” I said, “I’m ve—”

“You know what I mean,” Uncle Pete said, holding the packet dangerously close to the shelf.
I nodded. “I know, yes. I know.”

We somehow managed to fit everything into the van. It was quite satisfying actually, slotting individual boxes and cartons into the perfect-size spaces between everything I owned. I wriggled back into my seat, pulled the cage onto my lap, and despite having spent the entire journey desperately waiting for it to be over, I treasured the final ten minutes in the car with Uncle Pete, listening to him swearing at the satnav. It flew by painfully quickly.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593470079
• ISBN 13: 9780593470077
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384