Josh Silver, the author of Fruit Fly, this summer’s surprise bestseller, started out as an actor.
Born on a farm in England’s Lake District, he moved to London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in his early 20s. He was drawn towards the classics—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Trelawny of the “Wells,” an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Neck and back problems are chronic among stage actors; Silver carried his stress in his thumb. “I used to squeeze it really tightly all the time when I was acting, holding my hand behind my back as if I was standing like a gentleman,” he told me over the phone last week. “Now when I’m doing this,” he continued, referring to the writing career he embarked on after leaving acting to work as a mental health nurse, “I don’t want to feel that tension. I want to feel liberated by being able to push into conversations that are now, that are difficult, and that are confusing.”
Picasso once said something along the lines of, “art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth.” In Fruit Fly—Silver’s fourth novel, and the first to break out of the YA category his previous thrillers were assigned—substitute the words “art” and “us” interchangeably for the names of the protagonists: Mallory and Leo. We meet the former, the author of exactly one best-selling novel published seven years ago, sitting on the toilet playing Candy Crush, avoiding a party thrown to celebrate her husband’s promotion at Netflix. The latter—a young gay man who may or may not be an Instagram poet, unhoused, and a casual sex worker—we are introduced to in the midst of a drug transaction; he’s buying GHB and Tina (crystal meth) on his way to a chemsex party.
Over the next 300-plus pages, a witches’ brew of Grindr, 12-step recovery, home break-ins, and book deals bring the two characters together, then apart, as Mallory uses Leo’s story as a way to get out of extended writers’ block purgatory (and to escape, we learn as the plot thickens, much more than that too). Silver takes a question that’s become an unavoidable pitstop in a creative industry obsessed with monetizing authenticity—who gets to tell what stories—and turns it into a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. Mallory and Leo, both trapped in circumstances that are chipping away at their sanity, hold onto their capacity to deceive—and deceit as a means for survival—as tightly as Silver once squeezed his thumb on stage. These are the roles of their lifetime.
Anne Hathaway’s response to being handed a copy of Fruit Fly in a TikTok video with bookfluencer Jack Edwards—“Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme”—accurately sums up the world’s reaction to the novel. Three months after its U.K. release in April, the book was optioned by A24. (Silver will executive produce.) Since landing on bookshelves stateside on Aug. 4, copies have been hard to come by. (A friend has tried to purchase one at McNally Jackson no fewer than three times, to no avail!) And the Internet, that surprising evangelist of literacy, has been ablaze with dissections of every twist and turn. To see how the person behind them is taking it all in, we called up Josh Silver for a chat.
Can you tell me about your relationship to the word contemporary—both what it feels like for you to be an author in our era and to write within the constraints of contemporary life?
The word contemporary dates back in my life to when I was applying to drama school when I was 17. You had to pick a classical and a contemporary piece for these auditions. So you’d pick your Shakespeare monologue and then [something] from a contemporary play, a character that could come off the street today. I always found the contemporary one really difficult because I’d been told throughout my school career that [I was] good for period drama—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, classical texts. Then when I went to RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art], it was classical training and a lot of the casting I had was in the classical world. I played Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I did Trelawny of the “Wells.” I did Wolf Hall.
What that did was make me feel afraid of creating stuff that was contemporary. I got scared of being put in a role that would be set now. This restraint that comes with the sorts of classical stuff, I actually felt quite comfortable in because there’s a sense of being held. When I started writing novels, I just fell into, No, I can write a contemporary book. It was liberating to be able to draw from my experience of now, the cultural landscape, the technological landscape, and what that might look like in the future—because some of my YA books are dystopian techno thrillers.
I love writing in contemporary voice. A lot of people say they connect with my writing style. I’ve never attempted to have a style. I didn’t go to writing school. I didn’t do an English degree, and it has never really been part of my desire to create a signature style. I think it’s the way my brain moves; I have been diagnosed with ADHD—whether I have it or not is another matter. I do know that in this world of fast-moving information my writing suits people who want to fall into a narrative very quickly and feel like they can speed through it. That’s never really been an intentional choice, to write like that, but people respond well to it so I allow it to continue.
You describe the feeling of tumbling through the book so accurately. Mallory’s brain and Leo’s brain work at different paces. There’s the common tie of them both using technology all the time, having access to that constant distraction. Then with Leo you can so tell that he’s on drugs. There’s that syncopation of thought that really comes through.
I really love using form to play with that. There’s quite a difficult scene in the book where he’s been through something, but he’s sort of detached from it and it’s happening around him and his thoughts are starting to blur into one another. [You start to see] the punctuation become looser. I’m also quite particular about where the lines fall on the page, which is really important to the rhythm of how you’re reading it. That helps not only with the beats of the story, but also with the comedy. It helps you land those more surprising notes.
You wrote very successful YA books before Fruit Fly. I’m curious what made you transition into and out of the YA genre, and what writing under that umbrella taught you that you’ve brought into this book?
When I started writing YA, I didn’t know I was writing YA. I wrote a book from the point of view of this 17 year old. I was working in mental health wards at the time, and I was getting angry about what I was seeing. I wanted to write this dystopian thriller about a mental health system that’s using eugenics to breed out mental illness—that’s basically the premise of HappyHead. I submitted it to agents, and the agent was like, “This is a YA novel.” I was like, “Okay, cool, I’m happy with that.” Then I was contracted to write more YA. What I learned about YA is: pace is everything, plot is everything. The editors don’t like you dawdling around the color of the leaves on the trees for more than three words. You’ve got to get on with it. And I enjoy being voice-driven and having what I hope is propulsion through the story. Almost like I want to grab the reader by their shirt, and pull them through, right to the end of the book, always one step ahead of them. I learned that from YA.
I had the idea of Fruit Fly because I was getting a bit pissed off, to be honest. I was a gay actor, told being gay wouldn’t work in my favor. Then seven, eight years later, [there was] the cultural whiplash of, “No, no, no, we like inclusivity now. We like gay people. You can go and be gay. You can go and be yourself.” Suddenly I’m being told, “Actually, you’re going to get this audition because you’re gay.” It was wild. I was also drinking and using a lot at the time, so there’s a load of factors to why I was not in a happy place. But what struck me as I started getting more sober and writing and reflecting on the books and the media that I’ve taken in and enjoyed was why I have a sort of desire to take in other people’s trauma and other people’s pain. I want to watch something that makes me cry. I want to read something that makes me cry. As I started writing books, I started questioning the intention of writers and why they write what they write. Then the topic of appropriation comes in. It was trendy to be queer; especially in the YA market, those books sold more. There was a narrative that if you put queer characters in your books, it would have more cool appeal or a broader reach.
That’s when I came up with this idea of a woman who wanted to write a bestseller, but then there’s the complication of authenticity and her using her brother’s story to validate herself and her own actions. I would never say, “You don’t get to write that story.” What I would always question is why you’re doing it. Mallory is desperately trying to find some intention behind her actions. It’s obviously complicated by the fact that she’s in an abusive relationship, but I want people to look at themselves when they read it and think, Oh yeah, that’s really interesting. Why do I want to read that? And why do I like that experience being written by that person? Or why do I prefer seeing that experience through that point of view?
You’re getting to this idea also that a gay story has to be a sad story. We don’t expect a happy gay story. That has come up a lot even this past year with Heated Rivalry and all of the conversation around the fact that Shane and Ilya do end up together. But at the same time there is real pain.
I’m entitled to my anger around this. I grew up in a very difficult context and a religious context. My personal experience of being gay has been incredibly difficult and has caused a lot of pain. That is not wholly to do with my parents; it’s a systemic thing. But regardless of all that contextually, it fucked up the way I felt about myself. Then when you start to see people take the best bits of your experience and run with it, you’re like, “Do you know how that feels? Do you know how hard it was and still can be?”
With the sort of more fantasized version of a gay relationship that is more palatable to certain demographics of society now, that’s also confusing because I don’t know any gays who are doing it like that. I get why people want to see men interact in that way. I understand that it makes people feel safe. As I wrote the book, I was processing these sharp pangs of frustration about it all. I started to think more and more about different people’s experiences and viewpoints. I put myself in Mallory’s shoes and I’m thinking, Well, hold on a second. Let’s see how it is for a woman in this society and learn about that experience as well and apply the same logic to myself. It really helped me feel less frustrated.
What felt like the riskiest part of this book to write for you?
The first one would be writing from the point of view of a woman whilst making people question who has the right to tell what stories. I really wanted to get it right and I wanted to try and inhabit the experience of Mallory as truthfully as possible. I wanted to be careful with that experience and make sure that I was getting support. Lots of my female friends read behind me. My friend Leah [Brotherhead], who the book’s dedicated to, is a very straight-talking Northern girl and an avid reader. She would call me and be like, “Fucking hell, Josh, a woman’s not going to do that.”
But then again, there’s also a lot of Mallory’s inner world that is my inner world. That was useful, to be able to see what transcends our differences and that trying to avoid pain can be far more universal than we think. The second thing [I was cautious of] was writing Leo’s experience. Not everything that he goes through is the same as mine. But reopening an experience that I’ve worked through and in many ways tried to leave behind was in some ways difficult. But as a gay man who’s experienced chemsex and the dangers of it and the pain that comes around it, I wanted to put that in the book. I think the thing I was scared of was exposing myself, and now, as I go through press and interviews, how much I need to say to validate the story. I’m writing a story about who gets to tell the story and I get asked, “Well, is that my experience?” Some of it is, but some of it absolutely isn’t.
A major part of the book is about how you package a book. Everything from the advance to the notes that Mallory is getting from her editors to the way that it’s being marketed. You’re obviously on this huge publicity tour right now for Fruit Fly. I’m curious what the experience of promoting it has been.
It’s meta and ironic in many ways. When I finished writing the first draft, I sent it to my editor, closed my laptop, and said, “I’m going away for a bit. I need to not think about this book.” Then on the way to where I was going, I realized I needed to change the ending. My editor said, “You’ve got a week.” I opened my laptop, deleted the final part, and started with Mallory emailing her agency saying, “I need to change the ending.” The ending [she changed] was the ending I had written as the ending of Fruit Fly. There was all this sort of bleeding between reality and art that I was just sort of going with because it was the experience of the publishing industry that I was having.
[Now,] seeing my book packaged and marketed just feels surreal. I write Mallory saying, “Oh, how amazing to get a film deal, how amazing to have a deal in America and be around going around America.” I’m in America. I have a film deal. That side of it has been really strange. There’s a scene where she’s being interviewed for the release of her book and she’s got a big crowd there. And I was at my event at the Strand looking out to the audience, and it just took me into that scene. She’s looking out for Leo, and she sees him. Someone DMed me saying, “I was looking out for Leo in the audience.” People are wondering about my intentions and whether I had this big grand plan to get exactly what Mallory gets and whether I’ve done what Mallory’s done, ultimately. I had no idea at all that this would happen. No one did, to be quite honest. It came out in the blue for everyone, and I think we’re still playing catch-up a bit.
PK, this author whose first book came out at the same time as Mallory’s first book, is this shadow character throughout Fruit Fly. I like that she comes up at the beginning when we’re first introduced to Mallory and then at the end when Mallory’s interviewed by her at the equivalent of your Strand event. PK is someone Mallory has a lot of envy towards in terms of her career arc and her Malibu life, and I’m wondering if there’s an author who you’ve been jealous of?
My experience of that is you don’t know people until you know them. I’ve met some of my literary heroes since the book has come out and learned that they are the most wonderful, kind, generous, private people. We create this narrative of people for ourselves or collectively online. And that’s a really difficult position to be in if someone else is creating a narrative about you. But I don’t think I’ve ever really been jealous [as a writer]. I’ve been interested in the way things take off or what people run with. I have definitely been jealous in the past. I experienced it so much when I was an actor that when I became a writer, I just told myself, Stay in your lane. There is enough out there. Success and love are not a finite thing.
Fruit Fly came out in the U.S. at a moment where there’s this big discourse around The Life of M, Rachel Cusk’s new book, which is allegedly about Natalie Portman. It’s made me think about how we think about the ownership of our stories. You’re reaching this moment where more and more people know about you. How are you considering these ideas of authenticity, celebrity, and what you do and don’t share about yourself?
This is such an interesting thing that I’m navigating currently and have been navigating my whole life because I grew up thinking the point of life was to make everyone like me and okay with me—a lot of self-abandoning and not being able to really have self-esteem and listening to everyone else’s opinions of me rather than my own. As I go into this phase where I’m definitely seeing people have opinions I’m trying to stay away from it. I don’t mind if you come for my work: You can say what you want about my book. Art is there to be critically looked at. But if you come for who I am and my intention, I find that difficult to deal with at the moment. It’s not happened much, but I’ve seen the odd thing where people might question me, my authenticity. Has this even happened to me? Have I even been through these things, or am I just playing this wild game? And people like to sometimes have an out there take and those takes can get traction. That’s the nature of this beast, but it can be a bit strange when someone thinks they know you personally.
I want to talk about Ronan and Stacey, Mallory’s husband and mom. They’re side characters, but their presence really peels back the layers on our own experience of Mallory and how seriously we take her because there’s this constant questioning of the validity of her perspective. But we don’t really ever fully get to know them. When and how did you know how much of Ronan and Stacey—their stories, their rationalizations for how they came to be—you wanted to reveal or not?
With Ronan, playing with that from the beginning of the novel was intentional in that I wanted people to firstly fancy him a bit and then think, Oh, he’s got a lot of rationality. We’re inside this woman’s head and she’s acting crazy. I enjoy playing with the reader like that. I like being able to use points of view to manipulate the reader into thinking certain things about different characters and then revealing information as we go along. So readers are not going to be fully informed about their intentions, history, whatever wounds they may have that lead them to behave the way they behave, but what we are seeing is Mallory and Leo’s responses to their behavior. And that was important to me.
In my head, I knew what was going on for these characters, but sometimes it’s okay to not want to have to explain everything. I don’t want to do that. The human experience will never be that. We will never know someone fully—I say it in the book. Getting to learn about myself has been a very, very long journey and one I’m still on, and each of us are on that journey. People will do things and we can try and sit and rationalize or therapize, and actually, behavior is behavior. I think it is our personal job to change and shift that on our own behalf. I’m interested in that journey.
Tell me about the role of poetry in the book. Quite a few of the chapters are dedicated to Leo’s poetry. There’s one dedicated to Mallory’s. Poetry, especially Instagram poetry, which is what Leo’s kind of writing, can be seen as quite cringe. Were you thinking about its ironic value?
So much of this book is about performance. These two characters are very clever. They know how to get what they want. The creation of Leo’s poetry is him pushing a version of himself because he knows people fetishize it, that some chav writing poetry is going to make people horny. He doesn’t care if the poetry is shit or good. He knows full well that it will get people’s likes. The dopamine hits from the likes activate him. He’s an addict. He knows how to fulfill himself in that sense, however thin that fulfillment might be. And he knows what he needs to be to get people to like him—A fuckboy with depth, I’ll go that route. I’m not denying or confirming whether I’ve tried to do that myself in the past. [Laughs] But it’s certainly something that…
You’re familiar with, we’ll say. I want to talk about class because from the very beginning, we’re peppered with these very concrete class signifiers in Mallory’s home—and the house is a character in and of itself—with the double-door Smeg, the distressed mirror, even her intentionally messy bun. On the other side of the spectrum, you have all of the assumptions Mallory, and by extension the reader, is projecting onto Leo—he’s not able to read, his mother’s abusing him, where he’s from. How early did that dynamic surface for you in crafting the narrative?
There’s this sort of fetishization that can happen around the pain and trauma of people from lower classes. We want to view that sort of world from the comfort of our homes. There’s something about watching or reading those stories that the middle classes might enjoy in a way that makes them feel better about themselves. I just wanted to also talk about creative talent and how that manifests in people from different classes. It was really important to me that Mallory’s mom fought for a life that she could provide for her kids. Then Mallory’s perception of herself and the class she’s in makes her feel more entitled to being an author because there are a lot of class issues around publishing. And Leo did very well at school and was very instinctive with language and literature.
I just wanted to throw out there that we culturally create barriers for creatives. The way Leo sees himself is part of why he’s pushing himself into this self-destructive cycle because he knew he could have been a writer or he wanted to be one. He’s jealous of Mallory. I wanted that to be in there. Mallory is choosing to appear that way. But Leo is also choosing to appear that way. We think Mallory is appropriating everything that he is going through, but she is taking from him the lies he is telling her as well. He is part of the problem. He doesn’t need to sleep under bridges. If he wanted to truly get sober and get out of his own way, he could go home. We play into stereotypes that we know other people respond to and they’re both doing that.
I’m really curious about you changing the ending because I was left wanting more with the current one. Do you think a good ending is always about edging?
I’m absolutely fine with people having a sense of frustration. You need emotional resolution or where the characters have arrived by the end of the story is really important. But the reason I changed the ending was because the choices the characters had made in my original ending were not what they would do. That was me trying to fulfill a brief for an audience. It was important for me to get into their heads and be like, Leo would not do that. As soon as I got into that mindset, the ending wrote itself. I sent it to my editor and I was like, Oh God, because he wanted a bit more of a happy ending. Then two days later he replied saying, “This is it. We’re ready to go.”
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