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 British author Helen Walsh took ecstasy at 13 and ran away to Barcelona at 16 before writing a controversial novel about a predatory young queer woman.
At the beginning of Helen Walsh’s 2004 novel Brass, the character of Millie O’Reilly, a young student, picks up a female prostitute working the street. They go off to the graveyard and have sex. Later in the book, Millie helps a drug-addled teenager into the bathroom of a nightclub and proceeds to fuck her, without her consent.
Unsurprisingly, Brass seeded Walsh as one of the most controversial – and highly talented – authors in Britain. When asked why she made Millie gay, she tells CHERRIE, “She’s not so much gay but queer in that she has a very fluid approach to gender and sexuality. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. It was born out of a frustration of not being able to find female protagonists I could identity with in contemporary fiction. There are many lesbian, bi and straight heroines or anti-heroines in abundance but there’s a dearth of novels that manage to capture that very aggressive and predatory female sexuality.”
Feminists were divided in their reactions to Brass, she says. “Of course there were the Andrea Dworkin radicals who were unable to stomach the idea that women can be violators, perpetrators – that women can use and abuse other women. There were also many second-wave feminists who believe that all women’s sex and sexuality should be framed and understood within its political context and power hierarchies. Millie’s sexuality is apolitical, predatory, animalistic – she goes in search of pleasure. She fucks. She consumes. She uses. And she is therefore problematic to a certain hue of feminist. But there were many others who saw her sexuality as transcendent, liberating, empowering and authentic.”
Some people assumed that Millie was based loosely on Walsh herself. Born in Warrington in the north of England to a British-Asian mother, she immersed herself in the acid house culture of the ’90s, popped her first ‘E’ at 13 and ran away to Barcelona where she worked as a ‘fixer’ in a transvestite club, hooking up prostitutes with clients. “Of course, it would be folly to deny that there are autobiographical strands,” she admits. “I share Millie’s passion for the city and her fluid sexuality but Millie’s physical and emotional make-up are predominantly fictional. She is far more prone to excessiveness than me, she is more cynical and she lacks a feminist conscience.”
After living in Barcelona and London and taking a degree in sociology at Liverpool University (she blew her first student loan on lap-dancing, wrote a dissertation on porn and was awarded a First), Walsh returned home to Warrington where she worked with socially-excluded teenagers and wrote Brass “viscerally, impulsively” in just nine months, on her mother’s kitchen table. But while her early drug-fuelled, risk-taking lifestyle produced a cracking novel, it had its downsides.
“I fell head over heels in love with ecstasy culture,” she says. “It was magical. The scene was still very much nascent. It was very much a shared secret – utterly spellbinding. When it eventually collapsed though – it was swallowed up by the mainstream – I was phenomenally depressed. I guess being involved in that scene so young gave me an insight into worlds that I might not have been brave enough or feckless enough to explore as an adult. But in hindsight it had its drawbacks. I suffered with ill mental health for many years after, hallucinations, panic attacks, self-harm and suicide [attempts]. I’m sure a lot of my mental health problems are partly a result of consuming so much so young.”
Nowadays, Walsh lives a quieter life in Liverpool with her husband and 10-month old son. Her latest novel, just released in Australia, is Once Upon a Time in England. Completely different to Brass, the book tells the story of Irishman Robbie Fitzgerald, his Tamil wife Susheela, their daughter Ellie and gay son Vincent who suffer prejudice and outright hatred from their racist neighbours. It’s not a scenario too unfamiliar to Walsh’s own life, although she had a useful weapon against racism: beauty.
“Feminists find the idea of beauty problematic,” she asserts. “Perhaps because conventional Western notions of beauty are seen as being male defined and the very idea of cultivating and nurturing beauty, of being beautiful, is seen as anti-feminist. But … I managed to shrug off a lot of racist abuse by ‘practising’ beauty. As a teenager I grew my hair, watched my weight, aspired to be fashionable. Boys wanted to fuck me, not spit on me. It was a necessary means of survival growing up dark-skinned in an all-white town.”
As for her life today, Walsh – who believes CHERRIE’s moniker of ‘not-so-straight’ is “the perfect way to describe myself” – has this to say: “I love being a mother, but I think I’d make a better father. When I’m not writing or out and about with my little man I love walking. I read about four books a week, but probably only see one of them to the end. I don’t drink anymore. I’ve been going through a period of abstinence but God, I miss it. I’d do anything for a tipple. Or two.”
Once Upon a Time in England is published in Australia by Text Publishing.
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