Q: Where did Darlene begin for you?
I always start with the beginning. That sounds obvious, but I don’t begin with a plan. My novels are largely unplanned. Their climaxes are rarely climactic. They tend to hang, unresolved — much like life itself. I’m never entirely certain of where a story is going, and I’ve come to accept that as part of the process rather than a failure of it.
Q: You’ve said your work resists resolution. Why is that important to you?
We’re often told that a novel should move toward an ending, that it should resolve itself in a satisfying way. I don’t recognise that. We may know that life ends, but we don’t know how or when. Why should fiction pretend otherwise?
Q: Your work often seems to sit between reality and something more abstract. Is that deliberate?
I tend to blur the line between reality and fantasy, yes. A critic once asked whether my last novel, The Rivers That Run Through Us, was “full of symbolism.” I resisted that idea. It’s not symbolism in any deliberate sense. It’s people — often damaged, often unstable — moving along a very narrow line between what we call sanity and what we fear lies beyond it.
Q: Your writing has been described as unusual, even erratic. Do you recognise that?
I’ve been described as elusive, strange, and often erratic. That may be fair. I’ve experienced extremes — breakdowns and moments of clarity, poverty and comparative comfort — and I suspect those things find their way into the work. There’s a fine line between coherence and collapse. I’ve always been interested in that line.
Q: How would you describe your style?
Another critic described my prose as elegant and my narrative compelling. I would say I’ve found my style in a kind of stylised carelessness — allowing the work to breathe without over-determining it. I’m not a conventional novelist, and I’ve never tried to be one.
Q: You came to fiction relatively late. Did that shape the work?
Yes. In fiction terms I’m a late arrival. I started writing at eighteen as a journalist and worked across a wide range of publications, but I didn’t publish a novel until much later. By then, whatever voice I had was already formed — or perhaps fractured — by experience.
Q: You’ve spoken before about difficult periods in your life. Did those influence Darlene?
I came to fiction, in part, through a period of personal collapse — a self-medicated breakdown, if one were to be precise. It wasn’t something I set out to use, but it became foundational. Not in terms of content, but in how I look at things. How I approach what doesn’t easily make sense.
Q: What kind of book is Darlene?
It’s not a conventional narrative. It doesn’t offer resolution. It observes rather than concludes. It places a character within systems — medical, institutional, relational — that attempt to define her, and then quietly exposes the limits of those definitions.
Q: What interests you most in that space?
Proximity. How close we can come to understanding something without reducing it. I’m not interested in simplifying the darker aspects of human experience. Nor in redeeming them. Just in looking at them directly.
Q: What should readers expect from the novel?
I don’t think in those terms, really. I would only say that I’m not simple, and neither are my novels. Darlene doesn’t attempt to resolve that.
In this outstanding novella we get a sense of how the author’s former work had rattled the composure of publishing professionals. I suggest ultimately to their loss. Readers themselves deserve the choice to be uneasy. From disturbance and disruption of equilibrium more complex and interesting concepts emerge.
Phillip Michael Shirley was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1965 and lives in London. His work migrates between narrative urgency and a stark, often elemental sense of place and human consequence. Early in his career he was a journalist; later he became an author with HarperCollins. His first book, Miracles Can Happen, was published in 1996, but it was The Soul of Boxing – longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year – which definitively established his reputation in 1999. His other nonfiction work includes Blood and Thunder: The Unofficial Biography of Jonah Lomu, Deadly Obsessions: Life and Death in Formula One and the widely acclaimed Where Is The Winning Post, the biography of Mikie Heaton-Ellis. In fiction he has explored mythic and unsettling terrain: The Rivers That Run Through Us has been described as sometimes surreal, starkly violent and astonishing in its narrative force, earning strong reader praise for its vivid and unflinching vision.
