“This is it! This feels better,” she remembers thinking, albeit also feeling wired and sick.
Then one night – she works best when it’s dark – she put a song on repeat and, starting at 11pm and finishing at six the following morning, wrote until she had 10,000 words. I was like: ‘People don’t need this.’ So I just binned it,” she says. It was all about grief and she felt the world was grieving enough. But looking at it again during lockdown, she just “wasn’t vibing with it”. How do you follow a smash hit like Queenie? Writer Kit de Waal advised her to get the next book out as quickly as possible, so Carty-Williams had already completed a novel about a group of friends by the time Queenie was going to press. And a photograph of her nan, who was always her most stable influence growing up. “They are two identities that I’ve seen and that I’ve loved in my life – weeping and hiding,” she says. On the pink bookshelves, there are two black-and-white prints that she bought to support Black Lives Matter: one of a woman weeping, another of a boy in a hoodie, his face hidden by beautiful hands. More sombrely, on the other wall is a poster from the 2016 film Moonlight, which she saw at the Barbican with a live orchestra playing the score she cried so much that a man asked her if she was OK.
She has a small version of Sintra that goes on the top of her Christmas tree. “Yeah, she fits in,” Carty-Williams laughs. On the wall behind her is the famous 1970s Jamaican tourist board poster of the model Sintra Arunte-Bronte in a wet T-shirt in the same candyfloss shade with the word “JAMAICA” across her breasts. It is absolutely awful, but I’m so accustomed to it.” Now she always has a friend over if a builder is coming. “It was horrible, but I was also like, ‘Of course this happens,’” she says, settling into the sofa. In a scene that might have come straight out of her debut novel, a workman cornered her in her bedroom one night and started lighting candles. While she is delighted to finally have a place of her own (much of Queenie was written in a studio with mice and slugs for company), doing it up as a single woman was no fun. It is decorated with touches of the candy-pink and lush green of one of the book’s original hardback designs. “I’m a proper south London girl for ever,” Carty-Williams declares, after welcoming me into her home in Streatham, just round the corner from where she grew up, which she was able to buy thanks to Queenie. As I go through my life I will always write the things that I’m trying to make sense of That’s it.” Also set in south London, People Person is about a non-nuclear family coming together rather than falling apart, but again touches on contemporary issues such as social media, revenge porn and distrust of the police. “It’s time to write something that is just about Black people. “Queenie was so much about Blackness in response to whiteness, I’ve said what I needed to say about that,” she says. I have to write it all down,’” the author, now 33, says when we meet to talk about her much-anticipated second novel, People Person. “Queenie was this big burst of 25-year-old energy: ‘I am sick of sexism and going on bad dates and hearing all this shit, and my friends having to go through all this shit, and going through shit at work. Critics praised its combination of empathy, wit and political awareness some readers recognised themselves in fiction for the first time. Written when she was in her early 20s, and landing in the midst of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, Queenie couldn’t have been more timely. Toni Morrison’s famous injunction to write the book you want to read might have been conceived with a future Carty-Williams in mind.
The novel has sold more than half a million copies and is being made into a TV drama on Channel 4.īut where Bridget Jones’s Diary now seems dated in terms of sexual politics, Queenie is often deeply shocking in its depiction of the heroine’s treatment at the hands of a series of toxic men, taking in internet dating, mental health problems and the housing crisis, as well as everything else that goes with being a young woman. Today, her name rarely appears without the words “publishing phenomenon” attached: Queenie won book of the year at the British book awards in 2020 (Bridget Jones took it in 1998), making Carty-Williams the first Black writer ever to get the prize, an indictment of the industry in itself. (She wasn’t working in marketing for a publishing house at the time for nothing.) She wanted her novel, which follows the misadventures of millennial south London journalist Queenie, to reach as wide a readership as possible. I t was Candice Carty-Williams who came up with the “Black Bridget Jones” tagline for her debut novel, Queenie.