In Conversation with Jessica Moor, Author of 'Young Women'

There is a universality in womanhood that is truly represented in Jessica Moor’s novel, Young Women. Unfortunately, a lot of this camaraderie centres around the trauma inflicted upon us by the patriarchy. Instead of being able to offer answers to these issues, Young Women poses further questions about morality that truly reflect real life. Speaking to Polyester editor Gina Tonic about her writing process, the complications of the story and the reality of being a young woman, Jessica Moor gets deep on her second book.

A lot of the book is about idolising new friends and I think this is so common amongst women, feeling like their friends are impossibly perfect not even from a jealousy point of view, but out of awe. Why do you think women are especially susceptible to this?

Historically women haven’t been treated like full humans, and idealisation is a form of dehumanisation, albeit one that seems complimentary. Whether it’s Beyoncé or Helen of Troy or Marilyn Monroe, we elevate certain women in a way that allows them to be everything – except a whole person. Whole people are flawed.

I don’t think that women idealise women more than men do. Men definitely idealise (certain) women. But we’re all susceptible to that desire to put a woman on a pedestal – to deny her complexity. It’s one of the knottier, more pervasive forms of misogyny.

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On the other hand, Lucy is almost taken for granted, how do we avoid doing this to our friends?

Emily dismisses Lucy because Emily is insecure. She sees Lucy’s choices almost as a judgement on her own decisions. That can happen when you’ve grown up with someone – always seeing them as a peer. You forget that they’re different from you, that they might have different longings or passions or needs.

I try to cherish my friends for the ways in which they’re not like me. For the ways in which they’re wiser, or funnier, or more committed, or more informed. And not to see that as a threat or a failure on my part, but just a wonderful influence that I’m lucky to have in my life.

How much of this book was lifted from your own experiences? The writing is so relatable, it feels like we’ve all experienced these relationships in some regard.

It’s not direct experience, per se, but it just feels like something in the water of being a millennial woman. It’s a shared sense of anxiety, a guilt that we can’t hold all the problems of the world in our mind at once, a constant low level environmental dread. 

There’s a lot of me in each of the three main characters. With Emily it’s the striving, the sense that I ought to be doing something good, but also the smallness and the self-absorption. And I admire Tamsin – I admire the way she embraces life and refuses to be put into a box. But she conceives of responsibility very differently to Emily – she’s an individualist. And you could definitely say that that’s a tension in my own psyche.

What is definitely direct experience is the experience of being at an all-girls school in the early 2000s. That pressure-cooker environment, and the way it creates indelible friendships but also some pretty unhealthy attitudes towards relationships? Yup. It me. 

“I don’t really get overwhelmed by dark themes when writing. I get overwhelmed by what I see going on in the world.”

There are lots of different ways that men are toxic in Young Women, from the very serious to Stu’s act of negging, how important was it to show such a wide range of misogyny from the male characters?

It’s worth pointing out that there are also a couple of decent men. James and Andrew are decent guys, as is Youssou. They’re decent because their egos aren’t out of control – they don’t put themselves at the centre of every situation. 

With that said, yes, the novel runs the full gamut of shitty men. The range is really in the amount of power that these men have. I don’t think Rawlings’ misogyny is qualitatively different to Stu’s, but Rawlings has had decades of power, decades of being surrounded by yes men (and women), decades of being told that he’s a genius and feeling that other people don’t matter. And that’s how monsters are created.

How much responsibility do you think women have to other women, even those we don’t know?

We talk about rights all the time, don’t we? But we so rarely talk about responsibility. And the two have to be in balance. The question that the book asks is - (some) women now have (some) freedom – what are we going to do with it?

I think if I want to call myself a feminist, I do have to interrogate my choices. I can’t just tell myself that I can do whatever I want and that’s liberation. I need to ask myself whether my choices make the world a better or worse place for women. All women. 

Do you think we owe our friends access to all our secrets or are we allowed to keep certain issues private? 

Of course we’re allowed to keep certain things private! Everyone has the right to an interior life.

But it begs an interesting question – what exactly is it that we owe our friends? It’s not such an easily defined relationship. We can pretty comfortably identify what we owe to our partner, or our family, or even our colleagues. But friends can range from a buddy you’d go for coffee with, to your ride-or-die soulmate who’d help you bury a body. And we certainly owe those friends our honesty, but that doesn’t mean giving them unmitigated access to all our secrets. What do we owe each other? It depends, but it has to be reciprocal. Unequal friendships aren’t good for anyone.

And how much do we owe to our friends to keep their secrets safe?

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? What if you’ve been trusted with a secret, but revealing the secret could potentially help a lot of people? If you keep the secret does that make you complicit in whatever the repercussions are?

I don’t know. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t have needed to write a novel about it. I’m interested to know what readers think.

The ending of the book is morally open ended and I can understand feeling either way about Emily’s actions - did you purposefully leave this a grey area as to replicate the grey area where it sits in real life?

Exactly. Because there’s a tension between what’s good for women as a group and what might be good for an individual. I’m quite sympathetic to Emily – I truly believe that she was trying to do the right thing. But because of the complexities of everything we’ve talked about, it’s not actually clear what the right thing is.

People who abuse their power, and harm others, they’re the ones who are to blame. The ways in which other people screw up their responses are important, but there is huge ambiguity about the best way to handle a situation like that. What isn’t ambiguous is that abusing your power over someone is wrong.

When writing this book, which has so many dark themes, how did you protect yourself from negative feelings or becoming overwhelmed with the issues discussed?

I don’t really get overwhelmed by dark themes when writing. I get overwhelmed by what I see going on in the world. Then, by writing, I can metabolise that distress, can separate myself from it and become curious about it. The writing is what lets me ask - what exactly is happening? How do things like this happen? We need to understand those questions before we can create change.

Do you think male readers will have a different take away from this book than women?

I think male readers have had quite a different reaction to the friendship between Emily and Tamsin. Those super-intense, rather romantic (which isn’t necessarily to say sexual) friendships often aren’t as possible for men. That’s because of the way we police masculinity. And I think that’s a shame. Maybe I’d like men to know what a wonderful experience those close friendships can be.

Young Women by Jessica Moor is out on 26th May. Order your copy here and sign up to Moor’s mailing list here. #WeAreYoungWomen

Words: Gina Tonic