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In Will This House Last Forever?, Xanthi Barker reckons with the memory of her dad, the poet Sebastian Barker. He fascinated her but he also often chose poetry and the metaphysical over family and the everyday. His flickering between presence and absence as a father informed Xanthi’s experience of his death, resulting in her adamance that he was still alive, or that he could come back at any time. This memorable, affecting, and—despite everything—funny book traverses a loss that is gradual and then quick, and finds a way through.
Mirror Water met with Xanthi Barker in Highbury Fields on a hot day roughly two weeks prior to the publication of her memoir, Will This House Last Forever?, which is out now and available here.
MIRROR WATER: Can you introduce us to Will This House Last Forever?
XANTHI BARKER: I wanted to write about the experience of grieving for someone who you have very strong and very mixed feelings about. Will This House Last Forever? is about my relationship with my dad, who left when I was a baby. He was a poet, hugely intelligent, and this magical presence and a real playfulness when I was with him though I didn’t see him much. I was kind of in awe of him and in some ways we were close but he often let me down. He died when I was 25 and so the book is also about caring for him while he was dying and trying to work out our relationship. It’s also about alcoholism and eating disorders and growing up with a single mum too.
MW: Your book presents grief as a process, in all of its unfinished-ness. Did this grief make the book hard to write (or finish)?
XB: Unfinished-ness is a good word for it because the grief process is never really finished. You think you’re not grieving anymore and then a few years later you realise that everything you were doing was still done out of grief. The first chapter is all about thinking my dad’s not dead, and while I was writing that I was still convinced that he wasn’t dead. I thought I was writing some kind of philosophical proof, that people would finally believe me. But by the time I reached the end of the book it felt like he was really gone. Maybe writing it was the final stage of grief.
MW: What is it like for the people in your life to read something so personal?
XB: My brother said I’d solidified his memories of our dad. My dad’s sister said she felt that she had her brother back, that he came back to life for her while she was reading it, which meant a lot to me.
It was probably hardest for my mum because she is most implicated in it. I think the emotions were too raw, though. I wanted to write it for her because it’s her story as well. In a lot of my dad’s obituaries our family was written out, or conflated with his previous marriage — it felt like confirmation of our rejection from his life. But my parents’ relationship was such a romantic, beautiful story and I didn’t want it to be lost. I think readers will sympathise with her. She did everything for us with no one else to help, living alone with two small babies, on benefits in all the deprivations of those conditions and completely heartbroken. (Xanthi looks over to her phone which is ringing) It’s my mum! She knows we’re talking about her!
My boyfriend was upset the first time he read the book. He read it one morning and then he came to my work because he wanted to see me straight away. When you meet someone in the time after events like this they don’t always know the whole story so reading the book meant he could understand things about me in a way he might not otherwise have been able to do.
MW: Have you always wanted to write? Can you tell us about some of your earliest writing?
XB: I was one of those children who wanted to write stories all the time. Maybe because my dad was a writer and I wanted to be closer to him, to be part of his world. My mum took me to a creative writing class where you make a little book over a few weeks. But I think I shocked everyone because I wrote about a dog who convinced a woman to marry him and then he ate her on their wedding day.
Another time—I think I was 9 or 10—I had a teacher who would get us to meditate before writing poetry, which is something I still think is useful. You relax your muscles, follow certain visualisations, and then write about what comes to you. I wrote a poem about how I hated my stepdad. The teachers took me aside to see if I was okay and one of them asked me if they could publish it anonymously in the school magazine, which caused a lot of upset in the end. I can still remember it: ‘We were fine / until you came along / like a tyrannosaurus rex’. I was so pleased to have made something out of my fury, I can still remember the feeling.
My mum, my brother, and I were living on benefits with a flat falling apart, no money to replace anything, things like that. And then, in the background of that, we would go and see my dad and—though he wasn’t living in luxury either, by any means—but he would always be making something, or painting something, and showing us how to do it too. I think a parent who is seen rarely is always able to uphold an image of freedom and fun and excitement more easily, for obvious reasons, but he really instilled in me a sense of wonder. There was a manuscript of his that was tied together with string, a metre long on his shelf. That poem came out when I was little and was part of the reason that my parents split up, because he was so obsessed with it. But that manuscript fascinated me, that you could write something on that many pieces of paper, with that many iterations. There was this idea that you can be a poet as a way of living — not that it was a job, necessarily, but that it was a particular way of being alive.
MW: Your book is written in prose but it incorporates and absorbs your dad’s poetry, too, including a poem of his that he wanted you to finish. What do you like about prose? Have you ever written poetry?
"I wanted to write about the experience of grieving for someone who you have very strong and very mixed feelings about.
"
XB: I like that prose is so much like a conversation. But I think I’ve been scared to write poetry because my dad was a poet and his parents were poets and I felt like I would always be under their strict ideas of what poetry is and that it would feel hard to be free or be myself. My dad used to say ‘life is too short for prose’. He was critical of me trying to write a novel, so maybe in some ways writing prose is my way of striking out for independence.
That said, I’m glad his poems are in my book because it feels like a collaboration. The title of Will This House Last Forever? is a question I asked him that he put in a poem, but then I put his poem in my book so that feels like a back and forth between us.
I still need to finish my dad’s poem and get it published, which was his dying wish for me. He sent me a string of texts about it which didn’t really make sense, but he said I needed to ‘get a platypus to ski down the lines until they were all correct’. So I think he means some fine tuning, and to get it published.
MW: How does it feel to be a published writer?
XB: The weird thing which I’m trying to fight against is how you always move the goalposts in your head. At one point I thought ‘If I can get an agent I’ll be really happy’, and then it was ‘If my book is published I’ll be really happy, whatever else comes of it’. Then even that starts to feel like it’s not good enough. It’s self-defeating. So I want to enjoy it. Making a career or a living as a writer is in many ways separate to having a book published. There’s the other things like teaching and engaging with the whole literary machine. An old boyfriend thought it was so audacious of me to say I was a writer because I was a waitress and a tutor, that was how I earned money, but I spent most of my time writing. At that time I thought ‘Well that is the main thing I do, why shouldn’t I say that I’m a writer?’ I’d like to be that audacious again, not to let other people define me.
MW: What was it like to narrate the audiobook of your memoir?
"I was one of those children who wanted to write stories all the time.
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XB: I was anticipating feeling self-conscious about my voice, and doing it badly and sneezing a lot or something. Writing is often a distancing activity for me, putting something away from me — out of my head and onto the page. But for the audiobook it felt like the opposite, more like taking it all in again. I also had to put on a version of my dad’s voice to read some of his poems, approximating his distinctive rhythm and voice. We recorded the most upsetting part of the book all in one day—adultery, divorce, cancer, death—and it was intensely emotional, but the technician was so gentle. I loved doing it in the end. It felt like reading the book to my dad.
MW: Do you keep a diary or journal?
XB: Yes. I started keeping a proper journal when my dad got ill. I had been writing a novel and I couldn’t do anything anymore so I kept a journal instead. I write it on my computer and always write the place, the time and the date. I like the satisfaction of watching it build up in one document so it feels like a long creative project.
I’m running a four-week masterclass with Litro this autumn about journaling and self care for writers. It’s online, live, at a time that should mean it’s accessible internationally. We’re thinking about memoir, journaling for creative work, and journaling for self care.
MW: Are you writing at the moment? MW: When you’re not writing, what is your preferred way to rest and recuperate? XB: Drink loads of water. Have a shower. Put really soft clothes on. Lie down in the perfect temperature with the window open and a blanket. And read something gripping. I was feeling bad recently so I did this and reread Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The emotional dynamics in it feel so overpowering and so cleansing. Everything is in those books. You can find information about Xanthi’s Life Writing Masterclass with Litro here.
XB: I’m trying to write a novel, or something like a novel. I had a baby just before lockdown which has changed my creative process quite a bit, so I’ve been collecting fragments written in moments stolen during nap times, mostly on my phone. At the moment I’m trying to arrange it into a cohesive narrative — fiction based around birth trauma, sexual assault and the effects of loneliness and isolation on memory.
"Writing is often a distancing activity for me, putting something away from me — out of my head and onto the page.
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Xanthi Barker was born in London where she still lives. In 2019 her novelette One Thing was published by Open Pen. Will This House Last Forever? is her first book.
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