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Stella DuffyStella Duffy
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BiographyStella Duffy was born in London in 1963 and spent her childhood in New Zealand. Her novels are: Singling Out the Couples (1998); Eating Cake (1999); Immaculate Conceit (2000), adapted for the stage with the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain; State of Happiness (2004), in which a couple, Jack and Cindy, find that when Cindy falls dangerously ill they must face the ultimate test of their relationship; Parallel Lies (2005), involving the murder of one member of a menage a trois; and The Room of Lost Things (2008).
She has also written five crime novels featuring Private Investigator Saz Martin: Calendar Girl (1994); Wavewalker (1996); Beneath the Blonde (1997); Fresh Flesh (1999) and Mouth of Babes (2005). She has published over 20 short stories, many feature articles for magazines and newspapers, and also writes for radio and theatre. With Lauren Henderson she is co-editor of the anthology Tart Noir (2002). Her short story, 'Martha Grace', included in the Tart Noir anthology, was awarded the CWA Macallan Short Story Dagger in 2002.
In addition to her writing work, Stella Duffy is an actor, comedian and improviser. She has performed in Improbable Theatre's highly acclaimed Lifegame throughout Britain, off-Broadway in New York, and in Australia. She has also recorded several plays and the sitcom Losers for BBC Radio 4.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Crime, Drama, Fiction, Radio drama, Short stories
BibliographyCalendar Girl Serpent's Tail, 1994 Wavewalker Serpent's Tail, 1996 Beneath the Blonde Serpent's Tail, 1997 Singling Out the Couples Sceptre, 1998 Eating Cake Sceptre, 1999 Fresh Flesh Serpent's Tail, 1999 Immaculate Conceit Sceptre, 2000 Tart Noir (editor with Lauren Henderson) Macmillan, 2002 State of Happiness Virago, 2004 Mouth of Babes Serpent's Tail, 2005 Parallel Lies Virago, 2005 The Room of Lost Things Virago, 2008
Prizes and awards2002 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger ('Martha Grace')
Critical PerspectiveMagical, shape-shifting Princess Cushla is on a mission throughout Stella Duffy’s exuberantly splenetic fairy tale novel Singling Out the Couples (1998), to break up couples in love by becoming what they most desire. As she explains at its outset, when she was born, ‘in a land both far away and remarkably close’, the Compassion Fairy was stuck on the tube. Above all, she hates couples: ‘their smugness, their sweetness, their names and games and charm and we not me, and they not he or she …. from my window, at a north by northwest through two o’clock I see them. A He and a She. Hands touch, electricity runs from his palm to hers. They’ll do. They’re done. I’ve only just begun.’ Duffy takes a wickedly satirical look at contemporary sexual manners, especially in Singling Out the Couples, Eating Cake (1999), concerning adultery and its consequences, and Immaculate Conceit (2000). She employs fable and ‘the supernatural’ to counter-point cynical wit in anti-romances detailing the minutiae and problems of relationships (at least among fairly affluent metropolitan circles) between men and women, and between women. She is adept with the contradictory unreasonableness of feelings, the self-delusion and narcissism involved in passion, as well as raising wider feminist issues to do with women’s contemporary lives. State of Happiness (2004), however, shows something of a change, featuring a couple facing a far more serious test of their relationship, when the woman is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.
Growing up in a small town in New Zealand, Duffy was equally exposed to American and British culture, and by her own account influenced as much by television and movies as by literature. (She is herself a lively engaging reader, performer and actor.) Among her formative authors were Janet Frame (who gave her ‘permission to play with words’), Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, especially the latter’s Sexing the Cherry with its elements of fairy tale and feminist fable. The language of Duffy’s books is clever as well as forceful, often with passionate outbursts of free-flowing, almost poetic prose sprinkled with rhymes; the idiomatic is mixed with cultural references, wordplay, sometimes peculiar syntax, revamped clichés (‘variety is the spice of night life’) and, occasionally, slang and swear words.
She began by writing crime novels, and has laconically described her first such book Calendar Girl (1994), as ‘a relationship novel that went wrong’ when a dead body turned up. Her own contribution to the crime genre has been lesbian private eye Saz Martin, who features in three subsequent quirky adventures. Duffy went on to co-edit Tart Noir (2002), an Anglo-American anthology of crime stories by writers such as Val McDermid and Denise Mina. Their collective intention was to ‘cover all the bases from classic crime to magical anti-realism, hot sex to cold calculation’. In Duffy’s own prize-winning story ‘Martha Grace’, she deliberately created a woman who is ‘the opposite of all that we have been led to believe are the only attributes of desirability’. Martha Grace is a 58-year-old, regarded as ‘a witch’ by suspicious locals, who conducts an energetic sexual affair with a 16-year-old, and commits the perfect murder – with a blackcurrant tart. Cushla is another wicked woman handy with a knife, though her victims in Singling Out the Couples survive to lament their fall from grace: they include a soppy young couple who are engaged to be married, and a mixed race gay ‘multi-media coupling’. When she selects a bisexual masseuse ‘for a change’, Cushla’s equally seductive brother David arrives in London, ‘to halt the murder of love’. Can there be a happy ending for all concerned? ‘What do you think this is? A fairy tale?’
Like Cushla, the angel Gabriel in Immaculate Conceit has taken the form, for Sofia, of an apparently ideal lover. His mission, however, is not to sow dissension but to bring her the Good News that she will become the mother of the new Messiah. Sofia tells her incredulous therapist Beth that ‘I have spent a night shagging a bloke who appears in my flat and sometimes behind my eyes’. This is a version of the Bible story set in contemporary London, but also about women’s current lives, mental health and attitudes towards the body. For Sofia is a lap-dancer, or ‘post feminist stripper’ as she puts it, and as well as the usual problems with boyfriends, drink and recreational drugs, has a past history of self-harming. ‘As my therapist says, I’m an unlikely choice for Virgin Mary’. A mixture of comical scenes and serious issues ensues, as Sofia comes to terms with her choice to have the baby and is enabled to change her own life through her disembodied sexual relations with Gabriel. There is a more positive view of the possibilities of relationships, while the religious content (Sofia and Gabriel’s discussions about Free Will, and her divine son’s destiny) works surprisingly convincingly. An equivocal final scene takes place years later showing Sofia’s son walking on water – ‘her constant fear finally confirmed’.
Stella Duffy changed publisher for State of Happiness, and abandoned, at least temporarily, her characteristically irreverent manner. This is by far her most movingly emotional story and, significantly, her most realist, with less conspicuous wordplay. It concerns memory and mortality, and has been called ‘a sharp sobering cocktail spiked with metaphysic, immense good humour and understanding’ (Ali Smith), and at its heart once again is a relationship, between American mapmaker Cindy, and TV news producer Jack. They are another of Duffy’s materially successful couples who hit problems, though not this time of commitment. Jack gets a high-powered new job in Los Angeles and Cindy reluctantly moves from New York to be with him. She is diagnosed with a terminal illness, following a collapse in front of her students. The poignancy of her medical treatment and physical decline is accompanied by severe strains on their love, and its ultimate strengthening. The chapters are framed by quotes from Cindy’s book Dis-Location, about maps and mapping human lives, and her musings on such things are carried through to a movingly inevitable finale. Cindy’s past and present, her memories and relationships - with her parents, best friend Kelly, previous lovers and above all with Jack – at last come together. They find that ‘Love clarified inside disease’. She goes to her computer one last time and traces a ‘Mappacindy’: ‘a spiral of learning routes … travel, lovers, potential and past partners all spinning into each other …. Linking each moment to this disease, to the first collapse, to now’. Stella Duffy’s own mapping of relationships in her novels is wide-ranging, and she is able to move from cynical wit to pathos with great conviction.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
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