Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Peach
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017035826
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017035826
HEADING: Glass, Emma
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053 _0 |a PR6107.L345
100 1_ |a Glass, Emma
670 __ |a Peach, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Emma Glass)
670 __ |a Amazon website, viewed June 17, 2017 |b (Peach: about the author, Emma Glass was born in Swansea. She studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Kent, then decided to become a nurse and went back to study children’s nursing at Swansea University. She lives in South London and is a research nurse specialist at Evelina London Children’s Hospital)
PERSONAL
Born Swansea, Wales.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Kent; Swansea University, nursing degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and nurse. Evelina London Children’s Hospital, London, England, research nurse specialist..
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Emma Glass is a novelist and research nurse specialist in Great Britain. Her debut novel, Peach, tells the story of a young girl named Peach who is the victim of a sexual assault. The origins of the novel, published in 2018, started a decade earlier when Glass attended a creative writing class during which her fellow classmates were pitching “ideas for really high-concept novels,” Glass noted in an interview with Guardian Online contributor Marta Bausells. Glass had different ideas about the kind of story she wanted to write drawing from reading the novels of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce at the time. Glass told Bausells that she was ““fascinated with how everyone’s reading of those books is highly different, because the focus is on the language and not necessarily the story.” Although she was struggling with her writing, one night she was listening to music while writing and told Bausells that the idea for Peach “literally started with a beat” and a susequent “image in my mind of a frustrated or sad person and I identified that person as a young girl.”
In the novel, Peach comes home one night injured and staggering. However, her parents essentially ignore her, far more interested in their oversexed lives and their new baby. Peach has been assaulted by a stranger named Lincoln, and she stitches herself up in the bathroom. She does not tell her parents or her boyfriend, Green, about the rape. Peach goes on to have nightmares and lives in fear, especially after she thinks that she sees Lincoln walking in the woods near her school. As Peach tries deal with the psychological and physical aftereffects of the rape, she seeks comfort with Green. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that “tender moments between Green and Peach offer respite from an otherwise challenging story.”
Still, Peach is struggling as she views her body as deformed and growing abnormally, especially in the form of a distended belly. She is also viewing those around her differently, primarily as food, such as her baby brother whom she sees as a jelly baby, or gummy bear. Meanwhile, she keeps thinking she is seeing Lincoln but cannot be sure because of her psychological state of mind. However, eventually after those around suffer attacks, she is sure that Lincoln is stalking her. As a result, she decides that it is up to her alone to take action. “With paragraphs that read like poems, this is a memorably crafted entry into the canon of revenge narratives,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Annie Bostrom, writing in Booklist, remarked: “Glass … aptly portrays Peach’s real and mythical struggles … in this darkly arresting debut.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Peach, p. 33.
Publishers Weekly, October 30, 2017, review of Peach, p. 55.
New Statesman, January 12, 2018, review of Peach.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/books/ (January 11, 2018), Marta Bausells, “Emma Glass: ‘I Hope My Book Will Help People Find the language of the Ordeal,'” author interview.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, https://www.smh.com.au/ (January 19, 2018), Melanie Kembrey, “Interview: Emma Glass on Her Debut Novel Peach.”
Interview
Emma Glass: ‘I hope my book will help people find the language of the ordeal’
By Marta Bausells
Peach is a startlingly unusual account of sexual violence – but the author explains why it could not be more told conventionally
Marta Bausells @martabausells
Thu 11 Jan 2018 09.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.38 GMT
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Novelist Emma Glass whose first novel “Peach” is about to be published by Bloomsbury.
‘Readers can make it out to be whatever they want it to be’ ... Emma Glass. Photograph: Sarah M Lee
Emma Glass didn’t set out to write a rape revenge story; when she started her debut Peach, she didn’t know what kind of novel she wanted to write. But 10 years ago, as she sat in a creative writing class, she could see what she did not want: the teacher (“a writer who’s quite successful in the UK with fantasy novels”) was leading a class of 20, who all “seemed to have ideas for really high-concept novels”, she recalls. “I guess that’s where stories start, but for me that’s not where the story started.”
Glass was reading Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and was “fascinated with how everyone’s reading of those books is highly different, because the focus is on the language and not necessarily the story”. Stuck, she was going in circles late one night, listening to music, and Peach “literally started with a beat”. She had “an image in my mind of a frustrated or sad person and I identified that person as a young girl, and it really started from there.” That pulse can still be felt in the first line of Peach: “Thick stick sticky sticking wet ragged wool winding round the wounds, stitching the sliced skin together as I walk, scraping my mittened hand against the wall.”
The beat continued as Glass wrote, creating a rhythmic stream of consciousness of often rhyming words, all of which make Peach – a slip of a novel, but also a gut-punch – deeply affecting and very hard to put down. “Once I knew that the girl was in trouble, my mind just kind of rolled out these kind of really sleep-deprived thoughts of a menacing figure,” she says.
Lyrically and visually driven, Glass’s influences are clear in Peach. It also has its own entirely original style. Despite its slimness, it wasn’t written quickly; Glass left it half finished and returned to her native Wales, where she went to nursing school. She’s been a nurse ever since, and it wasn’t until 2016 that she reopened the manuscript and wrote its second half.
Inasmuch as it has a plot, Peach is a rape revenge story, a tale of violence and redemption. It starts with the titular protagonist’s walk home in the dark after the assault, follows her digestion of the traumatic events and culminates in a surreal catharsis, with an ultimately tragic ending. She is surrounded by her family – her sexually liberal parents and her baby brother – and her boyfriend, the loyal, morally robust Green.
But Peach does not, cannot, tell him what happened for fear of becoming “a victim”, being blamed and losing the little control she has. She goes back to school and is haunted by her rapist’s image. “I’m interested in what internalisation can do to a person. What the mind does if you hold on to certain experiences,” Glass says.
The reader sees the world through Peach’s visceral renderings of characters, places, objects: her baby brother has a jelly head, Green is tree-like, and cars “roll in rows in the street on sushi wheels”. Most oppressively, she imagines her rapist as a demonic sausage; the vile stench of barbecued pork follows her around. In one scene, she is in a diner and sees him looking at her through the window, but no one else seems to notice. Later, he “is gone but there is a seven-foot grease streak left on the glass and I can’t believe no one else saw”.
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Peach’s characters are ambiguous all the way through. Something Glass found difficult at university was “this obsession with the metaphor”: when she read passages back to her class, they’d praise her perceived use of literary devices. “I was like: ‘What if it’s not? What if it is exactly that straight-up reading of a girl who’s a fruit? What if it just is?’” Her satisfaction with Peach is the myriad readings different people have emerged with – readers can “make it out to be whatever it is they want it to be”.
Glass is conscious that the story will upset a lot of readers, but she stresses that the violence is not gratuitous. She hopes readers will stick with it to the end. “I feel real responsibility towards what I’ve written,” she adds. “I think that it will possibly and hopefully help people … find the language of the ordeal.”
Peach arrives surrounded by early praise, most notably from Man Booker prize winner and short-story luminary George Saunders (“her fearlessness renews one’s faith in the power of literature”), as well as a considerable marketing campaign. But Glass continues in her day job, and intends to keep it that way. “I’m not sure at what point I will flip around and say that first and foremost I’m a writer, rather than a nurse. And I really always want to have a balance of the two. I worked really hard to become a nurse. I love my job. It challenges me and it makes me a better writer.”
Peach by Emma Glass is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99, and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £9.49.
Emma Glass was born in Swansea. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Kent, then decided to become a nurse and went back to study Children's Nursing at Swansea University. She lives in north London and is a research nurse specialist at Evelina London Children's Hospital. Peach is her first book.
Sydney morning herald online
Interview: Emma Glass on her debut novel Peach
By Melanie Kembrey
19 January 2018 — 11:45pm
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Despite what teachers, parents and bosses might preach, Emma Glass is proof that leaving things to the last minute does not always end in tears.
Only a few days from the due date for the final assignment of her creative-writing course and exasperated by failed attempts to start, a desperate Glass resolved to type the first words that came to mind as she listened to music one evening.
February.
Photo: Sarah M Lee
"I just started throwing out words to see what would happen," Glass, 30, says on the line from North London.
"Once I relaxed and started going along with the music, throwing out individual words, an image formed in my mind. I didn't know much, but from then I had a picture of a girl in frustration."
Peach is the debut novel by Emma Glass.
Photo: Supplied
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The eventual result was Peach, a debut novel that has garnered comparisons to Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Eimear McBride's A Girl, and inspired Man Booker Prize-winner George Saunders to declare that Glass' "fearlessness renews one's faith in the power of literature".
But not yet. The high praise, promising early reviews, and inclusion on numerous "books to watch out for in 2018" lists, would come nearly a decade after Glass discovered her story beneath the shadow of a looming deadline.
Then 21, Glass submitted the early chapters and synopsis of Peach, graduated from the University of Kent in England, and returned home to Wales at a time when the recession had hit Britain hard.
"Writing wasn't really a practical option for me at the time. I needed to get a job where I would be able to be useful and have a career and I didn't think I would be able to do that as a writer," she says. "I had the time of my life at university but that's not reality and that wasn't reality for me and I couldn't see how writing would fit into my reality."
Instead, Glass followed in her mother's career footsteps and enrolled in children's nursing at Swansea University in Wales. For the next several years it was medical notes rather than novels that preoccupied her time. She spent time working as an acute nurse, helping children who were undergoing life-saving treatment for rare immunology diseases.
"Nursing changes you. The moment you see somebody's life end, that changes you. And the moment you have to work that into your everyday life, that really grounds you as a person."
But Glass had not forgotten the would-be novel her friends dubbed "that strange thing you were writing". In 2016, then 28, the time was ripe to finish Peach.
"I hadn't been able to forget about it the whole time so I just went back into it and I found it was like a riding a bike really, the language just fell out of me," Glass says. "I never thought I would send it out anywhere or try to get it looked at by an agent or publisher. I was just so happy [when] I finished it because it sort of felt like it had infected me after all those years rumbling about in my mind."
Glass may have had no "grand plans" for her novel, but writer couple Todd McEwen and Lucy Ellmann, who taught at the University of Kent, saw the potential and offered to take charge. While it reportedly took Eimear McBride nine years to find a publisher for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, things moved fast for Glass.
"It's kind of a fairy story for a writer," she says. "I know this is such an unusual thing and I feel so lucky and I feel so nervous because I know that it has been a risk."
The slim but engrossing Peach is marked by staccato punctuation, lush language, repetition and rhyme, with poetic sentences that demand to be read out loud.
Each line is precisely formed, perhaps reflecting Glass' own process of "never writing more than 100 words" before returning to edit. Try this one, for example: "The bricks push me, put pressure on each side of my stomach. If I squeeze in any more I might burst burst, pop, split and squirt my building boiling venom all over the rain-slicked street. I could burst with hate. With hate. And show my core. I wait."
The "I" is the eponymous Peach, whose stream of consciousness narration gives the novel an unstoppable flow. We meet Peach, a college student, as she navigates her way home after she has been sexually assaulted.
The book does not hide its fire. In the disturbing opening pages Peach relives her assault ("His black mouth. A slit in his skin. Open. Gaping. Burnt black. Burnt flesh"), stitches her own wounds ("White thread turns red. Red string. Going in. Going out. I pull") and watches as her pet cat laps up the blood that drips from her and leaves a puddle on the kitchen floor. The story explores the physical and psychological trauma that follows the sexual assault, and Peach's dark revenge on her attacker, the greasy "sausage man" Lincoln.
The visceral nature of the novel has led some readers to presume incorrectly that it was drawn from Glass' own experience, or that she was tapping into what she had encountered as a nurse.
The exploration of the ownership and consumption of women's bodies has an urgent contemporary relevance that Glass could not have guessed when the character of Peach first came to her as a student. Glass spent her undergraduate years analysing themes in novels, but says as a writer she was not always conscious of where her words were taking her.
"I wanted to try and tease out deep-rooted feelings to see more than anything what it looked like on a page. What it looks like on a page is pretty dark. I think I just wanted to create an entire sensory experience. It felt a bit like an out-of-body experience if I am honest because I was just so focused on the language."Perhaps too focused on language at the expense of plot and characters, according to one of Glass' university lecturers, a commercially successful writer, when they discussed her idea for her assignment.
"I completely understand what she was saying ... I just really loved the way the words flowed and I didn't want to change that to fit a conventional plot. I felt really rogue and cool doing that," says Glass. "It's so hard to write an original story. I think that's where Peach came from. For me, sitting in that classroom, everyone had really interesting ideas but I kind of felt like I had read that before, or seen that on a television show before."
In her mission to test the limits of both language and the novel as a form, Glass acknowledges the influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. But music has also proved a well of inspiration, with Kate Bush, Dylan Thomas and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon among those Glass credits as teaching her how to be daring as an artist and in her work.
Genre-defying fiction, according to Glass, is having a moment. A riskier time, she says, demands riskier writing and publishing.
"I think there is more fiction out there which is being shaped in a different way and that is a great thing," she says. "They are not just doing something different with story, they are doing something different with language and that is the key to it."
By night Glass might be dancing with words, but during the day she remains Nurse Emma.
Glass has taken the week of the publication of her novel in Britain off work, but will then return to her full-time position as a research nurse specialist at Evelina London Children's Hospital. The job is one she clearly loves – the relationships with patients and their families, the camaraderie of colleagues, the sense that she is doing something that matters.
Not to mention the inspiration she has derived for the second novel she is currently writing.
"I have this kind of dual life and one minute I will be in this busy clinic taking bloods and then two hours later I'll be at a book event. It's hard because I still haven't convinced myself that I am a writer yet. I am still Nurse Emma, the writing bit is yet to dominate."
However, there is a feeling akin to invincibility, Glass says, having written a novel with the power to shock and surprise readers. A novel that dares to be new.
"At least If no one else reads the book," she says, "I'll always have that George Saunders quote."
Print Marked Items
Peach
New Statesman.
147.5401 (Jan. 12, 2018): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Peach
Emma Glass
Glass's debut novel is a visceral work. It oozes slimy substances: blood, sausage fat, semen, grease, juice,
sweat, custard. Part fable, part novella, part poem, it opens with the words: "Thick stick sticky sticky wet
ragged wool winding round the wounds." Glass uses fragmented, sensory language to evoke the lasting
trauma of a sexual assault, from dissociative episodes to body dysmorphia. But for all its emotional insight,
the book's boldest choice is its suspension between fantasy and reality, as Peach and her friends (Green,
Spud, Mr Custard) seem increasingly to embody their names.
Bloomsbury, mpp, 12.99 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Peach." New Statesman, 12 Jan. 2018, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525709771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1756fd8a.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525709771
Peach
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Peach.
By Emma Glass.
Jan. 2018.122p. Bloomsbury, S18 (9781635571301).
College-age narrator Peach has just escaped a horrific sexual assault, not nearly unscathed, in the first pages
of this brief novel written in fluid, unconfined prose that calls to mind the work of Eimear McBride. ("I am
held under dragged under I am underwhelmed.") Peach discretely borrows the family sewing kit, stitches up
her own wound to the point of blacking out, and keeps the attack to herself while her world becomes a
claustrophobic, haunted funhouse. When Peach touches her baby brother, she can see right through the
transparent jelly he's made of. Because of her immediately full, swollen belly, she can't eat or fit in her
pants. Threatening, ransom-note-style letters from her attacker are delivered with a wink by her big-eyed,
sex-obsessed parents. When her loving boyfriend, Green, and her pet cat also suffer violent attacks, Peach
decides to take matters into her own hands. Glass, a practicing nurse in her native England, aptly portrays
Peach's real and mythical struggles between emotion and reason, power and trauma in this darkly arresting
debut.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Peach." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515383006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8dd22c3f.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515383006
Peach
Publishers Weekly.
264.44 (Oct. 30, 2017): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Peach
Emma Glass. Bloomsbury, $18 (112p) ISBN 978-1-63557-130-1
Glass's fierce and mesmerizing debut straddles the line between fable and novel as it chronicles the effects
of a sexual assault on a young woman by a depraved stranger named Lincoln. The book opens with teenage
Peach walking home after the attack, battered and bruised. The lingering smells, sounds, and taste of the
event are evoked in vivid detail: "charcoal breath," "burnt flesh," "crack crackly crackling" blood. Peach
tells no one about what happened to her--neither her boyfriend, Green, nor her oversexed parents--and
instead stitches her wounds up in the bath using a thread and sewing needle. In subsequent days, nightmares,
hallucinations, and fear creep in alongside the evocative scent of roasting sausage and eerie sightings of
Lincoln lurking in the woods near Peach's school. Peach relishes the comfort of Green's generous embrace
while trying to ignore the psychological, emotional, and physical changes roiling within her. These
surprisingly tender moments between Green and Peach offer respite from an otherwise challenging story as
it leads up to its unforgettable twist ending. Making full use of metaphor, alliteration, and wordplay, Glass's
remarkable prose stretches the boundaries of storytelling throughout, adding depth and strange beauty to this
vital novel. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Peach." Publishers Weekly, 30 Oct. 2017, p. 55. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514357732/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=33c82722.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514357732
Glass, Emma: PEACH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Glass, Emma PEACH Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $18.00 1, 23 ISBN: 978-1-63557-130-1
A young woman hyperviscerally experiences the aftermath of her rape.
On the first page of Glass' slim debut novel, we meet Peach, a college student stumbling home in the dark
after an apparent sexual assault. In truncated, lyrical language, Glass describes Peach scraping her knuckles
along a wall, stopping to be sick, leaking blood from between her legs. In the hours and days that follow, the
people in her life are largely oblivious to her clear distress--her sex-obsessed parents, her infant baby
brother, her doting boyfriend, Green. As she deals with the aftermath of her assault, her perspective is badly
warped: she believes her body, especially her belly, is distended and growing. She sees the people around
her as food: her brother is a jelly baby (a British variation of a gummy bear), and she thinks of her science
professor as Mr Custard, whose "limbs form from liquid....Blobs. Brilliant yellow. Bold, now. Bubbling."
And she keeps catching glimpses--or are they hallucinations?--of Lincoln, her attacker, whom she sees as a
sausage, greasy and fat, leering at her through windows or swinging from a streetlamp. As these visions turn
into more direct threats, Peach realizes she has to take matters into her own hands before her attacker
destroys everything she loves. Glass' stylized writing owes a clear debt to James Joyce's experimental prose,
something she acknowledges in a note at the end of the book. Although that's a difficult effect to sustain
across even a volume as slender as this one, Glass' prose is capable of breathtaking deftness. And the writing
is much more than a gimmick: the clipped sentences and obsessive repetitions provide a terrifying window
into a freshly traumatized psyche.
With paragraphs that read like poems, this is a memorably crafted entry into the canon of revenge narratives.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Glass, Emma: PEACH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244125/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=81f689d5.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509244125