Asked about the origins of his new novel, author Andrew Hunter Murray recalls an encounter with an enticing newcomer during his school days. Things didn’t work out as imagined.
“I arrived at university at the age of 18 in 2005, the week that Facebook launched in the U.K., and my new friends and I all joined, and it was fantastic. It was young. It was exciting. It was fresh. We all loved it, and I don’t think we quite appreciated the world that we were building,” he said via Zoom from his London home.
“We were all so naive about the world of social media and some of the things that can go wrong when you are given access to other people’s selected highlights,” says Murray.
“I spent years worrying I was doing life wrong, that I was missing out on things, that I should be doing something different with my life. Despite having, by any measure, a fortunate and cheerful life, I was just convinced that I’d done it all wrong,” he says.
From that initial experience with social media and its aftermath, the novelist, comedy writer and co-host of the podcast “No Such Thing as a Fish” has a new novel, “Everything Happens So Much,” out now from Little, Brown. While not explicitly about social media, the novel does take a close look at what can happen when you find yourself gazing off at other possible lives instead of living the one you have.
“There’s a natural human instinct to think the grass is always greener, but I think the world we’ve built over the last 20 years has contributed hugely to that effect. This book grew out of many years of thinking and feeling like that,” says Murray. “In fact, the main character, she is called Esme, and it was only after I’d been writing the book for about three years that I realized the name Esme sounds quite a lot like the words, ‘It’s me.’
“That wasn’t a clever move. It was just something subconscious that clearly had to come out,” says Murray. “That makes it sound quite a serious book, which I hope it isn’t. I’m not really capable of doing very much without having fun and putting jokes in.”
The novel is full of jokes and offers plenty of fun, but it also explores deeper themes, too. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, we discussed Murray’s novel, his popular podcast, Jane Austen and a secret that the very private Murray had not shared before.
Q: Your novel has comedy, action and speculative elements. So how do you describe it?
A: It’s about a woman who has spent so long imagining what might have been in her life that she has completely forgotten to actually start living her own life. It’s about the ways in which the world drives us all to do that, and what happens when you’re forced to actually start living.
Q: That’s a concise way of explaining it, while also not reflecting the utter craziness of the book.
A: Good. Yeah, I know I don’t tell people about the craziness, but when I describe it in the way I view it, it sounds very worthy, and it’s not a particularly worthy book.
Q: It is! Let’s talk about your comedy writing career. How has it informed writing this book?
A: Hugely, it’s taken me five years to write it and a lot longer to think about it. But I’m so glad that I waited until now to write it. It’s my fifth novel. Two of them were very serious. Two of them were quite light. This is the first time I’ve tried something light which is also speculative. In a funny way, I think this is the novel I always wanted to write.
In terms of how comedy writing has affected it, you develop a sense after so many years of professional comedy of how to structure a joke and what’s most pleasing for an audience. Even at the length of a full novel, you want to have expectation and payoff and surprise, and those are all the basic storytelling elements that keep all of us reading.
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Q: Your narrator is very chatty and funny and opinionated, and I wonder if your experience with Jane Austen’s work as a member of the improv group Austentatious informed that at all?
A: When you’re writing comedy, you want as many different ways to surprise and delight the reader as possible, and you have a whole new voice who can notice anything in the universe, zoom in on a particular detail or zoom out through all recorded time.
It’s a technique I certainly learned and stole from Douglas Adams, who was a master at including 100 short stories in one bigger story, and it is such a fun way of surprising the reader and keeping them on their toes. So that’s why I wanted to have a fun and chatty narrator.
Jane Austen did exactly the same thing by having a gossipy narrator; she’s able to crowbar in so many more jokes. It sounds quite technical when you put it like that, but it’s just an extra joke mechanism, basically.
Q: There is a lot of comedy here, but also, tucked deep inside of some high-tension moments, surprise nuggets of really funny stuff, too.
A: Oh, I’m really chuffed to hear that. “Chuffed” is a British word which means “pleased and surprised and a bit abashed.” So we don’t need to throw in a link.
I really love the process of writing and discovering what I’m writing as I do it, and I find that if I have a reasonably good route map for whatever I’m writing, the jokes come naturally. I don’t do an enormous amount of rewriting normally at that level, because I find things turn up when they’re needed.
Q: Did I hear that you rewrote this one a bit more than usual?
A: I did. [laughs] I rewrote this one almost fully twice, which was quite a process. But I’m so glad I did. When I met the editor, Emad Akhtar, he told me, “I like the idea, but this needs a lot of work,” and he was so right. I’m so glad that he said that because in publishing, the natural impulse is to say to an author, “This is great. Sign up with us. We’ll get it out on the shelves this time next year.” Publishing, when it’s done right, is very collaborative. I felt like my editor was taking it seriously and wanting it to be the best possible expression of itself.
The really nice thing about writing this book is that it has changed more than any other book I’ve ever worked on between the first version and the final published version, and yet, despite huge amounts of change happening to it, it has ended up being exactly the book I wanted to write all along.
Normally, writing a book is a process of compromise, where you get your book of marble and you chip away at it, and eventually you have something that looks quite like your original idea.
I’m not saying this book is Michelangelo’s David, but if you want to say it’s like that, that’d be fine.
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Q: I don’t know if you’ve found this, but sometimes reading an old paperback, even by a quality author, it doesn’t seem like they spent as much time rewriting as authors do now. I don’t even mean it as a critique, only that nowadays books can feel so planned out that you don’t get that kind of rambling chapter or two. Someone would have said, “Cut that.”
A: It’s nice to have a little bit of anarchy and for it to feel fresh. I do read a lot of obituaries of authors, and quite often it will say, “So-and-so wrote his first book in six weeks,” and that’s intensely annoying, of course. [laughs] But it’s also an indication, maybe, of how much or how little planning went into it.
Q: Since the podcast “No Such Thing as a Fish” is quick and clever, I can imagine that the slower pace of writing a novel might provide opportunities for overthinking things.
A: “Fish” is such an interesting podcast because all of the facts are prepared in advance, and none of the jokes are. The four of us meet with good knowledge – amateur, but decent knowledge – and no idea of where the conversation is going to go. So every joke is fresh in that moment.
And what’s really pleasing for the audience and I think the reason we’ve lasted is that you can see the comedy forming in real time. It really is an improv show. It’s just the best research-improv show on the planet, basically. [laughs]
Q: People really do love the show.
A: Oh man, “Fish” is just the wellspring of so much stuff in our lives, and we get these emails from listeners who say things like, “I’ve had a really bad year,” or “Someone dear to me has died,” or “I’ve been very ill,” or whatever, and your podcast has helped in a difficult time.
I’m getting a bit emotional even describing it to you because we are so unworthy of that. It is just a silly, funny comedy show about facts between four friends. And yet, we are so proud that it has found a place in people’s lives; it’s just a magical feeling. I feel like I have friends all over the world now.
Q: Your novels have ranged in genre from crime, thrillers and science fiction. Do you see a throughline in your writing career?
A: I think it is to try and explain the world to itself, and to make the explanations as interesting and fun as possible, because that’s the only way that information sticks with other people. My whole career really has been finding things out and passing them on and making them as crisp and enjoyable as possible. It’s such a big and amazing and interesting world to live in, and there are so many bits of it that none of us has ever heard of. There is so much to be learned and known, and so I find that very inspiring. That’s the mission statement, if you like.
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Q: It would be easy for you guys to seem like know-it-alls, and yet you’re delighted by every new fact.
A: The aim is to prove, in a way, how little we all know, because all the facts are new to us each week. The idea is that it’s the four most interesting things we have learned in the last seven days, and we’re lucky that we get to go away and research in depth before we talk about them.
But it has potential to be the most insufferable program possible for clever people trying to show off and show that they know more than each other and certainly more than the listener. That would be awful to listen to, and the joy of facts is in discovering them and passing them on.
On “Fish,” we build something out of the facts we’ve learned each week. We build maybe a good 15 minutes of comedy about an animal you’ve never heard of, a country you’ve never considered, an event in history you’ve only faintly heard of, that’s magic to us. We love it.
Q: In fact, I wanted to ask if the detail in your novel about phosphorescent lichen came from a “No Such Thing as a Fish” fact?
A: Yeah, I was interested in lichen for a while. So much stuff in my head that is almost forgotten and/or misremembered ends up in the books. That’s a really deep cut that you’ve got there.
Q: There is the version of yourself that you share with the show, and it’s possible for listeners to think that’s the entirety of Andy: He only likes moss, books about World War II and boring periodicals about painfully dull hobbies.
A: I didn’t think this was going to be a roast, Erik, but I mean, you have got me bang to rights, yeah.
Q: I respect that you’re a private person. But you do have other interests. I learned recently that you like cycling.
A: I try not to say anything personal about myself on the show because I’m pathologically private, and I think you can get into very dangerous territory, bartering away bits of your life in exchange for audience attention. Because where do you stop? But I am happy to share with the world that I like cycling. I think that’s safe enough to give away.
On the show, I pretend to be only interested in boring societies and crosswords and funicular railways and moss to disguise the fact that … actually those are exactly what I am interested in.
And it’s a perfect cover. Everyone assumes I must be more interesting than that, because no one can possibly be this abstruse.
Q: You’ve been hiding in plain sight. That never occurred to me!
A: That’s going to be the headline now: Andrew Hunter Murray has been hiding in plain sight this whole time.
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