She-Wolves: Writing the Women of Pompeii with Elodie Harper
Elodie surrounded by hardback copies of her historical novel set in the streets of Pompeii.
Courtesy of the Head of Zeus Twitter.
I recently had the opportunity to read an advanced copy of a historical novel set in the ancient world. It's called The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper and I just knew I had to tell you all about it.
Let's set the scene: Imagine yourself down the loud, bustling streets of ancient Pompeii. Turn the corner and walk into that shadowy doorway. You've just entered the lupanar - that word tells us that we're in the town brothel, but it also means “den of wolves.” Here we find she-wolves: women from all over, all of them enslaved and forced to ply one of the world's oldest trades. Our heroine is Amara. When her father died, she was sold into slavery by her destitute mother, and now she must do whatever it takes to survive. But Amara’s spirit is far from broken. By day she walks the streets with the wolf den’s other women, finding comfort in the laughter and the dreams they share. And the streets of Pompeii are alive with opportunity. Even the lowest slave can secure a reversal of fortune. Sharp, clever, and resourceful, Amara will do anything to find her way to freedom. But in the cutthroat world she has to live in, how much is that freedom going to cost?
The Wolf Den is everything I love in historical fiction: rich and immersive, it really does make you feel like you've traveled back in time. And the author, Elodie Harper, lets us see it through the eyes of some of Pompeii’s most interesting, and overlooked, women, giving them a vibrant and captivating voice.
I sat down with Elodie to talk about her inspirations, her characters, and what it meant to be a woman in the ancient world.
You can get a copy in the U.K. and Australia wherever books are sold! For American listeners, Blackwell’s in the U.K. is offering 100% FREE shipping to readers in the USA. All you need to do is create a free account with them when you order The Wolf Den online. They’re also selling the book at a discount, so it’s a good deal. U.K. listeners should know that Waterstones is selling a limited, signed edition with exclusive content on the real women and the lupanar of Pompeii.
Some graffiti from the lupanar, or brothel, in Pompeii. If these walls could speak I can only imagine what they’d say. (Wikicommons)
TRANSCRIPT
Elodie, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your book, The Wolf Den. I'm so excited to have you.
I'm so happy to be here. It's great. Thank you.
Of course! Well, I had the extreme privilege of being able to read your book a little bit early, which was super fun. And I just loved it. It's an incredibly immersive story. You know, my podcast is all about time traveling back through history to try to find out what it was like to live in the past, and reading your book definitely felt like time travel. So it's my favorite kind of book.
Oh, thank you so much. That honestly means a lot because that's what I love doing too. And it's really what I hoped to give readers, was just the feeling of time travel I had writing it, honestly. So that's great to hear. Thank you so much.
So what inspired you to write your book and how or where was the seed of the idea first planted for you?
It's been such a long process, in some ways, a lifelong process. So even as a kid I was really interested in the Greek myths and in ancient Rome, and then I studied at school I did Latin and Greek, I was a bit rubbish at Greek To be honest, but I loved Latin. And I studied that all the way up to university level. I mean, I had an English literature degree, but I did a paper in Latin literature. And so I read some of the texts in the original, though mainly, you know, it has to be said, in translation. And so it was a world that I've always been fascinated by. And I always wanted to write about it, but I think it is quite a male-dominated subject. Both, you know, the characters you learn about are mainly male, the people who write about it today are mainly male. Though we've obviously got Mary Beard, you know, blazing a huge trail for women scholars in the area. And in fact, more and more now there are a lot of women's scholars, but generally that was the feeling. So it took me a long while to have the confidence to write about that era. And then when I did, I mean Pompei is quite an obvious choice, because you can wander around the site, you can really have a sense of what that town was like, which as a writer is just such a gift. And the lupinar seems a kind of left field way to come into writing a book about, you know, a female-centered book given it's such a misogynist concept of a place, really. And even today, you know, just the way that it's talked about in the tourism in a quite sort of titillating way.
It's still somewhat objectified in the way it's looked at. And I just wanted to do it differently. Honestly, it was it was quite a challenge. I wanted to write a book that was neither really grim and depressing. Kind of, oh, isn't this awful, and also in a way that wasn't - which I absolutely loathe - the kind of titillating, "Oh, look at all these happy hookers" (to use that horrible phrase), you know, that really naff view of what it might have been like, that everyone's really sort of jolly and bouncy. I didn't want either of those. I wanted to think about people as people, really, and just explore the idea that this, you know, this is a part of women's experiences throughout history. There's a lack of sexual agency, but it really is not unique to women in brothels, you know. Women [in ancient Rome] didn't have any agency over who they married, or very rarely...they did sometimes. But you know, there was a lot less agency. I wanted to feel like there was not such a huge gap between the women in the lupinar and other women. So that was also partly why I wrote it. And it's also just an amazingly fascinating building, honestly. I mean, it's such an evocative place.
Well, let's talk about the place a little bit. I mean, the setting in the book is really its own character. It's so visceral, it's so detailed. I mean, as I said, reading the book really felt like I was there in ancient Pompeii and seeing the sights and smelling the smells, and really there with these women. So obviously you had to do a lot of research to be able to get all of that onto the page. So what did your research process look like?
Well, about 10 years ago, I went to this exhibition at the British Museum about life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. And it just blew my mind. Honestly, it was just such a brilliantly done exhibition. And having subsequently been to the site, it's the nearest you can get that I found, without actually being in Pompei. And they themed it. You know, there was gardens, there was taverns, they reconstructed some of these areas. And there was a lot about sex, because one of the really remarkable things about Pompeii is just how much there is about sex, not just the brothel. And so I was just fascinated by it as a place then.
In terms of the sort of specific process for this book, I knew I was going to go to the site, but before I did, I read quite a lot. Mary Beard's Pompeii is just incredibly detailed and evocative. And, you know, also a lot of books with lots of high-quality illustrations. And then sourcebooks: Alison Cooley's Pompeii and Herculaneum, which has a lot of graffiti, because graffiti was a really key component of building that particular world. And also, I have to be honest, a lot of the book is based on Latin texts. So it's, you know, it's something of a conversation - one-sided conversation on my part - with, you know, texts like Ovid's Art of Love was a huge part of the book, which is almost like a pickup artist's manual.
It's a straight-up pickup artist's book.
It is, isn't it? It's both deeply regressive, but also very modern, because these attitudes are still so there about, you know, how to get a woman to sleep with you basically, how to get her to stay, how to keep her interest. And also he did it for women as well, but in a very sort of misogynistic way about like-
...yeah, here's how to dress yourself up to make sure a man notices you, here's how to keep your man on the hook. Thanks, Ovid!
...and kind of, you know, 'don't sleep with him too soon, and make him think that other men might be interested, even if they're not, and don't you dare put your makeup on in front of him'. All that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's stuff that you would recognize from sort of modern dating tip books. So that was key. There's a book called for the Satyricon by Petronius, which is a kind of horrendous, in part, because the attitudes towards sex are just pretty horrifying. But it's a comedy set most likely in Pompeii, but an unnamed town of that period about 10 years before Vesuvius erupted. And so that was really interesting and instructive for me. So I kind of absorbed all this material. Oh, and obviously, Pliny the Elder, his writings was quite key as well. So I done a lot of research before I went to the site. And then I went to the museum in Naples, which has got a lot of the treasures and kind of got a real sense from that of the objects. And then, finally, I went to the site, to sort of piece it all together. And, you know, that really was just invaluable. I mean, you cannot - even from all the books, which are amazing - just the sense of what it's like to walk around those streets.
You know, you can see the counters, there's sunken bowls where people would have got served their stew. There's the bars, there's these incredible houses. And so even houses that I've invented in the book are based on real places, apart from the lupanar, and one or two other kind of places, like the baths. I didn't want to get so sort of tied up in "Oh my God, if I set it in the House of the Centurion, and you know, I've got to know exactly where the bathroom was," you know, which corridor went where. And so I tended to take houses there and then kind of extrapolate from it. But that's, that's kind of what the research looked like, I just loved it. I had so much fun, it was amazing.
I was wondering, while I was reading it, you know, you're taking us through the streets. And having done some reading about Pompeii myself, I knew that a lot of the buildings that you were mentioning were real places. And I love the way you peppered in all these details that were very historically accurate. But I was wondering how strictly you felt like you had to stick to like...As I was reading it, I was thinking is this actually, if you're walking through Pompeii, is this exactly how it would be? Or did she take liberties? I love seeing how authors kind of take the actual historical truth and sometimes fudge it to suit the story they're telling, which is an art. I loved how you talked about the bits of graffiti and Pompeii...no spoilers, but there are two characters who leave each other bits of graffiti and that's really one of the only ways they had to communicate to each other, which I loved. Because it's such a big part of Pompeii, and what we have from Pompeii to sort of know what life is like for people. And when it comes to the ancient world, especially when we're talking about women, there are just so many things that we don't know for certain about what their day to day looked like, about how they felt, we don't have a lot of documents that really open up their internal worlds for us. So I'm wondering, how did you fill in the gaps in your research? How did you really find your way into the minds and the hearts of these women?
When I said it took me a long while to write this book, I think what you say is absolutely true. So I did all this research, and then you have to take a bit of a leap, and have the confidence to fill in the gaps. And also sometimes to do what, you know, can feel like sacrilege. To say okay, so it probably might not have been exactly like this, but I'm going to make it like this at this specific point.
So I mean, it's like quite a minor detail: So the harbor is very much based on frescoes of what harbors along that coastline looked like. And then I had a statue of Venus in the middle of the harbor, which, you know, there's no archaeological evidence at that particular statue in the middle of the harbor. But I felt like that was something that I wanted to put there. And it doesn't feel out of place. So whenever I've done that, I mean, sometimes I've been really meticulous. So Yhe Sparrow is based on a different bar called The Phoenix, and even the sign is extrapolated from that. But the more important thing, what you were saying about actually getting into people's hearts and minds...So a book that I read as part of my research called Invisible Romans by Robert Knapp, it didn't actually find his chapter on women quite so helpful, if I'm really honest, but his chapter on slavery and trying to get into the "mind world," as he puts it, of an enslaved person, was genuinely eye opening for me, in that he looked at tomb inscriptions at, you know, fortune teller things that slaves would have looked at. He was really trying to look at the sources that remain, which were not leaked people talking about enslaved people, but how the enslaved people might have seen themselves. And you know, this kind of longing for freedom, and the ways that people might have become free and the ways that they might have preserved some aspects of themselves within a very hostile environment in terms of not allowing them a personhood. But everyone has a personhood. And so I thought...well, you know, I must admit, in this book, he was like "but I don't think you know, that women would particularly have challenged this very negative view of them." I thought, well, you know, absolutely, I except women would not have had, like, a sense of feminism as a systemic kind of philosophy. And I really, really, really didn't want to put feminism into the book in a way that would be anachronistic; women wouldn't have had that opportunity to think that way. But I do think that women as much as enslaved people, or anyone else, may have felt dissatisfied with what they have. I mean, that is just a basic human feeling to be dissatisfied with your lat, until once something else.
So I don't think the women would have been satisfied with their lives in this brothel on the whole, particularly not my main characters who didn't start off...one's kidnapped, one, you know, lost all her money. So I kind of based it from the idea of, if we take as a starting point that just because people were enslaved, doesn't mean that they didn't want more, that was really the basis. And then trying to look at what options would have been available to them at that time. And then look at, well, if those were your options, what would you do to get there? So that was really the process. To sort of look at the environment and basic human traits that we all need friendship, we all need love. We all want to feel valued, to feel secure. To be free, as much as (you know, and what is freedom etc.), but that was the basis.
I thought it was so clever, the way you have these women who have all come to sex work and enslavement from completely different circumstances. Like you say, one, her family lost all their money and her father passed away and basically they fell on hard times and she lived most of her young life as a free woman and then has ended up in this situation and is trying desperately to survive and make the best of it. One of the characters, who I don't want to say too much about because I don't want to spoil anything, but I just found her so compelling, was the woman who they called Britannica.
I'm glad you like her because she's a major player in Book Two.
I'm so glad there's a book two! That's incredible.
There are three books!
Oh, I didn't know that. That's so good! Because yes, as much as I will say nothing about the ending...but as much as I love the ending, it did leave me hoping for more.
So Britannica I found fascinating because she comes in, you know, to the brothel fairly late in the game, you can tell that she's lived a completely different life, that she was a warrior. That she's, you know, lived as a free woman. And the rest of the women are trying to help her assimilate. And it's just heartbreaking, because she's an example of someone who just refuses to even pretend to, you know, she won't even do it to survive. She just is so angry. And I loved her because it felt like she embodied the rage in the, in the sadness I felt for these women who were all doing what they could to survive, but you could see their frustration, you could see their sadness.
Because I think you're so right. I mean, there's so many enslaved people in the Roman world and so many enslaved women. And of course, they're people just like us; just because they lived in the ancient world, it doesn't make them any different. I can't imagine that there were a bunch of happy enslaved people who were like, "well, this is my life. And my life is fine. And I don't want anything else." Of course not. Of course they wanted more. And I am wondering how...I mean, you mentioned feminism, which leads into another question because reading the book, I was really struck by...you're trying to be really true to the ancient world and what it meant to be a woman in this patriarchal system. And, you know, to create something that felt real for the time, but you're also catering to a modern audience and to our ideas of a woman's agency and a woman's rights. How did you grapple with those two things? How did you figure out how to have a little bit of feminism, but like you say, not too much that it felt as if it wasn't true, it wasn't authentic?
I think, you know, ultimately, the modern audience would win if there was ever a really sort of knotty conundrum about how to go with something. But honestly, I didn't find it... maybe this is troubling...I didn't find it as big a gap as I was expecting when I started, because...So, you know, again, it's not too spoilery to say that Amara, the main character, the one whose family fell on hard times who was sold into slavery, because it was that or total destitution, right from the start of the book, her whole burning ambition is to get out of this place, you know. And she's looking for any kind of route out, whether that's working with her pimp on other lines of his business that are not to do with sex, or trying to find a patron who will sponsor her and, you know, want to have her higher up the scale because, you know, 'brothel worker' was actually not the bottom of the pile in terms of prostituted women. And it's very difficult because I know, you know, the term 'ex worker' versus 'prostituted woman', but I think there is a real kind of gradation in terms of the amount of agency, so I would genuinely generally use the word prostituted woman for the stage of where Amara is at.
So you know, the routes that are open to her, you know, attracting the attention of a wealthier, more powerful man...I mean, that is just a story that we still tell ourselves over and over again, from Pretty Woman to a million romances, you know. It's still the escape route for women from their lives, because we still don't have the same opportunities in other areas of life. So I wanted to really think about that in the book, in the sense that it's much more naked and brutal, in if one person is enslaved, and the other is free. So it's not just that somebody is much richer. But how does that tarnish every aspect of that relationship? Is it possible to love someone? Can you have love between two people in such a massive power and balance? What does she really feel about? And does she even know? Do we ever even really know why we might be attracted to someone? So there was that aspect. And then, you know, she has a number of different people that she has feelings for, relationships with, and I just tried to explore other things that were also apparent at the time. So there are some very devoted inscriptions between enslaved people or, you know, a man who was free and his wife was enslaved, or a woman who was free who bought her husband. You know, they started off as slaves and then she bought her husband's freedom, and this was kind of a great source of pride between spouses. You know, the idea of one was able to free the other.
So there were these really tender, beautiful, loving relationships between people as I think there always have been. And yes, you know, it would have been within a system at the idea of the man being...yes, it's a, you know, it's a profoundly patriarchal system. But I also think, a number of historians have made this point recently, that what we know about ancient Rome in terms of how they thought about women and men, and gender, and sexuality is so colored by the fact that comes from elite sources, and we don't actually know all the time whether, you know, the plebeian people, the common people, how bothered they were about ideas of chastity, or, or whatnot, in a woman, maybe they didn't care so much. I mean, they couldn't really care, you know, on the most sort of horrendous level, if two enslaved people who were married in a household, you know, that neither of them could control what happened to the othe. A man could not stop the master of the household sleeping with his wife, and they must have had to have had some way of processing that trauma, I think, and of still valuing one another and the relationship.
So I've kind of diverted a bit from the book, but that latter example is a way, I think, of how they're just profoundly different. I mean, I think it's unimaginable for us that a married couple would potentially have to suffer these kind of horrendous incursions into their private relationship. But equally, the other stuff about how women might use relationships with men in order to gain a sense of self or to gain a material advantage without...in the modern world, maybe thinking about it in quite such stark terms, I think that really does still exist.
Yeah, and I do think that's one of the reasons the book resonates so much. And there's so many moments that feel so true and I found deeply affecting. Because I think you're right, there are so many haunting parallels between then and now: more than we want to believe. And so you see a universal story in this book of women who are fighting to survive, but also fighting for freedom. And sometimes that means having to take drastic measures. And, you know, the way that they process that, one of the ways they process that, that I love in the book, is there's such profound friendships that develop between these women. And even though they have very different ways, some of them, of dealing with the situation, of processing, you know, the things they're forced to do. There's such a sense of kinship and sistership. And that, you know, they fight for each other. And I loved that.
Yes, and they have fun, because I think that's such a basic human need as well, honestly, is to have a laugh. And they laugh at the men, and they laugh where they can. You know, they have a tough time, but...I just, you know, however crappy your job or your situation, people want to have friends, they want to have a laugh, they want to find some way to enjoy their lives. So that was also really important to me, I didn't want it to be this kind of grim, bleak kind of ranting about how awful it was, because that's not how we cope with life, I don't think, on the main. And it would have been a very sort of much more sexually segregated environment. You know, the sort of women's baths, I wanted that to be a real real haven where women were able to hang out together and have the space to sort of chat and do a bit of business and enjoy themselves and relax. I really didn't want to set up the brothel...I mean, there is towards the end to do to get a bit of a sense of attention and rivalry between some of the women as their fortune start to diverge, but I did want to have a have a sense where it wasn't women competing for the attentions of men. They were...the key relationships for them were with each other. You know, the clients were business, but the relationships, the loving relationships that they could rely on, were with each other.
And then the very sort of fraught and complex relationship with the pimp, Felix, who I also wanted to make a multi-dimensional character. I mean, he is a monster, but he has reasons for why he's a monster. So I wanted to do that without...like, tread to really fine line without making him a character that we make all these excuses for and want to sort of romanticize. But equally, an acknowledgment that his life has been incredibly hard as well.
I thought you did an incredible job with that, because I did hate him. I thought he was a horrible, horrible man. But like you say, there's that really fine line between you're a horrible person, but I can see how you became who you are. He was enslaved originally to right?
Yes, he's a freedman. So we know from the start that he started off as a slave. And then very gradually, over the course of the book, we learn more about how and where he was enslaved and what his early life was, like. And he's made particular choices. And the relationship with Amara...I wanted to...you know, sometimes I think that's quite uncomfortable - or I hoped it would be uncomfortable to read - when she's really thinking about what Felix means to her and how she feels about him.
It's a really complex and interesting dynamic.
I'm wondering if...in the course of your research, I'm sure that you've found out a lot about being an enslaved woman in Rome, but specifically being a prostituted woman in Rome...Is there anything about their lives that you can tell us to help us understand what their day to day would have been like?
So, no, honestly, and I...not invented...but you know, I just had to use a lot of guesswork. So I had the women go out and about looking for business. In all honesty, it's quite possible, we don't know, it is quite possible, that the women in the lupanar would have been stuck there, that they would just have been stuck in those rooms. But that was just a) no narrative, and b) just too horrendous to even want to write about, honestly. And also, we don't know that for sure. It's also possible that they were kind of freelance, you know, and would be all, like, masses of different women who might have rented the space from somebody. There are so many different potential business models that that could have used, that particular brothel. A scholar called Sarah Levin Richardson has actually written a whole book about the brothel and her idea of how it might have worked, which I didn't actually use all of that, but it was fascinating and kind of illustrates how little we know and what we can deduce. So things that we do know: we do know from writings that prostituted women or sex workers, some of them would kind of wander the streets for business, as ever. Some were very much street workers, and the word 'fornix' for arches, that comes from women who would be plying their trade by tombs, or on the outskirts of the city, right at the bottom of the pile. I mean, grim. And then you would have brothel workers. And then you would have had women who just did a bit of business on the side, potentially, women working in taverns and bars were most likely doing a bit of business on the side.
Again, likely and slaved, so probably not doing business for their own profits. But some women would have been doing this as a way to make extra money. And then further up the scale, you get these kind of 'kept women' or the almost like...it's often translated as 'girlfriend' in say, Ovid, or whatever. So you know, they are providing a girlfriend experience, but they are still kept women. But then it becomes much more blurred and complex. Because it resembles much more a normal, what we would recognize as a relationship, a romantic relationship. So there's this huge spread of what people's lives might have been like.
But I think it's really important to say that the distinction we have between sex work or prostitution, and what it meant to be generally enslaved male or female, is not such a distinction. So yes, people who were registered as prostitutes or sex workers, they were a separate class of person. They were in what's called infamia. So they are kind of infamous. It's a stigmatized group of people, you have to register, that's a label you can never get rid of.
But how much of a stigma this was for people who are all living hand to mouth anyway? I mean, debatable. Sure, if you're like a high-class woman, this isn't great. But for anyone else, is that really the main preoccupation? But I think it's, and this was one of the really difficult things for me to get my head around about this period, is if you were enslaved, you had absolutely no agency. And I used the graffiti - really chilling - from Pompeii: "Take hold of your slave girl whenever you like, it's your right to use her." And that went for men as well. So both men and women had to live with this, this sense that they could be used at any time, and probably both men and women were used like that when they were enslaved within the household, just as a matter of course.
And the thing is, like, the Romans did recognize that this was not pleasant for people. So it's really not like people just accepted this as their lot and we're kind of fine with it. The Romans knew this was awful and they wouldn't want it to happen to them, you know, the free Romans. And then of course, you've got this whole category of freedmen and women who are unique to that period of history: people who've endured this life, but now don't have it, and they don't quite have the same privilege. So that I have to be honest, I find a really fascinating category of experience as well. So that's definitely going to come up more and more, I think, as I write these books.
There's this wonderful scene in the book that I was just thinking about where there's a party at the house of a freedman and his wife, who is also a freedwoman, I believe, and it's just this sumptuous, over the top, beautiful place, incredible food. And Amara goes and it's just gobsmacked by the whole thing. But you have a lot of these upper class, patrician guys who are there who are very much looking down on their host, only because he's a freedmen and so they think that they're somehow better than him. It doesn't matter how much money he makes, and is able to accrue: he'll never be viewed as their equal. And I thought it was so interesting to see that it's, you know, you're free and you have wealth and you can do so much, and yet...
I'm so thrilled you mentioned that party because that was a really specific retelling of Tramalchio's Feast in Petronius's Satyricon in which Tramalchio, the freedmen, n is the butt of the joke and we're meant to laugh at him and how crass he is. And it is a hysterical scene and he is absolutely over the top. But where Tramalchio is brash and loves himself, and just has no shame, I thought, 'well hang on a minute... what have we twist that around, and actually the Tramalchio character (he's not called Tramalchio in my book, and he's a very different sort of man) is actually riddled with insecurity and he wants to impress these men. And yes, he's making himself look ridiculous. But his aim is because he wants to be accepted. And we should have sympathy with him, and not the people who are laughing at him. I thought a lot about that party scene, so I'm really glad a bit stuck, it stood out.
Were there particular ways where you felt like your research forced your story to evolve?
So I must admit, the whole plot...almost did the whole trilogy came to me quite fast in that I felt it was....
So the Felix-Amara dynamic is quite crucial. And I wanted it to be this almost kind of nemesis relationship. And so that, that was running through it, but sort of how I told that story then...and the other really crucial point was that I wanted it to be an ensemble piece. So yes, it's about Amara's personal quest of freedom with this nemesis of Felix, but also about a group of women, very different women, and how they all felt and how they interacted.
Yeah, I mean, the research, it didn't change anything. There was no point where I thought, oh, no, you know, it's all going to collapse now, because this is just impossible. So I did try to do enough research first that that wouldn't happen. So no, I mean, I don't think there was anything that came up that really skewed things, I would say there were certain things that fed into it. So you know, the graffiti on the brothel walls with the names of the women, and sort of traces of personality, that fed into creating those characters. But it felt like a more collaborative process between me and the research as I went along rather than anything else, I'd say.
Was there a particular reason why you chose to tell the story through the eyes of both enslaved women and women who were prostitutes? What was it that made you want to choose that lens and that perspective to tell the story through?
Because I don't think it's often done, and when it is done, it tends to be done in a very particular way. So either kind of 'woe is me, this is horrendous', sort of lost honor 'Oh, the shame' type...very old fashioned. And I'm not talking about modern tellings, by the way, I should hasten to add. I'm talking about when we look at it in the past. So it's either kind of' this is all terrible', this is just the worst thing that could possibly happen to a woman, you know how her honor is ruined, or it's, kind of giggling women with their boobs out. And I just thought this...I don't want to look at it like that. I want to look at it differently. So I think the fact that there is all this kind of baggage ofeven thinking about prostituted women in the ancient world was one of the reasons that I wanted to try and look at it in a fresh way that would make people think about it differently. And really,that wasn't my primary interest, the fact that they were prostituted, honestly, because I don't think that the distinction between prostituted women and just women in general is quite as large as we feel. I mean, of course, it was. And I also don't want to make light of the fact...obviously, the reason Amara is so desperate to escape is because to have absolutely no agency whatsoever, is horrific. So it's a really difficult balance between looking at...yes, this is this is horrifying...I should say, you know, for anyone listening, I never ever wrote about it in a graphic way, ever.
Or even in an, I hope, not in a particularly obvious way, either. It's more something that's in the background, you know. We all know what it means to be prostituted, you have to have sex with lots of men. Absolutely no benefit whatsoever to me then writing loads of scenes of Amara or other characters having to have sex with lots of men. I mean, it tells us nothing new. So that's kind of more like the starting point. Okay, we know that aspect of their lives is happening, what else is happening? So I guess it's the what else - that's me burbling around trying to say it was the 'what else', this cannot be the only thing that we know about or think about this particular group of women. I want to look at all the other things
And that's really what I loved about the book is that you're, you're breathing life into what that experience would have been like, and them having to have sex with many clients is in there, but like you say it's almost background noise. You show them with desires, you show them with fears and anxieties, you show them with ambition. It's like these are full...these are women living full lives and helping each other and sometimes being jealous of each other. But it's like it's so beyond what they're forced to do to survive. And I love that because you're right, it's totally a story about well, what else is there? Because of course, that's not everything. That's not their whole lives. And that doesn't sum up their experience and who these women were. And you just breathe such life into them. They felt so real to me, in reading them. I felt like I was really there with them, which was sometimes uncomfortable.
But also just the their tenacity and their will to survive, and how, you know, they each have real low moments, but they helped to pick each other up.
And they have very different views of their lives and what their experiences mean, and what they want. And that was important to me too, because I think with something so extreme as that environment people find very, very different ways to cope. And you know, without wanting to give too much away: Victoria, one character she...she doesn't embrace the life, obviously. But she does take pride in being a very successful sex worker. I mean, she's the only one that I think the term 'sex worker' almost applies. I mean, she still is very much prostituted. And we learn more about...because she was to put on a real front, we kind of learn more about her vulnerable side much later.
I loved her, she was so brash. And so, you know...there was a sense of pride in a job well done. And you know, there were lots of jokes about how 'Oh, you always know it's her next door because of how loud she is.' I loved, like you said, the jokes and the camaraderie between the women even in difficult circumstances. But yeah, I thought Victoria was fabulous.
And I think, you know, that is one way to cope, isn't it? Okay, well, this is what I have to do. I'm just going to be great at it. And, you know, have all the business and be able to get it over fast, if that's what I want... because she has no control really, but what she's giving herself is the illusion of control.
That's it. I feel like she almost takes control by becoming...she's very good at what she does, but also she really commands a room. And she, she as much as she's able to, she really dictates the interaction she has with clients. And I love that it's like, well, I'm here. This is what's happening. This is my life. And I'm gonna, you know, not necessarily make the most of it. But do it well and kind of do it as much on my terms as I can. I loved that about her.
If you could have someone read your book, and walk away thinking about one thing, what would it be?
Firstly, I hope the they experience what you told me, which makes me really happy, which is the feeling of being immersed in a completely different world. Secondly, it is very much to think about things, particularly this group of women in this time and place, in a slightly different way. To not look at the brothel as this titillating curiosity, but to think about all the other aspects of women’s lives nd what that might have been like. And in this podcast we’re concentrating on women, and my book is mostly about women, but I did want people to think about the men too, and what it would have been to them. Bot hate people who were perpetrating that system, but also the ones suffering under it. So a sense of shared humanity, I guess, and that we aren’t as different as we might think.