VG Lee in a session chaired by Hastings Book Festival director Wayne Herbert.

VG Lee provides appetiser for Hastings Book Festival

Hastings Book Festival gets under way in mid September, and last week saw acclaimed author VG Lee in town for a literary appetiser. HOT’s Chris Connelley was smitten.

I’ll be honest. I’d never heard of VG Lee before Friday’s curtain raiser for the upcoming Hastings Book Festival at Hastings Library, which saw the author read and take part in a Q&A with festival director Wayne Herbert. But, as is often the case with those who come late to the party, I want to make up for lost time and reckon I have the potential to become a superfan.

The live event was a celebration of the re-issue, after 20 years, of VG Lee’s second novel, The Woman in Beige, her most autobiographical work which, with typical understatement, she describes as “not too bad but a bit slow”. It tells the story of Lorna Tree, a newspaper deliverer and poet, and her life and loves in the north London of the early 1990s, where the author lived at the time. It is conversational, funny, slightly waspish on occasions, and very English. Think Barbara Pym if she’d lived in N16 rather than North Oxford.

Ms Lee regaled the adoring audience, many of whom had bought the first edition of her book, with a succession of stories, taking in the original book launch at the Cava Bar in Stoke Newington, the emergence of a strong tradition of modern lesbian fiction over the last 30 years, the role of humour in her writing, the colour beige as a style signifier – “ beige is the new black” – along with a warning to avoid replicating any of the recipes that pepper the book. As the voiceover on vintage television shows used to say, don’t try them at home.

She also advocated slow, free drafting, taking sufficient time to let work find its voice and the importance of characterisation. Her own writing is especially strong on character, and sits slightly apart from much modern writing, which she thinks is now produced too quickly, under pressure from publishers, and to increasingly stock formulas in which manic plotting, cliches and stereotyping abound.

Her preference, by contrast, is for something more organic, low octane and gentle; and to develop a relationship between her readers and the characters in her writing in which we ‘sink’ into her stories and are ‘entranced’ by the people in them, much the way new arrivals to an area slowly absorb the texture and  personality of their new neighbourhood. There’s a strong sense of friendship and community in her text, a point picked up in audience questions.

Ms Lee is a self-confessed flaneuse who actively enjoys observing people and delving deeper to find out what lurks beneath the surface. While disputing that she is a brilliant writer, a throwaway line immediately contested by chair Wayne Berkeley and many in the audience, she concedes that she has a talent for people and characters before identifying Mr Ede as her favourite character in the book.

I’d strongly recommend you search out a copy of the book to find out more about him, and the sensation that is VG Lee. Her reading certainly struck an immediate cord with this ‘VG Virgin’; I’ve set aside the Booker Prize longlisted Sebastian Barry novel I was reading to get my fix of The Woman in Beige.

If you missed this session, fear not, there’s lots more literary excitement coming up. The Hastings Book Festival gets properly underway later this month with a selection of author talks, workshops and panel events mainly happening at the Observer Building on Cambridge Road in the town centre between 15 and 24 September.

Featured authors include Tom Crewe, whose first novel, The New Life, garnered rave reviews on publication earlier this year, Trix Worrall, creator of cult tv programme Desmonds, Instagram cook Richard Makin and A-lister Labour MP Wes Streeting,  who will be talking about his recently published East End memoir, One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up.

For full details, see the Hastings Book Festival website. VG Lee will be back hosting an evening showcasing local talent on 16 September.

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