Edinburgh Book Festival: John Darnielle & Gavin Extence

John Darnielle and Gavin Extence discuss mental health and their latest novels – Wolf In White Van and The Mirror World of Melody Black respectively – at the Edinburgh Book Festival

Feature by Ross McIndoe | 24 Aug 2015

The little red tent known as the Writers' Retreat has tartan tote bags hung at intervals all along each of its four walls, like hunting trophies. The Skinny does not know why. The classical music being piped in while we wait for the event to begin adds to the atmosphere of cheerful strangeness and if it were dark outside, this whole experience would probably be quite creepy. Still, it's possibly the perfect environment for writers like John Darnielle (Wolf in White Van) and Gavin Extence (The Mirror World of Melody Black) who have a clear taste for the strange; mining black humour from the depths of life's uncompromising weirdness.

The subject for today is mental illness, a tricky topic as becomes clear when one audience member admits that he didn't read Sean (Wolf in White Van's protagonist) as mentally ill, but just as a kid with some issues, doing his best to deal with them. In the conversation that follows, both authors are careful in their handling of both edges of the double-edged sword this presents. Nobody wants to see all signs of individuality or eccentricity labelled as mental illness, but the historical tendency to refuse to treat it as an illness at all has left multitudes to suffer without the help they need. From the current tendency to use medication as a quick-fix for complex personal conditions to the possibility of drawing artistic inspiration from such dark experiences, both authors handle the issue with the sensitivity it deserves, without sacrificing any of the force of what they have to say.

Darnielle asserts that he never intended to write a book about mental illness, just one about “a plain life with some extraordinary circumstances,” while Extence makes it equally clear his purpose was never to raise any one particular issue – “I don't like books where a theme is being waved in my face.” Both have aimed to capture something much more multi-dimensional than that, and it's probably this effort to work the elements of trauma and mental illness into their characters and their stories as just one colour amongst many that allows them to portray it in a full-bodied and unflinching way, while remaining powerfully humane.


John Darnielle and Gavin Extence were speaking at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2015 on 18 August

http://www.edbookfest.co.uk