Elle Nash on her new novel Deliver Me

Deliver Me is a viscerally uncomfortable book. There are passages which are almost overwhelming; the body horror, animal cruelty, and desperate situation of the protagonist, Dee-Dee, are upsetting and often shocking. But author Elle Nash has written an incredibly complex and vivid story with a protagonist for whom readers cannot help but feel a deep and shocking empathy. It’s a story of obsessive hope and love in the darkest of places; focusing on one working-class woman living in the heart of rural Missouri. The novel follows Dee-Dee, who is desperate to become pregnant, set against the complex social and political backdrop of the American rural South. 

Dee-Dee doesn’t hold many similarities with Nash, but the observations of America’s Southern states come from Nash’s experience living and beginning a family there. “I lived in the Ozarks in Arkansas,” Nash explains. “I was just really obsessed with the way that people in the South treated me while I was pregnant. It was like being above a first-class citizen.”

The rural South almost becomes a second protagonist in the story, and Nash deftly uses her own observations and experiences to bring it to life. The prevalence of the United Pentecostal Church, the lack of maternal and social healthcare, and Dee-Dee’s manual labour job in a chicken factory: these factors are the driving forces that make her life unstable and unsupported.

“It's very dangerous for women and mothers in general in the rural South,” Nash says. “There's just not a lot of access to proper medical care…There's not good access to maternal care, but there's also not good access to mental healthcare, either. That's one of the reasons why I feel that [Dee-Dee] ends up falling through the cracks. And that's a lived reality for a lot of women and disenfranchised people in the United States.”

It's clear that healthcare is an issue which Nash cares deeply about; Deliver Me is, arguably, a manifesto for nationalised, free healthcare. Dee-Dee’s story is a would-be mother’s horror story; a gruesome fable that threatens us with a reality outside of the NHS.  

“I'm extremely passionate about access to healthcare, especially now after moving to Scotland, and seeing for myself internally the way that the NHS works…It has its issues, but there's something there that is at least functional and it gives access to healthcare. It's radicalised me a lot more in terms of like seeing what the United States does and how terrible that access is.”

Adequate access to good healthcare would have completely revolutionised Dee-Dee’s life and Nash doesn’t hesitate in highlighting the United States letting its citizens down in this way.

“Being able to assess her mental state of health and seeing how she is – having someone in the system who's advocating for her, that's asking her about the state of her relationship and the power dynamic within it… There's ways that you can catch and support people through access to healthcare.”

Deliver Me is a tricky book to discuss without giving away the plot, and Nash is conscious to not discuss Dee-Dee’s journey in too much detail. Without giving away any spoilers, Nash says she drew her inspiration from a crime committed by a woman also desperate to become pregnant, in Denver in 2015.  

“When I dove further into it, I realised that it was a very fringe crime that happened very rarely. There were maybe 35-40 cases that existed worldwide that had ever happened,” Nash says. But, she is careful to add, she doesn’t write about the fringe crime for just shock or horror value. “I want to look at [the crime] with empathy and say: how does that happen?”

When setting out to write Deliver Me, Nash asked herself, “Can I bring a person with me on this journey to the end? Can I, adequately and believably and with empathy, bring a reader with me to that end?”

Nash says she doesn’t know if she’s succeeded or not, but reading Deliver Me is a bizarre and unsettling experience: it can be horrifying and gruesome, but it’s also profoundly, and uneasily, relatable. 

“I don't want to say too much in case someone wants to go down this rabbit hole, but one of the cases is so sad and so harrowing that you just look at the justice system, and you see the way that misogyny is present in the justice system and the sentencing of these women. And that's some of where [Dee-Dee] was born out of.” 

It’s hard not to fall down the rabbit hole once you’ve read Deliver Me. This is a book that will not just haunt you past its final pages, but also propel you into a warren of your own research: delivering you into a world of fascination, horror, and deep sadness for the women that slip through the cracks. 

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Deliver Me is out with Verve Books on 27 Jun. Elle Nash is in conversation with Kirsty Logan at Waterstones Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, 26 Jun, 7pm