First-person narrative that poignantly captures the loneliness of an unlovable teenager who makes even her own mother feel uncomfortable
Here’s a new tip for budding novelists. Spend hours on eBay, until you enter a “perfect state of catatonia”. Until you are – in the words of Tasha Kavanagh – dumbed down, “till you’re just this kind of drone”. At this point Kavanagh explains, “the work would come out of me”. Things went so well that her first draft of Things We Have in Common turned out to be the only one she needed, and got her a publishing deal with Canongate.
Most importantly, this unorthodox way of working helped her to capture the strange, unsettling voice of her 16-year-old first-person narrator Yasmin. A voice that can be flat and almost monosyllabic: “I went up to my room when we got home. I wanted to be on my own. I sat on my bed and thought about really trying to make the effort to lose weight this time.” But also a voice capable of acute insight and moments of sharp hilarity. She describes a curry as “like an alien autopsy”. Then explains that her mother is unable to use the word “fat” in relation to her daughter’s all too obvious weight problem: “It is our Voldemort.”
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