Deep Down: Imogen West-Knights’ debut novel about unhappy families

Billie’s dad has died and she’s just dropped her suitcase on an old woman’s head. Guilty, embarrassed, in tears, and trapped on the tarmac of Paris’ airport, this is how we first meet Billie – one of the two central characters of Imogen West-Knights’s debut novel Deep Down. The other is Billie’s brother, Tom, who she is staying with in the immediate aftermath of their father’s death. Pivoting between Billie and Tom’s perspectives, the novel follows each sibling as they attempt to bridge the emotional gulf between them while grappling with differing responses to their dad’s death, and how his past actions continue to haunt them. 

A lot of novels spin around grief, trauma, abuse and emotional disconnection. But not many can emotionally sucker punch you with one sentence and have you in tears of laughter the next. One of the remarkable things about Deep Down is how finely attuned it is to the way grief is intimately tangled up with ridiculousness. As West-Knights puts it to me, “when terrible things happen you don’t stop being yourself” – even when ‘yourself’ is a twenty-something intern in an office that talks about “art vaping” and celebrates “International Parkour Week”, like Billie, or an ex-drama school kid working in an English pub in Paris because it seemed like a better option than going to therapy, like Tom.

Throughout the book, West-Knights excels at depicting granular details that give scenes an affective jolt, like little zaps of lightning. A plastic bag is “hanging sheepishly” off a cupboard door in lieu of a bin; there’s “a thin crawl of moss” growing out of a car’s window. By the second half of the novel, when Billie and Tom travel down into Paris’s underbelly, going deep into the catacombs, the whole narrative feels volatile; ready to shatter or explode.

I spoke to West-Knights about sibling relationships, the notion of ‘monstrosity’ and why grief is absurd.

What was your starting point for the book?

Imogen West-Knights: I wanted to write about a brother and sister, because I feel like I read a lot about sisters, and also about brothers, but not so much about mixed-gender sibling relationships. I feel like they’re not really given primacy in people’s imagination or in fiction. But they’re really important. And if you’re doing it right, that’s the longest relationship in your life, with your sibling.

I feel like split-perspective novels are often about a romantic relationship or a long-term friendship, but those are very different dynamics to sibling relationships.

Imogen West-Knights: Yes, completely. I always wanted to do it in a split perspective, because I was interested in writing about a sibling relationship where there was a disconnect.

I suppose it’s because, in a way, a lot of people feel a sibling should be like an ally in the fight against your parents. And often it doesn’t turn out that way – sometimes you’re on the same side and sometimes you’re not. I’m much more interested in sibling relationships where people are not best friends. I actually find it a bit creepy when they are. No offence, anyone!

But I’ve always been really fascinated by that thing that happens in families where two people react totally differently to the same event. I think it’s so interesting the way that traumatic things can seem to either drive people very close, or completely apart. Why does that happen? And what would it look like if you tried to renegotiate it – how do you try to fix stuff that’s so deep-seated?

I feel like you hint at the father’s violence, but it’s mostly quite hidden or off-stage. In lots of novels about abuse or trauma this can be more front-loaded, whereas here it feels less about the violence itself and more about how Billie and Tom respond to it.

Imogen West-Knights: I think that feels true to me about trauma, and about abuse. Most of your life you live not during the traumatic event, but in the aftermath of it, and you’re dealing with the way it ricochets into the rest of your life.

I felt that the violence and the aggression would be more effective the less I said about it. There’s a scene where the dad spits at the mum in a supermarket. You only need that to happen one time to understand. One spit in the supermarket can say a lot more than eight scenes where someone is getting beaten up, you know?

“I think it’s so interesting the way that traumatic things can seem to either drive people very close, or completely apart. Why does that happen? And what would it look like if you tried to renegotiate it – how do you try to fix stuff that’s so deep seated?”

Communication issues are also central to the novel. It seems to spin around what’s on the surface, what’s being concealed and how to break through those barriers.

Imogen West-Knights: I just love a conversation where people are talking but they’re not saying anything. And dancing around things, and how obvious that often is. Any family that I’ve spent a lot of time with is like that. In my family, my friends’ families, all of these families, you get used to knowing ‘oh, it’s not actually that they’re talking about, it’s that.’

I loved how you depicted Billie and Tom’s relationships with other people. In Tom’s relationship with Nour, he’s terrified of his own anger and seems to suppress his emotions because he’s so afraid anger will be his reaction to things. While in Billie’s relationship with Angus, she reacts to a fear her identity might disappear. So in both, there’s an anxiety about reproducing a dynamic that’s damaged them.

Imogen West-Knights: It was important to me to show that in a way that was different for each of them, but also the same. Again, it’s the same input, but then the way you react to it is completely different. Tom, he does go into relationships and does seek that love from someone, but then fears what he might inflict on that person because of who he thinks he is. Whereas Billie is much more like, ‘no, not going to go there, because I could replicate that same dynamic where someone needs a lot of care and I’m just going to vanish’.

You complicate the idea of being a ‘good person’ or a ‘bad person’, in a relationship as well.

Imogen West-Knights: That's something I’m interested in generally and always have been; this notion of good and bad people. I’ve always felt there is no such thing. A lot of people get hung up on this idea of being a good person, rather than being a person who does good things sometimes and bad things at other times. It was important to me that no character came out as this perfect saint or perfect villain.

That was something I really worried about with the dad, because by not having him there a lot of the time to speak for himself, I didn’t want him to end up being this uncomplicated baddie.

Tom’s ex-girlfriend Nour writes a short story and at first, it’s introduced by another character reading it and saying she’s “bored with stories like that”, stories about “monsters”. Later you learn she’s fictionalised an event from Tom’s life, without his permission. What do you think about the idea of monstrosity and the ethics of using someone else’s story?

Imogen West-Knights: I think this has been in the ether a bit, the question of what you own or don’t own as a writer. I think you can basically fictionalise everything, but I would say that because I write fiction.

When I was writing the conversation between Tom and Nour, I felt like I actually agreed with both of them. Tom overreacts, but Nour also overstepped a mark there.  Tom essentially allowed Nour to perceive him, and then she did the ultimate bad thing in his eyes, which is let other people perceive him in ways he had no control over.

The whole notion of the monster was interesting to me because I wanted there to be just enough ambiguity about the story to think, who’s the monster? The dad is the monster but Tom is worried he’s the monster.

I feel like the monstering of people who are very sick is extremely difficult. There’s an unsolvable problem when people are very mentally ill, which is, to what degree are the actions of that person their responsibility? Let’s say you know someone who is mentally unwell and they do awful things. You can know it’s not their fault, but the terrible things that person inflicts on other people as a result of their illness still hurt. So what are you meant to do with those emotions? There is nowhere public for them to go.

You can feel like there’s no room for you because they are the person suffering. And they are suffering a great deal. But there’s all these people in these pseudo-caregiving roles who often feel like they’re not allowed to have feelings about it.

It's very difficult because there’s often this idea about a hierarchy of harm.

Imogen West-Knights: Yeah, and that’s another reason I didn’t want to focus too much on the violence between the mother and the father. I wanted that to be present enough that you felt it was real, but not the focus, because so much has been written about being the victim of this kind of abuse, and even being the perpetrator of this kind of abuse, but not so much about the collateral – especially children who grow up in the shadow of violence and what that might look like in their adulthood, and how they might carry that out into the world and into making their own adult relationships.

I want to ask about the dark humour of the book. Because it is so funny, and so many people say this about grief, that there are so many ridiculous elements to the whole process.

Imogen West-Knights: It’s absurd. In hindsight it is funny. I think anyone who’s suffered a big loss in their life like that also understands, when terrible things happen you don’t stop being yourself. Someone will make a joke, and you’ll laugh, and think ‘why am I laughing, everything sucks?’ But that’s just the way it goes.

Sad things are funny and that makes them sadder – to me anyway. Life doesn’t stop, it just carries on being kind of ridiculous.

I feel like you have that absurdist quality in your journalism too, and are drawn to things that are quite bizarre or being put in weird situations. Did you approach fiction in a similar way to your journalistic writing?

Imogen West-Knights: If there is a connection in terms of sensibility, it’s because I just love a weird vibe. Like, if things are a bit uncomfortable, then I’m happy. Truly. What could be better than a situation!

Deep Down is published on March 2 by Fleet.

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