Goodlord: How an ‘unhinged’ email became a rage-filled novel

Vinyl floor tiles buckling with damp, an absence of natural light, ambient noise from neighbours penetrating the thin walls, acrid, polluted air permeating the windows as buses park on the street with their engines perpetually ticking over. This is the world from which the narrator of Ella Frears’ Goodlord: An Email composes her response to a seemingly innocuous email from a lettings agent. What begins as a tense, passive-aggressive reply spirals into a harrowing, hilarious and deeply confessional soliloquy. In Frears’ own words, the book exists “somewhere between an epic poem, a novel and auto fiction, as told by one long email to an estate agent from a sort of rage-filled, slightly unhinged tenant”. 

While Goodlord (published by Rough Trade Books) is Frears’ debut novel, the influence of her previous poetry collections is evident in the book’s perfect economy of language and the cadence of her narrator’s compelling speech (at times recalling Claire-Louise Bennett’s brilliant Checkout 19). “It’s quite rhythmic,” Frears tells Dazed in a recent conversation over Zoom. “It's not verse, but I guess when I started writing through this angry voice, I found a cadence that makes it slightly unsettling.”

Oscillating between docility and rage, Frears’ female protagonist’s physical and emotional boundaries are as permeable and unfixed as her home. Reflecting on conceptions of home and self, sexual interactions, property, consent, and much more, she relates her most intimate experiences to Ava, the remote, unknown and unknowable estate agent. In doing so, she moves between grandiosity and arch superiority, abject disclosure and clear-sighted, incisive wisdom. She’s at once a fantasist and an unflinching sociopolitical commentator, perfectly evoking the precarity of life during the housing crisis for people subsisting on low wages. It’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation.

Below, we talk to Ella Frears about the origins of Goodlord, the impermanence and transience of renting, and the various sources of her narrator’s seething rage. 

I love the email form Goodlord takes. How did that evolve as an idea? Did that come out of your poetry? 

Ella Frears: I was struggling to respond to a commission and, at the same time, we were supposed to renew our contract on this flat I’m in right now. We’d been renting it for ten years and every year it was the same… you know, the threat of rent being put up etcetera. I received that email, which is basically verbatim at the beginning of the book, saying I had to make an account with an automated service called Goodlord. And I felt this enormous, almost righteous rage, which felt kind of misplaced, because, over however many years of renting, there’s a lot to be angry about. 

For whatever reason, the idea of making an account with Goodlord just really unsettled me, and I began sending these quite performatively floridly angry emails to the estate agent. They would always reply very neutrally, because why would they care? It doesn’t matter to them. I realised it was a sort of void that I could throw anything down. They’d say, ‘You have to make an account with Goodlord’ and I’d send them a Yeats’ quote, ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer’, which I would never normally do – I’m not that wanker. But it felt satisfying to resist a little bit, and I realised that the commission I was struggling with could actually take this form. This was the art. And so I just moved it into the fictional realm. 

I love that it actually began with a real email, I hoped that was the case! Talking about misplaced rage, I felt like the narrator swayed between docility and fury. 

Ella Frears: I’ve been interested in a passive female protagonist for a really long time. There’s something to be said about the fact that even when you’re being passive and allowing people to interact with you however they decide to interact with you, even if you’re not seemingly encouraging, you’re not discouraging, and so things escalate. You can find yourself in dark, unsettling – or beautiful – situations. 

As a poet, there’s an element of being an observer, which I guess has done something to my writing voice... there’s an observational quality and it’s less active than you might encounter in other works where the protagonist is making things happen. I wanted to show that, because of the way society is set up – particularly for young women, and if you’re renting – society will do things to you; men will do things to you. And that is a really interesting place to find anger within because it’s more complex than just non-consensual. At times, she’s sort of into things that you imagine she won’t be into. Because when you allow things to happen, there are always peaks and troughs in terms of desire, and there’s always interest. I don’t know if that’s quite a dark way of looking at those particular situations, but…

Would you say there is an ambiguous place between passivity and consent?

Ella Frears: I don’t want it to be confused – the things that are non-consensual in the book are completely horrific and nobody should be enacting any of those things on other people. But I am interested in what happens when somebody has desires that are potentially closer to the edge. Part of the engine within her is that she’s incredibly curious about what will happen next with somebody, whoever that is. And so she allows things to go further than you might imagine somebody would, even if she’s not into it. There’s a feverishness to the book. I wanted it to feel like it was constantly vibrating close to the edge.

Quite early in the book, she talks about ‘putting on her lab coat’ and studying what’s happening to her as if she were a passive observer. She also describes her ‘inner barmaid’ coming to deal with awkward interactions...

Ella Frears: I think we have these methods for dealing with unwanted advances – mostly from men, right? And there’s a control thing that can be quite satisfying where, if you put on that sort of sarcastic and slightly bawdy personality, there’s a sort of setup that people can follow – they make a saucy joke and you make one back, and it’s all safe. But take away the bar between you and try and do that elsewhere and it doesn’t always work because somebody can just reach across the space and touch you. 

I wonder if it’s a kind of disassociation, plus a feeling of being quite skilled at keeping somebody at a distance. But it’s reliant on both parties following those social cues, and as soon as the person that’s stronger crosses that barrier, you’re fucked.

“It’s not a book about homelessness or about someone who is living in poverty. I think it’s really interesting that we’re supposed to feel lucky to be earning enough to pay rent in London, and for that we get a shitty basement” – Ella Frears

It really evokes the feeling of people encroaching on her in various ways, and the sense of her boundaries being very permeable – not just her personal and physical boundaries but also her living spaces. There’s a transience in her life as a tenant, she doesn’t have a safe home anywhere. Was that a conscious correlation on your part, or is it all bound up with the same feeling for you?

Ella Frears: I guess when I started writing through this angry voice, I found a cadence that makes it slightly unsettling because she’s trying to inflict some sort of cultural power on the estate agent who has actual power over her housing situation. As soon as I started following that anger about housing, it didn’t take long for me to follow that uneasy feeling into other places where that feeling occurs as well. And mostly that has to do with boundaries, with the body and interactions that feel atmospherically similar to what the housing crisis was doing to her. 

She has a low income but it’s not a book about homelessness or about someone who is living in poverty. I think it’s really interesting that we’re supposed to feel lucky to be earning enough to pay rent in London, and for that we get a shitty basement. When you live in that rental aesthetic, it does something to you. In trying to figure that out, other elements came in and, for me, they meet atmospherically in ideas about the body, housing, aesthetics and patronage. All of those things feel connected.

Another thing you do so well is created the sense of the narrator having fun... and then it starts curdling into something menacing.

Ella Frears: I love the word curdling –  that’s such a great description of what that feels like. We all know that feeling when things suddenly take a turn. The art residency she goes on seems like an escape for her. It’s a dream job. You think that things are going to work out. But in those situations, you’re potentially just sort of dropped somewhere and, like, that’s weird. If you’re on your own in the countryside, it might be a more romantic setting but you’re not necessarily any safer or less lonely and there’s this overriding pressure where the trust sponsoring her residency in the book acts almost like a landlord.

And she’s left in a vulnerable, isolated situation and not taken care of.

Ella Frears: But she’s also not taking care of herself. I think when you enter this cycle of survival in the most mundane sense – survival in terms of just moving through spaces, there are no savings, there’s no permanence – you’re not aware of how much you're allowing things to just happen to you. So she’s not being taken care of by the trust, but there are steps she could take, I think, with perspective. But she hasn’t had the space for perspective, so she goes deeper.

And sees a spectral horse…

Ella Frears: Ha, yes. That experience is based on a real residency and a similar thing that happened to me.  Also, her dreams of the ‘big house’.  Some of my dreams used to be set in this sort of weird manor house and a friend told me about a theory that we dream of ancestral spaces. I liked the idea that she has this place she goes to in her dreams – the kind of place she would never be able to afford in her current situation but it’s the only space she owns.

Ella Frears’ Goodlord: An Email is published by Rough Trade Books and is available here now.