Opening the pages of Polly Barton’s debut novel, What Am I, A Deer?, you’re greeted with a breathlessly recounted anecdote of the narrator performing Céline Dion at a school show in a gold satin nightie. With both immediacy and the cooler reflections of hindsight, Barton sets a tone that is confessional and clinical, dissecting and shameless. 

This is Barton’s first novel, though she is an established translator of Japanese fiction, with titles like Butter by Asako Yuzuki, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai under her belt. She’s also published two works of non-fiction: Porn: An Oral History and Fifty Sounds. What Am I, A Deer? follows our narrator as she moves from the UK to Frankfurt for a translation job at a video gaming company. On her commute one morning, a stranger catches her eye, unravelling an all-consuming crush that will occupy her nearly indefinitely. 

Under the guise of her narrator’s internal monologues, fiction in Barton’s hands becomes a guise for tackling topics like heteropessimism, corporate capitalism and karaoke as a unifying theory of translation. She details her approach to writing between genres, writing obsession, and, of course, drops some karaoke recommendations.

Translation is a central theme of the book, both because of the character’s job and how she approaches language. How is fiction different to your other writing work, or is it at all?

Polly Barton: I see translation as one of a trio of things in the protagonist’s life – along with violent crushes and karaoke – where there’s some kind of complex mediation going on between her and the outside world. They’re all sites where the desire for connection and the self come together in an almost tricksy way. All of them ostensibly a way of getting outside of herself, and offering release, and communion, but all of them in a way coming back again and again to herself. 

I don’t attach all that much stead to the boundary lines between fiction and non-fiction, really. Ultimately, the difference is largely one of the expectations we attach and the way we read, rather than any hard divide in content. The writing I tend to admire the most or be the most drawn to is that which seems to blur that boundary or exists on both sides of it. I suppose I see the novel as a form rather than as something that dictates the content. That said, I think there were aspects of writing a novel that I found really liberating. Something about being able to take bolder leaps, to do less explaining. To pull out all the stops in rendering an imaginative world on the page. 

Let’s talk about karaoke, because this book takes karaoke very seriously.

Polly Barton: A thread that runs through everything that I do is paying close attention to the things that we dismiss out of hand as not worthy subjects for discussing, or writing about – particularly anything that's seen as trivial or lowbrow and therefore somehow shameful. As I talk about in the book, the general attitude to karaoke in the UK has shifted quite radically in the last ten years; when I first came back from Japan, obsessed with it, there was really quite a lot of distaste towards it, and people would be quite incredulous when I told them that I loved it. There was something about the dissonance between that reaction and my feeling, which is that I’d truly had some of the most memorable and profound moments of my life singing karaoke, that felt like quite a creative impetus.

I felt like karaoke had transformative power, and I wanted the book to explore that and also this crossover with translation, which seems big to me. This idea of becoming someone else while also remaining yourself. Of singing a song that has already been written for you, and sung, as opposed to just making one up on the spot, or in your bedroom. The narrator is really uncomfortable with herself, terribly self-conscious, and when she is nominally inhabiting another voice, she feels most comfortable in herself. That’s the paradox I wanted to centre in on. 

SO many women have said to me that they wish they liked other women and I just find it such an interesting utterance

I was going to ask about heteropessimism – I think that does come through quite clearly in the narrator’s musing after her breakup and the letter that she receives from her ex. What made you want to include this in the book and use fiction as a vehicle for this line of thinking?

Polly Barton: I guess a lot of that stuff comes straight from personal experience: at this point, so many women have said to me that they wish they liked other women, and I just find it such an interesting utterance. Or things like, ‘I’m attracted to men, but I don’t find them attractive’. I’m just fascinated by this stuff: by how people conceptualise and narrate their sexuality, how ‘raw’ desire interacts with our social mediation of it, how all of that interacts with our fantasies and ideas of what romance is. This sense of our conscious and unconscious desires pulling in different directions. And yes, I think having theory around that is really important, but I also wanted to try and depict that within a fictional setting, to make it utterly relatable, and ridiculous, because it so often is ridiculous to me. Again, I think there’s something there about digging right into the stuff that seems the most gauche to talk about. Gauche and tangled. I think there’s a way of treating that stuff in fiction, with its focus on the particular, that can get right to the heart of it in a very different way to theory.

Similarly with obsession: I read the book as an anatomy of obsession. Once the narrator gets what she wants from her crush, it’s ridiculous to her. 

Polly Barton: I love ‘anatomy of an obsession’. Does she get what she wants from her crush, though? She definitely sees it through to its completion, in a way, but I feel like the completion of it is seeing through to the reality – the shattering of the fantasy, and it‘s only when it‘s shattered that she can see it for what it is. Which always contains an element of ridiculousness, of risk. I saw someone on Instagram the other day saying ‘a crush is just a lack of information‘, which I adore. But I think there are definitely ways that the letdown can happen more gradually, more sustainably. The narrator experiences it in a very concentrated form. While she‘s in it, it‘s fully intoxicating – it‘s a kind of drug that puts her in an altered state. It‘s not necessarily easy to write from that place, but once you are that in itself is quite exhilarating. I wanted there to be a soupiness to the prose, which in some way emulates that way of being steeped in this world of blind hope and intoxication. 

I see this book as being concerned with the rift between the conscious and the unconscious mind, what we can articulate to ourselves versus what we can't

The narrator’s grandmother is German-speaking, and she feels a claim on the language without speaking it. What does this say about a failure of translation, maybe, or where translation ends?

Polly Barton: I see this book as being concerned with the rift between the conscious and the unconscious mind, what we can articulate to ourselves versus what we can‘t. I think the grandmother here, in various aspects, represents a lot of the parts of the narrator that she isn‘t able to consciously own or face. Some of that is intergenerational trauma; other parts are less clear-cut and are things that resist any linear explanation. I hadn‘t thought about it as a failure of translation, but I like that analysis: certainly there‘s something about the seepage, and how that expresses itself. I didn‘t want that to have too huge a role in the book, in terms of its presence on the page, but I wanted it to be felt as something lurking there, kind of pressing in at the walls of consciousness. 

I have to ask if you have a favourite karaoke song for releasing pressure? Also, what is your favourite place to do karaoke in the UK?

Polly Barton: I personally quite like ‘Purple Rain’ as a pressure release, but I feel like it asks quite a lot of the people in the room watching, so I wouldn't do it in front of just anybody. Blonde Redhead’s ‘23’ is also so much fun to do. I love witnessing people's unusual karaoke personalities, too. I remember going to karaoke with a big group of people and seeing this quite mild-mannered, intellectual guy sing for the first time, and he absolutely roared heavy metal in a way that totally shocked everyone in the room: it was so extreme and morbidly compelling. 

Location is harder. I used to always go to Epoc, which was an under-the-radar karaoke place in the back of a second-hand Japanese bookshop, Adanami, in an old dry cleaner’s in Brewer Street. But now I don't really have a go-to spot... I need to find one!

What Am I, A Deer? is out on March 26.