Fruit Fly starts at a party – in Crouch End on a Friday night – starring a “wannabe Bloomsbury set” where people think “Virginia Woolf is just a total fucking mood.” The hosts are Mallory and Ronan, a married couple with an enviable facade: good-looking, well-off, living in a home they own and designed with obsessive detail. Mallory used to be a literary sensation after penning a hit book, Shallow Embers, but spiralled in the aftermath, wrestling with writer’s block and obsessing over her image.

While Googling drunk for inspiration, she – a cishet woman who doesn’t know what chemsex is – goes on Grindr for a thrill, and subsequently meets a young addict, Leo. The ethics of their relationship are dubious on both ends: Leo is a thief and a fabulist, while Mallory hijacks his narrative in her pursuit of another bestseller. As both characters get into increasingly desperate situations, author Josh Silver delves deep into the themes of loneliness, tense family dynamics, and forgiveness.

We spoke with Silver about the performativity of pain, who gets to tell which stories, and the ugly side of the publishing industry.

Before beginning a writing career, you appeared on Broadway and the West End, then retrained as a mental health nurse. Tell me about these pivots.

Josh Silver: When I was at school, I definitely wanted to be an actor; I went to RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in London. When you’re 17 and you’re choosing what you want to do with your life, well… I certainly didn’t think too deeply about it. I had no real understanding of what that would look like in terms of a career. It tied in with me struggling with my mental health, and I went through a really difficult time; I had to get myself sober, which I did do. When I was sober, I questioned everything in my life and what I was trying to achieve. My whole concept of success shifted quite massively. 

I always thought that quitting acting would be seen as such huge failure, so I’d resisted it and kept going — I’d gone to this good drama school, and I’d done some good jobs — but throughout, I’d been very unhappy. One day I just sort of had enough, and I said, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.’ Literally the next day I signed up to retrain as a mental health nurse. I’m interested in the development of personality and my own coping mechanisms and how I interact with people — how I interact with myself. The government would give me a second student loan to either be a teacher or a nurse. I decided on being a nurse, and I loved it. 

It was Covid, and a lot of my creative friends were stuck at home, and I was out on these wards, learning a lot, getting this degree. I began to shatter the expectations that I had of myself. But I did start to miss being creative in a way that I don’t think working in mental health quite fulfilled for me. I started writing, and from there on, I’ve written a book every year for the last five years.

Right — you’ve written several young adult tomes, but this is your first adult novel. What’s different in your approach, given the different readership? 

Josh Silver: I didn’t know when I wrote my first young adult book that it was a young adult book. I set it from the point of view of a 17-year-old who is going into this dystopian origin story. It was coming from what I was experiencing on the wards, and the way I was frustrated at the system; it was very much informing what I was writing. When I worked on it with my agent, they said, ‘This is a young adult book.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, great.’

There are definitely things you have to think about in terms of the coming-of-age element, what you can put in and also leave out for the audience to infer. For adults, I felt like I could kind of go for it: there’s more space to explore human thought and the darkness that can come with it. I’m not saying that teenagers can’t do, but I think there’s an expectation in young adult that you don’t go too far with too many triggering or difficult subjects. 

Am I only supposed to write people from my perspective, that have gone through the pain I’ve gone through? If I write about someone else’s pain, am I appropriating it, or am I using it in a positive way to shine a light?

How did your own mental health journey inform your novel?

Josh Silver: My character Leo is a 22-year-old, gay, struggling addict, and I can definitely relate to that. I struggled a lot with addiction and having to hide parts of myself, coming from a world that didn’t fully accept who I was. I’ve seen a big change over the last 20 years in how the world navigates the LGBTQ+ community, but the pain that he experiences is definitely something that I’ve experienced. And there’s an element to Leo of having to perform his pain in order to be seen and heard. And I definitely relate to that.

I’m interested in the manipulation of using your trauma to push things in order to be seen. When I became a mental health nurse, I saw lots of people doing this too. We live in a system where it’s so stretched and the wards have so few beds that pain and mental struggle get categorised, and people feel like they have to start showing you how bad it is for them. I found the system to funnel people if the pain was being seen strongly enough. I think patients start to understand how they can get help, so I wanted to look at pain as a sort of value, and that’s what this book is about.

You mentioned changes in the perceptions of being gay throughout your life — can you expand on that?

Josh Silver: When I was an actor, when I started, being gay was not really something you’d talk about. People would say to me, ‘Don’t mention that. It’s not going to help you.’ And then there was a huge shift in diversity and how the world was coming around to the idea of allowing stories to be told by people from different demographics. Suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, tell everyone you’re gay.’ The appetite for what is relevant — is it about making money, or is it about genuinely putting stories of diversity out there? 

There’s a narrative with actors where some people might think that you could only play a gay character if you’re a gay person. Many straight actors have won awards for playing gay characters, often rooted in real trauma and pain. Many say that gay actors don’t even get a look-in at playing straight parts. But then there’s also the flip side of it, which is: can you only really play yourself? And is that really acting? This conversation is very interesting to me as a writer as well. Am I only supposed to write people from my perspective, that have gone through the pain I’ve gone through? If I write about someone else’s pain, am I appropriating it, or am I using it in a positive way to shine a light? What’s the intention? And that’s where Fruit Fly came from. The book is about who gets to tell what story. So wanting to tell half the story from the point of view of someone that I am not [as a woman] was just to put the conversation out there. Did you read Yellowface?

Yes — I very much thought of that as I was reading this.

Josh Silver: So what [RF Kuang] cleverly did was write it from the point of view of a white woman. I was very much inspired by the meta aspect.

The ethics of writing from experience that isn’t your own can be so… muddy. Leo says he and Mallory are the same, in that he wanted to steal her nice things and she steals his story. Do you think that they’re the same?

Josh Silver: Yes, that’s what I think. There’s a shared understanding in the patriarchal heteronormative system that we live in where you feel shunned. I think it’s a subconscious pain that [straight women and gay men] actually share that often makes us become very close friends and understand each other. The ‘fag hag’ term, which has been used is a bond between these two communities where we actually are sharing in an understanding of what it’s like to live in a world that is stacked against us. 

The point of the book is that these two people are reaching for connection, and actually, their pain is very similar. Mallory is being manipulated and controlled to uphold [her husband] and his needs and what he wants, and she’s looking for a way out. Leo is trying to come out of his situation, where he feels like the world has been against him because of his sexuality.

Recurrently, Mallory justifies her behaviour with the phrase: ‘This is not problematic. This is unhinged bravery.’ Where is the boundary?

Josh Silver: Yeah, what she’s doing is extreme. She gets really alive through Leo; she gets very excited by his life. She fakes her way into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to hear his story, but there’s a side of her that’s like, ‘this guy is struggling and in pain, and I get what that’s like. He’s doing extreme things; I’m going to do extreme things.’ Context really matters in explaining why someone behaves the way they do. I can understand people’s frustration and anger of having their stories told by people who might not be in the demographic. I didn’t land on any outcome, but I think writing the book was part of me exploring it for myself.

There’s a lot of skewering of the publishing industry. Mallory’s first book starts to blow up because of a YouTuber who loved the cover — and there’s also mention of BookTok, screen adaptations, editors wanting different endings. Why reference the industry itself in your book?

Josh Silver: I’m interested in the push for diversity, the nuance behind what that means: whether it’s purely about diversity, or if it’s about making money. The publishing industry is a business. The publishing industry is excited to have narratives about gay or LGBTQ+ people now, but lots of people used to not care. Now it’s useful to you to have that pain and that struggle. Do you sell more books because the cultural narrative is saying we can read those now? The conversation around authentic voice — which happens in the publishing industry a lot — is: do you need to be close to the characters you’re writing to tell the story? And it’s a very muddy conversation, like you said. There’s lots of muddiness around it. I wanted to satirise the publishing industry [...] art becomes life becomes art.

Fruit Fly is published on April 23.