Born in 1997, the British writer Jo Hamya is the author of two novels, Three Rooms (2021) and The Hypocrite (2024), as well as a short story, “Osmosis,” published in Necessary Fiction in 2020. She works as a digital archivist for the Booker Foundation and is also a journalist, featuring in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times. At present, Hamya is PhD candidate at Kings College, London, writing a thesis on digital posting as a form of critique.
Both of Hamya’s novels are concerned with the ways digital technology affects cognition and thereby shapes our encounters with one another. In her writing, no one perspective is privileged for long before being undercut, either directly within the novel by other characters or, in The Hypocrite, through Hamya’s omniscient narrator. Hamya’s refusal to uphold any one viewpoint without extensive examination leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions, resulting in novels that are more akin to thought experiments than an affective experience of readerly identification. That no one stance on contemporary political and cultural issues is endorsed without sustained in-text interrogation yields an ethical experiment for the reader—one that is always contextualised in astute intersectional analysis and a sense of historicity.
Three Rooms and The Hypocrite were both widely acclaimed, but they have also occasionally been misread—the biographical similarities between Hamya and the narrator of Three Rooms led readers to confuse the latter for a stand-in for the author. As Hamya notes in this very interview, there were also issues with the way Three Rooms was jacketed in the UK—the cover features a fractured image of a woman of colour. Because of this, Hamya shared, some readers were disappointed that the novel’s primary concern was not race. Yet, race inflects social encounters throughout the novel, both in the narrator’s own reflection on her ‘brown’ and ‘bourgeois’ identities, and in the manner that the other characters choose to bring up her race. In contrast, The Hypocrite’s content and mode foreclose inclinations to read the novel biographically; the novel features a cast of more traditionally conceived characters, none of whom share any identity markers with Hamya.
The result, in my view, heralds a new social realism that moves away from its established conventions– plot, character, ideas of progress– which it perceives as no longer adequate for capturing our contemporary moment. It is characterised by a deep interest in other people, but foregrounds their thought and arguments rather than focusing on soliciting empathy via affective readerly identification. What is more, the social dynamics in her novels are heavily inflected by social media, which shapes the ways the characters argue with one another.
We met in person, days before the publication of The Hypocrite, at Panella café in West London, followed by email exchange. Topics discussed included issues of ethics in the contemporary novel, her relationship with archives (literary, cultural, digital), Rachel Cusk’s work, and ideas of character and interiority. The interview has been edited for clarity.
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PERI MIRZA [PM]: I wanted to start by talking about questions of ethics in the contemporary novel. Could you comment on the ethical value of the novel, and how you think through the ethics of craft?
JO HAMYA [JH]: For the novel in general, I don’t think the novel has any obligation to improve the reader or society at large. I’m pretty much in agreement with Rita Felski’s idea of affective reading, where it might provide shock, or enchantment, or what have you, but it’s very subjective to the reader, and I guess to some extent the writer. I don’t know that I can think of a text that objectively betters the world. Someone might argue that the Bible does, and then I’d say the Old Testament has really fucked the world. The New Testament maybe less so.
In terms of craft, I don’t know that I thought much about it for Three Rooms, but for The Hypocrite I suppose tangentially I did think a lot about ethics. There are two main characters who are having a sustained ten-year argument in the book, and I didn’t want the reader to be able to take sides . . . I’m less concerned with the idea of morally or socially improving the reader or the environment they live in, but I am interested in putting them in some sort of grey area and making them think through whatever conclusions they are drawing from the text properly.
PM: You’ve previously discussed how you aren’t comfortable with Three Rooms being read as autofiction. To me it reads very much as a new kind of social realism, but I was curious about what traditions you see yourself writing in. Is there a particular canon or archive you feel you are writing back to, or influenced by?
JH: I was really determined to have space be the main character of the book, but there was no, ‘I read Tristan Shandy and then I moved onto Wuthering Heights, and then tried to work in the tradition of a novel.’ I was just looking for books that tackled the idea of environment in an interesting way.
I do remember getting very offended when the SEO [search engine organiser] on Google classed it as an urban novel. My publishers were very keen about the idea of it being an autofictional novel, and they jacketed it in this really strange way that I suppose led everyone to believe it had something to do with race, and then everyone was disappointed when it wasn’t. I rejected that: “urban” is just a really lazy way of saying you’re black. But I do remember a lecturer of mine calling it social realism, and it was the only thing I didn’t balk at. I had intended it to be a kind of state-of-the-nation book, but I really didn’t have anything in mind when writing it. The really sad fact is that I was so unemployed when writing it that it was just an exercise to not go mad.
PM: I read that the form of Three Rooms was shaped by a digital news archive from 2019-2020. Could you say a bit more about how that worked?
JH: From around 2016-2020, I had a file on my laptop which I’d been dropping random bits of paraphernalia into. Like tweets or New Yorker long reads, or clips from BBC Radio 4. For no purpose, really— I was just being a digital hoarder. It was really lucky, because there wasn’t much to seek out. There were some things I had to go back and find; I had to read the Grenfell inquiry, I had to go back and watch the Conservative party conference at the point where Johnson got elected, which was painful. But a lot of the everyday stuff that went into the novel, I had saved. I had dated each of the files, and then I would just go back and look at whatever was interesting . . . I think everyone does that a lot. You screenshot on your phone or you WhatsApp your friend an article you’re reading. You like tweets and they constitute an archive in their own way, so I don’t think there was anything more effortful or grand than that. It’s just that I had happened to consolidate them in a document on my laptop, which is now so dead to the world that I don’t know that I could retrieve it.
PM: Would you say there was a similar process with The Hypocrite?
JH: No, weirdly enough . . . It’s a very character-driven book, because it’s about two people arguing over who has it worse, essentially. For that, I was drawing less on a kind of news archive and more on a cultural one, and I had this kind of mood board in my head for each character. For the father in the book, I had a playlist of Leonard Cohen songs, Will Self interviews and Howard Jacobsen essays. For the daughter, I had clips from Emerald Fennell’s A Promising Young Woman (2020) and Fiona Apple songs. It was a lot more culturally inspired because they are essentially having a kind of culture war in miniature.
I think my first novel was about anatomising the country, or at least this city, because admittedly the book only goes from Oxford to London, and a brief part on a train. Then my second one was anatomising the state of mind of a sixty-something year old man and a twenty-something year old daughter.
PM: I notice you call them characters. In this sense I think The Hypocrite is formally different to Three Rooms, as they resemble characters you would find in a traditional realist novel.
JH: They probably are . . . I don’t mind using characters as kind of cognitive marionettes. I guess they are characters in the sense that they had—or at least, the father did—a voice in my head, whereas nobody did in Three Rooms. He had a very cogent voice in my head because in a way he’s kind of a complication of all these extremely erudite and sometimes unsympathetic male authors of the 80s and 90s, who had this great literary boom, who won Booker prizes or got stuck on a Granta list.
PM: Can you say more about why it was important to split the narrative space between the two protagonists in The Hypocrite?
JH: It had to be split evenly, and they both had to be compelling because I didn’t want one of them to win. I think it would have been pretty useless to write a novel in which one character is just blatantly and obviously right, and you put it down and say, ‘well I felt really sorry for that guy or for her.’ I don’t know what you could possibly gain from that, at least from a 21st-century novel, because that’s essentially just Twitter isn’t it. You read someone’s thread, and you go, ‘well, I really identify with them, or I really hate them,’ with absolutely no nuance. I wanted— in this case, it might be a reactionary book, in the sense that I wanted to start them as avatars and gradually deepen the readers understanding of them, to the point where you couldn’t pick a side.
For some reason it seems like I’ve got a real obsession with putting cleaners in my novels. There’s a part at the end of the book where you have a character, Elena, who is sort of like Maria in Three Rooms. She cleans the house that they’ve been staying in in Italy, and she throws out their work. I wanted the book to end that way because it’s partly a novel about the odd way that cultural production seems to be working in England.
The daughter in this book has written a play based on a summer she spent with her father, writing this deeply misogynistic, gross little book that you could probably very easily find if you walked into a Waterstones and found an 80s or 90s novel written by a man. But what she writes is no better than what he’s written, it’s just that it’s the right person being attacked in this case, i.e., her father. In the end, you have Elena, who’s been their housekeeper while they’re on holiday, throwing out all their work, and this book, I suppose, is a way of prompting the reader to think more about the characters’ emotional landscape than about any political statement they’ve been making throughout the book.
PM: So is it fair to say that you’re not so much interested in the desire to reconcile these different perspectives, but to stage them and leave the reader to draw their own conclusions?
JH: Yes. I find it strange that there are a lot of big summer blockbuster novels that don’t allow for any sort of complexity. The way I think of it is, you love your parents, right, but sometimes they say stuff that’s abhorrent to you. It’s either racist or its slightly homophobic or . . . but then you have to sit down and eat dinner with them later on in the night, and when you leave the house, you have to say ‘I love you’ to them. And you wouldn’t just abandon them, in spite of that. I think the novel should be like that as well. Perhaps it says something discomforting to you, or perhaps it presents you with a kind of multiplicitous set of ethics, but you still have dinner with it, so to speak, and when you put it down, maybe you’re capable of saying ‘I love you.’
PM: I wonder if you could say more about the space you give to other characters or speakers in this novel, to offer their own perspectives as a corrective to the protagonist’s outlooks.
JH: There are far fewer characters, but they do all get a prolonged period of time and actually I have a few bits of direct address in second person which incorporate the reader as a character. Because their affective judgment is going to shape the novel as well. There are these sorts of free-floating moments for the reader. Half the book is set in the theatre, taking the reader walking through the theatre, or watching the stage being set up, going out for a break in the interval. The main characters’ mother and ex-wife respectively have lunch with the daughter, and she voices her opinion of the play and the main thrust of the relationship that is propelling the plot, insofar as there is a plot, over the course of the book. There’s Elena, the cleaner, who perhaps gets less dialogue throughout the book, but she definitely ends it over the course of about eight-ten pages. I’m still, I hope, problematising what main characters are saying to the reader, by way of other perspectives.
PM: To what degree is the perspectival distribution influenced by social media?
JH: I’m constantly really fascinated by the way that, now, for example, I could be on Instagram stories or on Twitter, TikTok or what have you. And I might at one moment watch some brutal footage from the war in Gaza of people getting bombed, or starving, or being beaten. And then two seconds later, I’m being shown a cat video. And then a moment after that, I’m being told about a stranger’s break up or their relationship with their parents, and then after that I get a BBC news article about the state of the British economy or, I don’t know, new hate speech laws in Scotland, and the fact that JK Rowling is daring the police to arrest her, which, take her at her word, please do.
But I don’t really have a theory about this, except I really do wonder how it affects general cognition. Does it numb you out, or does it make you hyperactive? Possibly both, depending on how tired you are, or how long you are scrolling, or how used to the platform that you’re on. But it definitely does influence how I write.
PM: Is your doctoral research linked to any of this?
JH: Generally, in all my writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction or academic, I’m really interested in what social media is doing to my brain or to yours. Or at least—I’ll just speak for myself—to my capacity to empathise with other people, or to make a prolonged moral judgement. My PhD research has now narrowed down to the idea of posting being a form of twenty-first century criticism. I’m not particularly interested in looking at whether it’s a good or bad form of critique, but I’ve used three platforms to create a kind of digital literary sphere (that’s Simone Murray’s coinage, not mine).
I’ve been finding a great affinity between something like the idea of a timeline and Bourdieu’s idea of a field of literary production, or the idea of posting a photo on Instagram being similar to what Susan Sontag said about needing an erotics of art. Basically, I think they’re linked in the sense that I’m trying to figure out what kind of value they have on a day-to-day basis, but I don’t know that— I think that the people in my books are maybe a lot more judgmental about these platforms than I really am.
PM: In my research on Rachel Cusk, I try to elucidate her conception of what she calls an oceanic model of selfhood with her Greek chorus of speakers. Does any of that bear on how you imagine the ways selfhood today is shaped by technology?
JH: That’s really interesting, like we’re hearing everyone’s voices all the time. But I don’t know that—well, do you think that Cusk’s narrator internalises these voices that she hears? Do you think they have any impact on her view of the world or her bearing, or do you think they destabilise her in any way?
PM: On first instinct no, because you don’t get much of her—
JH: Because she’s a cipher. I think that’s a really good parallel . . . I would say that for a lot of people, having a social media presence is sort of the antithesis to being a cipher, that’s the only deviation I can see there. It’s more about establishing yourself. It depends on the platform, but if you have an Instagram profile you need to sort of litter your profile with photos that represent your tastes, your day-to-day life, and your appearance. Or if you’ve got a Twitter profile, you’re constantly tweeting things that you hope other people will react to in some way. The idea of voyeurism is always ingrained into the idea of having a social media presence.
And I guess on the other side of it, being a spectator— it’s a lot more tangible, because you’re engaging in these forms of gesture. You’re scrolling, you’re liking, you’re tapping, you’re in bed with the phone, like this, leaning over, which seems very opposite to what Cusk is doing in the Outline trilogy and where Faye is, up until the point that she gets pissed on in the last book. I know Cusk means that as a kind of feminist provocation, but for me that was always the point at which the book has to end because now Faye—how do you ignore someone peeing on you? Now, she’s got a body.
So yes, in a way you’ve got this kind of Greek chorus of voices coming toward you on social media. But there’s maybe a difference the sense that you have to be a very tangible and cogent person if you’re receiving them. Even if you’re just lurking. In order for TikTok to work for you, for example, you have to establish some kind of sense of taste. For the algorithm to show you anything of interest, you have to linger over videos.
PM: What comes next after your third novel? Do you ever think of fusing your creative and critical work, or do you see them as very separate?
JH: Well, I thought I was going to write nonfiction for the rest of my life. I thought I was going to finish my MA and then wait a couple of years, be a journalist, then complete my doctorate and write academic articles. And this is maybe why I have ended up with the form that I have. I took one creative writing class when I was 16 and one when I was 19 and I was really dissatisfied with everything that came out of them.
PM: Why do you think that was?
JH: Because all the writing felt really stymied and false. I still have this issue where when I write, the worst thing it could sound like is blatantly fictional. So, I never expected to do that, or to write novels. Though I really enjoy writing them because— well, I still haven’t figured out why.
PM: Why novels, then? What do you feel you can do with the novel that you can’t with—
JH: Why not a book of essays? I suppose with essays you really explicitly have to think about, if not the reader, then to think about what sort of argument you are crafting. And I wasn’t interested in crafting an argument or coming up with some sort of propaganda for the reader. I just wanted to write something potentially interesting and complex. Not that a work of collected essays can’t be interesting or complex. But you seldom read collections of essays that actively contradict themselves from essay to essay. Maybe like across a writer’s life, or they’ll write a forward saying, ‘I now refute what I wrote twenty years ago.’
PM: How did having already published a novel affect the way you wrote The Hypocrite?
JH: I was thinking a lot more about myself in a different way. I was very happy with Three Rooms; I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the structure and the language, but I wasn’t thinking about it as a “novelist.” Again, I wasn’t interested in crafting characters or thinking about readers. So when I started my second novel, I wanted to know whether I could do certain things as writer that I may never come back to. I wanted to know if I could write a non-linear plot, or whether I could write a sustained internal and external conflict, one that has to happen between two characters as opposed to just one the narrator feels for two hundred pages or so. And I wanted to know whether I could have characters, because in Three Rooms, characters only interact for ten pages or so. I wanted to know whether I could believably sustain a relationship for more than ten pages.
This time around, I read a lot of the first block of essays she included in Coventry (2021), and also in Aftermath (2012). I don’t know that Cusk is going to have much to do with the third novel. For that one, so far, I’ve been reading more of mumsnet, and Denise Riley on grief. I listen to a lot of music when I write. The running thread so far is that each book has one or two Nina Simone songs attached to them. For Three Rooms, it was ‘Rich Girl.’ With The Hypocrite, it was ‘Break Down and Let it All Out’ and at the end, ‘Don’t Let me be Misunderstood.’ For my third novel, the two I keep coming back to are ‘Here comes the sun’ and ‘Strange fruit.’
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Peri Mirza