Feeding Frenzy: Hot Press meets Natalie Young

"I haven’t seen a dead man’s penis,” declares author Natalie Young. “But I can imagine that it isn’t hugely appealing.”

Truth be told, there’s probably no part of the male anatomy that’s terribly appealing if you’re planning on preparing, cooking and consuming it. Young’s extraordinary sophomore novel, Season To Taste (or How To Eat Your Husband), centres around an outwardly unremarkable, fifty-something, Surrey housewife named Lizzie Prain, who does just exactly that.

Having killed her emotionally abusive husband of 30 years, impulsively smashing his head in with a garden spade on an otherwise dull Monday morning, Lizzie Prain needs to dispose of the evidence. She decides that the kindest and most moral thing she can do is to carve his carcass into 16 parts, freeze the sections in intricately labelled packages and... eat them.

Over the course of 276 occasionally stomach-churning pages, she gradually ingests and excretes her former spouse: roasting, frying, boiling and barbequing his various body parts. Curiously, however, when our man-eating anti-heroine eventually defrosts and devours Jacob’s penis, Young doesn’t especially dwell on the details.

“When I was writing the book, I didn’t make conscious decisions as I was going through,” the 37-year-old Englishwoman explains. “I followed the thoughts that I was having in my head. I didn’t sit there and think, ‘I should probably do this and this, and that will make it better’. In terms of the actual penis, I was always conscious that his head was the most important. I was really interested in the idea that she can’t move away from the head.”

Whatever the body part, accurately describing Lizzie’s culinary cannibalism required some expert outside knowledge. “I did some research with a brain surgeon at George’s Hospital in Tooting, and I basically learnt from her what to do with the body. The practicalities of dismembering and disposing.”

Written in a laconic, detached and often humorous style, with echoes of Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Camus’ L’Étrange, Season To Taste is a truly bizarre literary feast. Given its taboo theme, it hasn’t been to everybody’s liking. Even so, Young declares herself surprised at the largely positive reactions.

“The interesting thing about the book is it’s getting different responses from people,” she observes. “I thought it was going to upset a lot more people, or that more people were going to be against it. But it’s weird, it seems to be about 75% at the moment raving about it, and then another group can’t go anywhere near it or won’t touch it.”

Young was born and raised in the Surrey hills, not far from the isolated countryside where the story is set. Having studied English at the University of Bristol, she lived in Paris and various other European capitals “writing and being a terrible waitress.” She married and had two children in southern France, before returning to the UK where she worked at The Times as the book buyer for serialisation, and later as arts and books editor of Prospect Magazine.

“I have always written, since I was 11 years old,” she says. “And the ambition was always to be a novelist, so I did other jobs on the side. I actually started off at The Times as a PA, but ended up writing book reviews and buying books for serialisation there. I always worked at something else to support myself, because I didn’t make enough money. So now I work part-time in publishing. I sell book rights to Brazil and to Portugal.”

Her debut novel, We All Ran into the Sunlight (a blend of modern and historical fiction set in a small French town), was published to respectable reviews but fairly paltry sales in 2011. Freudians will delight in hearing that Season To Taste was written while she was going through a divorce. She sounds slightly peeved when it’s mentioned. “Well, it was happening at the time, yes.”

Was her marital implosion a major influence on what she was writing? “I think inevitably, yes, our lives will affect what we are writing,” she admits. “Life does have a way of feeding itself into your work, whether you are conscious of it or not. So it would have had an effect. Of course, all the gossip columns like to dwell on the divorce. But I don’t know whether it’s interesting or not, really. This book kind of stands on its own terms.”

Thankfully, her ex-husband hasn’t taken umbrage. “He absolutely loves it,” she insists. “He actually gave a quote to The Telegraph saying that he’s very proud of it. He’s telling everyone he knows about it. He thought it was gripping, he thought it was funny, he thought it was clever.”

Gripping, funny and clever it may be, but the novel is also occasionally quite grisly. While it can be hard-going to read, it must have been hell to write. Was there a point where she wanted to stop?

“Absolutely! I did stop once, for three months. I had written most of the dark stuff, and I realised I couldn’t go on any longer with it. It was kind of repugnant. So I just took a break from it. And what made me go back to it was a conversation with a friend, where she just kind of persuaded me to get back into it. And I think having a break, I was able to get perspective on it and see the ways I was able to make it funnier.”

The subject matter is lightened considerably by frequent use of the lists of self-help advice Lizzie writes herself (“As much as possible, switch off the thinking brain and go through the motions. Eat, shit, sleep. Repeat this mantra to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you go to sleep at night”).

“That came in quite late in the process. I realised that was the way of cracking open what would otherwise have been a relentlessly dark and horrible book. Once I got the idea to include her lists, it just cracked the whole thing open and made it feel very modern and very fresh. And very accessible to a popular audience, as well as a more literary audience.”

The novel also features numerous lovingly-described recipes of the type that most definitely shouldn’t be attempted at home. However, Young maintains that she isn’t actually a great cook. “I have a great love of food, prepared for me by somebody else,” she reflects. “I love to be cooked for. Or to go out to eat – which I don’t have the luxury of doing very often. You see, when I was writing this book, I was unemployed and a single mum. So, as you can imagine, I didn’t get cooked for or taken out to eat. So food was a kind of obsession, but in an odd sort of way. It’s funny how these things come out.”

What’s the weirdest thing she’s ever eaten? “Actually, I’m not adventurous,” she laughs. “I once ate an undercooked scallop, and it has haunted me ever since.”

Season To Taste is is out now through Headline.