This Isn't The Sort Of Things That Happens To Someone Like You

For his fourth book, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, Jon McGregor has returned to his first love – the short story.

“My publisher said I could!” laughs McGregor. “I started out writing short stories and initially I was quite determined not to write novels. I got an agent on the strength of some short stories, but they couldn’t sell them, so I caved in and wrote a novel.”
For several years the short story has languished in publishing limbo, a situation McGregor believes is changing.
“I think publishers are coming back around to it. In the last couple of years there have been quite a few debut books in the UK that have been short stories. When I started out ten years ago nobody was prepared to put out short stories as my debut. For a long time it just became a truism that collections of short stories don’t sell. But I always wonder if there wasn’t something slightly circular – that they weren’t selling, so they weren’t been published and promoted, so they weren’t selling.”
The further problem, notes McGregor, is that collections of short stories are sometimes published for expedient reasons instead of literary ones.
“I think what’s happened is that a novelist gets to the third or fourth book and decides to release some stories and it is a really thin anthology of stories that have been published in a magazine somewhere and some bits from the bottom drawer. I was really determined with this book to make it a book in its own right.”
While McGregor is no longer averse to writing novels, he argues that short fiction has significant creative pleasures.
“I don’t know if I prefer short stories, but I found putting this book together more satisfying creatively. With each story I was giving myself a new challenge and playing with new ideas. I guess the challenge with a novel in making it sustain itself over two or three hundred pages is less enjoyable – but ultimately more satisfying perhaps. The two are just so different.”
The stories in This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing fluctuate between different styles, registers and genres. For McGregor, experimentation is a way of avoiding self-repetition and complacency.
“I’m always quite wary of falling into a formula and doing something a particular way, just because that’s the way I did it last time. I kind of feel that each time you start a story you should be thinking not just about the character, the story, where it is set, but also what kind of voice it is going to be, what kind of format and what else you can do on the page. It is not experimentation for the sake of it but using format as another tool.”
While the collection may vary in style and tone, thematically This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing overwhelmingly concentrates on incidents and accidents beyond the control of the protagonists. McGregor claims this was accidental instead of intended – a neat parallel between the book and its subject matter suggesting that life really does imitate art.
“I didn’t realise that is what I was doing so consistently through the book. I think what I was interested in is not so much the idea that life is random and cruel but more the response when this kind of thing happens to somebody and how it changes who they are. I suppose I do worry about random cruel things happening. That’s partly to do with being a parent. But it wasn’t deliberate. It’s a bit disturbing!”
The title, of course, underscores the haphazard nature of life.
“The title came right at the end – it was suggested by a friend of mine who’d read a draft. As soon as he suggested it I realised that it was an underlying motif of a lot of the stories. I think it’s to do with people’s own blindness, keeping their eyes down and not seeing danger approaching until it’s too late. That’s what I was interested in.”
Blindness of all sorts afflicts McGregor’s characters – if their distraction doesn’t cause accidents then their inability to see the consequences of their behaviour imperils those around them or, as in ‘In Winter The Sky’ a character who has turned a blind eye to the truth is forced to confront her repressed knowledge of the incident that has shaped her husband’s life.
“In that story there is a lot of denial and self-deceit going on. She knows a lot more about what had happened than she seems to be saying, but she’s suppressed it.”
Despite his interest in the unforeseen, pivotal and often tragic moments that shape his characters’ lives, a number of McGregor’s short stories have a darkly comic streak. In ‘Looking Up Vagina’, for example, a young boy is teased by his classmates because of his fixation on words beginning with the letter V.
“I wrote down all the words in the dictionary between ‘vagina’ and ‘vulva’ and tried to get as many of them as possible into the story. I came up with that first line, about him being the first boy in his class to get pubic hair, and I found it quite funny. I don’t know – the story came out of nowhere.”
Hot Press gently reminds the author that there was an episode of Friends where Joey became attached to subjects beginning with V, having bought this volume of an encyclopaedia.
“Ah no! That surprises me. I’ve seen a lot of episodes of Friends but not that one. Oh dear!”

This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You is out now through Bloomsbury Press.