Jess Shannon’s debut novel Cleaner follows the tumultuous life of an unnamed woman who just graduated from university, struggling to find work before becoming a cleaner at an art gallery. This novel has no paragraphs and reads like one long diary entry, and the erratic nature of the protagonist means there is no knowing what’ll happen next. It’s an incredibly exhilarating read, especially for those currently experiencing the transition from uni into ‘the real world’. I spoke with Jess Shannon about her writing style, transforming her dissertation into a publishable novel, and her thoughts on the current publishing industry.

Firstly, I’d love to talk about Cleaner’s writing style and lack of paragraphs. I’m interested to know more about this stylistic decision and your experience writing with this technique.

I talk a lot in interviews about how I took stylistic cues from a novel called Petite Fleur by Iosi Havilio. That’s a book with no paragraphs; it’s just one long stream of consciousness. I found it really exciting as a text, and it was actually recommended to me by my supervisor when I was doing my master’s–Cleaner started out as the first 20,000 words of my dissertation. I was finding it really hard to produce anything, and my supervisor said, ‘what you’ve written today reminds me of Petite Fleur, you should read it.’ I read it and loved it, and I kind of made a methodology out of imitating Petite Fleur. But having no paragraphs was also an exciting way for me to keep the daily grind going. Every time I started a new paragraph I would run out of ideas and stop writing, but I could keep going if the story carried on and there were no breaks. So, part of it was stylistic but part of it was practical and motivating.

You mentioned that the first 20,000 words of Cleaner came from your master’s dissertation project. What’s the difference between writing for a uni assignment and turning that into something suitable for public release?

I don’t know if it was a bit of cosmic luck that what I produced at that time was the right story to publish, but getting it from a twenty-thousand-word dissertation to a short novel was years of work. I finished my master’s and did some more qualifications before getting my first big girl job. I didn’t have a lot of time to write, so it took me two to three years to write 15,000 words, bringing it to 35,000 words total. I then got my agent, and they wanted to send it to the London Book Fair in three months’ time. They told me to make it 50,000 words so it can sell as a short novel, and I just did it. I’m a bit of a hyperfixator, so it makes sense to me that I wrote 20,000 words, did very little for two years, and then wrote another 20,000 words. I think it worked for Cleaner, because I would live a bit, wait for something weird to happen, add it to the manuscript, put it away again, go to work. Over and over again.

Do you mind sharing which parts of the novel are inspired by real life experiences?

Quite a few. I want to be careful here. It’s not autofiction, I’m not the narrator. Psychically, I don’t think any author can divorce themselves from the characters and the subconscious meaning they create, so some part of me is definitely in that book. But in terms of harvesting my life for detail or plot points, sometimes it’s just the mundane parts. If something weird happens, I find it useful too. The erotica man really happened; I read a man’s erotica in a bar when I was about nineteen. That was so funny, so I thought I’d use that. I haven’t been to a Pride and Prejudice themed gender reveal. I took influence from the TV show Miranda for that, because there’s a Pride and Prejudice coming out party, and I thought it was really funny. I did walk through chalk on a murder scene, but it was a bit less exciting than it seems. I probably shouldn’t say all the things that are real. But the characters are all fictional constructs. It’s fun to take little details and twist them into something narratively useful.

You’ve said that you choose to avoid genres and prefer to write literary fiction. I was wondering if you could speak on the current obsession with genres and tropes found within the publishing industry.

Well, it’s all part of late-stage capitalism and consumerism. It’s a business at the end of the day, the illusion of choice. I do think there’s this excessive need for tropes for a marketable product. I do like genre fiction, but I don’t need my books to follow a particular pattern. When I say I reject genre personally in my work, a part of that is because I don’t know how to do it. I find that genres are a promise you make to your reader, and I don’t always feel like I can fulfil that promise. That’s why I think there’s a lot of criticism around Cleaner, which I expected. It’s a very Marmite text that people find frustrating, because it doesn’t meet any promises. So on one hand I don’t want to follow the rules of genre, but on the other hand, following the rules is really hard. It’s hard to write a successful genre fiction piece that is original and fulfils that satisfying shape. Is there a problem with the fact that you can’t buy a book now without its tropes being shoved down your throat, where you already know what’s going to happen before you’ve even read it? Yeah, I do think that’s a problem. I think the solution though, is that people have a varied reading diet. I usually try and have something old, something literary, something trashy and something unexpected on the go, all with different reading groups.

I usually try and have something old, something literary, something trashy and something unexpected on the go, all with different reading groups.

Since we are a student publication, is there a message you want Cleaner to send to students who are about to embrace ‘the real world’?

Selfishly, I wrote it for myself. If you’re a polemic and you’re trying to write something politically stirring or with a message, it’s a different kind of writing experience. I’m a big fan of The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck; he set out to write a book about the Dust Bowl and to educate people about the reality of what was going on. He also stole a female journalist’s work and took all the credit, so it’s a problematic love of John Steinbeck. Nevertheless, he was a polemic, and it was text with a message. I wrote Cleaner with no thematic message in mind, I just wrote about things that interest me: the gendered body, domestic spaces, short term zero-hour contract work and its place in the modern world. I think what’s also important about Cleaner is that it’s a Covid novel. I graduated during Covid when no one was going to hire me; Cleaner is kind of mad and insane because I was feeling quite mad and insane. I think that part of the cleaner’s lament is that she’s overeducated and underemployed, but what she doesn’t realize is that she’s perpetuating this message that education must be financially fruitful. And I do believe in education for education’s sake, I think you should study things just because they’re meaningful. But the counterpoint to that is that everyone deserves to be valued, respected and useful in society. She doesn’t feel connected or like she belongs, and she’s seeking connection in a society that’s built around individualism, which is a systemic problem.

Words by Kitty Connolly

Image credits to Jess Shannon.