Emma Forrest’s unflinchingly candid memoir about her suicide attempt, Your Voice in My Head, presented a definitive list of places the author had found to cut herself: “Thigh. Bikini Line. Forearms. The Chateau Marmont. The Standard. The Mondrian.”
It’s a passage that displays both the best and worst of Forrest’s writing: provocative, honest and disarmingly funny; yet all the while assuming an insouciant familiarity with the world’s most exclusive bohemian hotels. Her debut novel, Thin Skin, featured a damaged Hollywood starlet with a compulsion to self-harm. Her most recent film project, Untogether, which she both wrote and directed, contains a scene in which a blocked writer in Los Angeles inflicts paper cuts with the pages of her previous novel.
It should come as no great surprise that the current book features a spoiled 19-year-old heiress named Jasmine who lands up in hospital in London following the latest in a series of suicide attempts. As the occupant of the next bed, an introspective boy named Steven, observes, it is not a good look: “She was bone white, cuts on her arms, holes all the way up her ears, black charcoal staining her chin where they’d induced the vomiting.”
Eighteen-year-old Steven – who might be gay “but hasn’t decided yet” – has not been put in hospital by his own hand, but that of his father, a drunk and abusive East End taxi driver. To the eternal shame of his dad, Steven dreams of transcending his working-class Jewish background and becoming a fashion designer. Also, this being the summer of 1981, he is unhealthily obsessed with the sartorial choices and emotional state of the new Princess of Wales.
Whereas Jasmine’s case history could have been cut and pasted from any of Forrest’s previous books (“a spoiled princess marinated in childhood trauma … she felt intoxicating but was clearly toxic”), the characterisation of Steven is tenderly handled and shows real imaginative effort. His sensitivity becomes apparent in the pride he takes in his illustrations, as well as in “my skill with a sewing machine, my skill with taking out the rubbish, my bread-toasting abilities, my ability to name Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands in correct order”. He is exceptionally close to his mother, who lives in the shadow of her husband’s violent mood swings: “He bought her perfume on her birthday and he hit her. He got her kitchen remodelled and he hit her. He cheated on her and he hit her. He told her she was beautiful and he hit her.”
Motherless Jasmine, by contrast, lives alone in a Notting Hill mansion, receiving infrequent visits from a father whose idea of supportive parenting is to ensure that her cocaine hasn’t been cut with baking powder. Steven and Jasmine’s intense affair is entirely platonic – they take a lot of long baths together, during which Steven’s penis “shrinks to the form of a sleeping cat, curled up, content and lifeless” – and the narrative blurs into a sequence of indistinguishably hedonistic episodes in Jamaican nightclubs and Parisian hotels. The most fully focused scene occurs in a defiantly unreconstructed East End corset shop where, smothered in the affection of his “mushroom-shaped” aunts, Steven receives his initiation into the family trade: “Tan cotton twill with dark brown cotton lace, which was interesting, because who’d have thought to render the erotic in such hey-ho colour combinations?”
Though the events of the novel are compressed into a few short weeks corresponding with the Princess of Wales’s honeymoon (“We called it ‘Diana’s honeymoon’ as if Charles had not been present”), it is also clear that the narrative has been framed in retrospect, with Steven now established as a clothes designer famed for reconceiving Victorian corsets as outerwear. The passage of time enables him to place Jasmine’s psychosis, and his own lack of maturity, into context: “Her suicide attempts were her children and they gave her renewed purpose. I was too young to dwell on how sick that was. That, yes, she was quite unwell.”
It also suggests that, in fulfilling his wildest dreams through a damaged princess, Steven was hardly alone. As he points out, throughout the 1980s, “none of us would get bored of projecting our desires on to Diana”. If the novel feels maddeningly aimless at times, it only serves to reinforce the central metaphor of a doomed aristocratic beauty crushed by the weight of expectation. “Diana probably only did end up where she was because she was a bit directionless,” Steven reflects. “She had a big heart and she was a bit fucked up. That’s a powerful combination: beauty, heart, unhappiness. She gave a lot of people their direction.”
• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Hotlines in other countries can be found here. Royals by Emma Forrest is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
