Q&A with Lauren Mooney, Author of Service

Could you introduce yourself and your debut novel?

My name is Lauren Mooney, I’m a writer and theatre-maker from the midlands, now

based in East Sussex, and my debut novel Service is a sort of workplace-comedy-

slash-ghost-story (normal genre) about class, precarity and time. It follows Danielle,

who’s twenty-nine, broke, living in London and working as PA to blithely privileged

Jeannie. After a break-up, she ends up with nowhere to stay while she’s waiting for

her rental contract to end, and is surprised when Jeannie who offers her a stint at the

country house where she grew up — Westerley, in rural Yorkshire. But rattling around

alone in this big house, things get increasingly strange and spooky.

Can you introduce Danielle, your main character, to us?

Danielle is the main character and narrator. First person actually isn’t my natural

medium, I much prefer writing in third person and started the book like that, then had to re-start when I realised I needed Danielle to be much more self-deceiving and un-self-aware than I could make her in third. Which I think tells you a bit about who she is! She’s a very well-intentioned character, and I hope quite a fun narrator to spend time with, but she fundamentally doesn’t know who she is or what she wants, and that causes her a lot of problems.

What have been your literary inspirations?

My favourite writers are probably Pat Barker, Susanna Clarke and Michael Chabon, though all of them have written these big, sweeping, multi-layered stories with lots of characters, set over big periods of time, which are a thing I love but haven’t tried to write. I’m a firm believer that everything you do teaches you something and makes you better, and that I have ambitions to write things that I don’t feel ready to attempt yet. My biggest literary inspirations for Service specifically are probably MR James and Shirley Jackson — and of course Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, one of my favourite books, which I re-read during the writing process and was in conversation with in a very active way.

What made you want to write this genre in the present day?

I grew up loving stories about these big houses, everything from The Secret Garden

to Brideshead Revisited, they occupy such a space in literature — and then you get

older and realise that, if you’re working-class, you wouldn’t be one of the main

characters, you’d have been below stairs. So it felt like an opportunity to use all the

tropes of those big house stories — and gothic novels too, the Brontes, and ghost

stories, all that kind of literary Englishness I’d loved when I was young — and use

those things to tell a story about the modern world, and one version of being a young (ish) working-class person today. I wanted to talk into the kind of experiences I’d had,

living in London and working in offices in my twenties, which often felt like cultural

cache at the expense of material security. Danielle’s been to university, because

that’s an experience that’s been made much more available to working-class young

people over the last few decades, but actually a lot of jobs are still given out through

closed networks, so she’s basically racked up all this debt, and is living in a city she

can’t really afford, doing work she doesn’t like. There was a period of my life that

really felt like hitting this class ceiling. And I had a sense that being working-class is

being haunted by the failed ambitions and wasted talents of your ancestors, and so

you feel this responsibility to do something with your freedoms and your social

mobility, but you also can’t, because of all these structural things beyond your control

— so it’s easy to find yourself stuck in quite a provisional, precarious life. And so I

wanted to use those tropes to shift that ‘haunted’ feeling out of the level of metaphor

and into the text.

What is your favourite quote from the book?

I honestly have no idea! One of the weirdest things about publishing is how long the

timeline is — and actually now, at point of publication, how long ago I last read it. But

several people have quoted the same joke to me recently, so let’s go with that:

I had a job I hated, running around after Jeannie, and no prospects, no career

ladder, no idea where I was going. Nowhere to live. And now I was banned from my

own couch, because my ex was sleeping with a Dutch girl who was skinny and

blonde and still had freedom of movement in the EU. I was fucked.

What would you like readers to take away from the novel?

I really wanted the book to be fun to read, moment to moment, you know? There’s

jokes, there’s scares, there’s a journey. I think some people believe that having a

sense of humour makes things less weighty and serious, and those people are

probably not much fun at the pub; the book is about a lot of things, as I hope these

answers have made clear, and I would love it if Service made people think about

class, precarity, work, freedom, time, all of that stuff — but most of all, I honestly just

hope they have a good time reading it.