Q&A with Sam Beckbessinger - author of Femme Feral

 1. Please can you begin by introducing Ellie and Brenda? 

Ellie is a woman with an infinite to-do list in her head. She’s a hyper-competent tech executive in her mid-forties, balancing caring for her ageing father-in-law, a troubled daughter, and an annoyingly easygoing husband. She’s also, when we meet her, starting to experience some common midlife symptoms: hot flushes, trouble sleeping, changing body hair, and a brand-new, bubbling sense of rage. She is, of course, turning into a werewolf.

Unfortunately for Ellie, someone’s noticed her troubling new nocturnal activities. Every good monster story needs a Van Helsing, and mine is a cantankerous octogenarian named Brenda. Brenda’s perpetually underestimated. She’s got arthritis, her landlord’s threatening to kick her out her home, she’s perpetually pissed off, and she’s going blind. She’s also the most clear-sighted person in the novel.

2. How much of your experience in the tech industry inspired Ellie’s experience at Tranquility? 

Far too much! All the most outrageous moments of the novel are cribbed directly from real life. The novel begins when Ellie is passed over for a promotion for a job she’s already been doing for years, in favour of some guy who knows nothing about the industry. This literally happened to my beloved boss and mentor at the last tech job I had. She was expected to just accept it gracefully and keep playing competent number two to this absolute buffoon, and I remember seeing this and thinking, I can’t keep working in this industry. 

I worked in tech for about ten years. It was a younger, more naive time; or maybe it’s just that I was younger and more naive. But in the early 2010s many of us truly believed that we were trying to solve the world’s problems. What I came to understand over time was that even the most well-intentioned tech founders have a remarkably shallow grasp of the problems they're trying to solve, particularly when those problems are complex, psychosocial, or rooted in structural inequality. All they can offer are easy solutions and quick fixes. I find it especially outrageous that an industry which has done so much to deepen loneliness, undermine democracy, and concentrate power in the hands of a small number of extraordinarily strange dudes now proposes to sell you the solution to loneliness and anxiety in the form of therapy chatbots. The audacity, truly.

I had a blast recycling many of my silliest tech industry memories into this novel (for instance, the model train that delivers beer to the engineers’ desks, trying to make everything “AI”...) but the most absurd stuff was actually too absurd to put in a novel. I once saw a male engineer Photoshop a female colleague’s head onto a pornographic image and send it around his team’s Slack, and face zero consequences. It’s just too on-the-nose! 

But still, I think many moments in this story will be all-too recognisable to anyone who’s ever worked in a startup.

3. Ellie feels like being emotional in the workplace shows weakness. How did you want to portray gender office politics and why? 

One of the first rules you learn working in a male-dominated industry is to keep your tears in the  bathroom. If you cry, you’ve lost the argument. As a woman in these spaces you have to perform your gender in a way that doesn’t give your colleagues any excuse to dismiss you. And god forbid you’re a woman in perimenopause. You’re constantly walking an impossible tightrope, monitoring your tone, your outfits, your facial expressions. The rulebook’s impossible: be assertive but never bossy. Be warm but never mumsy. Have superb relational skills but never give a hint that you ever have any real emotions of your own, and never allow your family responsibilities to have any impact on your performance. Be attractive but never sexy. Be brilliant at your job but not so much that you make other people feel insecure. It’s a rigged game. 

Ellie’s been so good at playing for so long she’s blind to how much it harms her. She’s bought into the idea that the answer is just to try harder, do more, add another thing to the list. She’s become so competent that all of the work she does becomes invisible to the people around her. She’s drowning but still functioning, so no-one notices. Even she doesn’t notice. She’s lost touch with so many parts of herself. 

But the thing about repressed feelings is that they don’t actually vanish, they curdle. Perimenopause, for many women, is the moment where our lifelong coping mechanisms fail, and we are forced, finally, to reckon with all the ugly things we’ve been squashing down as they come roaring back to the surface, demanding to be dealt with. 

Of course, the irony of all this is that men are just as emotional as women, they just show their emotions differently. You’re telling me these techbros doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and getting hair plugs and losing their minds about whether other men respect them aren’t trying to satisfy some emotional need? Please. 

4. The menopause is depicted as an animalistic transformation in Femme Feral. How did this idea come about and do you think there's enough representation of premenipause today? 

There’s a joke at the centre of this novel, which is that the medical industry knows about as much about perimenopause as it knows about lycanthropy. The US National Institutes of Health didn't require medical research trials to include women until 1993, and even now menopausal women are routinely excluded from research on the grounds that our hormones make things too complicated. Men, of course, do not have hormones.

Until recently, perimenopause isn’t something I’d heard discussed at all. The little I’d absorbed was medicalised and tragic: hot flashes, sad dry vagina, unreasonable anger. Half-notions I suspect mostly derived from male stand-up comedians in the 90s.

It was only when my friends and I started actually approaching this stage of life that I began to understand what a powerful, and positive, shift it can be. Caitlin Moran has this brilliant essay called ‘Me, Drugs and the Perimenopause’ where she makes the point that the acquiescence and nurturing patience of women’s fertile years is actually the anomaly. We’re high on oestrogen, about as fuzz-minded and love-soaked as being on MDMA. When those hormonal levels drop, we return to our true selves, getting sober, finally seeing how little our uncomplaining self-martyring servitude has actually gotten us. No wonder so many women this age are furious.

So many of us hit our late thirties and early forties (which, yes, is the age perimenopause symptoms often start, something I wish someone had bloody told me) and begin to feel something foundational shift within us, but we have no idea what’s happening. We go to the doctor for answers but even today, the vast majority of medical professionals receive basically zero training on this experience that affects 50% of the population. So we’re told to lose weight, stop drinking alcohol, and are made to feel like we’re just losing our minds. 

But there’s so much potential in this change. It’s a psychological, social, and physical shift. It’s the moment that the coping mechanisms, the repression and self-effacement that we’ve relied on our whole lives, so often fail. And then we get to decide what’s going to be unleashed from our darkness. It’s frightening. And it’s thrilling.

5. Ellie has a never ending list of tasks as a mother, wife, career and career woman. What does it mean nowadays to “have it all”, and is this something women should be aspiring to? 

“Having it all” has always been a lie. That saying – “having it all just means doing it all” – is 100% right. 

Ellie’s generation, my generation, were among the first women who grew up being told we could have any career we wanted, and a family and a full life of hobbies and friends and adventures. But the world around us hasn’t actually been restructured enough to make this possible. In any case, we’re all going to die one day. None of us can actually live every possible version of the life we wish to live. But the ideal’s still sold to us, pumped into our eyeballs as a carefully-curated aesthetic on Instagram. It’s too easy to feel like the failure’s on us; we just need to try harder, do more. 

Some of this is about men going through their own cultural shift. I saw a graph recently that showed that Millennial fathers in the U.S. now spend as much time with their kids as Boomer mothers did. Progress, right? Except that Millennial mothers are now doing about twice as much as that. The labour didn’t get redistributed, it got doubled. Household work is still unevenly spread, the mental load most of all, and everyone’s now expected to have a full career on top of this, and an Instagram-worthy life? No wonder everyone’s so exhausted. And for what? Who is benefiting? Not the kids, it seems, who the data says are the more anxious and unhappy than we were at their age.

The expectations have risen, and we’re doing all of this with far less social support. Most of us are less connected to extended families or close friendships or religious communities than we ever were. Anne Helen Peterson’s iconic essay, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” is something I think about all the time. She writes from a very American perspective, and my life has been shaped by dramatically different forces as a South African, but the insights ring very true about how we grew up in a particular mix of economic precarity, growing individualism and the tech-enabled need to optimise every single aspect of our life.

Which brings me back to the tech industry, which loves this narrative of self-improvement. Algorithmic media is just an endless feed of ads to things we can buy to solve our problems. There’s currently a gold rush of menopause products. Yet another thing to add to your infinite to-do list. 

In the novel, Ellie tries so hard to “solve” all her problems, including perimenopause. It doesn’t work. It’s only after she falls apart and truly faces her own powerlessness that she finally meets herself, and finds a pack.

6. Female rage and metamorphosis is on trend with the popularity of novels like Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. What literature and media inspired Femme Feral?

I’ve been a horror junkie for as long as I can remember. By the time I was eleven, R.L. Stine had published 109 Goosebumps books, and I must have read at least 108 of them. After I finished everything in the kids’ section, my librarian reluctantly allowed me to start borrowing from the adult horror section, where I dug into the Stephen Kings and never really climbed out again. I love how horror allows you access to dream-logic and rich metaphor and the most primal human emotions. So there’s a lot of classic horror DNA in Femme Feral. Observant readers might notice some specific nods to American Werewolf in London in the book (one of the all-time greatest werewolf films). I was also greatly inspired by the iconic puberty werewolf film Ginger Snaps and Alan Moore’s foundational comic ‘The Curse’ (Swamp Thing, vol. 2, no. 40).

As someone who grew up reading horror when the only writers being published were straight white dudes, I’m also thrilled to be emerging with a new wave of horror authors like Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Stephen Graham Jones, Hailey Piper and Ally Wilkes. I’m particularly obsessed with the current crop of “Weird Girl” and Femgore writers who blend horror and humour, playing with the idea of the embodied and monstrous feminine and the strangeness of the contemporary world – writers like Mona Awad, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Rumfitt, and Ottessa Moshfegh. That shit’s my jam.