It’s a weird age, isn’t it, nineteen? Firmly an adult in the eyes of the law, but still wavering between the last vestiges of teenagerhood and the looming expanse of grown-up life, the nineteen-year-old girl is simultaneously dismissed as a child and denigrated as knowing exactly what she’s doing. She hovers on the line between seductress or ingenue, depending on which way the wind blows. And to complicate matters further, within the heteropatriarchal social framework, straight men lean heavily and leeringly upon the plausible deniability of finding the alleged maturity of the nineteen-year-old attractive, while enjoying all the trappings of her childlike malleability.
This was the starting point for Cacoethes (although it didn’t find its title, which is an archaic term that means ‘the urge to do something inadvisable’, until much later, when a chance scroll through Twitter yielded this eureka moment in the form of Susie Dent’s word of the day). It started as a play that never made it past two pages and one setting (the train – when it came to designing the cover, my publisher, Northodox Press, and I both gravitated immediately to the imagery of the train), and to this day I still haven’t written a play. When I realised the play was a no-go, I chucked the whole thing and started it as prose instead, and quickly took to the extensive, expansive world of details and painful, boundary-pushing intimacy that opened up to me within the medium. As a seasoned letter-writer to pen friends of all ages and genders, the first-person letter-based narrative came pretty easily and provided a neat juxtaposition to the third-person unfurling of the wider story.
Erin as a character evolved pretty quickly too – she took her name, initially as a placeholder, from a teddy bear I really wanted in a chemist’s shop as a child – and her unguarded, semi-pretentious, proto-feminist diatribes were nothing short of cathartic to put to paper, being at the time a nineteen-year-old writing a different nineteen-year-old. Over the decade since, perhaps the hardest thing has been editing Erin and her story in a way that is efficient and productive without over-polishing her or buffing away her jagged adolescent edges with the (relative) wisdom of the almost-thirty-year-old. It all gets a bit ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ at that point, so great swathes of dialogue remain relatively untouched.
Once I had Erin down pat, she needed friends: Molly rose out of the kneejerk reactions I would have on my more misandrist days, Alicia from the counter-responses with which I’d reason myself down from the raging man-hating ledge. Some of the points Molly makes are things I agree with; but in other instances, Alicia’s more convincing, because some things just aren’t that deep. Essentially, these three are what happens when you want to have a big old ‘working through some shit’ session. Then there was Bo, for whom I have several headcanons that didn’t make it into the final edit because they felt like over-explaining her, overly justifying her place in the story. I also wanted to be extremely careful with the role she, Megan, and Harriet all ended up playing. When you’re discussing bisexuality, especially when you’re foregrounding things like power imbalances and transactional encounters within those male-centred relationships, the temptation to – like Molly – put the female-female relationships on a pedestal, simply because of the political triumph of removing men from the equation, is quite potent. Of course, this essentially undermines the entire bisexual identity – we’ve all seen bisexual women being jeered at as being either straight women cosplaying part of the rainbow, or lesbians who are kidding themselves – and in Erin’s (admittedly specific!) case I think it’s important to explore both types of attraction and the very different roots from which they stem.
Wealthy white cis het men wield so much social power that it’s understandable a working-class young woman would romanticise them – I suspect social capital is a powerful motivating factor in many relationships – which is where Aidan and Hal, the two men at the heart of this saga, came in. By contrast, however, it would be easy to make Megan, Harriet and Bo some kind of sapphic Mary Sue figures purely because they’re not wealthy cis het white men – but women can be exploitative and self-serving too. I’m sure you’ve seen that saying floating around online, ‘I support women’s rights and wrongs’, and that’s what I wanted to, at the very least, gesture to with the broad array of female love interests Erin encounters. What fascinates me is the transactional nature of relationships, some far more overt and obvious than others, and the challenge of this book – as well as the reason it comes in at a hefty 368 pages! – was capturing as many nuances and angles as possible that explored this basic premise.
Money talks, but personally I find inherited wealth terribly tedious. What’s far more compelling is the mire of self-fashioning and sometimes self-loathing that comes from accrued wealth via meritocratic means (though to what extent merit truly played a role in either Aidan’s corporate career or Hal’s creative one is a debate for another time, and another set of headcanons). The working-class urge to strive for ‘more’ and ‘better’ and yet not totally feeling at ease in oneself when one gets there is something that really interests me, because from Erin’s perspective, both these men represent the epitome of being set for life and having no material concerns; at one point she realises that Hal’s appeal essentially boils down to the fact that he’s a Gen Xer who is kind to her, sharing the spoils of having grown up in a better economy and with more scope for social mobility. Alongside this, however, she finds his persistent personal preoccupations with his parents and place in the world irritating. Meanwhile in Aidan’s expensive minimalist London apartment, the glossy trappings of corporate success quickly lose their sheen to reveal themselves as a clinical impersonality that papers over the cracks of a very damaged man’s inability to form meaningful relationships.
Wrestling with all this while trying to navigate university as a young working-class woman is no mean feat, and I wanted to reflect this jumbled intensity Erin faces in the narrative style and structure. The patchwork-style narration – stitching together letters, dialogue, and time-jumps that reveal alternate perspectives on events – leaves the reader with a time capsule spanning those formative three years as an almost-adult in socioeconomic limbo captured in polaroids and text threads, flashes of drunken memories and one-liners hollered in smoking areas at two in the morning. The question of where Erin ends up next, and how much stability – and self-knowledge – she’s gained by graduation is an open one, but I hope the journey she took to get there entertains, as well as sparking conversations about the slightly more unseen side of identity, sexuality, and contemporary feminism.
"As a woman, you can be three things: demonised, victimised, or fetishised. And as a sex worker, I’m three for the price of one."
18-year-old Erin is bisexual - she just doesn't know it yet. A fresher at university and determined to embody the Cool Girl archetype, it's not long before a chance Tinder match reels this very modern ingenue into a world of BDSM and power-play that consumes and intrigues her as much as it stresses out her friends. And when that all falls apart, where could there possibly be left to rebound except the even murkier realm of sugar baby dating?
Crashing through a sordid world of transactional encounters, late nights, sexual awakenings, and more bad decisions than you can shake a stick at, Cacoethes is the story of one queer young outsider's quest for - well, she's not quite sure, actually.
Cacoethes is available direct from Northodox Press: https://www.northodox.co.uk/product-page/cacoethes-paperback
Or from Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/cacoethes/chloe-de-lullington/9781915179630
Or in ebook format from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cacoethes-Chloe-Lullington-ebook/dp/B0DYZ3T1KY/