How do you follow a game-changing, award-winning debut? Candice Carty-Williams on Queenie, binning her second novel, and how People Person draws on life with eight siblings
It was Candice Carty-Williams who came up with the “Black Bridget Jones” tagline for her debut novel, Queenie. (She wasn’t working in marketing for a publishing house at the time for nothing.) She wanted her novel, which follows the misadventures of millennial south London journalist Queenie, to reach as wide a readership as possible. She succeeded. Today, her name rarely appears without the words “publishing phenomenon” attached: Queenie won book of the year at the British book awards in 2020 (Bridget Jones took it in 1998), making Carty-Williams the first Black writer ever to get the prize, an indictment of the industry in itself. The novel has sold more than half a million copies and is being made into a TV drama on Channel 4.
But where Bridget Jones’s Diary now seems dated in terms of sexual politics, Queenie is often deeply shocking in its depiction of the heroine’s treatment at the hands of a series of toxic men, taking in internet dating, mental health problems and the housing crisis, as well as everything else that goes with being a young woman. Toni Morrison’s famous injunction to write the book you want to read might have been conceived with a future Carty-Williams in mind. Written when she was in her early 20s, and landing in the midst of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, Queenie couldn’t have been more timely. Critics praised its combination of empathy, wit and political awareness; some readers recognised themselves in fiction for the first time. “Queenie was this big burst of 25-year-old energy: ‘I am sick of sexism and going on bad dates and hearing all this shit, and my friends having to go through all this shit, and going through shit at work. I have to write it all down,’” the author, now 33, says when we meet to talk about her much-anticipated second novel, People Person.
