MUSE :: INTERVIEW with Olivia Sudjic: "It helps if you at least have a plan of your day written down to deviate from.”
The Muse Letter No. 40
MUSE :: INTERVIEW with Olivia Sudjic
While I recently downloaded an app to restrict my Instagram consumerism (discipline where art thou?), having a talk with Olivia Sudjic the author of 'Sympathy', her 2017 debut novel exploring surveillance and identity in the digital age, was quite the enlightening chat. I guess we’re all somehow just dabbling and trying and hopelessly failing especially in these times where the digital realm is sometimes the only form of contact, as she put it: “It helps if you at least have a plan of your day written down to deviate from.”
Olivia Sudjic is a writer living in London. She is the author of 'Sympathy', 'Exposure', a non-fiction work on anxiety and auto-fiction and, ‘Asylum Road’, her second novel that just came out this week, which is told from the perspective of Anya, who escaped the siege of Sarajevo as a child but still searches for stability.
At first I’d like to talk about your book Sympathy a little bit. Given the fact that most people are all quite reliant on social media right now and Sympathy deals with that topic very interestingly, do you have any rules or ways of using social media at the moment that are different from pre-lockdown?
To give a slightly annoying preamble to this: I know the obvious reading of Sympathy might be that I’m critical of the way consumers use social media (and a lot of the crude early soundbites I myself gave about it probably expressed something like that both because it was easier to say succinctly and seemed to be the main thing interviewers wanted to ask me) but actually I was just as much (if not more) attempting to explore the dynamic between the consumer and the companies themselves. I saw Alice as a victim in that sense - feeding her phone ever more information that ultimately narrows the world around her and ends up dooming her to a lack of real choice. Her behaviour towards Mizuko (stalking her, harvesting information, predicting her every move and using it to ensnare her) was a way for me to think, on an intimate scale, about the more worrying aspect of social media addiction, which is how it’s maintained, who it ultimately benefits, and how this shapes our political/social etc landscape. So, when it was first published, some commenters took issue with the way I seemed to be so down on social media users, I tried to explain that a) I was looking, intentionally, at an extreme case, and b) I was not intending to pass judgement, at all, on users. Anything I might’ve implied to the contrary you can put down to the awkwardness of having to promote a book (Side note, authors don't usually write their own blurbs or headlines). I am, for the record, very much addicted to Instagram myself. I have a Twitter account but don’t Tweet because I know I’d never be able to stop if I started. So I have no judgment. OK, preamble over. Over ten months into this pandemic here in the UK, I have, not before time, instituted a daily schedule, which supposedly confines my social media use to certain times. Obviously, it’s not working, but I recommend just mapping out that schedule so you at least have a constraint to ignore. Something I find difficult right now is the feeling of just… floating in space, untethered, time kind of passing but to what end, with this general sense of both urgency and doom. It helps if you at least have a plan of your day written down to deviate from.
Something I find difficult right now is the feeling of just… floating in space, untethered, time kind of passing but to what end, with this general sense of both urgency and doom.