Author Insight: Rosemary Collins
Rosemary Collins shares the background to her short story, Six Names.
Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
Like a lot of people, I’ve been accosted on the street by ‘chuggers’ throughout my life, and I find them really annoying, but also fascinating. I’m autistic. Like a lot of autistic women, I wasn’t diagnosed as a child and only realised I was autistic as an adult. It was a revelation that helped me know who I am for the first time. In social interactions with other people, I’ve always felt like I’m putting on a performance, studying others to see what’s expected, planning out my words and how I’ll deliver them with care. It fascinates me that chugging is a kind of performance too – chuggers will adopt a very friendly, sociable tone as they accost people on the street, but these people are strangers to them and it’s very obviously fake. It’s meant to manipulate people, particularly vulnerable people, into signing up to donate. It always makes me really uncomfortable and angry to witness chugging or be a target of it.
My office is on Bristol’s Colston Avenue (famously where protesters pulled down the statue of Edward Colston in 2020). It’s a pedestrian area and last summer there was a really persistent team of chuggers covering the whole street, so I had to dodge them every time I left the building. Again, they adopted a very faux-friendly tone and tried to use really bizarre methods to get people to engage with them – “If you were a fruit, what kind of a fruit would you be?” was an actual opening line one woman used. They were a nuisance, but I noticed that they were all very young people, and I knew they were probably doing this because they didn’t have a lot of other options in life. Another autistic trait I’ve always had is a tendency towards obsession with my particular interests – in my case, reading and writing. I’ve always read and written fiction much as I can. One of the things I love about fiction is that it allows you to immerse yourself in another person’s perspective and, to quote To Kill a Mockingbird, walk around in their shoes. Again, autism plays a part in this – autistic people have impaired cognitive empathy, meaning the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings. We do not have impaired affective empathy, meaning the ability to sympathise with the suffering of others. So I like reading and writing stories because it gives me practice at seeing other people’s point of view. I decided that even though these chuggers were painfully unpleasant to interact with, I should write a story about them. I should step into their heads and try to imagine their point of view and how they ended up doing this job. I also did some research by reading articles by chuggers, which confirmed my perceptions – they’re not paid much, but they get a bonus if they get a given number of sign-ups, which is something I incorporated into the story.
Alexa seems frightened of standing up for herself, saying what she thinks and making changes that she knows would ultimately be good for her — can you tell us how she developed as a character for you?
I put some parts of myself into Alexa. She’s a bit like me when I was younger – she’s very meek and unassertive, and doesn’t know what she wants in life, and is just stuck in a bit of a dead end in terms of her job and economic situation and relationships with no way out. Again, autism and my problems with cognitive empathy play a role in this – because I struggle to put myself into other people’s minds, a lot of my characters end up based on me in some way. Although I do also find it liberating to try to write characters who are very different from me. I also didn’t want Alexa to be an autistic character, so I wrote her as different from me in some ways. I’ve never been in her exact life situation, and I’ve never been a chugger, although I have had experiences as a volunteer campaigner trying to get passers-by to sign a petition. I know the frustration of standing there for hours, only getting one or two sign-ups from multiple approaches.
The fact that Alexa is struggling to pay her own rent and eat while raising funds to help others says a lot about our societies and the issues humanity is facing. What made you want to explore these themes?
I just wanted to write about the precarity so many people are facing at the moment. I graduated university in 2015 and it felt like there weren’t a lot of good opportunities for me, although I have a lot of privileges that have made my life easier. And it feels like the outcome for every crop of young people every year has got worse since then, especially since Covid. We’re all climbing up a ladder and seeing the rung below us fall away. There are a lot of rooms advertised in Bristol which are much like Alexa’s and Mart’s – crappy places that cost a ludicrous amount. I’m concerned about what it does to people to constantly live hand-to-mouth, not just physically but emotionally. If the place you sleep in every night is too cramped and shabby to ever be a home, if you never have enough money to cover your needs, yet alone your wants, do you ever get to relax? Do you ever get to truly feel like you’re a part of your own life, or the society around you?
A lot of people point out that it’s hypocritical for charities to say they want to make a positive difference in the world, but then use these chuggers, who are antisocial and make it unpleasant to go down the street. In a capitalist society, is anything morally pure? Do we all have to use bad means in the service of hopefully worthwhile ends? Are we all exploiting someone else to survive?
You are currently working on a novel and a memoir - can you tell us more about those? Do they explore similar themes to your short fiction?
My novel, Distraction Displays, is about a young woman with undiagnosed autism trying to solve the mystery of her twin sister’s disappearance when they were children. Again, it’s a balance of writing from my own experiences and imagining experiences I’ve never had and never want to have.
My memoir, The Bad at Games Manifesto, is about my life through the prism of dyspraxia, which is the other neurodevelopmental disorder I have. I feel there’s been an outpouring of writing by autistic women in recent years but no equivalent writing about dyspraxia, although it impacts many people who have it profoundly.
There’s a quote about writing by George Eliot that I love: “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.” I’m interested in writing honestly about all the complexities and contradictions of life at this fragile and frightening time.