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Chrysalis

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An unnerving, compelling and utterly contemporary debut novel about one woman's metamorphosis into an online phenomenon, from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-shortlisted writer. She is watched by Elliot as he trains in the gym. He notices her dedication to building her body and taking up space, and he is drawn to her strength. She is observed by her mother, as she grows from a taciturn, tremulous child into a determined and distant woman, who severs all familial ties. She is observed by her former colleague Susie, who offers her sanctuary and support as she leaves her partner and her job and rebuilds her life, transforms her body, and reinvents herself online. Each of these three witnesses to the woman desires closeness. Each is left with only the husk of who she was before she became someone else: a woman on a singular and solitary path with the power to inspire and to influence her followers, for good and ill. An oblique, intimate novel told in lucid, beguiling prose, Chrysalis a story about solitude and selfhood, and about the blurred line between self-care and narcissism. It is about controlling the body and the mind, about the place of the individual within society and what is means when someone choses to leave society behind. It is strikingly contemporary story about the search for answers and those we trust to give them to us. A man who sees the woman in the gym and get a front seat view into how she transforms her body. He sees her on her first day in the gym and how she transforms both in the gym and in personal setting… because they start dating. JA: The treatment of trauma is interesting in this narrative: the main character at one point shares her traumatic experience with a guy she’s kind of seeing, and he listens “dutifully” and thinks, “I wanted her to need me, but not like this.” Were there cultural moments of recent that have prompted you to think about the ways trauma is treated? A lot of it resonated with me in terms of women finally sharing their stories and then being undermined or not actually heard when they share. Or, maybe that we don’t collectively have the tools to talk about trauma in a way that feels helpful; people are often at a loss for how to respond. Metcalfe, who teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham, and whose work has been published in The Best British Short Stories, nominated for the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award, spoke with me via Zoom about the language we use to describe processes of transformation; what it means to be perceived; how social media plays a role in how we see ourselves and are seen by others; and what it means to balance responsibility with freedom. Elliot is a freelancer and his “big jobs” define him, but the passages describing his work habits make no direct reference to what he does. Susie’s hinterland is also only glimpsed, and through the book we uncover much about why the protagonist becomes an influencer, but little sense of how. In a novel concerned with curated displays of experience, this wonky, haphazard cleansing of context works. It heightens the forcefield around its subject, giving her that ultrafiltered, hyperreal plausibility that is influencer capital. I felt that I could see her large stilled form, the tree stirring behind her in her overgrown garden, and could understand why a person might follow her – the “cool and pleasant feeling” that she can induce. The absence of context also feeds the feeling that something is seriously amiss. “Cut yourself off,” she urges her followers. “Do you really need the people in your life, or do they need you?”

JA: It made me think so much about how we are seen, how do we wish to be seen, when do we consent to being seen, and is anyone ever really seeing another real person? The effect of the novel's triptych form feels like looking at the protagonist through the lens of a kaleidoscope, each segment dazzling, but ultimately fractured, leaving compelling gaps in our perception of who she is * Electric Lit *We are more surprised when we see a woman refusing to conform to somebody else’s expectations of how they ought to behave. Her resilience becomes performative as she posts videos and launches a career as a cult figure who embraces solitude Chrysalis examines the illusions built into our search for online connection and our idolisation of strangers simply because we feel intimate with them... The resulting tone is one of isolation and introspection, as though humanity were being viewed from afar - evocative of the psychological loneliness that is the extreme end of self-care * Literary Review * WOW. I just devoured this. What a wonderful, painful, funny novel… It’s so beautiful and cruel, and summed up just perfectly by the ending – a flawless final sentence, one of the best I’ve ever read, it absolutely gave me chills’ Avni Doshi

I thought a lot about the necessity of performing some sort of victimhood in the face of trauma [in] a way that makes their trauma legible to others. Metcalfe was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2014 for “Number Three”, a story that later appeared in her first collection of short stories, Blind Water Pass, published by John Murray in 2016.

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AM: Perhaps what I wanted to think about is that at first, it does seem like a really empowering thing that she’s doing, that she’s been able to separate herself out from the things that have been really damaging to her and that she’s been able to rebuild herself. She is becoming this huge, extremely strong, healthy person, all seems really liberating. She gets so fixated on it that it comes at the cost of everything around her and then it starts to feel unhealthy. But it’s hard to say exactly where that tipping point is. Managing the intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship and coming to terms with how it went wrong makes for compelling material * The Times * JA: In the gym, too, the themes of gender and power are introduced. I love that the main character wears a full-on blouse to the gym and is fine with it, and doesn’t move when the trainer encourages her to stretch on the mats. Chrysalis is an entirely unique novel about an unnamed woman who transforms herself, physically and mentally, in the wake of an abusive relationship.

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