Filthy, fun and ‘f*cking amazing’: Anoushka Warden, the debut novelist rewriting female sexual desire

For free actual time breaking information alerts despatched straight to your inbox signal as much as our breaking information emails

Sign as much as our free breaking information emails

First, there’s the title. Anoushka Warden’s debut novel is known as I’m F*cking Amazing. Fun to learn on the Tube, possibly, however bizarre to ask for in a bookshop? Then there’s the intercourse scenes. Let’s simply say don’t lend the ebook to your gran. “In my head, I’ve written the dirtiest, sexiest novel ever,” the author tells me, with a slight wince. “I know it’s not, but that’s how I feel.”

Has Warden written the dirtiest, sexiest novel ever? Well… it’s fairly impolite. Certainly by the requirements of what female novelists have traditionally received away with. The ebook follows a younger girl in her twenties and thirties as she falls in love with Serious Boyfriend Number Three. Everything’s going nice, till her physique stops cooperating – as she places it, she develops a “faulty fanny” that not “gets wet”. What follows is the story of her quest to repair it, as she navigates infatuation, marriage, emotional abuse, divorce, abortion, deceit, desire, plenty of considering, and much more shagging. It just isn’t for the fainthearted. The phrase “fanny” seems 113 occasions.

But the novel, a fictional story with a few of the actual Warden thrown in, can be frank and hilarious, and filled with self-discovery. It reads like a giddy, galloping diary entry, Warden’s anonymous narrator jotting down musings on all the things from her “Top Humps” to the scent of her vagina at totally different occasions of the month. We converse one week earlier than the ebook’s launch. And Warden’s nervous about all the impolite bits. “Any time I read over the sex stuff, I feel physically sick,” the 40-year-old says, her arms over her face in her publicist’s workplace. “I don’t want my dad to read it and I don’t want my brothers to read it. I’d rather no male that knows me read it. But that’s ridiculous!”

Warden wrote the ebook two years in the past, initially intending it to be her third play. Her first, My Mum’s a Twat, was loosely based mostly on her actual expertise of her mom becoming a member of a religious cult, and was carried out by Patsy Ferran at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2018. Her second, My Dad’s a C*** (sure, she has a knack for eyebrow-raising titles), was a fictional, feminist riposte to her first, and gained the Platform Presents Playwright’s Prize, with Aimee Lou Wood performing it on digital camera throughout lockdown. But when Warden sat down to put in writing I’m F*cking Amazing, she discovered that she couldn’t cease. Before she knew it, it was tons of of pages lengthy. “I realised that if it was a play, it would be a woman on stage, for 12 hours, knobbing on about whether her fanny’s wet or not,” she says with signature bluntness. “I was like, I just don’t think people want that.”

The author has a sprite-like, scatty vitality in person who matches the bouncy fizz of her writing. Between us on the desk lies her dog-eared pocket book, which accommodates scribbled to-do lists with reminders from “don’t forget to hang up washing” to “buy Dr Gross’s face LED mask when I can afford it”. “I write notes like crazy because I don’t have a good memory, which is quite freeing in many ways,” she smiles.

When Warden despatched the first draft of I’m F*cking Amazing to her then-agent, they informed her: “I don’t think anyone wants this.” Warden sighs at the reminiscence. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way, but I felt incredible shame. I kept it in a drawer for a year because she didn’t react well to some of the scenes.”

One specific passage about an abortion drew a robust detrimental response. “Because nobody else had read it, I was like, ‘Oh, God, I’m a monster. What have I created?’” At the time, Warden had simply learn Charlotte Roche’s 2008 novel Wetlands, a bestseller so graphic it reportedly had folks fainting at readings (it features a thorough topography of a girl’s haemorrhoids). She ultimately felt courageous sufficient to indicate it to another person, and had a a lot hotter response from her male writing mentor. “He read it and was like, ‘I want my 14-year-old daughter to read this now.’ She couldn’t have, because it’s X-rated or whatever, but that made me feel not like I’d done something gross or weird.”

There’s a tragic, pointed irony to the proven fact that Warden was made to really feel gross or bizarre for what she had written – the novel is designed to cease ladies and ladies feeling embarrassed for the questions they’ve about their our bodies and relationships. “I want it to feel like something helpful that isn’t a self-help book,” she says, explaining that there have been numerous issues she was confused about when she was younger that she’s making an attempt to untangle in the story.

“When me and my friends were teenagers, being fingered was just people shoving their fingers up your hole,” she says, laughing. “I wonder if younger generations are more like, ‘Oh, no, we go straight for the clit now,’ but we didn’t know that when I was a teenager, because there wasn’t social media or really the internet.” She additionally had questions on how widespread it’s to orgasm from penetrative intercourse (not very) and whether or not it’s OK to make use of an electrical toothbrush to masturbate. “It all comes down to: ‘Am I a freak and is something not working right?’”

I’m F*cking Amazing additionally explores intercourse in long-term relationships, with the protagonist searching for physiotherapy for her vagina when her arousal for her companion begins to wane. “In my early twenties, I was sort of obsessed with knowing how long couples had been together,” says Warden. “I’d be like, do you still have sex? How often? And it always seemed like, after five or six years, it was not such a big thing.” In the ebook, she wished to interrogate whether or not that sexual decline is inevitable, and what to do about it.

Warden reckons she was extra clueless than most girls about all of these things as a result of she grew up in a small city in Devon, the place she “didn’t have access” to open, progressive dialogue. She is the youngest of an prolonged household of seven brothers and sisters, along with her mom leaving when she was younger to affix a religious cult (the topic of her first play).

She calls being a novelist her “third career”. Warden began out appearing, earlier than transferring on to a “proper job” doing PR for the Royal Court Theatre. Then she started writing in her thirties. “I think writing came through osmosis of being in the Royal Court building,” she says, “because I had never given two s***s about it before.” She’s positively received the bug – she has already written her second ebook and is engaged on a movie.

Although the novel is fiction, I’m F*cking Amazing does have robust crossovers with Warden’s actual life. Both Warden and the protagonist labored for a scientific firm, and have moms who moved away. Both love purchasing and copious note-taking. Both converse in an infectious, uncensored approach. “If I had to have the book laid out in front of me in a detective room and circle it [the parts that are autobiography and fiction], that would be an impossibly hard thing to do,” she says.

While I’m F*cking Amazing seems like a diary, Warden has by no means stored one. “I don’t write my feelings down ever,” she says. “I wonder if that’s why, starting writing in my thirties, it’s been kind of non-stop. Maybe everything is just exploding.”

One of the endorsements on the cowl is from Deborah Frances-White, co-host of podcast The Guilty Feminist, which is apt on condition that the present revels self-mockingly in the hypocrisies of recent feminism. The ebook is stuffed with admissions equivalent to being pissed off {that a} man desires to separate the invoice, and sentences like: “I did a lot of reading about places in the world where women didn’t have access to free abortions and it really got me upset. I didn’t do anything about it, though.”

I’m F*cking Amazing ends on an agonising cliffhanger, and Warden says she is “desperate” to put in writing a sequel. “I want to, but there’s no point spending a year doing it when we don’t even know if people like book one,” she says, although the novel’s already been optioned for TV, with Warden writing the script. “I bet men who would write the same thing wouldn’t even be feeling like this. I need to not be apologetic and embarrassed about it.” She laughs. Unashamed female desire, and being open about it, is a piece in progress, in spite of everything. “And I hope in six months, I’ll have found a way to not feel sick when I think of all the blowjob words I wrote!”

‘I’m F*cking Amazing’ by Anoushka Warden was printed by Trapeze on 21 March, £20