JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Ian McEwan’s first book First Love, Last Rites, the author recalls how he wrote that “scandalous” collection of stories featuring incest, sexual abuse, murder, and a penis in a jar.

Other strange voices, other weird or wretched characters, surfaced in that year to haunt or infest my fiction. Violent, sexually perverse, lonely, they were remote from the life I was living in Norwich at the time. I was meeting many new friends, falling in love, keenly reading contemporary American fiction, hiking the North Norfolk coast, had taken a hallucinogenic drug in the countryside and been amazed – and yet whenever I returned to my notebook or typewriter, a savage, dark impulse took hold of me. Sibling incest, cross-dressing, a rat that torments young lovers, actors making love mid-rehearsal, children roasting a cat, child abuse and murder, a man who keeps a penis in a jar and uses esoteric geometry to obliterate his wife – however dark the stories were, I also thought elements in them were hilarious. Sometimes I persuaded myself I was some kind of wild man, a fauviste, kicking against the bourgeois divorce novel that people complained about.

Read it.