In the introduction to I Want to Talk to You, her first volume of collected essays and nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Diana Evans offers possibly the most succinct and accurate distinction between the modes of journalism and fiction that I have encountered in 25 years of trying to do both. “The journalism voice is direct, conspicuous and definite. The fiction voice is nebulous, shadowy, prefers to disappear in order to speak.” After four successful novels and more than two decades of writing across the British press, for magazines such as Pride, Vogue and Granta, plus the Observer and the Financial Times, Evans goes on to explain: “They’re still arguing. They still would rather I choose between them.” But she has eventually concluded that both can and should coexist as ways of seeing: “All writing is in some way a voyage of disappearance, a departure from the self outwards into the world.”
The careful selection of pieces here, grouped not only chronologically but thematically, illustrate Evans’s development as a writer, from her earliest interviews with huge cultural figures (Alice Walker, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill) in the late 90s to her most recent comment pieces on, among other subjects, the murder of George Floyd, Steve McQueen’s Grenfell and the ICC’s judgment on Netanyahu. She sets the earlier articles in context with brief introductions, explaining the significance of publications such as Pride, one of “a host of magazines and newspapers that had come into being as a response to the mainstream media routinely ignoring or misrepresenting black life and culture”. Evans, then in her 20s, was unexpectedly thrust into the role of culture editor a week after starting at Pride as an intern, and though she writes of her initial nerves, it’s clear that a distinctive and empathetic voice is present in her earliest interviews. Eventually, this voice outgrows the constraints of the form (“I found journalism creatively stifling”), and she takes another leap into the unknown, leaving her “perfectly bearable life in London” to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
