Recasting a fairytale is like shattering an old mirror. In hammering at the tale’s surface, in picking up the splinters and reconfiguring them, riveting new reflections of our own era appear. “You shift time and location,” author Helen Oyeyemi says of her reconfigured fairytales, “to see what holds true, and why or why not.” Contemporary retellings provide another deep pleasure, of revisiting one’s childhood mind, flickers of that brighter, less inhibited self before the dimming constraints of adulthood.
My new novel, Take What You Need, revealed itself early on to be a fairytale. It is about polarisation and it’s possible that any art imagining a dissolving of cultural divides, even in small ways, is a fairytale too. Take What You Need takes place in a former steel town like the one where I grew up. A stepmother estranged from her adult daughter begins to weld metal sculptures and memorise lines from Louise Bourgeois. The stepmother brings in a ladder and her sculptures get taller. They become towers covered with bits of mirror in which her estranged daughter eventually comes to recognise her own face.
