Five posts about Foxy-T at twenty: #5 – ‘Fag break?’ | Piece of Paper Press & tonywhite.london

My novel Foxy-T was published twenty years ago this week, so I thought it might be interesting to open up the archives. I’ve been posting every day this week with views from behind the scenes of book publishing.

Shortly before publication of Foxy-T, I remember going in for a meeting with the team at Faber. Everything was in place: there was to be a launch at the Horse Hospital (a counterculture arts centre and exhibition space in the old cobbled mews behind Russell Square tube station), proofs and finished copies had all gone out at the right times, appearances at a couple of festivals were fixed, etc. The machine was doing its job, in other words, and there was probably not much I could add to it, in those days before social media. But it’s a stressful time. A recent article on the subject of author care and author mental health has raised lots of questions for the industry, particularly around managing the expectations of first time authors. Even with your fourth novel, or your sixth, and with a fair wind, it can be an exhilarating and slightly scary experience. Well, there’s a lot at stake. Back in 2003 I may have been whirring a little. This was after all the culmination of an all-consuming journey that had begun when I started writing Foxy-T three-and-a-half years earlier. I was excited and probably feeling a bit like I ought to still be doing something now: putting copies of the book in the right hands, perhaps? Who had we missed? Anyone?

Tony on the steps of St John, Smith Square, 2003 (out-take from Faber shoot for Foxy-T author photo). Photo: Charlotte Bromley-Davenport.

Charles Boyle in Faber’s poetry dept had been managing the Foxy-T production process. He pointed at the fire escape: ‘Fag break?’

Those were the days!

Three years later, I was sitting at my desk in what was then the Arts Council England national office on Great Peter Street, Westminster, one Thursday morning in April, when someone working nearby said, ‘Oh, Tony, Foxy-T is in the paper again.’

It was that day’s Guardian, and when he passed it over I saw that this was one of their periodic books round-up features where a number of currently fashionable authors are all asked the same question. In this case, authors and celebrities had been asked to recommend the books they loved which had failed to get the public attention they deserved.

The headline was ‘The 25 Best Books from the Backlist’.

Quickly scanning the feature I saw Ekow Eshun recommending Vertigo by W.G. Sebald, Alexei Sayle recommending Elizabeth Taylor, and Ali Smith the collected short stories of Grace Paley. There was Hari Kunzru on The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon, Carmen Callil on Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Gwyneth Lewis on the Irish author, artist and map-maker Tim Robinson. Well, this was excellent company to be in.

Further down, astonishingly, the author Toby Litt was recommending Foxy-T:

“What’s your favourite British novel from the past ten years?” The other day I was with a group of friends, and someone posed this question. A few fairly obvious titles were suggested, which gave me time to think. And when it came my turn to speak, I said, “Foxy T by Tony White”. My partner said “that’s just what I was going to say”. Foxy T is mostly set in the E-Z Call shop on Cannon Street Road. It’s written in a style that I can only describe as 100% Pure London, meaning a mix of here, there and everywhere. It tells the story of Foxy-T and Ruji-Babes, two very streetwise girls who are not without their troubles. Although not a big book in terms of length, Foxy-T encapsulates an astonishing amount of now – and it does it funnily, honestly, sexily and tenderly.
Toby Litt

Wow; so exciting! And I’d have gone out to the newsagents in Strutton Ground immediately, to buy a couple of copies of the paper for the file.

There’s a moment that comes in the publishing lifecycle, and it comes every time, with every book, where you think – and I don’t know if other authors recognise this? – where you think something like: Well, it’s just a book after all.

This is not a negative thing to say. I mean it in a good way. It’s a book. And it’s out there.

And if you’re lucky some people will enjoy it, and others won’t. For every blessing there’ll surely be a brickbat or two: someone slagging you off for this or that. Some will boast that they haven’t read it, and still slag it off.

(It happens all the time. ICYMI there’s a line in the Wyndham Lewis novel The Roaring Queen where a London newspaper’s bombastic literary editor, a thinly veiled Arnold Bennett, is derided for just this: claiming to be able to review a book without reading it.)

But that’s okay, because it’s just a book, after all, and you’ll be on with the next thing soon enough: the next book, the next short story, the next article or whatever. And so will they. And no-one else will care.

There was a funny moment at the Foxy-T launch in July 2003; a bit of a reality check. The Horse Hospital was rammed, and sweltering, on what was surely the hottest night of the year. Not long before the speeches, I bumped into another writer I knew.

‘Hi Tony,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Yeah, pretty good, thanks,’ I said.

‘So, what are you up to?’ he said, rather surprisingly.

Was he joking?

‘Well, I’ve got a new book coming out,’ I said.

‘Oh, great,’ he said. ‘When?’

But the interesting thing is that once a book is published, it’s out there in the world, doing its thing: representing you, and performing and circulating in the way that books do, at any scale: being read, passing from hand to hand. And if you’re lucky people will find it, and they’ll do what they want with it. And if you’re not, they won’t, for a bit. But then maybe they will. Who knows? And who knows who might come across your book, and not just in a bookshop, but in a charity shop, or on the shelf in a pub, or a holiday home. Or be lent a well-worn copy by a friend.

But I’ve been very lucky over the years since 2003, because Foxy-T made an impact, and people have continued to discover it since. And people enjoyed it, and some people used it in their teaching, put it in grammar text books, and PhDs, and it led to lots of other gigs and opportunities and commissions. And people have continued to speak up about Foxy-T; on social media, and in the press. Sometimes so positively it takes you aback, and sometimes negatively – and other times very positively but slightly puzzlingly all at the same time, as here...

There was an event at Whitechapel Library on the tenth anniversary of the book’s publication! And earlier this year I was invited to discuss Foxy-T at the Modern Cockney Festival as part of a panel on the changing languages of London.

And on it goes, and I’m very grateful. Thanks, all.

Last few paperbacks of *Foxy-T* selling out at NOIR AT THE BAR recently…

And funnily enough, I gave a reading from Foxy-T just the other week, for NOIR AT THE BAR in London. Foxy-T is not something I’d usually think of for a Crime Writers’ Association gig. But because it’s in the repertoire, and because we were coming up for the book’s twentieth anniversary, and mostly because I was on last, at the end of a 3-hour bill of about twenty authors(!) I thought I’d better put on a bit of a show; go out with a bang; so Foxy-T it was. But also because I remembered that when Mark Lawson and Iain Sinclair had discussed Foxy-T on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row back in the day, Lawson had described it as a ‘crime novel.’ Something no other critic ever did. He’d evidently homed in on a certain accelerated murder-mystery element that’s hiding there in plain sight. And it was a good choice for a live reading at NOIR AT THE BAR. It worked well in that context. And we sold all the copies I’d brought along. And not only that but they were the last copies I’d been able to get from the Faber warehouse. Which means that the mass-market paperback is now out of stock – OFFICIAL! So if you wanted to buy a print edition of Foxy-T right now you’d better be quick, because whatever is out there really is all there is, for now anyway; either that or buy it second-hand while you can. And in the meantime there’s the ebook, of course.

So what did Charles Boyle say, in our cigarette break out there on the damp and leafy Faber fire escape, just a week or so before Foxy-T was published, all those years ago in 2003?

He said something like this: Take a deep breath and savour this moment, with all its possibilities and potential. It’s a special moment, a magical moment, just before publication, and anything could happen, but there’s not much you can do about it now except go with the flow. So just take in this moment, take a deep breath, and run with it, and see where it takes you, and enjoy it.