Guy Mankowski is a lecturer at Lincoln University, and his agent is Matthew Hamilton at The Hamilton Agency. His TEDx talk Kristen Pfaff’s Unseen Archive was entitled “Lived Through This: Kristen Pfaff’s Hidden Archive and Influence.” His next novel, You Complete The Masterpiece, will be published in November 2024.
Part thriller, part literary puzzle, and set between Morocco and Barcelona, the novel looks at artistic legacy and the challenges that arise when our identity is built around problematic artists. Ruth Dugdall said of it, “Perceptive and intimate, you will want to savour every line in this timely book.”
About You Complete the Masterpiece
You Complete The Masterpiece was written to capture the precarious state of millennial living which is still only starting to be accepted. What is striking to me is that, though the writing was completed in early 2019, I have been shocked to see that the themes it explores have only become more acute since.
The novel depicts a world in which a generation were brought up to realise that the traditional trappings of comfortable living they thought could be achieved through hard work in fact often require inheritance and the power struggles that come with that. In the novel, a struggling author finds the means by which to finally find financial security- by completing the final “masterpiece” of his favourite author. But as his hero’s own toxic legacy comes to light he has to decide, what moral cost is there to achieving security?
Why do you write in the genre that you do?
Thank you for having me on your insightful blog. It’s an interesting question as this novel as been described as a “jet-setting thriller.” It’s set in various sun-scorched hinterlands such as Morocco and Barcelona and in windswept England, and it’s often only when people attach labels you realised what you’ve written.
I’ve seen this one also pegged as “white collar crime.” I was intrigued to see a former novel of mine, An Honest Deceit, considered a crime novel as it hadn’t been my intention!
The honest answer is that literary novels have the room to bear the weight of different themes and thereby lean into various genres. My novels are always a hybrid of various ones and some tilt more ways than others.
Do you keep a notebook of ideas?
Yes, but as time has gone on and research has included audio, YouTube clips, quick notes, it has all become multi-media and unwieldy. I wish it was still the days when it was all in a notebook purloined from the stationary cupboard of wherever I was working.
Inspired by Nabokov, I do keep quick notes of dreams I have and compile them in on a Word document. As a former Assistant Psychologist who used to analyse psychological questionnaires of clients and draw themes from them, I’m interested to perhaps one day see what I learn about myself from it.
Do you have a muse?
Ha. I see this as a “quicksand” question in which my pretentious impulses could easily hang me out to dry. I think all serious creatives are channeling and working behalf of unseen others in some ways.
Are you more of a fan of plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
Character, I think. I’m largely uninterested in plot but have had to pull my stories over such frames to get them published. The more I’ve taught narrative theory, the more interested I am in plot, but characters and archetypes and the way we all perform roles and craft our identities are ideas that interest me more. I see that by the time people fit forty, the personas they’ve created are evidently working for them or against them and it’s all coming out in the wash.
Fill in the blank: “People will like your book if they like stories about…”
People and why life has got harder for the younger generations.
What are your thoughts on typewriters?
I can see myself if I had been publishing in the nineties carrying around an unwieldy Olivetti as Manic Street Preachers lyricist Richey Edwards did. Apparently, it was a “portable” typewriter, but reliable witnesses say there was nothing portable about it.
We no longer live with Gutenberg-press minds. We all exist scrolled across various digital landscapes, mentally stuck between ten browser windows, stranded psychically somewhere between them.
If we’re creative millennials, we live more in our work than we do in our rented rooms and our hot desks, which we can be turfed out of at a moment’s notice by someone probably with a housing portfolio who takes the lion’s share of our wages. And if you liked those two sentences there’s plenty more of them in my new novel, You Complete the Masterpiece.
Would you rather own a bookstore or run a library?
If you owned a bookstore, you’d just have to deal with mad people sharing their theories at you all day, and my life is enough like that anyway. With a library, I might get some peace.
How do you name your characters? If you write nonfiction, do you ever change the names of your characters, and if so, how do you decide what names to change them to?
They’re often placeholder names that end up in print. What is curious is about how later in life people can come along who might in some ways be like those characters, and they can claim to see themselves in your stories, though the stories in fact predate them. They can recognise an aspect of them, but it is one dimension of what is hopefully a multi-dimensional character.
In my last novel, I named a character after the actor River Phoenix purely because I wanted to evoke for myself the freewheeling creativity of a certain part of my nineties existence he reminded me of. I’ve used the sense of humour a friend of mine has in a character and they could see that, but it doesn’t mean the character is all them.
What is your favorite website that you use to promote your writing?
I have met people who feel part of my tribe on Instagram, such as my friend Irene, who later translated some work of mine into Russian and Georgian. Something about its visual aspect seems to bring out the less aggressive aspects of people, including myself.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
I’ve had quite a few meetings with film companies about a book I’m working on, about Kristen Pfaff, the bassist from the grunge band Hole. I think questions like this can be another form of ambition-related quicksand, and I had no idea how complex this world was, and that’s just as someone whose merely been in the foothills of it. Short answer- movie.
Do you try to hit a certain page or word count with each writing session?
2000 words feels like a healthy expression of a chunk of something.
Do you have any writing rituals?
I have writing neuroses, if that counts?
What are your passions/obsessions outside of writing?
Being with my partner, swimming in the sea and playing football at a level that is too competitive for my limited skill. And playing guitar and Sega Megadrive.
Have you made any public appearances to promote your book?
I’ve been very grateful to Meg Whitelock, of Lincoln Universities Creative Writing night sloth, who has brilliantly put together the launch for You Complete The Masterpiece. The writers I was keen to have on the bill showcase the great talent in that faculty, from my colleague Amy Lilwall, to the talented writers Em Burton, Maya Shell, Sian Toop.
My great friend Tim Marks is performing fifteen minutes of a new comedy show of his, which is a great honour. He used lines from my last novel, Dead Rock Stars, in his last show, Multitude of Casualties. It was on 29th November at the Cargill Lecture Theatre, Minerva Building, Lincoln University at 5.30pm.
Who would you most want to read your book, living or dead?
Kurt Cobain and P.J. Harvey spring to mind. Jarvis Cocker.
Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of greatest/inspirational authors?
Albert Camus, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Will Self, who was kind enough to give me a lot of good advice when I interviewed him for Lincoln Book Festival. He said, “Bond to the people you’re talking with by only badmouthing people who aren’t in the room.”
What is your favorite bookish possession?
An autographed invite to an event hosted by the director Anthony Minghella, who directed a few of my favourite films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley. It was a glamorous occasion I was too young to attend, that Helena Bonham Carter and Lady Diana’s mother were at.
My parents were there and had the presence of mind to ask him to write something for their son, the aspiring writer. I often look at his scrawled note to “keep writing,” which seems even more potent given he’s no longer with us.
Have you ever mentored another writer with their writing?
Yes, when people have reached out, I try to help. As long as they’re not coming up to me at book events with a list of corrections from a book of mine and opening with the word “right.” That’s not the way to make friends, I don’t think.
What is the most unique way that an idea for a piece of writing has come to you?
Often a glimpsed image. I remember the first novella I completed was because I got a glimpse of a woman writing at a table with the sea behind her and the sun on her back. The mood of that scene took a whole novella to explore.
Are you a big reader? Do you own a large collection of books, or are you more of a borrower?
Yes, I do but I live through and use books, rather than having them in glass cases. I try to look after them, but my onus is on making them a useful part of my life. So, they have folder corners for my favourite pages, underlined lines etc. Nothing in this world stays immaculate, and I find people with any type of stationary fetishism a bit unnerving.
Have you ever gone away to work on a piece of writing? If not, where would you go if you could?
You Complete The Masterpiece was inspired by an escape to Morocco. I went off the beaten track and stayed in Casbalanca to write by the sea. I took a train trip from Casablanca to Marrakech, and the train broke down in the desert, which was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
Curiously, I had someone I remained in contact with, until my battery died, who was tracking me on Google Maps. It spoke volumes to me that you could be lost in a desert and someone on another continent would know, to the inch, where you were. Until, a moment later, they didn’t. The resonance of this incident forms a pivotal scene in the novel.
What is an annoying thing that a non-writer has assumed about writers or the act of writing?
During the writing of the biography mentioned above someone who seemed oddly keen to criticise the project said, “How can you write a book about someone you don’t know everything about?” Which was a remarkably stupid comment that I often use to students when teaching them about the nature of research. They seem to find it a remarkably stupid comment either.
How do you measure the success of your writing career?
I suppose I try not to. There is always someone ahead and behind yourself, and it’s not good to compare yourself to an entirely different person.
You’re on your own path when all is said and done, I suppose. I remember Martin Amis saying something about how he thought he’d have no legacy.
There’s plenty of demystification and barely concealed struggle in our world, but I think that was excessive of him to say. You don’t need to be a writer of his size to make an impact on someone.
How do you know someone won’t pick up your book in a library or a charity shop and it’ll plant a seed in them? That’s the real mystique of writing I think. You don’t need some huge foundation named after you.
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