Ada is a widowed writer, navigating loneliness in Oxford after the death of her husband. She has no children. No grandchildren. She fears she is becoming peripheral, another invisible woman. Eliza is a student at the university. She finds it difficult to form meaningful relationships after the estrangement of her mother and breakup with her girlfriend. After meeting through Ada’s new venture, ‘Rent-a-Gran’, and bonding over Lapsang Souchong tea and Primo Levi, they begin to find what they’re looking for in each other. But can they cast off their isolation for good?
Leaf Arbuthnot’s Looking for Eliza is a beautifully tender story that has human connection at its core. The universality of the importance of relationships is the thread that runs through it, whether it’s the warm hearted Ada or open minded Eliza, both are looking for something.
I found the read pacy, exciting, and fascinating. A delicate touch on deep psychological yearnings and the human condition.
I spoke to Leaf to learn more.
Where did the idea for Looking For Eliza come from?
Japan, strangely enough. A few years ago I heard that people there were making money from pretending to be someone’s girlfriend, wife, friend, dad. It struck a chord. While materially a lot of us aren’t lacking, I think many of us are suffering from emotional deficits. We’re lonely. I wanted to explore how it might feel to sell your time and personality and attention, in an intimate way that doesn’t involve sex. I didn’t want to set my story in Japan as I’ve not been and I also wanted to probe Englishness. So I came up with the idea of an older woman who lives in Oxford and decides to set up a business where she rents herself out as a gran, after her husband dies. Once Ada had come to me (more or less wholesale as she is in the book) other characters slinked up too, most notably Eliza.
Who is looking for Eliza? Is it Ada trying to find friendship? Eliza trying to find herself?
For readers who’ve not read the book: Eliza is my younger character, who’s 25 and doing a PhD. She lives opposite Ada, who’s a poet in her seventies and who starts the ‘rent-a-gran’ business after her husband dies. Both characters are quietly questing, as I see it. Eliza’s had her heart trashed by a former girlfriend. She and Ruby had a long relationship, and Eliza is now having to find out how to be alone as an adult. It’s something I’ve had to do in my life: when you de-extricate from someone you love, you can find that the muscles you once relied on to stand up straight by yourself have weakened. So Eliza is trying to work out who she is, or who she can be, in her own right. There’s a chapter I loved writing in which she basically tries everything: casual sex, art, religion, whatever to make herself feel whole.
As for Ada, I see her as not realising, for quite some time after the death of her husband, that she needs to continue to develop as a person. She has had the most magnificent marriage, and quite a rich life though not one full of achievements. But she learns after Michael’s death that she can’t just lead the same life she was leading before minus him. She needs to take charge and act to enrich her life again. She needs friends, basically. I’ve been interested for a long time in how friendships multiply or die off – too many older people I know have failed to keep friendships alive, often for legit reasons (they were busy having kids for instance). Ada eventually realises she needs other people; solitude isn’t feasible forever.
What do you think intergenerational friendships offer that friendships of people of a similar age don’t?
Perspective mainly. Older people tend to take a longer view and can encourage younger friends to see the wood for the trees. My grandmother is 100 and I’ve found talking to her over the years to be immensely reassuring. For someone who has lived since 1919, as she has, there are few problems you can take to her that she views as insurmountable or even significant. Generally I also think that friendships across generations are often less encumbered by envy, rivalry, longing and judgement. You’re at different stages in your life. One of my closest friends is a man in his mid sixties – my parents’ age – and while we don’t see eye to eye on almost anything (particularly politics) there’s a shared sense of humour there that’s precious to me.
Obviously friendships with people of a similar age are important. I would be nowhere without my cohort of friends; the pandemic has underlined that over and over. But I don’t think we invest in intergenerational friendships enough in Britain, or take them seriously. In fact often young people are shown boating in to telephone vulnerable lonely oldies, which I understand is important, but can underemphasise how much they stand to gain from that connection.
There’s some beautifully romantic – and sensual – passages as Eliza falls in love, sleeps with people, and discovers women she fancies. You don’t often read about lesbian or bisexual relationships, even in our enlightened times. Why do you think this is?
Thank you, I’m slightly bemused to report that the “sex scenes” in the book – if you can call them that – were among my favourite bits to write. I’ve tried to work out why, and I think it’s because sex is such a strange and dramatic experience that it was therapeutic to try to work it out on the page. I could have made it more explicit but I didn’t think the passages needed that.
It’s true that lesbian and bisexual love and sex still doesn’t get much of a showing in mainstream novels. Too often I think same-sex love is ushered into the rainbow corner. I think authors who are straight are probably now a little wary of writing same-sex relationships for fear of appropriation. There’s also a deficit of experience that they probably baulk at. And other challenges arise with it. If you’re writing say a story about a family, by making the parents two women or two men, you might as a writer feel the need to address the unusualness of that dynamic. The book could be dismissed as some LGBTQ+ story. I can see writers not wanting to clutter up their tale with those questions and concerns.
But for me, Eliza meandered over as a bisexual young woman so that’s how she stayed in the book. I didn’t feel the need to get too entangled in a discussion about her sexuality. It does come up though, because Ada, in her seventies, can’t help but be fascinated by Eliza’s sexuality. I think it’s normal for people of an older generation to be gripped by the sexual proclivities of the young, to stress about them choosing their own gender, etc, and I wanted to probe that.
You’re a literary critic. Does close reading of other books help inform your writing?
Absolutely. There are two strands to this question, I guess. Firstly there’s my work as a book critic, which is vital to my writing because I’ve been reading contemporary stuff forensically for years now, and have been able to work out what I like and what I don’t. But the more important strand here is my reading generally. I read pretty widely (novels and poetry, I have to force myself to read non-fiction). I find there is a horrifyingly direct relationship between what I read and what I write. If I’m not reading interesting nourishing books, I’m not writing anything worth the word doc it’s typed on. Reading novels and poetry is the foundation of my work as a writer. I am baffled by novelists who don’t read. If you’re a non-fiction author it’s a slightly different thing.