Interview by James Taylor

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Elle Nash: writer, editor, teacher, and author of some of the most viscerally obscene fiction you’ll ever read. But read it you must. Nash, who grew up in the American South and is now based in Glasgow has created a niche for herself as a conjuror of strange, lush, and unsettling fiction, from her debut novella Animals Eat Each Other to her short story collection, Nudes.

Elle’s newest novel, Deliver Me, takes the themes of her previous work and runs with them into the deep, deep dark. You’ll follow her, though; the veiling shadows which obscure the subjects of her work from public eyes are intentional, you realise. So, how to rescue the disenfranchised individuals and communities from the concealment of the darkness they have been relegated to – by politics, by the media, by common ignorance? Reading Nash’s work is a strong first method.

Deliver Me follows Dee-Dee, a young woman whose brutal, miserable work in a meat packing facility in Missouri, U.S.A, is only moderately relieved by her relationship with her boyfriend Daddy, a man whose disturbing attraction to insects provokes more repugnance in the reader than any of his criminal activities. Dee-Dee’s life is a bleak, inescapable monotony, but it’s just more bearable than her previous life lived under religious fundamentalism, still present through the hellfire voice of her estranged Momma over the phone.

Dee-Dee becomes morbidly obsessed with bearing a child, as a way to fully realise herself and find meaning in her life. But the reappearance of her childhood friend Sloane, herself expecting a child, triggers a chain of events that inevitably lead to horrific tragedy.

In Deliver Me, Nash has produced a singular, devastating, uncompromising masterpiece. Very rarely do you come across a novel so committed to apprehending the reader, making them accountable, forcing them to bear full witness to the horrors of a community in collapse. Here, the rollback of reproductive rights and mental health support is dangerously coupled with a return to right-wing conceptions of motherhood and gendered social duties.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Deliver Me’s eclectic brew of body horror, brutality and erotic dread is no sourceless bump-in-the-night. The true horror of this novel is the slow, brittle panic that arrives on you, as you realise the gap between your own life and the world of Nash’s writing is as thin as an insect’s wing.

In the following, exclusive interview with James Taylor for The Glasgow Review of Books (and ahead of her next live event in Glasgow tomorrow night), she explains why this is and more . . .

Please be aware that this interview covers some disturbing themes and material.

Glasgow Review of Books (GRB): The novel was initially inspired by a criminal case which occurred near where you lived in the American South, in 2015 – and you’ve spoken about your continued interest in criminal psychology. If you’re comfortable sharing, how did this real-life case start the germination of Deliver Me? What was it about it that interested you so much?

Elle Nash (EN): I was living in Denver, Colorado when this crime happened, it was just north of where I was living. I didn’t think, I’m going to make this a book, more, how did this happen? What was intriguing to me was this idea that a person could lie about being pregnant for nine months and no one around them would notice. Why wouldn’t anyone notice that, what’s going on there? Then I moved back to the South a year later, and while I was there I started a family, and the process of being pregnant in the American South was a weird, wild experience. It’s very conservative.

When I started to dig into case studies on this type of crime (a very fringe crime), very few have ever happened but it has happened before, there have been other cases. So what’s the link here, what’s the psychology that’s happening with people who end up doing this? I uncovered another crime, also near to where I was living in the South, there was the famous case of a woman called Lisa Montgomery who I believed lived in Missouri. That was the seed of it, being curious about this.

When Lisa Montgomery was tried in 2005, the case seemed very cut and dried, when they sentenced her to the death penalty – but the craziest thing about Lisa’s case is that she was the first woman to be given the death penalty by the United States’ Federal Government since the 1960’s.

I began writing this book while Lisa was still alive. There was not a lot of information about her case. It wasn’t until around 2021, after the book had already been purchased, and during Trump’s presidency, right before he was about to leave office, when he was imposing the death penalty on a lot of people. Lisa had a new lawyer at that point to appeal her case, because they uncovered massive amounts of terrible abuse that happened to her as a child. The worst of what humanity can do to children.

When all this information came to light, it made me think, how can we have empathy for these kinds of people, why do these things happen, can we examine them further? I think that’s where I was going with it. I don’t think I knew at the outset that’s what I wanted [to do], but as I began to get deeper into the novel, and trying to inhabit the psychology of a person like this, that’s where it ended up going. It’s weird; my research of the crime and my experience of these types of women deepened and changed – even during, and after, the writing of the novel.

GRB: Has living in Glasgow during some of the writing of this book, and having that geographic as well as political distance from the U.S, given you different perspectives on the issues it tackles? I wonder if the book might have changed at all having been composed entirely in the U.S. Even though it takes place in the American South, the themes Deliver Me explores are just as relevant in the U.K at present, as both sides of the Atlantic swing towards the right politically, or entrench themselves further in it.

EN: I started writing Deliver Me while I was still living there [the U.S] but I finished writing it after I moved to the U.K. One thing that changed was capturing some of the things I loved about living in the American South, the Ozarks in particular, the landscape, and the sense of what it’s like for working class people who live in these areas.

I think in the U.S there is a tendency to look at the South as this monolith of conservatives and religious people – they’re all mad and they should suffer. Whereas there are actually a lot of working class people, a lot of Queer people, disenfranchised people, who are not part of this monolith, they are actually really struggling to survive in this area. But it’s their home and they’re not able to move to more liberal places because they don’t have the resources to do that.

I’m a leftist, I’ve always had these ideals, but moving here made me feel more angry at the structures that do exist in the United States. For example, a large part of the novel explores this idea of access to healthcare and mental health support, which doesn’t really exist. Dee-Dee doesn’t have access to a community of people or mental health support, and that’s why these people fall through the cracks.

In Scotland, even though I know the NHS isn’t perfect, there have been moments I’ve experienced where I’ve almost cried out of gratitude, because I can’t believe this exists. I can see that it’s working, I know it’s not working perfectly, but it’s one of these things that must be protected at all costs.

So, then you think, why would people intentionally block the creation of these structures, or try to deconstruct them? Which is what’s happening with the conservative movements in the U.K. Why would you push only for privatisation of medical care? I’ve seen commentary online from people who are not politicians, just your average person, who are also promoting this, who are British. There’s part of me that’s like, you do not understand what it would do to how you live, because you haven’t lived it and you don’t see how these policies can cause people to struggle. They have this fantasy idea of it. I think that’s benefited my perspective and how I look at, and have written this book.

There are a lot of similarities – like, I read this line about Liz Truss being at one of the Republican national events in the U.S, and she’s backing Trump. Why are you there, why are you involved in American politics? Why are American politicians trying to get involved in U.K politics?  It’s like they are trying to create an international political movement – to what end? The government is meant to support its citizens, so why are you getting involved with other countries? This collusion together, it’s motivated by money, it’s about power. They know that together, they can wield more of that influence to benefit themselves. It feels so insidious.

GRB: Dee-Dee’s work at a chicken-processing plant is repetitive, shocking, and often repulsive to say the very least, but it’s necessary to the conditions of her motherhood; they’re somewhat equated in the opening lines – ‘the factory is a fertile body, each breast a beginning’. Can you say something about the relationship between motherhood and capitalism in Deliver Me? ‘Labour’ really earns its dual meanings here . . .

EN: Where to start! In terms of labour, working class people build societies, working class people are doing the jobs that are not fun, not everyone wants to do. Not everybody is following their passion by saying, I want to work in a chicken factory, in a coal mine, any of these kinds of things. It’s really important to highlight these kinds of work.

In terms of the female body and motherhood under capitalism, I do think there’s a misconception. I see discourse online, about a couple of things. One, is this idea that women do not do manual labour. I see a lot of these MRA [Men’s Rights Activist] types talk about men doing the majority of these dangerous jobs, so they’re more likely to be subjected to workplace violence. Even in that narrative, there is an erasure of the women who do perform these jobs. It’s not just that women face struggles with entering and staying in the workforce and commanding pay because they end up having children. It puts working class mothers more at risk.

There is also something to be said about motherhood being a kind of labour. Personally, in my late twenties, I was really burnt out at my job, and I had this almost naive idea that [becoming a mother] would allow me to escape the nine to five, and free myself from labour, and I would be in a relationship that would be supportive of that. I hate saying it’s naive, and I don’t want to speak ill of anybody who decides to leave the workforce to become a mom. I think it’s really important.

But even in a supportive relationship, when you become a mother, it’s labour all the time. It’s unending, it really is a kind of manual labour. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful, treasured experience, but it’s also a kind of work. It’s a necessary work, it’s a work that has to be done. You’re not compelled just because you have this baby and you love it, but it’s a necessary work because mothers are creating people. Fathers play a role in that too but all families are organised differently. It’s important to lean into it, as it’s something that I’ve experienced and I’ve thought about a lot. I was working full time as a barista all the way up until three days before my due date . . .

GRB: Oh my God!

EN: I was working on my feet that whole time, and the reason I elected, for the first two years, to not go back to work was because childcare is so costly. It didn’t make sense.

The other added element of being a mother under capitalism, which is really difficult, is that even birth itself incurs cost. One of my British cousins, who is around my age, we were pregnant around the same time, our kids are a month apart. Watching her birth experience online – not the actual experience, the process! [laughs] – she had to go into the hospital a month early and stay in there for a while. None of that incurred a cost.

I was living in Denver, and I was so anxious and miserable. I wanted to leave Denver and I remember thinking – the only way I’m going to be able to afford to have a family is if I’m living in a small, nondescript town, where the cost of living is way cheaper.

That was part of it – how am I ever going to have a house or pay for childcare, or afford to feed my kid, or pay for the cost of giving birth? It was so insurmountable, even on the salary that I was on, which was a pretty decent salary for the city. I couldn’t believe I would have to incur debt just for having a baby – they’ll even charge you for things like skin to skin contact.

GRB: I think Dee-Dee’s obsessive reduction of her identity down to her fertility, and the parallel value of her as a woman in her community being predicated on her reproductive capabilities, was so hauntingly resonant of the wider political climate of America. It extends across the board, even into the trans and LGBT experience, some of which Deliver Me approaches – this dilution of the human experience to physical descriptors and their labour value, like flesh on a production line.

EN: I want to rant a little bit – the biological determinism argument of what womanhood is or isn’t is so frustrating. For one, it comes from this religious culture which says, this is your job, this is what you’re meant to do. If you have other desires outside of being a mom, in the South, you feel weird, because you meet very traditional and religious moms who do really love and thrive doing only that. If you have a family, but that’s not the only thing you do, you feel alienated. That’s one part of it.

The other part of it is – God, I saw some stupid tweet from J.K Rowling this week talking about whatever the biological determination of what a woman is. She’s talking about gametes, or something, I’m like, how many little mental hoops are you trying to jump through to justify this mindset? She and others who think this way just end up repeating this narrative that your value as a woman is based solely in what your body can do for, or provide to society.

I deserve equal rights and access to healthcare, no matter what my body is or how it was born because I’m fucking human. I don’t understand what is hard to grasp about that. I am a human with a mind, and we should all have value in society for the different things we are, rather than it being based on what society determines our bodies are valued for.

GRB: I found it really interesting that the main voice of this religious culture, this fundamentalism, in Deliver Me, was female. I think we’re used to considering religious control associated with patriarchy, male iconography, and fatherhood. Here, it becomes the Mother, the very figure Dee-Dee wants to escape but also ascend towards, even usurp. What are your thoughts on the gendered experience of religious fundamentalism? Even more so when we see Dee-Dee and her old friend Sloane dabble in pagan rituals and spells . . .

EN: In my own personal experience, I always thought I would be able to relate more to my mom, and my mom would be able to relate more to me, and I never really had that. My mom is nothing like the mom in this book, but I think when you have that expectation as a daughter to have that closeness, or want someone to show you how to live, when that person continuously shames you and tells you how you should be, it just creates pressure.

In a way too, having the mother being the voice of ‘religious reason’, almost legitimises for Dee-Dee that this is a pathway for women. If it was her father, it would be much easier for her to rebel against that, and see outside of it. In a patriarchal society, the figure of the father is scary, closed, and the figure of the mother has the very specific role of conferring that emotional content. That can be disarming, right? So that allows the toxicity to get in, in a way.

GRB: I felt there was an emptiness to this pervasive religious environment Dee-Dee suffers under, through the voice of Momma, as she thinks when she considers the slaughtered chickens, ‘Where was the God in all of this?’ The traditional routes towards ‘salvation,’ in whatever form that may take (economic, spiritual, sexual) are all equally fruitless in this novel. It’s through her own selfhood, and the ultimately disturbing, violent pathway towards it, that Dee-Dee feels will rescue her. It’s a work of inverse self-actualization.

EN: For seeking salvation, I think everyone is always seeking something. We all have desire, we all have yearning. That’s the first Buddhist precept, suffering is inevitable because we have cravings. That’s a normal, human, emergent experience.

I think that’s really where I started from. Everyone can have this kind of experience, but how it can manifest in different areas of society can be so radically different. Whether that’s through seeking money, some people do seek salvation through motherhood, and sometimes what will happen is they end up being terrible parents, because they are projecting and living vicariously so deeply through their kids that it can damage [them], creating these childhood wounds. These childhood wounds grow up and they say, I’m yearning too.

I also wanted to position all of the characters in the novel as proselytizing some way of life to Dee-Dee. One thing that happens when you’re a newcomer to organised religion, and they’re not familiar with you, is that they’re all so friendly. If you look at the Church from the outside in, sometimes what you see is this vitriol and hate for non-believers, spitting poison in a way, to protect their ideology.

But when you step into a Church and say, I’m just here to learn, I’m curious, they tend to be very open and friendly. Part of this is, specifically with certain elements of charismatic Christianity, that they want to be the one that saves you – because for them, that’s practising good work, being closer to God.

Something that’s also weird culturally about the United States is that there’s this heavy element of puritanism that exists, even when people are secular. Even if they think they have left religion behind, there’s a function and structure of Christianity that exists in their mind. In some ways, some of these people are always trying to convert others to their way of being. It’s Christian thinking.

In how I live my own life, my values, I’m trying hard to remove this sense of structure and Christian thinking in my own mindset. It’s a lifelong process. I feel that for some people, that’s the best way for people to free themselves. But it’s hard, because so much of society reinforces it, even when they think they’re free. It’s something as simple as Richard Dawkins thinking he’s an atheist, while being the deepest puritan on the planet.

GRB: This book certainly veers towards body-horror and violence, more than your previous work such as Nudes and Animals Eat Each Other, and I’m interested in how horror as a literary genre coincides with political and social horrors. You’ve mentioned the repealing of Roe vs Wade and the more general reversal of human rights across the U.S informing Deliver Me. Horror is so pervasive, from visual and social media to the minutiae of everyday living; how can you make that feel fresh and urgent, when it saturates so much daily life now?

EN: Absolutely. I don’t know if this is particularly true, but part of what I feel about a novel is that it’s a map of the human mind. Or a human mind, a map of consciousness, in some way, mapping society. I don’t think my bent towards horror at first was intentional, because I also just became really fascinated with the psychology of killing in society, the morals around that sort of thing.

As I went further into it, I realised it was more horror, but not the traditional genre horror, I wasn’t writing to a particular structure. I started examining myself more. I realised I watch more horror than I watch anything else. I would just watch anything, I don’t even remember the titles of them. I was thinking about what worked and what didn’t, what surprised me and what didn’t surprise me. It made me think a lot about what it represents for us as a society, and why it looks the way it looks. For example, I feel there’s been this trend, not in fiction but in film, towards gratuitous horror. Why is it getting more extreme, but also rated as less extreme?

GRB: Terrifier 2 is a prime example of this, I suppose – a horror that is both extreme but banal in its repetitious explicitness?

EN: Yes, and the story behind it was completely uninteresting. I saw that one, the aesthetic of Art the Clown is interesting, right? There’s a mass shooting in one of the sequences, and part of me was like, what is this meant to be saying about society? We’ve gotten to a point in the United States where random violence is so commonplace [people become] blase.

I do think horror is this place where we can safely play out what these survival tactics might mean for us. It is this place where we get to say – well, what if everyone died? What would that look like? What would happen if we were forced to confront this extreme gender violence? Or even in the case of something as simple as The Handmaid’s Tale – what would it look like if we took how we actually felt, and what society is telling us we are meant for, how would people in this environment think and feel?

It becomes this place in the mind where we get to explore and
experiment with these scenarios. We get to take our social anxieties and play them out, and experiment with feelings like disgust. We can trigger ourselves in a way that is fundamentally safe, because if something in a book becomes too real, we can always just put the book down. Whereas, in real life, you don’t always get the option to step away.

GRB: And body horror usually examines the reality of the body as a political subject, a body under conditions in which it cannot remain itself – it has to change, morph, and flood in response to its reality. I note how ‘politics’ often seems to invade the feminine, queer, colonised body first, but never the white, heternormative male – they escape the modulation from object to subject in contemporary life. Is it ever possible for the body to exist apolitically in horror? That it’s not the bodies who must morph, but the politics that control them?

EN: That’s interesting. I have a theory too, there’s a history (I’m not quite sure how to delineate the exact timelines) of female bodies, disenfranchised bodies, queer, black bodies, being used in art and film to express these anxieties of society. In the sense that, because it’s othered, it becomes a lightning rod for society to impress its social mores on it. This is what a body is supposed to be, this is what a body is supposed to do.

The thing that’s intriguing about the rise in transgressive fiction, for example, is that you have this othered person being able to take that back, and say, now I’m going to challenge these social mores, that you’ve been putting on the archetypes of this art for years and years.

Horror is such a great place for queer writing and disenfranchised writing, because people are trying to claim this sense of autonomy. You see a lot of films and books now in conversation with female rage, like Titane, or Animal by Lisa Taddeo, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. Even Eric LaRocca.

We’re saying, we’re not going to follow your tropes anymore, we’re pushing against things. That’s what transgressive media is for, it’s not just for shock value. There’s empathy underneath it; what does it look like to challenge the way the world is trying to impose on you? As far as can the body ever be apolitical . . . I don’t know? That’s a deep philosophical question!

I do want to say that, I don’t think the ending of Deliver Me is trying to say it’s impossible to find freedom. The little Buddhist part of me is saying that suffering is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be nihilistic. It can be through self-actualization and self-reflection, finding the root of that suffering, and maybe find some equanimity through that. Also, accepting suffering is sometimes always there, it’s a sad fact of human existence. But it doesn’t mean you can’t see and appreciate human goodness on a grand scale. It’s not just saying, appreciate the small things in life. It’s trying to centre things like community and love and support, those kinds of things too.

GRB: Your previous work, particularly Animals Eat Each Other, also examines relationships which are unconventional, transgressive, often unhealthy. It certainly continues through Deliver Me, where Dee-Dee and Daddy’s relationship is marked by discommunication, abuse, and the festering presence of insects . . . What continues to draw you back to these particular relationship dynamics?

EN: I’m very interested in power between people, on a personal level. That’s what I’m constantly trying to explore. You get involved with a person, and have all these feel-good, crush energies, you have thoughts of the future. At some point, not with everyone, but with some interactions, things change and friction happens. Baggage comes out, everyone has their fucked-up thing. Power dynamics start coming into play, and people tend to feel mired or trapped, and not know how to get out of them.

I’m fascinated by how this happens. Especially in terms of the modern institution of marriage. Not that this is official research, but I swear, I feel like I read hundreds and hundreds of posts on Reddit about marriage and relationships – though people tend to go complain [online] when they’re unhappy – but it seems there are so many pitfalls for people who end up in these long-term dynamics. Some are just way more fucked up than others, some people just should not be together.

Some dynamics, even with both the ‘bad-actor’ and the victim, are incredibly complex and nuanced, and it’s this chance meeting of people where it should not have happened. I’ve been researching the Jodie Arias case a lot, from the United States. Jodie murdered her Mormon boyfriend, the case was again super-cut and dried, and she got a life sentence.

People represented her in the media as manipulative and a seductress, a stalker. And yet, when you dig into him, the man who was murdered, you find that he was consistently manipulating her, he may have been domestically abusing her. It’s just this weird chance encounter which should not have happened, and I’m just fascinated by how these things end up happening, and trying to look at it from all angles.

GRB: Deliver Me navigates the territory of compulsory heterosexuality impressively in this way – these characters end up in terrible relationships they should never have entered into because their real desires were denied by the Church, family, whatever social structure it might be. Dee-Dee, Daddy and Sloane all experience this to some extent, their socially-imposed relationships wreaking more chaos than the expression of their true desires ever would have.

EN: You’re shamed, and you live in fear, and yet desire will always find a way. It snakes through things like a river, to get to whatever it needs to. I think about that a lot – if they had grown up in a really liberal city, would Dee-Dee and Sloane have ended up being together? Would it have still been such a fucked up power dynamic, because of that shame? Or Daddy, being shamed by his father, what feelings linger under there that he represses constantly, does he feel shame not just around compulsory heterosexuality, but also shame around what masculinity should be like? Would he be less abrasive and rigid, because his ego is trying so hard to protect itself that he has to front all of these harsh ideals towards Dee-Dee?

GRB: To end, how do you process working with such difficult material as a writer? You do a lot of research, and I imagine it has an emotional weight to it. Are you able to distance yourself from it through the craft, or does it still take time to navigate when it regards subjects and topics close to you personally? What’s your relationship like to the finished narrative of Deliver Me?

EN: That’s a good question. Obviously I enjoy writing and I get
something out of it. I’m definitely in the camp of, if people say ‘writing is hard’, then maybe they should try manual labour.  The craft, the language, puzzling out language and figuring out how to create a representation of something with words, is endlessly fascinating to me. I love looking at a sentence, and just puzzling out word choice. That part is really enjoyable to me.

Sometimes you are doing research and looking at things that are quite gruesome, and I don’t know if it affects me personally, per se, but maybe that’s part of what the writing is – I’m thinking and absorbing, and exorcising it when it’s out on the page. There’s some things that you have to look at as facts of life. I worked at a medical clinic for a while too, so maybe I’m not quite as squeamish about things.

When you look at real horror, or see images of Gaza, you do feel emotionally affected by it. Maybe part of what I do is trying to process what that every day violence is like, and develop a deeper understanding of these horrible things that exist in the world. Dee-Dee works in death, she works at this factory where she’s constantly killing, but it is very sterile. And we live every day, consuming things that have been killed this way, but we’re not thinking about how it’s been killed, how it’s been treated.

This idea that violence goes on without our attention or care, that’s something that deeply bothers me. I’m not vegan but I still think about milk, for example, with animals forced to be constantly pregnant until they’re no longer useful. On a deeper level, when you come face to face with what that brutality looks like, I think it’s important to see and experience that.

For example – people don’t want to look at the images coming out of Gaza, they don’t want to see children suffering. As a parent I understood this, it’s really distressing. It pulls that human part out of you, you feel an insurmountable amount of helplessness. But then I imagine how they feel. Our governments are supporting and funding this, and they have been for over seventy-seven years. They’ve been doing it for so long, and hardly anyone had paid attention to it until October 7th.

That’s the kind of horror that exists every day but that we don’t think about. I think that’s why I feel compelled to put these experiences on the page and that’s my relationship to the narrative. There is horror every day. I do feel it’s important to bring a reader to their knees in front of the event, it’s important to elicit empathy, and expand our narratives beyond what currently exist. 

GRB: Elle, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to The Glasgow Review of Books.

Elle Nash will be talking about ‘Deliver Me’ at Waterstones; Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow on Wednesday, 26 June along with Kirsty Logan. You can buy tickets for this event here.

‘Deliver Me’ is available via Verve Books and other good outlets.

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