How Jo Hamya Sits Down & Writes
Debut novel, 'Three Rooms,' is thoughtful, intelligent, and renders millennial, Gen Z precarity with echoes of Virginia Woolf.
“A woman must have money and a room of one’s own.” So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many.
Set in one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.
Three Rooms is great for fans of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, as well as fans of Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith.
We spoke with Jo about not finding story inspiration, but obsessing over themes, about writing in silence, but making playlists for the ‘in between time,’ and about how nothing worth writing about happens while writing.
Q: Where do you like to write the most?
It usually happens in bed.
Q: When do you like to write the most?
I have no preference.
Q: When it comes to drafting, do you prefer writing on a computer or freehand?
I don’t draft: I usually edit my sentences as and when I write them until they’re perfect. Typing is better for that because it makes for less mess and fluid editing.
Q: Are you more of a plotter or pantser?
Bit of both.
Q: Stephen King has a great line in ‘On Writing’ that says “the scariest moment is always right before you start. After that, things can only get better.” That scary pre-start moment often inspires procrastination in writers. Suddenly, you have to clean your entire house, do the laundry and play Candy Crush for an hour before you can actually start writing. Is there anything you need to do before you can actually sit down and work?
No, I don’t find that King quote to be true at all. The moment before starting is the best one — it’s full of potential. Anyone sane would stop there. To quote Dylan Moran, ‘it’s potential, leave it!’. The desire to get up and start cleaning usually comes three or four hours into the working day when things start to get effortful or dry up. At that point I don’t let myself do anything more than pace around the room I’m in.
Q: Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what music? Is your choice of music inspired by the project you’re working on?
I made playlists for both of my books to keep me in the headspace of each in the ‘between times’ of writing — when walking or eating, etc. The songs were directly related to the content, but also the style: I like rhythmic prose, so music and poetry feed a lot into how I go about things. But I prefer to write in silence.
Q: Some writers believe you have to write every single day. Is that true of your process? How often do you write/how long for each session?
I don’t believe in sacking off work because you don’t feel like it or it’s hard, but equally I don’t believe in forcing something that’s definitely not coming. I use word counts: 2,000 a day as a goal, and 6,000 a week as a kinder baseline. When the words are done, I’m done. Because I revise as I go, I can be sure I’ve written exactly what I needed to.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give an aspiring author?
Get out more. Talk to people. Nothing worth writing about happens while writing.
Q: Where do you normally find story inspiration?
I don’t think I get inspired, and I don’t think I write ‘stories’, in a plot sense. I just tend to become very obsessive about a theme and write my way to some kind of conclusion around it. So far those themes have been digital technology and social media, contemporary social issues, and how different generations relate to each other in light of those two things.
Q: Three Rooms is set against the backdrop of pre-Brexit. What made you want to explore this story through the lens of that time?
See the above.
Q: Three Rooms follows a young woman over the course of a year, but she remains unnamed throughout. Why did you choose to leave her unnamed?
The narrator didn’t have a name because there was no relevant reason to give her one. Nothing about the book would have changed whatever her name was.
Q: Three Rooms was inspired by Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own. What inspired you so much about that book? And about the quote specifically that every woman should have "money and a room of one's own."
When I figured out I was writing a book about ideas of home, I began seeking out works of non-fiction that might further my arguments — either by working with the book or against it. Woolf just so happened to be a delightful combination of revolutionary and blinkered: there was a lot of point/counterpoint material to write off the back of. That essay means we now have an almost century old example of how much it sucks to freelance, for example. But it also makes very reductionist, self-defeating points about the work of domestic labourers. It was a very rich source to think about in tandem with writing: it gave me a good 60 pages or so. And I’ve always loved Woolf’s fiction in general, so it felt like a good spot of homage. I was very close to using Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space instead of the Woolf at one point, but it was too joyful.
Q: Aside from Woolf, are there any other writers or books that inspired Three Rooms?
Yes, Hannah Sullivan, Anne Carson, Andrew Motion, Wordsworth, Walter Pater, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Lowell, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Rachel Cusk.
Q: At one point, the narrator voices what many millennial readers feel keenly in their everyday lives:“When did it become ridiculous to think that a stable economy and fair housing market are unreasonable expectations?” Despite the many grim realities Millennials face (and have faced throughout their lifetimes), they are often criticized by generations above and below them. Why do you think the millennial generation gets so much criticism—and why was this such an enticing dynamic to explore in your novel?
I think all generations face some sort of criticism: “boomers” are seen as out of touch, millennials are ‘entitled’, Gen Z have no nuance — these are broad generalisations each age group pushes against because anything that contributes to them is just a product of their specific circumstance which hasn’t been empathised or engaged with by other people properly. I find those gaps in communication fascinating. They’re where large shifts in socio-political values take place, or to put it another way: they’re sites of struggle for what we think of as right or wrong, or valuable in a given society. The process of how an idea, or cultural artefact is deemed valuable is what’s always enticed me in any writing I’ve done, fiction or otherwise.
Q: Is there anything in particular you hope your readers take away from your narrator's journey in Three Rooms?
No. It’s probably best described as a ‘state of the nation’ book, very specifically set in 2018-2019 England. Some people have complained about Brexit and Grenfell making it anachronistic, and I take that as a great compliment. It means I did my job well. Not everything should be universally applicable. It’s good to look back, sometimes, as an aid to figuring out where things stand now.
Pick up your copy of Three Rooms at bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound.
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