Hannah Webb: 'I always seem to end up writing at the extremes'

Fictionable

We opened this Autumn season with Daisy Johnson and followed up with Judith Vanistendael and Scott Jacobs. We'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo over the next week or so, but this episode is devoted to Hannah Webb and her short story Titanic.

While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists that her story is definitely not autobiographical.

"I have been on one of those holidays," she says, "but it didn't end up like that. There was much less cruelty."

Under the surface, she explains, Titanic is driven by technology.

"Teenagers have been struggling with their mental health for a long, long time. But I suppose phones do bring this new aspect into it of never being able to turn off. And the internet is this vast space where there's endless things you could be looking at. Sometimes it's very difficult to know when to stop looking."

In our connected world, you're never far from the extremes, Webb continues, extremes that are often rewarded by the algorithm. But that unreality doesn't make the experience any less important.

"The emotions that you feel from it are happening in the same body," she says, "and you're going to have the same mind. It's good to retain perspective, but at the same time it can be dismissed too easily as not real."

The world always feels like it's breaking, she adds, but Webb hasn't given up hope. "While there's maybe a lot of uncertainty, part of that uncertainty is also possibility."

We'll be exploring possible futures with Esther Karin Mngodo next time.

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