A Sense of Occasion: Brodie Crellin on Their Debut Novel

Crellin’s richly plotted, character-driven debut novel, endorsed by Robert Glück, Mary Gaitskill and Chris Kraus, is a thoughtful consideration of family structure, grief and identity

“Herein you will find the greatest orgasm ever written,” reads the poet and author Robert Glück’s jacket blurb for Brodie Crellin’s remarkable debut novel, A Sense of Occasion. Just one in a long list that includes seminal writers like Mary Gaitskill and Chris Kraus, Glück’s endorsement is a testament to this singular, sexually charged portrait of a dysfunctional family in the days leading up to a funeral. 

After the sudden death of Mary from sepsis, her adrift daughter Patch and slick, cold niece Jude navigate an uneasy reconciliation, presided over by Patch’s “English teacher slash actor” father Robin. While the headline of this novel might be the sex (there is a lot of it, and it’s beautifully and boldly rendered), what lingers is Crellin’s thoughtful consideration of family as a structure, the immediate shock of grief, and the ways in which people find their own identities and private meanings both within, and outside of, accepted frameworks. 

A Sense of Occasion is also a novel about other novels. A richly plotted, character-driven work in a contemporary landscape often dominated by first-person, Crellin’s deep reverence for the novel as a form is evident right from the outset. “When you‘re writing a novel, especially a first novel, so many people think that what you‘re bringing is all of your emotional experience, everything that’s happened to you,” says Crellin. “I think that, actually, it’s the things in your head, it’s what you’ve read. It will be quite clear to anyone who reads the novel that I love The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Jean Stafford, Ursula Parrott and the Patrick Melrose books.” 

Here they discuss writing sex, family, and crafting characters. 

Holly Connolly: Your novel made me think of Cassandra at the Wedding in terms of form and subject matter. I’m interested in how that book might have inspired your novel, or acted as a starting point?

Brodie Crellin: One of the things that I found really interesting about Cassandra at the Wedding was the psychosexual currents between [the twin sisters] Judith and Cassandra that don’t really get to come to the fore. I was interested to see what would happen if you were to give them more room to think through what that relationship could be, because all the ingredients are there for there to be quite an incestuous relationship between those twins. You can feel the pull, and you can feel the triangulation, and you can feel the way this impending wedding is going to completely rupture their relationship. They’re such a good example, not necessarily of codependency, but of an imbalance, and one person in the relationship wanting more than the other, which is so often also the case in a romantic relationship. Also, formally the novel is just perfect. You have this closed unit of a weekend, you have five characters, and reading it I just thought, ‘This is the perfect structure.’ Then I started thinking, ‘How could I repurpose this? How can this inform the way that I construct a novel?’ So I started by inverting things; the twins became cousins, the wedding became a funeral.

HC: Each character felt very authentic to me. Especially given this is your first book, how were you able to inhabit each of them? Particularly, for instance, Robin, who is a father and an older, gay man. 

BC: All the characters are composites of characters I’ve met, either in books, or people I know, or they’re bits of me. When you get to know a character and you spend enough time with them, you can also start to sort of pick them up, put them down, and see what happens. There are limits too. In terms of, say, Robin, I would never think that I could go and write a first person novel about a 60-year-old man who is gay. That’s part of why I love close third person: you’re able to spend time with lots of different characters, but you’re not following anyone so intimately. I think it allows for a broader canvas, where you’re able to move through different people’s experiences.

There were also certain aspects that I struggled with. In terms of writing some of the sex, I hadn’t seen a cock since I was a teenager. To research I would watch porn, or sometimes gay friends would send me voice notes of their hookups. Intergenerationally, their ages, I think that doesn’t really matter once you get to know the person. None of these characters exist on their own. So I understood who Robin was in relation to Patch, Mary and Jude, and that helps you formulate an understanding of how each character operates. 

“A family is a fiction. It’s like any relationship, it’s a narrative, it’s an illusion that you all maintain together” – Brodie Crellin

HC: Why did you want to portray a family? 

BC: A family is a fiction. It’s like any relationship, it’s a narrative, it’s an illusion that you all maintain together; you all buy into this idea that you are this family unit. I think there’s something really interesting about the family as a structure, and seeing how much that structure can hold. Socially, you can make choices about who you want to spend time with, but the forces of elasticity and estrangement are particularly potent within a family. With Jude and Patch, within this novelistic universe, I was interested in seeing both how far they could pull apart, and the forces that would ensure they’re brought back together. 

I think that there is an erotic undercurrent in any relationship, and with families we don’t necessarily have a way of talking about, or thinking through, that without plummeting into this idea of ‘taboo’. But I do think that charge is often present, and so in thinking about family, I was thinking less about taboo, and more about what is under-explored, and what can’t be presented on the page. With Jude and Patch, their bond is not romantic, necessarily, but it is possessive, and it’s about wanting control. 

HC: I’m interested in how you approached writing grief, which can be such a long process, over this very short space of time.

BC: I think I approached grief in the way that I approached all of the other emotions or experiences in the text, that they are always inflected by multiple other things. So, for instance, you can be really horny in the midst of grief, or you can be distracted by something quite banal. It’s those absurdities that I found interesting about grieving. You still have to sort out some logistical thing, you’re still hungry, you still have to take a shower, everything, life is still in motion. 

I guess, also, this book isn’t necessarily about the aftermath of grief. It’s more about how to deal with it in the moment, or it’s about difficulty to process. I think that Patch, especially, finds things difficult to process and understand. All of the characters are struggling to process life in real time, and grief is a way to sort of externalise that and dramatise it. 

HC: Sex feels very central to the novel, and in some ways it’s a depiction of queer life across different generations. Do you think of it as a queer novel? 

BC: I was really interested in the erotic landscapes that existed for these four people, and what it meant for them to think about their sex lives in public, in private, relationally, or alone. For me, it’s incidental that these characters are all bisexual. I’ve always been gay, I’ve always had a gay family. I wasn’t thinking of these characters in terms of the queer spectrum. It was so much more important to me to just think about their sex lives and what they wanted from sex; whether they were using it as a way to fashion a new self, to connect, to appear more socially acceptable, to settle a score.

When I initially shared this book with others, one of the first things people commented on was the sex writing. I don’t think I set out to do that, it’s just that, for me, sex is such a vital and significant part of our daily lives. I wanted to treat sex in the same way that I would treat dialogue. In the novel it functions no differently to a conversation, or any relational activity, like cooking, swimming, or driving together. I think about dialogue and sex in the novel as connected, because I think a good conversation, like a good sex scene, should drive the plot forward. They should never be there for the sake of it. 

A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin is published by Jonathan Cape and is out now.