2 weeks Ago By Olivia Marks
“The fear is that motherhood will completely annihilate everything else about you,” says author Saba Sams, 28, as we meet ahead of the publication of her debut novel, Gunk , and just eight weeks after the birth of her baby son, her third child in seven years. “And then I realised, OK, then annihilate me,” she continues, settling deeper into a sofa wearing a zip-up Kappa tracksuit top in a luminous Lucozade hue, before she is called into wardrobe to change into the candyfloss-coloured Rejina Pyo dress for her Vogue portrait. “It’s a complete reinvention, transformation, whatever.
And you kind of just have to allow it to happen. And accept that this new self can keep doing both things.” It certainly has.
Sams’ award-winning short story collection Send Nudes , from which her story “Blue 4eva” (an immaculately drawn portrait of the pain of adolescence and broken families) won the prestigious BBC National Short Story award, was published in 2022. A year later, she was named on Granta ’s illustrious Best of Young British Novelists list. If her short stories, some written when she was 19 and studying creative writing at the University of Manchester, were focused on coming-of-age experiences, her first novel is, perhaps, inevitably, centred on contemporary motherhood, particularly on “blowing open this very small definition we have of what a mother is”.
Set in Brighton, the town in which Sams grew up, her tale revolves around childless Jules, her ex-husband Leon and 19-year-old Nim who starts working at the sticky-floored student nightclub – Gunk – they own. When Nim discovers she’s pregnant, Jules steps in to help and finds herself facing a future she didn’t think was possible. “I think I’m interested in nontraditional families because, in a lot of ways, I have one,” Sams continues.
Take today: Sams’ close friend, Brenna, is on set to help with the baby, strapping him to their chest to get him to sleep. “I literally couldn’t do it otherwise,” she says. Growing up, Sams’ parents, who are separated, “were creative in the way that they lived.
We went to a lot of festivals ; there were always a lot of people around,” she says. Although she wouldn’t describe her household as a “particularly literary one” (“I don’t think my dad’s ever read a whole book, apart from potentially mine”), her parents “are natural storytellers”. To write, Sams escapes to the café at her local east London cinema – there’s no space for a desk at home “and they don’t make you pay for drinks or kick you out”.
Catching snippets of conversations inspires her, as do her children. “Having kids, you’re witnessing what it is to become a person,” she says, “and that is hugely creative. And that informs my writing every day.
” Gunk by Saba Sams (Bloomsbury, £17) is published on 8 May Cover image: taffeta dress, Rejina Pyo. Photograph: Clay Stephen Gardner. Styling: Eniola Dare.
Hair: Hiroshi Matsushita. Make-up: Francesca Daniella. Nails: Naima Coleman.
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