2 Girls 1 Book: Gunk by Saba Sams

two women and a baby

Welcome to the fourth edition of 2 Girls 1 Book, a monthly cross-post where Ochuko and Pandora chat about a new book via Google docs. This month we’re talking about Gunk by Saba Sams—the first novel from the British author following her 2022 short story collection, Send Nudes. (The eagle-eyed will note that we were meant to be reading Fish Tales, but the sexual violence was too much for us.) As ever, we’d love to hear from you in the Comments. And for those of you who like to read along, next month we will be reading Sleep by Honor Jones.

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Thirty-something Jules runs a club in Brighton called Gunk, alongside the nightclub’s owner, Leon, a grubby Peter Pan figure who is also her ex-husband. He regularly shags the student waitresses he employs and one day that happens to be Nim, who is beautiful, mysterious, cool (far too cool for Leon, thinks Jules). When Nim, aged 19 and broke, finds out she’s pregnant, she’s terrified. Jules reassures her that everything will be fine, she will help. But then Nim disappears, leaving her with her baby. Jules has always wanted to be a mother, but not like this. But what if the baby is all she has left of Nim?

“I remained convinced that I wasn’t drawn to her romantically… Her strength intimidated me, her generosity even more. She had a past packed with secrets and a new life growing in her womb.”

Pandora, you read this one a while ago and had been telling me for weeks that I’d love it. And I did! They say there’s nothing new under the sun, but I truly don’t think I’ve ever read a plot quite like this. It did none of what I expected it to. I was as delighted by the narrative and the characters as I was by the surprise of it all. Did you feel the same?

I was so excited for you to read it. As you say, it feels very original without obviously striving to be uNiQuE. You know when you can tell how much an author is labouring to create something offbeat?

I don’t think I loved it quite as much as I loved Send Nudes, but that’s because short stories are my favourite genre. For example, Katherine Heiny is beloved for Early Morning Riser but my favourite is still her short story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow (bad title). But I still thought it was so very good.

I didn’t know you were big on short stories! That’s fun. I resisted them for a while but I’ve fully bought into them now. And yes, I know exactly what you mean—it’s obvious and it’s never good.

Ochuko, they are my favourite. Tempted to list my top 5 for you, but I’m going to try and stay on track. It’s really impressive, what Sams has done with Gunk: she’s taken a story which is in itself very readable, but she’s actually saying something much larger, about what a family looks like, what makes a mother, whether romance is the only way to have a partnership. I’m not surprised she’s been so lauded: at the age of 29, she’s won the BBC’s Short Story competition, been named one of Granta’s best young novelists, and been heralded by Vogue (although I’m wary of such heraldings) as “Britain’s brightest debut novelist”.

Impressive. Something that struck me while reading the book was how fast-paced and easy it was to get through. She could have taken a different turn and made the exploration of those themes much heavier. I’m glad she didn’t. There’s such skill in that, I think. I really need to read Send Nudes. It's sitting on my shelf!

Yeah it tackles these big, amorphous things with such easy elegance. For instance, there’s a bit where Jules compares Nim’s cool intelligence—she has “not been taught to pontificate”—with the students who frequent the bar. Basically, Jules questions education for the sake of it—how we reward and elevate the people who look smart and sound smart, but aren’t, as Jules would argue about Nim, the most interesting people in the room, or the most curious, or the most resilient. I think how she did that was masterful.

I loved the subtle commentary there as well. It made me think of many young, wealthy, well-educated people I know who have strong opinions about the world without ever really experiencing it. I wonder what Nim would think about the protagonists of Perfection—her opposites in so many ways.

I think Nim would think Anna and Tom are ridiculous! Nim and Jules are people who value the physicality of things. It’s a very visceral book: the stickiness of the club, the grubbiness of Leon, the raw animality of birth, the milky yearnings of the baby. That’s very Sams, incidentally; Send Nudes has a short story set in a butcher which is very… meaty.

I read a book at the start of the year called Service that was mostly set in a restaurant. It made me realize how much I enjoy that hospitality setting (although Gunk is only hospitable to a certain kind of person). Did you ever notice how small their worlds seemed? Nim’s horrid apartment, Jules’ nicer one, the beach, and Gunk. I’m fascinated by how authors build these closed worlds for their characters to traverse and how it sets the mood of the novel. It all did feel very sticky.

I imagine it’s for storytelling purposes—that sort of intimacy slash claustrophobia—but also these people don’t have much money, and they’re mostly working long shifts.

Speaking of sticks, I love the way she describes things. Here is her description of Leon:

“He was beautiful and brazen and bad with it. He loved attention in whatever form: positive, negative, it hardly mattered, so long as someone, anyone, was thinking about him. Leon was skilled at giving the impression, in a room full of people, that you were the one he’d picked out. His issue was longevity, was resilience. There was something unquiet about him, I saw that straight away: a continuous internal buzzing that meant he bored of everything easily, including people.”

I think, how many men—and their appeal—can be summed up like this? The eternal non-committers? Whose slipperiness is the very thing that makes them appealing?

I felt quite bad for Leon, you know. It was interesting to see how his character evolved as the book went on. It’s funny, I also couldn’t really imagine Jules with him—much less her staying as long as she did.

He is a tragic figure. But he’s probably the most predictable figure, too. I’ve seen him in fiction (and life!) plenty. Jules describes being drawn to Leon because she was running away from the conventional life that her parents expected of her. And I think this book as a whole is a rebuke against the conventional, and a necessary reminder that you don’t need to live a certain life to have a child, to be a mother, and it’s not bad to be a mother under and in different circumstances.

If the book has one big message, that’s it. And as someone who’s young and figuring life out, it meant a lot to read this at this time. There’s all this pressure to have so many ducks in a row before starting a family. How do you know when it’s the right time, or who’s the right person? And what do you do when things turn out differently than you’d hoped, or when a prayer is answered in an unexpected way? I love how Sams doesn’t write Nim in a negative light because she doesn’t want her child, and doesn’t turn Jules into a saviour either. The way she explores Jules’ initial feeling of fear and guilt and imposter syndrome was so well done.

Nim is someone Jules admires because she follows her impulses through.But the specific contours of their relationship are quite vague. Jules and Nim are not in a sexual relationship, but they are in an intimate relationship. What did you make of their relationship?

I kept waiting for something to happen between them—something more. Perhaps because we’ve been trained to expect relationships of that intensity to end only one way, a tension Sams so smartly explores in this book. I’m not confident I know what either of their feelings were for each other, or how romantic they really were. Making Nim as young as she was, I think, was the author’s way of creating a literary cock block, I’m sure.

I feel like rather than crafting a cock block, she was intentionally showing this new version of a relationship which has intimacy, but not sexuality. This idea that people could be best friends and co-parents but not in a romantic partnership. It’s very moving on Jules and her desire to be a mother.

I thought it was shady how she’d hook up with random guys in the hopes of getting pregnant though.

I admire that honesty. I think it’s very true. For some women, who long to be mothers and are not, that yearning for a child, this screaming desperate need, can send you to insane lengths. To do things that you might not otherwise do.

And wasn’t it interesting to see that overwhelming desire juxtaposed with Nim’s confidence that a child was not what she wanted—and to see both feelings and experiences validated?

100%. I adored the parts on motherhood: the yearning for it (Jules); the eschewal of it (Nim). Sams is a mother of 3 and a lot of the physical descriptions of Nim’s pregnancy felt very familiar to me; like when she talks about how hard a baby feels inside your tummy, that it moves like an eel, it ripples. Sams said something in her Vogue interview on the joy that can be found in the obliteration of early motherhood which I found so galvanizing:

“The fear is that motherhood will completely annihilate everything else about you. And then I realised, OK, then annihilate me. It’s a complete reinvention, transformation, whatever…. Having kids, you’re witnessing what it is to become a person and that is hugely creative. And that informs my writing every day.”

I love her reclamation of it. And I find it so helpful. It reminds me that I’ve chosen it, this life with three small children, that the obliteration is exhausting, sure, but who says it has to be a bad thing, that it can’t be a creative thing?

Oh wow she had kids young then. Makes sense. Reading her descriptions of motherhood, I thought, okay, a mother is writing this. Those were the most tender parts of the novel for me—Jules' early experiences with the baby. All the intense feelings she was navigating, especially because she hadn’t birthed this child. I’d never read about surrogacy in such an intimate way before. I thought it was very generous of Sams to include those moments.

And we find out right away that Nim has disappeared, leaving Jules holding the baby. It’s one of those books where you know right from the bat what has happened and then the book rolls back to tell you how it came to pass. I love this, because I don’t like thrillers—for eg I watched episode 1 and episode 6 of Secrets We Keep on Netflix last night because I just wanted to know what happened straight away. Do you like finding out what happened at the start? I know you loooove thrillers, so perhaps you prefer the suspense…

Pandora, you know it. It’s funny, because even though the book opens with this big question mark around Nim’s whereabouts, I felt so sure she’d come back in the end that the suspense didn’t really hold for me. That didn’t detract from my experience, though. I was more curious to see how their relationship would have evolved by the end, but that was kept open ended as well. How do you imagine their future playing out?

I hope they live happily ever after.