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The award-winning novelist and screenwriter sits down with Hadley Stewart to discuss his latest novel Twenty Years Together, which asks us to examine the meaning of marriage.
A couple of weeks ahead of the publication of his latest novel, Tom Rob Smith walks into Cafe Boheme dressed in a sleeveless knitted vest. The top’s blue and green wool stands out against the dark-brown wooden interior of the Parisian inspired restaurant. Not only is the location of our interview apt for the novelist and screenwriter’s choice of attire – the year in which Cafe Boheme opened, 1992, happens to coincide with the start of the love story we’re here to discuss, Twenty Years Together.
Smith and I are seated in the heart of London’s Soho, just a stone’s throw away from where his two main characters meet. Danny, who is somewhat lost and unsuccessfully dating as he retrains to be a nurse, meets a handsome Spanish lawyer called Luis in a bar on the corner of Old Compton Street. It is a meeting that will see the pair fall in love, move in together and two decades later be confronted with something neither of them thought would be an option for their relationship: marriage.
As we order a bottle of sparkling water, I ask Smith about what prompted him to write this novel in the first place. He points to this very notion of things that had seemingly been out of reach for gay men years ago, and that are now available to us today. He tells me about attending a friend’s wedding in the United States. It was 2016 and one of the grooms, in his fifties at the time, spoke in his vows of how he did not think he would survive the Aids crisis, let alone be able to marry the man he loves. It was a declaration of love that moved everyone to tears and shifted Smith’s views on marriage. “I looked around and thought there was something really special about this. I was… converted,” he recalls today. “So that’s one of the energies of this book: What is it about this mission that has this kind of magic?”
The morning of our interview, Smith says that he was listening to a podcast where weddings were brought up in conversation. “That’s the thing, once you start researching something, suddenly it’s everywhere!” He tells me that there is something “very celebratory and comfortable” about a wedding that draws people in. “I saw it a lot in Spain,” he says, having spent some time there researching the book. “People stopping to look at a wedding party coming out of a church.”
Although Smith describes himself as being converted in favour of marriage, the inspiration for the book came from a place that seems entirely at odds with marriage. “I honestly never thought I would write this kind of story,” he replies when I ask him what prompted him to write this novel. Years ago Smith was in a long-term relationship, and when the couple met marriage was not an option for them and was never discussed. Unlike the characters in his book, the conversation about marriage happened eleven years into Smith’s relationship; but it was nonetheless prompted by a change in the law for same-sex marriage.
Recalling the strange conversation, as Smith puts it, he says that the question of marriage was asking much more about the couple’s relationship as a whole: “Were we talking about marriage, or were we talking about whether this relationship was right?” He believes that had the possibility of marriage existed when they were younger, perhaps they would have realised that they did not want to get married, and therefore the relationship wasn’t right for them.
“It ended us,” he says of the impact of the conversation about marriage on Smith’s relationship. “But this marriage conversation, or in our case this crisis in a relationship, became the central idea for the book. I thought, that’s so interesting to do a genre story about marriage, but from a completely different perspective.”
The marriage anecdotes that are weaved throughout the book are an amalgamation of stories that Smith was told by married couples as part of his research for the book. He describes himself as someone who does not like to delve into the personal lives of others, yet Smith dared to step outside of what felt comfortable, in order to make the book feel authentic. “It’s not one of my natural tendencies to ask people personal information unless they volunteer it,” he says. “But for this book, I knew that I was gonna ask pretty much everyone about their marriage experience.”
He remembers being invited to a charity dinner whilst he was writing the book, and was seated across from a married couple. Smith says that he had very little in common with them. “But when I asked them about how they met and their wedding, suddenly the conversation began flowing,” he recalls. “One of the great things is people really love – nine times out of ten – telling you about their love story. It’s one of the greatest joys of their life.”
Whilst the majority of the book takes place during the year of 2012, Smith describes the book as a “period piece” arguing that now when same-sex couples meet the question of marriage is a conventional one. As for why Smith chose to start the love story between Danny and Luis in 1992? “It needed to be not so far back that it was in the days where people were super secretive. It had to be on that threshold of change,” he replies. “I also think there needed to be enough time where you’re living together successfully, before something happens to spark the conversation about marriage.”
Smith also keenly points out that the years during which the book is set are very much contextualised to where the book takes place, adding that same-sex couples in other European countries had the right to marry earlier than those in England and Wales. Moreover, he remarks that the potential rolling back of LGBTQ+ freedoms, notably in the United States, is something that makes the book feel more important as a story today.
Speaking of setting, I say, there was something quite special about 2012 for London in particular. “There was something about London being optimistic again,” replies Smith, who saw that time as a moment when the capital was pulling itself up in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. “It’s like a fond year that people look back on, before Brexit, before all of that stuff,” he continues. “It’s like before the country got pulled in a quite, I think, negative way. And so it just felt like a really good, hopeful time to set the story.”
Twenty Years Together also takes place during the Olympic Games, with Smith’s main character Danny taking part in the opening ceremony through his role as an NHS nurse. One question that Smith always asks himself when writing a novel is, “How can I make this visual?” he explains. “I loved the opening ceremony, so I tried to visualise Danny there and him making this big life decision.”
What prompted Smith to make Danny a nurse in the book? “It’s a really interesting question, because one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote the book was about the attitude people had towards male nurses, and how it was looked down upon,” he replies. Whilst Smith tells me that he does not know any male nurses, nor did he speak with any of them during the writing of the book, Smith’s assessment of society’s views on male nurses rang true more recently, when he read a comment in an article about the shooting of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. He was shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
“I knew there was prejudice out there, but I wasn’t expecting that,” says Smith when he stumbled upon a comment under an article about the shooting, which read: What kind of a job is it for men? “He had a job in which he was saving people’s lives. Loads of patients spoke really beautifully about the work that he’d done, and this is what some guy is writing under the article?”
Smith did meet one nurse years ago, who seems to have influenced his writing. When Smith’s friend Ben had a stroke in his thirties, Smith used to visit him in hospital. “Ben had a male nurse looking after him, who was absolutely incredible,” he tells me. “I didn’t particularly speak to him about the nature of being a nurse at the time. I didn’t really think about it, but perhaps he set the scene for Danny.”
When Smith tells me about his friend’s stroke, I ask him if this inspired him to write the BBC family drama MotherFatherSon. The eight-part series stars Richard Gere as a media mogul, the late Helen McCrory as his estranged wife, and Billy Howle as their son, who has a stroke after battling with a cocaine addiction. “Yes, that’s right,” replies Smith. “I watched [my friend] having to learn the alphabet again, and learn how to write again. It was so strange watching an adult go through a kind of compressed childhood again with his parents and his friends.”
Twenty Years Together felt to me like a piece of activism, with Smith carefully including key moments in recent LGBTQ+ history within the plot. Notwithstanding changes to legislation when it came to same-sex marriage, Smith also explored the impact of the criminalisation of homosexuality and the Aids crisis on the gay characters in the book. When I tell him this, Smith is not overly convinced that this is activism, rather that this speaks to how he wanted the book to be universal to its readership.
“One of the ways you do it is to get the details right,” he says of crafting a universal story. “I don’t think you can understand as a reader the idea of evaluating marriage, unless you understand some of the difficulties people have been through.” Smith adds that he also wanted to explore the psychologies of these two men at the centre of the book, by contextualising the adversity gay men have faced in the past.
The use of key landmarks in our history is something that Smith also had to take into consideration when writing his first novel, Child 44. Published in 2008 and set in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the novel went on to become an award-winning global best-seller; the book was subsequently adapted for film, starring Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman and Noomi Rapace. “You could write thousands of words about the Soviet Union, but writing [Child 44] was about working out what pieces of research really amplify these characters,” he says. “I think it was the same with Twenty Years Together.”
When I was reading Twenty Years Together, I was struck by the sense of uncertainty about the future of this relationship – I really didn’t know what was going to happen by the end of the book. As it happens, neither was Smith. “I didn’t know, because the real inspiration for this book was a breakup,” he says when I bring this up. “When I was writing it, I thought both things are true for these characters.” As he worked on the ending of the book, Smith mentions that he was conscious of not making this book about a hostile breakdown of a relationship, or a book that was filled with arguments and very little else. “This was not about people litigating a marriage. This was about two people basically asking, is this a midlife crisis or a marriage proposal? And, can we reinvent this relationship for the next 20 years?”
One of the commonalities between the two men in this book is that they both come from coastal towns, moving to London as adults. It perhaps speaks to a wider theme amongst some within the queer community of moving to the capital to start a new life away from their families. “A big city can be a place where you can hide and reinvent yourself,” says Smith, who was born in London. “I don’t think that is necessarily unique to London, but at the time there was a sense, if you were gay, that you could maybe go to London and kind of find a way forward. There was that kind of energy about it.”
Smith continues, “Basically, both of them are escaping that past, and when they meet neither of them share their pasts. They’re both foreigners equally.”
Speaking of the past, the two men are forced to face their families, as they ponder the idea of marriage by returning to their hometowns. There are a number of cross-generational conversations, I venture, in this book. “Yeah that’s definitely true and one of the unique things about marriage,” replies Smith, who argues that preparation for a wedding feels like more of a psychological exercise. “You literally have to face up to stuff from your past. I think it’s a wonderful challenge for both of these characters, who have ignored their families and moved away from them.”
It is also an opportunity for the men to revisit certain conversations from the past, especially moments where things might have almost become lost in translation. “When you’re coming out, you’re flushed with emotion. You can miss something. Some little nuance. Someone’s clumsy sentence, which is all you can remember was actually, in a bigger picture, them trying to articulate something else.”
Moving on from the notion of articulating feelings in a conversation, I pivot our discussion to the articulation of stories across different mediums. I ask about Smith’s decision to go from writing books to television. His first TV drama London Spy (which aired in 2015) saw Ben Whishaw playing Danny, a gay man who enjoys partying all night in Vauxhall, before he falls in love with an MI6 agent, played by Edward Holcroft. “Danny would never write a diary,” explains Smith of the reason behind why London Spy needed to be told as a TV drama, rather than a first-person novel. “It’s impossible to imagine. So it needed to be visual, a bit like him having a camera on his shoulder.”
London Spy is loosely inspired by the death of MI6 agent and GCHQ codebreaker, Gareth Williams, who was found dead in August 2010 inside a zipped and padlocked holdall in his London flat. However, when it came to writing American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (FX), Smith found himself with an even bigger weight of responsibility of telling a real-life story. “That was just really hard,” he says of the experience, which saw him winning a Writer’s Guild Award for best adapted series, an Emmy and a Golden Globe for best limited series. “I don’t know if I would do it again.”
Currently, Smith shares that he is working on adapting his novel The Farm for television, alongside working on another novel. It seems that he is constantly running some kind of writing marathon. What keeps him motivated? “I think when I was younger, I was just hungry for work,” replies Smith, whose parents were antique dealers; their work ethic is something that he credits today. “But now, I’d say I’m lucky in the sense that I’ve never got to the point where I’m questioning why I’m doing this. I’ve always loved it.”
Tom Rob Smith is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. His latest novel Twenty Years Together is out now. Photography by Pierfrancesco Artini.
