—cock
Joanna Pidcock | Tolka, Web Only, September 2023
Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it?
Yes, it is, in a good way.
I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you??
In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’, in the wider sense of the word; both looked quite similar; and had also both spent extended time in the American West. I signed with an agent and then realised that her agent was my agent’s associate.
At this point, I had not read any of her work. I was already a bit bitter and afraid that in reading her work I would be jealous, too – deeply unattractive and ungenerous behaviour that I wish to avoid at all costs. I’m not a jealous person, or, at least I try not to be. I like to think of myself as actually being relaxed and self-assured.
After joking with friends and colleagues about this person whom I had started referring to as my dark doppelgänger, it felt like a waste not to try and write about her. It is writing that has brought us into one another’s orbits, unveiled one thorny coincidence after another and lodged each one into my nascent practice as a writer, a practice that still feels like the back of a newborn baby’s skull – fuzzy and unformed, vulnerable.
We meet, Joanna Pocock and I. It feels impossible to coordinate our schedules, and then when the Central line fails on the morning of our meeting, we speak our first words to one another over the phone.
Joanna? It’s Joanna.
Oh, hi, Joanna.
It’s undeniably funny. We sit down together in a big glossy café near Liverpool Street Station, and I try to arrange my phone so that it records the two of us and not the aspiring method actor seated at the next table, who is reading a script and a book at the same time, talking on the phone and watching clips of James Dean on YouTube. At one point in our conversation, I get out my diary and a pen to write down the name of a book she has recommended.
Oh, you’re left-handed. So am I.
Stop it.
Yeah.
Oh, that’s weird.
These similarities are uncanny, no? Unheimlich – close enough to home that it’s recognisable, but with tiny differences that make it unsettling and slightly distressing, the mirror on a different wall throwing the entire familiar room into a previously unseen shape. I know the contours of the room of my name, I know where it sits on the floorplan of the house of my self, but the existence of Joanna Pocock has revealed a basement that I never knew about and throws up some serious concerns around the structural integrity of the property.
Who am I as a writer, a person, even, if I am so easily and readily mistaken for someone else? By virtue of time and experience, Joanna Pocock is the original and I am the copy. Suddenly, here were all of my anxieties about originality and influence, the taunt that rumbled in my gut and told me I would never produce anything unique, made manifest. Personified.
I obviously first learned of your existence when I got shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo prize and everyone was sending me the announcement that you had won it two years, before being like, ‘You’ve already won! What’s going on? Is this you? What’s this all about?’
Oh, how strange.
All of a sudden, I kind of became aware that I had this doppelgänger who writes about very similar things. We have almost the same name and it was just this strange moment.
Yes, that would be strange for you. I remember noticing your name because I always look at who gets shortlisted, and I just remember thinking it was funny because the year that I won two of the judges were called Joanna. It was Joanna Kavenna and Joanna Biggs, from the LRB.
Yes, I think she was judging my year as well.
And I just thought, Wow, Joannas have a good chance.
It took me a while to grow into my name. Joanna has a weight to it, a sombre gravity that hangs too heavy on the flighty frame of a small child. Instead, I was Jojo all the way through school, and then all of a sudden Jo, when I cut my hair off at 15 and started to display creative aspirations. Were you named after Jo March? etc., very predictable, but no less flattering. At college, to the boys whose preferred sport was unclipping girls’ bras through their T-shirts as they were walking through the cloisters to lunch, I was Piddy, Piddo, J-Piddy, Pids – boyish enough to make it clear that I wasn’t an object of any real sexual attraction, but not so much one of the fellas that they were comfortable to draw explicit attention to the fact that the last syllable of my name is cock. I am related to every Pidcock I’ve ever met, whether I’ve known it or not. Most of the Pidcocks in the UK are from the North West of England, which is where my Pidcocks were from before they went to Australia. We are the same Pidcocks. We can all trace ourselves inside the lines of each other’s family trees, which, when you go back far enough, is just the same tree.
My name, like everyone’s name, has a history to it. It was chosen for me by my parents, perhaps in hope of the kind of person I would grow up to be. Someone who would fit into that gift of a name and wear it in the world proudly, transforming the vestiges of history and lineage that inevitably sit within it into something new.
How did you feel about your name growing up?
I loved it! My mother always told me, because I was the youngest of seven and she wasn’t really supposed to have any more kids, that it meant ‘gift of God’. When you’re three years old, that’s really great to hear, right? I feel that with Pocock after, it undoes all the good of Joanna. Joanna is so mellifluous and fluid and it’s such a pretty name, and Pocock is so ugly and harsh and masculine.
Growing up with ‘cock’ at the end of your name, quite obviously, it’s hard to ignore.
Yeah, it toughens you up. I’ve always had a very ambivalent relationship to my name; a lot of people do, though. It’s not something you can choose, but maybe that’s a good life lesson.
Once you become an artist, your name becomes quite an important part of your work, in terms of – I hate the word brand, but it is! That’s how people know your work.
Yeah, you can’t escape it anymore.
Exactly, and it becomes indivisible from the work that you put out into the world because you’re putting it out under your name.
My name was always in bits until I moved away from where I grew up and started introducing myself with all of it, enjoying how much space it took up: my name is Joanna Pidcock. It feels like my name, insofar as it feels like it reflects a version of myself that I am happy to present to the world. Its femininity is sleek and ambiguous, rather than obvious. It is distinctive and slightly unusual. It sits in the mouth both round and sharp, weighty, memorable, with an irreverent acid flick at the end.
When people ask if I go by a nickname, I am still ambivalent, a bit uncomfortable. I don’t quite know what name reflects who I am in relation to people I care about, and perhaps by shifting that decision away from myself they will tell me, by their choice, who they see. You can call me whatever you like. This is something that I don’t like about myself.
I think it took me a little while to grow into my name, and to grow into Joanna. I feel like it’s actually quite a grown-up name. I think it’s not the name of a very small child, so I was Jojo.
I was Jojo!
Were you really? Do you still get Jojo?
With people who have known me my whole life.
I was Jojo, and then I was Jo.
Oh, interesting. I don’t like Jo. When people call me Jo I always correct them, but there are a few people who are allowed to call me Jo, if I like them enough.
What do you feel about Jo?
I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel like me!
Does Joanna Pocock feel like you?
I mean, because I have no other choice, yes.
I mean, it feels like me now. Joanna Pidcock feels like me now but didn’t always.
I still feel uncomfortable about it. It just sounds ugly to me. But whatever, it’s fine.
I think there’s something interesting that by virtue of you being older and more established you are the original and I am the copy. I know that sometimes when I submit my work in places it’s mistaken for yours.
[Laughing.] Really?
Yes! It’s great for me because people are like ‘Oh my god, Joanna Pocock has submitted’ and then they’re like ‘Oh, hang on, no, that’s the other one’.
I’m glad, that’s really interesting.
I think because we write about similar things and have such similar names, like at first glance I know that I am sometimes mistaken for you.
Wow, gosh that’s a very strange thing. I guess it’s a kind of mentorship.
Yeah!
Which is great, good.
A kind of mentorship. Culture is full of doppelgängers, spooky twins, uncanny doubles, people whose lives and identities are suddenly stolen or disrupted or sabotaged by a more successful, more ruthless, more dazzling, more version of themselves. The relationship is generally categorised as being antagonistic and deeply, primally competitive. Often one party goes mad. Crucially, the story usually only considers the experiences of one of the pair, the original who is usurped and overshadowed, as though the other doesn’t fully exist or could reasonably be a fantasy, a trick of the light. Time tells me that I am the interloper, but my own experience and perspective casts me as the original, the put-upon party.
A significant difference between us is that Joanna Pocock is older than me. She is married, with a child, and has lived with herself for longer than I have. She seems to have the grace that comes with perspective and the realisation that the vast majority of things in this life are out of your control; that nothing will ever happen in the way that you expect, no matter how hard you try to make it so, and that that realisation is both terrifying and glorious.
It becomes clear over the course of our conversation that I have thought a lot more about Joanna Pocock than she has about me. She looks at the similarities between us, I imagine, as a quirk of the universe. A tiny respite from the entropy of everything where a coincidence just falls into place, delightful and unexpected. She talks about how her life has been ruled by coincidences, how she seems to experience more of them than other people. She seems serene when she talks about how these coincidences have shaped the arc and thrust of her life – taking her to London, to Montana, to her husband. I don’t ask directly, but I suppose that I am another coincidence, another flicker of ordered design in the chaos of existence. More often than not, when I am deep in thought, I am actually turning over in my head a series of possibilities and decisions, hypothetical at this point, that I may need to make at some point in my life. I pre-emptively worry about making the right decision on everything, from whether to text someone to whether to have a child. At certain moments, everything feels fraught and thorny, half-hidden and impossible for me to fully and critically assess.
When did you leave Canada?
I left when I was twenty-four.
I was twenty-four when I left Australia.
Oh my gosh! I wanted to live somewhere I had no family, where I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know it then, but I think I was after an act of reinvention.
Yeah. I mean I feel like anyone, particularly any young woman, moving overseas in their twenties is, in some way, after an act of reinvention.
Totally. Totally.
You know, I did that as well.
So, you were twenty-four when you came here? And did you stay?
I did. And I came here after my first relationship in Australia went up in flames; and some very exciting things were happening in my other work, as a theatre director, and suddenly I had nothing really tying me to Australia. Apart from, obviously, my family, whom I love very much. I’ve got two younger sisters and my parents would rather have supported us to move out into the world and do our own thing than keep us at home, so they’ve always very much encouraged us to go off and make our own lives.
Do you think that’s a new world thing? Because my parents were the same.
Really?
Yeah, we’re all over the world.
Yeah, I think it is.
And my parents never once kind of said, ‘Oh it’s so sad.’ They loved it.
There are so many people I meet here, and so many of my friends, who could not imagine living even a few hours away from their parents, and I’m like, yeah, it’s really hard, but it’s also fine? It’s great, you know?
I like the freedom. I’m glad I didn’t have clingy parents.
I think I know myself, at least well enough to write about myself, but I constantly evade my own grasp. Sometimes it feels like a gap opens up in the fog of my subjectivity and I can peer through and back and look at myself: ah! There she is! In my view, crystallised and clarified for a moment I see someone both more and less unique than she thinks she is. Then the image blurs and I’m back in my head, wildly trying to calibrate and understand my behaviour, completely, desperately, terrifyingly blind to the truth of how other people see me.
On the one hand, I am trying to relish this fuzziness around my conception of myself. The feeling that my edges are solidifying slowly but haven’t quite finished yet is thrilling – I can still shapeshift, I can surprise myself, I haven’t yet been pinned and hedged into a form that is fully legible. My choices feel like true expressions of agency and enable me to build the contours of my life; they feel like continuous tiny acts of reinvention. On the other hand, I sometimes fantasise about getting a glimpse of my life thirty years into the future. It would be a relief to see that everything has gone OK; that I am happy and healthy and successful enough to feel secure in my life, loved, comfortable, fulfilled. It would be devastating if that flash forward showed me something else and I then had to live with the knowledge that I was hurtling towards a situation that was in some way unsatisfying or unhappy or unfortunate, all the grit and propulsive effort of living carrying me to a future I don’t want. Sometimes I just want someone to give me the answer, show me the sequence of moves on the board that will get me to the better place. I have made a strong opening, and now I find myself in the thorny middle game, and I can’t see the whole board, and I worry what catastrophic blunders I could be making.
I turn thirty at the end of this year, and I have felt lately a dawning, gnawing clarity on some aspects of myself that feel unchangeable. The bracing, almighty realisation that has come from this newfound clarity is that I don’t like all of these things. There is peace, sure, in coming to terms with your own personality and the specific and particular ways in which it will not budge, but there’s also a sense of complicity and disappointment. The fact that I now understand my own part in the breakdown of various relationships, romantic and otherwise, does not enable me to go back and fix them. I have always been critical of myself, in ways that have sometimes been destructive and counterproductive, but the difference here is that now these criticisms aren’t unfounded or deluded or forged in the heat of self-hatred – they are clear, fair, and true.
Sometimes, I think I would be a better writer, a better person, even, if I thought about myself a bit less.
At one point in our conversation, Joanna and I talk about our shared Catholic upbringings. We talk about confession and Vatican II, faith, doubt, superstition, and whether we could actually give it up if we had to. We talk about things that run deep in and between the two of us, a worldview that, not unlike a name, is bestowed rather than chosen, and how it inadvertently shapes the rest of your life.
In the weeks following our conversation I keep returning to a scene in the second season of Fleabag. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s eponymous character (another uncanny doppelgänger, in fact – my sisters can no longer watch interviews she does because her face and mannerisms remind them too spookily of me) sits in the confession booth and says that she wants someone to tell her what to wear, what music to like, what to believe in, who to love and how to tell them.
I think I just want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I’ve been getting it wrong.
She tells the priest that she’s scared and asks him to tell her what to do, even though she knows that wanting someone to do that is anathema to any idea of independence and autonomy, any kind of rational relationship with the self and the world. She wants someone to tell her how to do things so that it will all turn out alright. Sometimes I wonder if this is what I’m seeking from Joanna Pocock – a kind of reassurance. The coincidences linking the two of us together seem too uncanny, almost as though she holds some key to who I am, some answer to the question of my own future. I look at her and blur my eyes for a moment to soften her distinctive and separate edges, and it looks as though for me, everything is going to be alright.
I almost wrote this essay without meeting the other Joanna. I thought about a slippery and clever way to write it without doing an interview; imagined that we wouldn’t be able to meet at all, given that we are, in fact, the same person existing in two different timelines, an unholy and impossible convergence. The necessity of encountering other writers in the world anyway sometimes feels like a difficult thing, all of us trying to do the exact same thing: make something that is different from everybody else. The push and pull of it, the desire to create something lasting and unique that will still achieve success in a market that groups writers and their work together by form, genre, background, identity. By slicing and filleting a person and their art into discreet data points that can be arranged within an immense matrix in order for the work to be understood. This is like nothing you’ve ever read before, and it’s also exactly like this. It feels as though we all need to define ourselves on our own terms and each other’s, simultaneously. We are all colleagues, and we are all competitors, and it doesn’t feel like there’s enough of anything to go around.
I still haven’t sat down and read my dark double’s book(s). I’m afraid to. I’m afraid they will be extremely good, the kind of thing that I want to write about land and identity, the long scratchy fingers of colonialism raking over a landscape and how different people try to grow things in the soil that’s tilled in their wake. I’m afraid that because she’s written it with her name, I won’t be able to write it with mine.
But what about this idea of the anxiety of influence, though. Do you think, Oh, god, I have to now do something different so that people don’t think of me as similar to Joanna Pocock?
Kind of! I know that whatever I write will be different to what you write, obviously, and I think there’s also a thing, particularly if you haven’t published a book, reading something and being like Goddamnit, that’s really good, isn’t it? And she’s got the same name as me. That thing about feeling that someone’s already done it, and I’m sure that you probably felt that as well, when you think about the texts that have made you a writer and you know that you have been irrevocably shaped by them. I guess in the same way that we were talking about Catholicism, you can’t separate yourself out from your influences and so you’re always writing in the shadow of something.
Of course, I am writing in shadow. Joanna Pocock makes that shadow more obvious, but the words I write are shaped by those I have read, writers who have chiselled some new contour into my mind. If I’m lucky, perhaps I will be the shadow that someone else writes in, maybe some other Joanna with
—cock at the end of her name. My name is not as unique as I think it is, and neither is my work, but that doesn’t make either any less worthy. I can’t escape my influences, and nor can I escape a market that wants to link my work explicitly to other people’s. Joanna and I speak about being called ‘nature writers’ and how inadequate that feels as a description of our writing, how flattening and frustrating. My ambivalence and fear about originality and influence may manifest itself in Joanna Pocock, but it is almost certainly all about me. I have things that I want to say, and I fear that I lack the talent and drive and artistry to say them.
I recently read Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch and seethed with jealousy that I hadn’t written it myself. The muscularity and intensity and weirdness of it, the tender understanding of an animal I know better than any other, the singularity of the voice. Kathryn Scanlan and I do not write in the same form, and yet here were those same feelings, here was the anxiety about originality, here was the solemn little nub of bitterness. The existence of Joanna Pocock makes these feelings within myself more obvious, but they would clearly exist whether I knew about her or not. Being jealous of another writer is not solely a consequence of sharing the same name. I am worried about writing in the shadow of someone else, when what is actually paralysing is writing in the shadow of myself.
As a writer, you’re putting out original work, but what happens when you come into such close contact with someone with almost the same name doing very similar work?
It’s a really fertile area. I don’t know about you but, when I see my work out in the world, it’s almost like an out-of-body experience for me. I almost don’t really believe that I wrote that book, because, for me, the book is not the finished book; it’s the process of having written the book, and so there’s already a strange dislocation between myself and that name on the book. It’s almost like I feel closer to someone with a similar name to me than I do to the finished work with my name on it. There’s a funny sort of weird dislocation – temporal and physical and artistic.
But I think it’s also because in that context your name is no longer like the thing that people call you to talk to you. It’s no longer the kind of vector of a personal relationship that people have with you. It becomes the vector of a professional relationship instead, and there’s something quite depersonalising and slightly alienating about that.
Yeah, because you sort of feel once you’ve come out with something with your name on it, that is out there and has a life outside of you – I mean throughout the decades, women in particular have kind of likened it to having a child and then there are a lot of people who don’t agree with that analogy, but I think there are some similarities in that once you put something out there it walks away from you, it gets up on its two little legs and walks away, which is also what a child does, but it also, it’s this funny feeling of not being able to escape it, because, I don’t know about you, but I would sometimes fantasise about changing my name.
Perhaps a book is not so dissimilar a thing to put out into the world as a child, at least at first. You feed it from yourself and then you bring it out of your body, arduously, miraculously, and give it a name that belongs to both it and you. You hope that it will be as important to other people as it is to you, and you know that it won’t be. You put a little piece of yourself out into the enormous, careless world and try to give it a life that is separate from you. Writing is so often a deeply private process, happening inexplicably and molecularly, somewhere in the crevices of the self. Publication is just that – public, often indiscriminately so. You both hope and fear that your writing will be read by many people, understood, appreciated. You hope and fear that your child will go out into the world and live its own life, entirely separate from you.
It is strange, it’s, yeah, as I said, initially it was when I got shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo prize that people suddenly started sending me . . .
Like you’ve already won it!
Exactly, sending me your work, sending me stuff about you, and I was like ‘What the hell?’ Like, it was also this weird thing . . . You always want to be original in some way and, all of sudden, I was just, like, ‘Well, now it just looks like they’ve made a spelling mistake.’
But I think there’s a lot of laziness out there, right? It’s very easy to sort of blur Joanna-Pidcock-Joanna-Pocock-Fitzcarraldo and everyone’s so busy and they’ve got a million emails and whereas actually it’s more interesting, going back to this idea of looking at the nuances, seeing how different we are as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we are different, and in the meat and marrow of it, so is our work. I am guilty of this laziness that Joanna speaks of in seeing her as some kind of shortcut to myself, sanding down my own nuances to try to more neatly fit into a known shape for my life. Maybe it doesn’t all work out in the end, and maybe I have made the wrong choices, and perhaps all of it will be shifted by some coincidence I can’t possibly foresee, an alignment that tilts me onto another axis. And the only real option is to keep walking through the shadow, catching progressively clearer glimpses of Joanna Pidcock and trying to write myself into some kind of light.
Joanna Pidcock is an Australian essayist, librettist and theatre-maker based in North London, writing about nationhood and identity through the lens of landscape and horticulture. She is currently working on her first book, about colonialism, nature writing and the idea of ‘claiming’ land, the proposal for which was shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize.
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship.
Joanna Pidcock’s ‘Borderlands’ was first published in Issue Three of Tolka (May 2022), which you can purchase here. You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
