Best known as an editor and memoirist, Diana Athill also wrote two books of short stories and this novel, first published in 1967 and now reissued. It shows her editor’s eye for an arresting opening – “When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me” – and the story ends with the emotion neatly reversed: “There’s something almost enjoyable in having one person in the world I can truly hate.”
We get from there to here through the pitches and rolls in the life of a young woman, Meg Bailey, in England in the 1950s. They do things differently there: girls marry for parental approval, a baby born outside marriage causes shame, and it’s such an innocent time that even the word “duvet” is italicised. Meg is both typical and not; she has a modest upbringing as the daughter of a rector, but doesn’t believe in God. “My father did, although being shy and having very good manners, he rarely talked about it outside church for fear of embarrassing people.” Like most children she frustrates her parents’ outpourings of love, and plans to get away as early as she can.
She goes to art school in Oxford, and while there lives with her friend Roxane’s well-off family, who make her parents seem even more embarrassing. Don’t Look at Me Like That is about belonging and not belonging: Meg moves from one home to another, concealing and revealing aspects of herself to different people, mostly men. She imagines herself as a passenger on a train, isolated from the life rushing by on the other side of the window. Her desire to smash it and grab what she sees will lead to conflict with friends and family, and to that one person “I can truly hate”.
Early on the novel seems unfocused, but it becomes tighter once Roxane marries – at her mother’s direction – and Meg gets tangled up with her husband. Athill’s skill is to make Meg sympathetic despite her bad behaviour and self-regard (“I am a pretty woman. I have known this for years”). She conjures up a chaotic life very unlike her own: the privileged upbringing that she described with such disarming self-awareness in her brilliant first memoir Instead of a Letter. This novel shows not so much that Athill should have written more fiction – we wouldn’t want to be without those memoirs – but that she could.
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