Interview with Susana Medina about "Philosophical Toys"
A throwback interview about a forthcoming reprint.
As subscribers to the Three Percent Podcast (the “non-Dalkey” substack for news about Open Letter, the Two Month Review and Three Percent podcasts, and information about non-OL/DAP translations and the Translation Database) already know, I’m tied up right now with reading all of the finalists for this year’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, while working on a long piece about Christine Montalbetti, and an essay on
“reviewing translations.” Which is all to say that I’ll probably be leaning into some CONTEXT pieces and excerpts for the next week or two . . .
So for today, we have this interview John conducted with Susana Medina that originally appeared in CONTEXT No. 25. Born in England, but raised in Valencia, Spain (before going back to London as a teenager), Susana is the author of several works, including Borgesland, Red Tales, Souvenirs of the Accident, Chunks of One, and Rebel, Rebel: An Emergency Dialogue (with Roc Sandford), and, of course, Philosophical Toys, which came out from Dalkey Archive in 2015, and is being reissued this month (July 2025).
Her writing has been praised by the likes of Deborah Levy (“Susana Medina is a genius!”), Will Self (“A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise.”), Steward Home (“[Red Tales] will come as a total shock to mummy porn fans—E. L. James meets J. G. Ballard! Makes both writing and BDSM dangerous once again. Eat your heart out, literary establishment.”), and many others.
In terms of Philosophical Toys, here’s the jacket copy:
Nina, a drifter from southern Spain, comes to London in search of experience, only to find that the strangest of stories is hiding in her father's loft in Almería . . .
A playfully concocted, fast-paced novel committed to the irresistible pleasure of reading, both a celebration and a critique of our relationship to objects (from fetishes, to curios, to commodities, to objectum sexuality, to our becoming cyborgs through our addiction to technology), Philosophical Toys travels through different times, countries and experiences as chance leads Nina to encounter time and again the enigmatic nature of things, which end up transforming her into that most rare of species: a female philosopher.
Witty and elegiac, Philosophical Toys takes the reader on a tour of fetishism, late capitalist culture, Buñuel’s films, psychoanalysis, Alzheimer's disease, as well as the avatars of belonging to two cultures, an experience increasingly shared by myriad expatriates.
John and Susana were quite close, and met up whenever John was in London. Personally, I’ve met Susana twice. Both times she appeared on the street in front of me during the London Book Fair. The first time, I didn’t recognize her at all—although she knew me from a picture online, maybe of me holding a cat?—the second time she left a rather sexy lipstick kiss on my cheek1 that I was unaware of for at least an hour . . . Both times, she was incredibly fun to talk to and I could totally see how and why she and John became close friends.
And why John wanted to publish Philosophical Toys. And why he wanted to do this interview.
Informal interview about Philosophical Toys, Susana Medina
John O’Brien: I don't quite know how to ask you this. I've told you that your novel reads as though it could be a memoir, but you have said that it is largely not autobiographical. Did you have the memoir genre in mind? Did you want it to read as memoir? I will point to just one scene in particular: when your character is stopped at Customs because of the collection of her mother's shoes. That reads like memoir (to my mind, at least).
Susana Medina: No, I didn’t have the memoir genre in mind. I rarely read memoirs, although, of course, there are plenty of first person narratives out there. All fiction contains inevitably autobiographical material. Anecdotes, experiences, anxieties, something you once heard suddenly crops up in the narrative, because that’s how memory works. It’s interesting how memory unearths things through context, place, word-association, emotional resonance . . . The permutations the creative mind tends to perform make the end result unrecognizable as autobiography. Emotional memory is interesting. Someone says something and if it makes an imprint in your memory, it’s because it was emotionally loaded. A character is a composite or it might develop into an extension of what someone you know could have been, or done, in your mind. Most of the ingredients that make up a character might not be real, but the flavor is.
As I wasn’t writing in my native language, I thought the narrator had to be non-English. Thus, Nina, the Spanish narrator was created as an alibi, and it gave the narrative another layer, which was to do with language. All this is pretty autobiographical, I’d say, and might give it the flavor of a memoir, but it’s blended with sheer fiction . . . I tend to write about places I haven’t been to . . . it’s more exciting . . . except for London.
That scene at the airport is fictional. I thought of the shoe collection as a metaphor for the baggage we inherit from our parents and how it affects our lives. The shoe collection becomes baggage straightaway and starts traveling. It becomes trouble straightaway, as it takes up a lot of space and she’s besieged by it in her small flat . . . I think that the baggage that we inherit we first experience as obstacles, until you learn to be your own person . . . Of course, over the years, I’ve had to move around different flats and countries with boxes full of books . . . So, in a way, the experience with all these boxes full of shoes, it’s the experience I’ve had with boxes full of books . . . Shoes are leather-bound stories . . .
JOB: Why are women philosophers so rare? You opened the gate to this question, and so I am walking through it.
SM: History cannot be undone in just one century. As everyone very well knows, social order is not founded on reason, but on a series of interests, and gender inequality is still a worldwide problem. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence, cannot but be perplexed at how History has excluded women from so many fields. The western canon echoes this exclusion, in some fields more acutely than others. It’s interesting philosophy should be one of those fields. Any thinker could have written at length about the absence of women from History, but it is, of course, women, who have found that absence most bewildering. Female thinkers, artists, writers, scientists have to deal with this absence, something most male thinkers are not overly concerned with. Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings took over two centuries to be digested. We have mainly twentieth century female philosophers: Weil, Arendt, Luxemburg, de Beauvoir, Zambrano, Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Sontag . . . Most female thinkers have tended to veer towards feminism and social activism, because that’s the area where work was most needed, and many put their thought into practice by trying to improve the social condition of women—and men, because we are all in it—thus becoming above all social actors or commentators—like Greer, Paglia, Klein. Another reason might be that as there is such an emphasis on what women look like, women have felt pressed to articulate their views on their sexuality and bodies from their own perspective. This is by no means the only subject women thinkers write about, but sadly, whereas female readers read independently of gender, most male readers tend to only read pieces written by men. This is still a problem, not only for female philosophers but for female writers too.
Also, many female thinkers are interdisciplinary, or hard to categorize, often not delimiting themselves to one genre. As new disciplines like psychoanalysis, anthropology, semiotics started to be incorporated into intellectual inquiry about reality, perhaps the word ‘philosopher’ wasn’t applicable anymore. It depends on your definition of it, but female thinkers feel more comfortable in this new soup.
Recently, there was this article in The Guardian (Jan. 2015): “Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds”—why are there so few women? . . . Over 70% of philosophers in UK universities are men. So, it’s still perceived as a problem . . . Though I think female philosophers have migrated to other fields where they can be more hybrid . . . more concrete . . . Of course, money, and trust funds, enable all genders to do all sorts of things . . . It’s just so wonderful when they’re used for utopian purposes, to help others.
JOB: How long did the novel take you to write?
SM: The first draft took me over two years and I was already working on a pre-existing developed outline. Luckily, when I did my MA in Hispanic Studies, I was “allowed” to do a creative project, so that was the very first sketchy outline for my novel. I worked on fetishism and Buñuel. I had lost all my hearing (I struggled with sudden hearing loss for three years) and had a cochlear implant operation. I was so excited about hearing again, about being a bionic woman. I wanted to ration solitary work. I started a PhD on Borges—It was kind of therapy—so I’d have some social interaction, and went out a lot. I worked on the novel on and off for five years, adding layers of thought and changing a word here and there, with lots of things and projects happening between one draft and the next. I made two short films: Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys and Leather-bound Stories (co-directed with Derek Ogbourne). As I wrote the script for the later and we made the film, I added to the novel fragments as well as an extra frame which is the structural device in the film: the red notebook.
JOB: What were the biggest challenges for you in writing this?
SM: The biggest challenge was to switch from writing in Spanish to writing in English. Writing in English was an experiment. I had to work with linguistic limitations. Rather than working on the language itself, I thought I had to make good use of other devices such as rhythm, ideas, plot and structure.
Another big challenge was that after I finished the first drafts, my dad was diagnosed with vascular dementia, echoing the ill father I had written about in Philosophical Toys . . . So every time I went back to the manuscript to edit this and that I became more and more conscious of what was happening to him. So, editing became painful, because at all times, it brought about my father’s reality, which was rather different, and very real . . . It was like, in some ways, I was re-enacting my novel . . . going back to Spain to look after him . . . and that made me look more after him and become closer, which was good. I suppose the ill father and the trips in the novel where there as a manifestation of a fear I didn’t know I had. It foretold the future.
JOB: There are several references to her sexual experiences, but these are only references. But there is little in the book about them. Reason?
SM: I thought it was more interesting that way, as it’s up to the reader to imagine. Nina, who’s rather bashful here and there, is mainly dealing with ideas, and the references to her own sexuality are deliberately vague, funny, and revealing. Somewhere she says she’s a knowledge fetishist. What if her own sexuality is inextricably linked with exploring all these ideas? Knowledge and learning are intimately linked to pleasure, our libidinal energies aren’t limited to physical acts. Her voyeuristic imagination makes her wonder about her parents’ sexuality. I thought there was something naughty and humorous in this, and saw it as kind of part of her own sexuality . . . Also, Red Tales, my previous book, contained explicit sex . . . so, I didn’t feel the urge to write about it in an explicit way. In Philosophical Toys, many things are intentionally second-hand . . . at one remove . . .
This interview originally appeared in CONTEXT Magazine No. 25 circa 2015. Philosophical Toys is available via Bookshop.org and better bookstores everywhere.
Proof!
