Emma Healey

Thursday 13 February 2025

On a very chilly February evening Emma Healey brought us to the steamy world of the gym, when she returned to the Ipswich Institute to talk to Gill Lowe about her latest novel, Sweat.

This is Emma’s third novel. Her first, Elizabeth is Missing (2014), was a bestseller. It won the 2014 Costa First Novel Award and was adapted into a film in 2019, starring Glenda Jackson. The story unfolds through the eyes of Maud, an elderly woman struggling with dementia. Maud becomes convinced that her friend Elizabeth is missing, which sends her on a desperate search for clues, while struggling with her own fragmented and failing memory.

Emma’s second novel, Whistle in the Dark (2018), concerns Lana, a fifteen year old girl who goes missing for four days and refuses to talk about what happened. The reader follows her mother Jen’s frantic attempts to piece together what might have happened in those missing hours and days.

The latest novel takes us to a world that is very unfamiliar to me: the intense, sweaty world of the gym. We are taken on an uncomfortable journey of fitness, control and revenge. It is written in the first person as Cassie, a personal trainer, comes into contact again with her ex- boyfriend and former personal trainer, from whose coercive control she had escaped two years earlier. This time the tables are turned and Cassie is in control, with an opportunity for revenge – but is she really in control?

Emma draws inspiration from her own life and brings to us characters who are under extreme pressure. Maud in Elizabeth is Missing was inspired by Emma’s wish to see through the eyes of her grandmother who suffered from dementia. Whistle in The Dark stems from her own teenage depression and her desire to understand what that might have felt like for her mother. In Sweat Emma draws on her own experience of extreme exercise and fasting, following the birth of her daughter.

Emma highlights the very narrow line between fitness and health on the one hand and obsession and control and coercion on the other. She touches on the power dynamics in the relationship between the trainer and the client. Who has control? Emma is struck by the contradictions that bombard us, the powerful messages that reinforce stereotypes, the obsession with body shape and with eating less. She describes the gym as a quasi religious place, the virtuous feeling we can get from spending more hours at the gym and controlling what we eat. What begins as a desire for health and fitness can quickly tip over into obsession.

Emma’s next book is already on the way. It will deal with parental competition, the lengths to which parents might go to help their children to progress and how one might fall into the trap of becoming competitive. In Emma’s hands it is a very enticing prospect.

Dymphna Crowe