Hollie McNish: We pretend we’re free, but we follow rules we never chose

The poet and author on why more us should interrogate things society tells us are normal.

I never quite know where to start when someone asks me what I’ve been thinking about, because the honest answer is usually about 5,000 things. I was flicking through my books earlier – Slug, Lobster, Virgin – trying to work out what sits at the centre of all of them, and I kept circling back to this strange idea people have about what counts as “political” and what doesn’t. 

I get told constantly that some of what I write is political, and then other things – especially anything that looks domestic or small – somehow isn’t. I’ve always found that division odd. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about love at the moment. And about the fact, and I do actually believe this, that most people are good. Or at least trying their best. Most people want very little: safety, kindness, enough money not to flinch when they buy a present.

But then I look at the news, or what the algorithm wants to show me, and I realise so much of the negativity I see boils down to the same ten people, again and again, the same voices amplified to the point they feel like the whole world.

And it messes with your brain. I saw a talk on how our brains react to rolling news. When we see the same traumatic event again and again, our brain doesn’t register that it’s the same event. It treats each viewing as another trauma, stacking and stacking them. So of course it feels like everything’s falling apart. That’s what your brain’s being taught to feel.

I’ve actually tried to get more international news on my feed, just to escape the constant stream of US political horror. No matter what I look at online, it’s Trump, all the time. I think he seems more normal than he is simply because he’s everywhere. But he’s not normal – that’s the whole point. He doesn’t talk like an average person, doesn’t behave like an average person, and is doing more damage than most of us could ever dream of doing. But when your phone feeds you him like 20 times a day, you start thinking the world looks like that.

It doesn’t. And I have to remind myself of that constantly. When I step outside, when I talk to people, what I actually see is care. I see teenagers sending each other videos of boys hugging their mums in front of their mates, or a group staging a fake classroom fight so they can surprise their favourite teacher with flowers. I see a kitten hugging a duck get more attention than any of the politicians in our country. And I honestly think that says something hopeful about what people want.

Every book I’ve written has come from that urge to interrogate the things society tells us are normal

Maybe the reason I look for hope so stubbornly is because of my mum. She’s been a nurse since she was in her twenties, meeting a new person every ten minutes. She’s seen everything; psychiatric wards, GP surgeries, flu clinics, domestic violence, child abuse, every kind of vulnerability. And she still believes most people are trying. She’ll say, “People have hard lives, Hollie. You have absolutely no idea what people have been through.” But she’ll also say, “You should see what they went through as kids.” Her understanding of people is so broad, so rooted in lived experience. I think her view of humanity sits at the core of mine.

I do take in a lot of news. And I think what that does to my work is force me to question everything – not just the world but my own prejudices, my own assumptions. Every book I’ve written has come from that urge to interrogate the things society tells us are normal: what we call gross, what gives us the ick, what we think is just how things are.

Growing up, I heard so many men talk about women that way – women over 30, women speaking, women existing – as if discomfort was a moral category. It’s not that I’ve got a problem with it, they’d say, I just don’t understand why that woman’s on TV. That idea that your personal discomfort should determine someone else’s right to exist. I still see it everywhere: It doesn’t offend me, I just don’t want to see two men kissing in the street. And I still find it ridiculous. Because most people don’t make conscious choices about these norms; they just absorb them. Every boy with short hair. Every girl with long hair. The social weight behind all of it is enormous. And if someone steps outside even the tiniest bit, the backlash is huge. We pretend we’re free, but we follow rules we never chose.

I do try hard not to sound like a wanker

I think that’s why I write poems instead of shouting into the void online. I don’t want to add to the screaming. I want to work things out slowly, properly, with care. I’ve seen minds change; my own, my family’s. I watched my grandmother soften and shift her potentially racist views after years of conversation. I’ve seen what time and patience can do. And I’ve seen what humiliation can’t do. I had that at university, other students laughing at me in seminars because I didn’t know something, never explaining, just mocking. That approach never changes anyone.

Poetry feels gentler. It makes space for that. And yes, I know how pretentious that sounds. I do try hard not to sound like a wanker. My whole family has practical jobs. My mum was once standing next to me at a book signing when someone told me I must be exhausted after the gig. My Mum whispered to me, “Are you, Hollie? Are you so tired?” after she’d done a full week of NHS overtime. Poetic exhaustion doesn’t quite compare.

But still, I love it. I love that poetry can get to the heart of something in a tiny space. I love that people can read one poem at a time. I love the craft of editing; shaping something until it lands exactly right. And I love the range. Poetry can be Paradise Lost or a haiku or a list of words shaped like an apple. It can be formal, or chaotic, or free. It’s as diverse as music. And yet poetry is the only art form where people say, “I didn’t like this one poem, so I don’t like poetry.” No one does that with novels. 

One positive thing social media has changed for me is who gets to answer back.

People blame social media for shortening attention spans, but honestly, I don’t buy it. I see no difference in engagement between long poems and short poems online. And if we’re talking attention spans – a lot of my childhood was spent happily flicking through TV channels, staring at newspapers covering my dad's face, being quiet in the same room because someone was reading. No one called that a crisis. People have always skimmed. People have always scrolled in their own way. One positive thing social media has changed for me is who gets to answer back.

When I was young, if a newspaper printed something sexist or racist, it just sat there. There was no comeback. But on social media, you get called out with tens of thousands of people saying, “no, that’s not right and we won’t stand for it.” But still, the way we talk online can make me furious. Especially when people throw around headlines like “One in three teenage boys don’t care about women’s rights.” If you’d asked me at 15, “Are you a feminist?” I’d have said no out of embarrassment. I’d absorbed that feminism was an ugly word, that feminists were “ugly women.” Teenage boys are no different. A lazy headline becomes a prophecy. 

So yes, I worry about that a lot. I catastrophise brilliantly. When someone asked me recently what parenthood is like, I said, “Be ready to think about death every day.” And it’s true. I think about all the terrible things constantly. Racism, xenophobia, the rise in online hatred, and far more than I ever wanted to: child trafficking, abuse, paedophilia. The economics of those horrors. The supply and demand. The fact that if no one wanted to buy a child, trafficking wouldn’t exist. And yet it does, because so many men want it. Not poverty. Not circumstance. Desire. That thought disgusts me. It keeps me up at night. But sitting in dread doesn’t help anyone. 

I’m sceptical of poems that are just “I’m so sad about genocide.” I feel the sadness, I understand it, but I want to know: what does this do? What does this help? I don’t know the answer. I’m still trying to work it out. But I do know that talking helps. Care helps. Patience helps. Because people can change. I’ve changed. My gran changed. And I’ve had my own moments of realising just how indoctrinated I was, like when I was a teenager and someone suggested animal testing could be done on prisoners instead of animals. I remember saying, “I don’t know, because animals haven’t done anything wrong,” and my English teacher holding me back afterwards, pretending to talk about my essay, and then quietly explaining the prison system, its inequalities, its racial and class dynamics, everything I didn’t know. She didn’t humiliate me. She talked to me. And that changed me. That’s what I want poetry to do. To start conversations rather than end them. To open rather than close.

The first poem that blew my mind as a kid was Roger McGough’s “Sky in the Pie,” a ridiculous, fantastical thing about the universe inside a pie. And Wilfred Owen only hit me when my gran read it to me, crying, telling me about the boys in our family who died in the war at 16, 17 years old, and how she thought of them as she read it. That changed everything. It wasn’t the poem’s structure. It was the connection. It was someone living it.

And that’s why I still love poetry. Because it’s ancient and everyday all at once. Like crafting something with your hands like they did thousands of years ago. How pottery turns mud into something you can drink from. People have been doing that forever. People have been telling poems forever too.

Here’s a poem from my book, one I wrote when my daughter hit 16 and I thought of being that age and thinking that the age of consent meant “this is the age you’re meant to have sex,” rather than “this is the age the law stops protecting you as much.” It broke my heart. I wrote the poem to comfort myself. It’s called Most People.

And I will end with this because, despite everything I’ve said – all the worries, all the rage, all the bleakness – I still believe it. I have to. Most people are good. Most people are trying. Most people want to love and be loved and be safe. Most people are not the news.

most people

once a month at least, most people hold a saucepan

in their hands, stir soup, make extra just in case

on mondays, most people wake up hoping children

will be safe, notice roses on a roadside and sigh

most people make love nervously, worry afterwords

whether their breath was fresh enough

get embarrassed  buying underwear, apologise

when crying, blush when offering a seat to a stranger

on the hour every hour, most people are not newsworthy,

every day we are watching the extremes

most people do not make headlines,

hands full of weapons, most people are searching

through the rubble, hoping loved ones may laugh

with loved ones once again. drawing curtains, searching

for just a little rain that roots may glug enough to blossom

into fruit again. there’s too much sorrow, this is certain

but most people bring a cup of warmth to loved ones

in the morning, pray for peace when they are praying

This conversation took place on 14 November and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow. 

Hollie's latest book, Virgin, is available now.