Interview by Amna Bagadi Pete Kalu, a short story writer, novelist, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, my former boss and agitator, a mentor to many, community activist, former stilt walker, has written and published an incredible new memoir called Act Normal. It talks unflinchingly about the Black British experience, particularly in the North West of England. I spoke to him about how the book came about, what he means by Act Normal, and what he hopes readers and writers alike will take away from it. Amna Bagadi: The overwhelming feeling I got when I started reading the book was like a rush or a release, a bough breaking.  The quiet part finally being said out loud – which was deeply enjoyable to read!  So I’m curious, what was the catalyst for the book? Pete Kalu: Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it.  I was in an iconoclastic mood.  I wanted to drive a horse and carriage though the model of the conventional memoir – I’d read about thirty of them one after the other because I was judging a competition – and I got bored with the formula.  So the project became to wreck that, then rebuild the form using ideas from other sources – eg. from neuroscience’s often counter-intuitive understanding of memory, from French examples of biography-essay mergers and from English movements in the popular essay.  The essay is going through so much change at the moment as a form.  Parallel with all that, I’m a big fan of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ignatius Sancho’s Letters and Jonathan Swift’s Tales of a Tub.  So, it became a mash-up of all those things. AB: You mentioned that you were inspired by Britain’s first Black diarist, Ignatius Sancho. How did Sancho’s work influence your approach to writing Act Normal, and in what ways is your memoir a tribute to his writing? PK: Reading Sancho’s Letters, it struck me as the earliest example of the day-to-day consciousness of a Black person in Britain.  The musings of an ordinary black bloke.  The writings of Equiano and the stories of Henry Box Brown are very much penned for a public audience.   Whereas Sancho was close to being a diarist, just jotting his thoughts down on the day’s minor incidents – did it rain, am I broke this week, is cabbage in season?  That is what I loved about it.  I specifically echo some of his jottings.  Like the bits about standing in a queue wanting to buy a lottery ticket and wondering how to get lucky, about giving advice to a young person only for it to be completely ignored.  And wondering if there is enough cash flow to see me through the week. I’m such a fan.  I have a whole sheaf of Sancho-like writings.  I only included a few in Act Normal. AB: What does the title Act Normal mean to you? PK: It came from the language of the 70’s TV bank robbery – where the robber would pass a note to the terrified teller saying ‘Act Normal!’  More widely, I love the indeterminacy of the phrase – it begs the question, what is normal?  It’s curious, and allows each reader to fill the gap in their own way. AB: I really enjoyed the format, punchy, a bit trippy and hallucinogenic sometimes, almost algorithmic in length.  A great way to tackle memory in fits and bursts.  You describe Act Normal as “part memoir, part auto-fiction, part diary,” with the narrative presented in 250 mini-essays and vignettes.  Can you talk about the structure and form? PK: I had one large question in mind: can a memoir mirror consciousness?  Can it show all the thoughts, feelings, ideas, patterns, leaps, hallucinations, imaginings, fears, ecstasies that make up (at least my) consciousness?  I wanted a form that might allow that and would allow tone shifts and style shits to reflect how I felt my own thinking and feelings changed across a day.  Then somehow, I had to make it cohere as a work of literature which, by definition, demands pattern.  Those two forces – mirroring yet patterning determined the structure. AB: The voice and perspective also jumps around, why did you choose to do that? PK: I was interested by an Italian philosopher, Adriana Cavarrero’s suggestion in her book ‘Relating Narratives’ that the sense of ‘who we are’ (as opposed to ‘what we are’) comes from the stories told about us by other people.  She invokes Romeo & Juliet and Ulysees to ask, what would it be like to arrive incognito at the telling of your own story?  I try to enact that idea thorough shifts of perspectives and voice I’m not saying I understood fully all Cavarero’s ideas, but she was a jumping-off point. AB: It’s a proud Mancunian book as well.  In the book you say Black Britishness should be tied to a Mancunian identity, instead of being confined to a London one.  Talk about this, this assertion of a British north west identity is a strong theme running through the book. PK: The Black voice in Britain has too often been reduced to the noises coming out of London. For a while, I went along.  I set one of my novels in London and it did very well, I even ended up writing a column for a local London newspaper on daily London life – when I was living in...