Teeth: Some Notes

 I undersell my books. People ask me about them and I make jokes. I bat away interest. I apologise for them, as though they were an embarrassment to me. They're not. I've written three books and I'm proud of them, because they're very good. 

No, it doesn't sit right with me. I DO believe this, but my social training won't allow me to say it, or even type it. So I've written these notes, so I can learn them and talk about the books, my intentions, properly. Ask me what the book's about, why I wrote it. This is what I'll say.  

                                                                         Teeth

 

Teeth is the story of how I paid a plausible stranger a lot of money to remove my awful smile and replace it with a newer, more socially acceptable one, leaving me with very little to smile about.

     Teeth was my first published book, but it was not the first book I signed a publishing contract for. My intended first book was a novel called Fine. I was on holiday in Brighton when I got the e-mail telling me Sagging Meniscus Press would like to publish the book. I was just awake and blearily scanned the message. It was quite long and my eye tripped over the word "unfortunately", so I groaned and went back to sleep. Later, when I grasped the nettle and read the full message, I found it was a love letter. My eyes filled with tears. I was going to be published. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the publisher's list, it wouldn't be for another two years. But I was a boy of 51 then. I had my whole life ahead of me. And, frankly, after waiting half a century to publish a book what was another couple of years?

     And I was busy. I was writing a film for Disney. My friend Aislinn is a film director, and we were both fans of Folk Horror, and Ireland, the country that invented Halloween, was particularly rich in myth, legend and romance, and we agreed that no one had ever done an accurate depiction of a Banshee on film. Though the one in Darby O' Gill is authentically terrifying. She pitched the idea for a banshee film in a meeting, it was immediately greenlit, and suddenly we were writing a feature film for the Hulu Channel and I was being paid money, quite a lot of money, and doing Zoom meetings with American film executives, all of them twenty years younger than me, and each equipped with the sort of chomping equipment that could take on an iron girder. I was acutely aware of the trope of English teeth in America, but in this room, at least, it was true. I spent those meetings with my hand hiding half of my face. I allowed my eyes to communicate any emotions I might be feeling, and mostly it was a feeling a shame about my horrible teeth. They'd been nice teeth once. Slightly goofy, but nice. Years of bruxism, red wine and literal grinding poverty had left them like sharp shingle on a grey, winter beach. I was going to be having loads of these meetings with Americans now I was a top Hollywood writer, so I discussed it with Susan, and she advised me I should get my teeth fixed because they were upsetting me. She's a very generous woman.

     The dentist devised a plan of action, and I surrendered myself to his violence and the aggravated assault he was making on my bank balance. And I thought this is odd. I'm paying a man to hurt me. And I keep showing up for it. There's a woman in the room with me whose only role is to vacuum clean saliva from my mouth with a saliva vacuum cleaner that does not work in any way. It was funny. It was so ridiculous, it was funny. Or I thought I could make it funny. So, I started writing it down, all the weirdness, the absurdity of my dying my brand-new teeth yellow because I didn't know a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle contained turmeric, or the fact the light in the dentist's toilet went off when you shut the door, like a fridge, so you had to piss in the dark. And I thought about the semiotics of bad teeth, the folkloric, atavistic roots of rotten, irregular fangs, mouldering and roped with saliva, and how we've come to associate bad teeth with bad morals, with danger, irrationality, darkness, and evil. The witch, the vampire, the werewolf, all of them outfitted with jagged, jugular-bursting incisors. If bad teeth are a moral question, they're also a projection of my body dysmorphia. I'm getting older. I'm fatter, saggier, and my eyesight is dimming. My hair's like Pampas grass. I'm a grey shadow of my former self. If I had a lot of money I could get a personal trainer, go under the knife, pare off the ugliness, the excess Higgins, the unwanted Higgins, though it's all unwanted Higgins. But it costs too much and it's lazy and it's vain. We didn't have Ozempic when I was writing the book, even though it was only published two years ago (it really does feel like it was a lot longer). But teeth are something you can change, and society is fine with it. They're happy about it. A winning smile is the norm in all media. An influencer with bad teeth wouldn't exist. Bad teeth are not aspirational. There was one thing I could change, and it was my teeth, and I did.

     I wrote it all down. I sent it to my publisher Jacob, and he offered to publish it as a part of his Sagging Shorts sub-imprint and, as such, it could undercut my novel by eight months. My first book was a book about my bad teeth. But really, really, it was about so much more.

     They never made the banshee film, and I never had another Zoom meeting with a Hollywood producer. The production house collapsed and reconfigured and new brooms swept clean. Anything they were going to make – including my film – they were no longer making. They can keep their intimidating teeth. I live in Northern Ireland. My teeth look pretty good here.