In her troubled eyes she started to speak

THE Rhondda exerts a strange pull on those that know it. It might have something to do with those houses hanging from its sides, once a proximity of necessity that also fosters an intimacy, where lives spill over into one another.

Never wealthy, the symptoms of a new hardship arrived when the work went elsewhere and with it an end to the old sense of community. Doors were closed, their owners retreated into a closed-curtain private world of personal difficulties. The human cost of decline, shameful and shamed.

But the intimacy – the blanket – remains, and it remains an enigma. Comforting for those that remember the way the Rhondda once was but oppressive for others.

“It’s more oppressive than comforting” says Rachel Trezise. “It’s always on top of you, and it depends who you are in the way you treat it. I’m aware that I’m from somewhere that’s completely unique, in that it isn’t countryside or urban. There isn’t another place like the Rhondda that I’ve ever come across.”

Unique doesn’t necessarily mean good. Trezise has made a name for herself with frank, autobiographical tales of parental neglect, sexual abuse, homelessness, drink and drugs. They don’t, as one journalist put it, necessarily chime with Visit Wales promotions. Some call her controversial, but that very much rotates on a subjective definition of the word: controversial, because her writing is unflinching in the tough existences that it portrays? Or controversial because it pushes against a culture of talk-up that Welsh society is often forced to perpetuate, to shout loudly lest it be disbelieved?

But Rachel herself is an intriguing clash of contradictions. Her work speaks often of a desire, a need, to leave the Rhondda and its dark judges way behind, how it is no place for the free spirit. Yet she continues to live in Cwmparc, the very village in which she grew up. Her difficult relationship with her mother remains an abiding feature in her books – particularly her debut In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl which, while not quite approaching Marshall Mathers-like matricidal urges, nonetheless lays much of the blame for the protagonist’s ills at her feet. Yet Bobby Gentry, one of her favourite musical artists, was also her mother’s, and she still listens to her records now, perhaps partly for nostalgic reasons (she insists the two became reconciled before her mother died a couple of years ago).

In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was published in 2000, when Trezise was aged 22. She had studied journalism and English at Glamorgan University in Pontypridd before going on to make mugs, television aerials and LED displays in local factories while writing her debut. It was published by Parthian, the West Wales publisher responsible for producing some of the country’s best new writing talent in recent times, including as Richard Collins, Lloyd Robson and Susie Wild.

There was some fuss in Wales, particularly over its harrowing account of the central character Rebecca’s sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather. But it was drowned out by far more favourable critical noise from elsewhere. She was put on the Orange Futures List. She appeared at a new European literature event in Italy after she was chosen by the Guardian Hay Festival. She began to freelance on arts and music for titles as diverse as The Independent and Big Issue Cymru.

“There was some controversy, but none of it came from me,” she says. “For me, I can’t imagine writing any other way. The only way to write is honestly. First of all, I write for myself. If you try and write for anybody else, you’re going to fail.” (This echoes RS Thomas, who once commented: “I write for myself and if other people like it, well, there we are.”)

In 2005, she published Fresh Apples, her first collection of short stories. As well as developing the pared-down direct approach of Goldfish Bowl, she stepped into other lives, and not just in the Rhondda. There was Chickens, the story of a sweet childhood grandfather, Merry Go-Rounds, in which one long-lost friend is dragged out of her regimented existence and dragged round the country following a band by free-spirited mates, and Coney Island, the tale of a young girl caught up in some transatlantic dodginess she doesn’t quite understand for an older boyfriend she knows is bad for her.

It won her more plaudits and awards, not least the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers in 2006, along with a £60,000 cheque from the poet’s daughter Aeronwy. “That money kept me alive,” she smiles. It also allowed her to realise a long-held ambition and get involved with a big writing project on music. The result was Dial M for Merthyr, the story of Valleys band Misasuno – “a gaggle of Merthyr kids with a ton of conviction and a penchant for neck breaking guitar riffs,” as her website says. It goes on to describe how Trezise “shared their tour-bus ‘Black Betty’ in summer 2005 and watched as they razed the British toilet circuit, signed a record deal, left a label, had a to-do about a lampshade, got drunk, took drugs, broke down (mentally and automotively), signed another record deal and threw a vacuum cleaner at a window”.

Although Trezise has always linked her writing closely with music, from the days she edited local fanzine Smack Rupunzel, the experience with Misasuno, who subsequently disbanded, was enough to put her off going to see live bands for some time. “I was really fed up afterwards – I still am. I haven’t been to any gigs since, I don’t think. I was so obsessed with music when I was much younger, I had to get it out of my system. And I did. I loved the band and the experience, and I still love music.”

These days there’s less Midasuno and instead it’s artists like Regina Spector, Tory Amos, some folk music and, of course, Bobby Gentry. “At the moment, I keep playing a song she wrote called Fancy, about a mother who sells her daughter into prostitution” (a line from the song provides the headline to this piece).

Trezise then ventured into theatre with I Sing of a Maiden, a story of teenage pregnancy interspersed with folk songs that played to sell-out audiences in Chapter Arts Centre in 2007. Now she is waiting on the release of Sixteen Shades of Crazy, about three women friends who, in their search for fun in a Valleys village, meet a stranger called Johnny – “Englishman, drug dealer and shameless seducer”.

The book is slated for release in May, but Trezise is already deep into her next project, provisionally entitled The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore, after a PJ Harvey song of the same name. It is about a prostitute from America’s Deep South and set there and also in New York, a city for which Trezise has much affection.

“I’m about half way through. That’s how much I’ve delivered to my agent. I have a writing routine which I sometimes struggle to keep to, but it’s been easy with this book, because I’m enjoying it so much. My husband (Darren) gets up at five for work, so I get up with him and start then, and carry on until Loose Women,” she smiles.

Given her own troubled family upbringing, children of her own might remain a touchy subject, but Rachel admits to becoming broody. “I’ll have to give up smoking first, and I still love smoking. There’s a big brown stain above where I write in my converted attic.”

And you’re not likely to see her on social media, either. She has a MySpace page, and is on Facebook, but she doesn’t use Twitter, and professes to being baffled by its appeal. It fits with how she comes across, as someone who would rather sit back, think and then speak through her prose, to the point where she is not the most comfortable of interviewees.

“I’m just a writer, not a female writer, because that puts men off. Not a Welsh writer, not even a young writer. The minute you put anything in front of writer, it becomes a handicap. It takes away from what you are trying to say.”

- Sixteen Shades of Crazy is out in May, by Blue Door