‘Everyone’s trying to figure out how to live, and I think they’re looking at other people as a way to figure that out.’ Hannah Regel is discussing the themes of her debut novel, The Last Sane Woman, which tells the story of Nicola, a struggling London artist. When she discovers a series of letters written by a deceased potter named Donna, Nicola becomes obsessed. ‘They offer an escape for her, but she also sees parallels between herself and the letter writer.’

Though not autobiographical, the book’s inspiration came from Regel’s own experience with archival work during her PhD. ‘I was working in The Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, and the stuff I was working with brought up a lot of surprising questions about property and permission and ownership in a way that I hadn’t quite expected. I realised that actually there are much more fragile and sensitive issues in dealing with the ephemera of someone’s life and how easy it is to just completely project.’

With parasocial relationships now being a fact of life, Regel hopes her novel will speak to contemporary millennial anxieties. ‘I was thinking a lot about the internet and the way that we look at other people’s lives and all the miscommunication which that engenders. The vehicle of the archive made sense without being too on the nose.’

After writing two books of poems, the switch to prose was easier for Regel than even she anticipated. ‘There is a narrative structure in my poetry collection, Oliver Reed. So perhaps my poetry was more novelistic than the other way round,’ she laughs. In other ways though, the novel writing process was totally new. ‘I’d never worked on anything this big or for this long before, but I loved having something long-form to think about. As you go about your life, everything you think about, everything you read, and everything you look at filters through this lens. I enjoyed having that as a way to move through the world.’

Regel got her start writing for and editing the feminist art journal SALT, and while hesitant to call The Last Sane Woman a feminist novel, she is keen to explore women’s lives and female relationships in her work. ‘With women and women’s fiction there’s a sort of assumption that everyone’s interests and affinities are the same and should be shared.’ This is certainly not the case in The Last Sane Woman, however, which sees Nicola’s feeling of ownership over Donna bring her into conflict with other women, especially Donna’s best friend Susan. The title (a reference to The Last Sane Man, a biography of studio potter Michael Cardew) also plays on this. ‘There’s a kind of wink in it because, depending on where your sympathies lie, it could be any one of them or none of them.’

Concerned as it is with depression, failure and even suicide, The Last Sane Woman can be a heavy read, but one that Regel believes will speak to people. Nicola and Donna both repeat the same mistakes, seemingly on a path to self-destruction. ‘If you’ve ever read back on your own diaries, it has that same frustrating cyclical nature,’ she says. But there is an element of hope nestled in the story too. ‘I think at the end there’s a kind of rupture where there’s space for possibility. Nicola’s life will continue and perhaps she’ll figure it out.’

Hannah Regel: The Last Sane Woman is published by Verso on Tuesday 2 July; main picture: Sophie Davidson.