A Bitter Sweet running experience
Hattie Williams has written a stunning novel that explores ideas of running through its troubled protagonist
Writing about running with Hattie Williams
This week sees the release of Bitter Sweet, the debut novel from Hattie Williams, an old friend of mine from London. It’s not a book about running, per se, (it’s a torrid rite of passage tale of a young publishing assistant getting caught up in a compellingly uneven relationship) but it is a book by a runner that features plenty of running within it. And it’s fantastic. I’m not just saying that because she’s my friend — it’s got 4.1 on Goodreads (underrated imho), and people like Jodi Picoult have been extolling the book’s virtues.
How does running help you write?
“Being a full-time writer, I am on my own all day, making people up in my head. It often means that I don’t have any reason to leave the house. I love working from home, and I’m a very homebody type of person, so running is a really essential part of my week. I treat myself to a run in the afternoon. I get up early, I work all day, get my words in, and then I know that at 3pm, I can go for a run.”
“When I wake up, the creativity is really flowing, and I find that my creative flow throughout the day has this real descending curve to it. A lot of writers will work for two hours in the morning every day for years and years — that’s how they write a novel. For me, that’s not how it works. For me, I think about a novel for ages, and when I start writing it, I will write for seven to ten hours a day, and I’ll often only stop because I get stuck. And when I get stuck, I put on my running shoes.”
“Usually, the music I’m running to relates to a part of the book that I’m working on, and I will go out and run, and on that run I will solve every problem that I’ve been unable to solve.” It’s where I do all of my creative problem solving.”
Tell us about how you’ve written about running
“The book is very much based on my time living in Stoke Newington and starting out in publishing in 2010, and that was kind of the time that I discovered running.”
“I’d suffered a lot with depression, and all sorts of mental health problems, and running became this massive part of my life, helping me stave off depression. It became absolutely essential to me that I needed to run. I ran a huge, huge amount around Clissold Park.”
“I used to have some really harmful behaviors that I would enjoy for being harmful, and running became a thing that hurt, but was good for me. It would clear my head, and it made me feel healthy and strong. As somebody who’d never found any joy in any sport ever before, I just fell in love with it immediately.”
“So, when I was writing about Charlie, who is the protagonist in Bitter Sweet, and her need to hurt herself, and feel her body, and understand her trauma, it was very obvious to me that she would be a runner as well.”
“You can feel like an outsider when you’re running because you’ve got your music in, you’re working at a pace that’s different from everybody else, and you kind of feel like you’re looking in on people in a different way — that’s you’re floating above. I really try to summarize that in the book and how she loves to run, and feels that need when she’s feeling restless and lost, but also how she tries to use it in times of extreme emotional distress and how it can not work.”
“You know you have those runs where it’s so hard, and for no reason you have to stop after 2km and you can’t catch your breath, and some days you’re flying? I think how your emotional state impacts that more than your physical state is really interesting, so that’s something I try to explore in the book.”
“Charlie goes for a run on a particular occasion. She sees these families, she sees this couple, she sees this happy group of friends, and she feels so detached running that she pops her earbuds out to listen to snatches of conversation, but all it does it make her feel more outside herself. I wanted to write about running in that way, and the different ways it can feel.”
If you like the way that Hattie has talked about running here, you will love the way she writes about that, and a whole host of other stuff.
Go and buy Bitter Sweet from [Bookshop], so that independent bookstores benefit. It’s out in the USA tomorrow, 08 July 2025. It came out in the UK last Thursday.
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’s musings on life on her Substack, .
Recently on Running Sucks
If Hattie thinks and writes about running in beautifully human, flowing prose, last week I wrote about how we can think about running from a more academic point of view. Yes, the language is different, but the desire to understand and explain the incredibly human aspect of this thing that we do is right there.
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Raz x