Originally
from the West of Ireland,
Emer O’Toole [photo credit: Trevor Browne] teaches performance, theatre and
Irish studies at Concordia University. Along with her impressive academic
credentials and publications, she is the author of
Girls Will Be Girls
(Orion, 2015), a humorous and thoughtful take on gender as performance, now
translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Icelandic and Korean.
O’Toole’s gleeful refusal to shave her body hair made her an internet star of
the 2010s. More recently, she has published
Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change: Activist Aesthetics (Routledge, 2024). She lives in
Montréal, QC.
1
- How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work
compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When
Girls Will Be Girls came out in 2015, life was such a whirlwind that
it’s difficult to know what to attribute to the book. I got a generous 2-title
publishing deal from an imprint of Hachette and a tenure track job offer that
involved moving to Canada at exactly the same time. I should probably have
chosen one or the other. Instead, I thought – I’ll do everything! I’ll be an
author, and a newspaper columnist, and write and deliver six new undergraduate
courses, and take on graduate students, and edit an academic collection, and
turn my recently completely PhD into journal articles. So, ill-advisedly,
that’s what I did.
Visibility
brought additional asks – everyone wanted me to be on their board or committee,
there were public events and trips and media things, and just so many e-mails. It
wasn’t sustainable; I ran myself into the ground. The year after Girls Will
Be Girls was published, I experienced two big bereavements, and my partner
dumped me. I shifted into first gear and stayed there for a while. The second
book for Hachette never materialised. I tried, hard. But I was all out of things
to say, and my writing voice felt forced.
Girls
Will Be Girls remains the
thing I’m proudest of from that intense period of my life. I re-read it about
two years ago before a talk I gave on creative non-fiction, and I hope I won’t
sound conceited if I say that I think it holds up. There’s stuff I’d write
differently now, of course. There are parts I wish I’d researched more fully
and personal sections that I’d choose not to share if I were doing it over
again. The process was quite rushed, and that definitely shows in the writing. All
the same, I think Girls Will Be Girls offers a way of thinking about gender
that remains unusual and valuable in popular culture, and, even now, a decade later,
I get e-mails from readers for whom it has been important. And Girls Will Be
Girls is fun. I think it’s fun, anyway.
I
wrote Girls Will Be Girls on a deadline with a significant advance from
a major international publishing conglomerate and the promise of lots of media
attention. I’d get home from the university in the evening, make dinner, and
then write late into the night, with a readership in mind, and a team of professionals
reading chapter drafts.
Comparatively,
I wrote my novel Do It Yourself when my little boys were babies and
toddlers. There was no deadline, no deal, no guarantee it would ever be read at
all. It took seven years from the first words on the page to the book on
shelves. It’s a very different beast. But it’s still fun. I think it’s fun,
anyway.
2
- How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or fiction?
I
fell into it. I blogged from the early days of the internet, and found my
writing voice that way. Near the end of my PhD, I contributed to a feminist
group blog edited by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet and Holly Baxter called The
Vagenda – it was a whip-smart, hilarious platform by and for women who’d
grown up with media instructing them in bad body image and casual misogyny. A
piece I wrote for The Vagenda on body hair went viral, and my writing
got picked up by The Guardian. From there, I got a great UK agent, who
encouraged me to write a creative non-fiction feminist book. Voilà. Girls
Will Be Girls was born.
Fiction
is my first love and I’ve always wanted to write creatively. It feels magical
to have a novel published, finally, in my 40s.
3
- How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your
writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear
looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious
notes?
Depends
what I’m writing. With newspaper columns, I can comfortably go from having a
pitch for an 800-word column accepted to having the column researched and
written in about 8 hours. (Or I could before I had children!) With academic
projects, the research takes a lot longer, of course – you need to compile a
bibliography of what already exists in the field, then figure out what you’re
going to study deeply, then actually do the reading, then write. I don’t enjoy
the process of academic writing very much, although I do love having written
something. With both columns and academic articles, I usually over-write and
then chop back.
With
creative non-fiction, a lot of it happens in my head before I sit down. I need
less structure. I trust my voice to find the melody. Writing can be a
flow-state activity for me – I look up at the clock and can’t believe I’ve
spent hours on a few paragraphs, re-positioning petals, moving sprigs of baby’s
breath about. I’ll tend to edit yesterday’s work, which warms me up, then write
fresh stuff. I make editing less painful by transferring my darlings to a
document entitled “snippets” rather than outright murdering them.
Fiction
is alchemy, isn’t it? My characters appear from God knows where. Like, I can
hear their voices yabbering away, and sometimes I have a pretty good visual on
them. Then I have to figure out where they are, and what’s happening to them,
and why they won’t leave me alone. Every piece of fiction I’ve published has
gone through multiple drafts. Do It Yourself is a fifth draft and is unrecognisable
from draft one.
4
- Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short
pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a
"book" from the very beginning?
I’m
learning from these questions that I have multiple author personalities. I work
in all these ways. Girls Will Be Girls was a book project from the
outset. I thought Do It Yourself might be a novella, but it had other
ideas. And I’m currently pulling some short stories together into a larger
project.
5
- Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m
a theatre kid.
6
- Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of
questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the
current questions are?
With
Girls Will Be Girls, I was trying to make academic gender theory
accessible to a general audience, and also figure out how much agency we might
have over our genders within the cultural systems that have formed us, and
which reward and punish certain types of expression. With Do It Yourself,
I was interested in questions of the performance of self in the age of the
internet, and of the ways in which the private and public spheres have been
changed by online spaces.
7
– What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do
they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Well,
funny you should ask. Why not pick up a copy of my riveting best-selling
block-buster academic monograph Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social
Change: Activist Aesthetics, and read the introductory chapter, in which I
wrestle with questions of the cultural, social, and political utility of the
artist for approximately 50 theory-dense pages! No? You don’t want to? Fine.
Essentially,
I think that artists, including writers, can (and evidentially do) involve
themselves in wider cultural issues, sometimes with activist intent, and this
is just great; however, it is also fine for writers to privilege art for art’s
sake, to lean into the aesthetic autonomy of their craft, to refuse to be
mouthpieces, and to make things happen in fictional worlds that we would not
condone in real life. I think it’s wrong to hold art to the cultural standards
of the real, or to expect that artists toe some kind of line. There are lots of
different types of writers out there, and there is no one writer’s role.
8
- Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or
essential (or both)?
I
love working with editors, readers, and advisors. I am always so grateful for
an eye on the work. That’s not to say that my immediate emotional reaction to
criticism is always pleasant, but it is always information, and there’s nothing
more valuable for a writer than a reader who isn’t afraid to offend them.
9
- What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
Margaret
Atwood’s advice: “Read, Write, Read, Write, Read, Write.”
10
- What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?
How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Nope,
no routine, just moments wherever I can snatch ‘em.
My
day begins with little feet running to my bed, usually far earlier than I would
prefer, it begins with breakfasts and packed lunches and school bags, with
confiscating pirate swords, then confiscating the chopsticks that have replaced
the pirate swords, with begging people to please, please put on their shoes,
before somehow, miraculously, leaving the house.
11
- When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of
a better word) inspiration?
I
let it sit. I go work on some other thing. It helps that I always have fingers
in a few pies.
12
- What fragrance reminds you of home?
Coal
fires in the cold night air.
13
- David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any
other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual
art?
Theatre
and film for sure. My fiction is dialogue heavy. I love trying to capture
certain rhythms or cadences of speech.
14
- What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your
life outside of your work?
How
long you got? Here, in no particular order, is an inexhaustive list of writers
who have shaped me: Octavia Butler, Leo Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, Ursula K Le Guin, George Saunders, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, Mona Awad, Eugène Ionesco, Ali Smith, Lisa McInerney, Oscar Wilde, Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel,
Edna O’Brien, Kevin Barry, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Agota Kristof,
Doris Lessing, Joanna Russ.
15
- What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I
would like to travel to India.
16
- If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or,
alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a
writer?
I
can’t imagine not being a writer. Who would I even be?
I
love my two jobs – theatre professor and writer – and I have very little desire
to attempt any other (harder) occupation.
17
- What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well,
I do other things! You’re not interviewing George RR Martin here – the HBO
Specials have yet to start paying my mortgage.
I
write. I always wrote. What made me like this? Um, I am going to blaaaame,
let’s see… astrology? Or maybe we’re living in a computer simulation and I was
coded this way.
Anthony Burgess once said, “To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is
the only thing in the world that matters.”
My
children also matter to me, obviously. Those guys aside, I’m with Burgess.
18
- What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last
great book: George Saunders’ Vigil – about phantoms attending to the
immortal spirit of a soon-to-be-deceased oil baron.
Last
great film: Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting
Suicidal Person – about… well, the title is doing a lot of heavy lifting
here.
19
- What are you currently working on?
Three
things!
1.
A
short story collection centred around my hometown, Galway.
2.
A
second novel about the allure and cultural creep of the far right
3.
A
series of performance lectures from the perspectives of Irish animals.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;