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.
