Tell us about your new novel, Into the Wreck.
Into The Wreck is told from the perspectives of five family members – Anna, Gemma and Matthew, their mother Yvonne and their aunt Amy – with partly overlapping chronologies. It’s the weekend before the funeral of the children’s father, who has died by suicide, and they’ve gathered in the childhood home in Donegal. Over the course of the five chapters, the characters grapple with their own insecurities, all while trying to grieve for a man who has always been kept at a certain distance from them. There are also some jokes.
What does the wreck, which features in the title and the text, signify?
I don’t think the wreck signifies any one thing, but it’s a vessel that comes to provoke the anxieties of a family struggling to express themselves. It also represents in some ways the plethora of suppressed histories harboured by families across Ireland.
The story is split into five sections, told from the perspective of a different family member. How did you hit on this structure and what are its pros and cons?
To intersperse their perspectives would have been to formally imply a degree of reciprocal communication that just isn’t there. The characters are rendered in these monologic sections because that reflects the boxes they’re trapped in. The downside of this might be that the reader doesn’t get to experience every character’s reaction to each of the book’s events, but then, the characters don’t get that, either. I didn’t want to create too a conspiratorial relationship with my reader, whereby we’re omnipotent and consistently know more than the characters. The point is that we’re limited by what we’re able to disclose, and if that feels unresolved … I’ve never been especially interested in resolution.
What can the books people read reveal? Anna reads Rachel Cusk and courts Alex by performing paragraphs of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, reimagined in the style of DH Lawrence.
Anna is caught between intellectual precocity, and self-destructive immaturity. Her reading choices reflect that – the Cusk Outline trilogy is more like autofiction than any realist novel, in my opinion, because it sublimates the self in this wash of external encounters, drawing attention to its own artifice. That feels apt for Anna, who is trying to “write” her own story in a linear way, but has to contend with the uncontrollability of being a body, acted upon. She is intense self-curation and inescapable impulse – she’s clever but desperate to prove it, and so her books are lifted directly from the contemporary and 20th century canons. She is also rampant and horny, and nobody embodies that like Lawrence.
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The North’s divisions and violent past are mostly noises off, but there is a sense of living in an aftermath of damage, “the poison of this place”. Matthew, by contrast, is exercised more by impending doom – climate change.
If Yvonne gives a voice to the North’s very specific historical harms, then Matthew speaks to the broader and more generalised dangers faced by the world at large currently, the North included. A big theme in the book is trying to voice the past in a way that facilitates an understanding of the present, and as someone born not long before the GFA, this is a subject I’m fixated on: understanding the conflict in the context of broader questions of class disparity and colonial power, but also seeing how those same hierarchical structures are responsible for climate collapse and mass displacement as a result of climate collapse.
Yvonne is sceptical of Amy’s poetry, “just blocks of prose-looking absurdity”. “In Yvonne’s day, poems had line breaks, and something resembling a rhyme scheme.” Your debut collection, ISDAL, won the PEN Heaney Prize. Tell us about it and your approach to poetry.
ISDAL was an attempt to examine how language is used to narrate the lives of women, particularly after they’ve been killed. Women continue to die at the hands of men across the North, and I was trying to think about how language gets weaponised to reduce, dehumanise, and vilify victims. Poetry is the form I use to try and keep my own thoughts capacious and flexible, to keep thinking critically about how language is one of the means by which the world is shaped.
Tell us about your two previous novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022).
They’re pretty good, I think. I worked very hard. I love them because they’re so representative of where I was at the point of writing them. They feel like a young person’s novels, and I admire that about them – they’re messy and unsure in some ways, ambitious in others. With each book I find myself more invested in writing Ireland, so it’s funny that Tennis Lessons didn’t even name Derry as its setting – I didn’t feel qualified to write the place where I live.
Common Decency is angry and more lateral; it’s all about me trying to become a writer, rather than someone who wrote a book. Ireland is present, but you can tell I still feel anxious about the weight of interpretation. Into the Wreck is more sure of its questions, because I’m more sure of the questions I want to ask.
Three novels and a poetry collection by the age of 33 is a remarkable achievement.
Honestly, I’m fit for nothing else.
Which projects are you working on?
I’m finishing up a new poetry collection – it’s about the challenges of trying to be a top shagger during a period of mass ecological death.
Who do you admire the most?
I currently hold a huge amount of respect for Francesca Albanese. Also, the Italian dock workers who have been blocking arms shipments to Israel.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
Palestine Action will no longer be listed as a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act.
Which public event affected you most?
When Veronika the cow scratched herself with a broom.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
I want to force Evelyn Waugh to watch me eat a load of bananas.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I live about 100 yards from the Errigle Inn, and I live about 100 yards from the Errigle Inn.
Into the Wreck is published by Bloomsbury Circus on April 9th. Susannah Dickey will be appearing at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature on April 25th. Cuirt.ie
