Tell us about your debut novel, Wild Iris.
Eve is having a psychological breakdown on her 42nd birthday, caught between ending her life and reconnecting with a lover from 20 years ago. The elevator pitch might be “sex or death?”.
What were the challenges of writing about this, especially the ending?
Pitching a novel that is essentially about a suicidal middle-aged woman getting drunk on her birthday wasn’t easy. Prospective editors and agents said they loved the book, but wanted it to be more “uplit” (one said “you know, like After Life by Ricky Gervais”). When capitalism and art meet, art usually loses. There was no way I was changing the ending – and I won’t give it away now, but I’m dying to know what readers think.
How important is guilt to Eve’s story?
Eve describes it as “the sleekit worm of guilt”. Something terrible happened between her and her best friend Louise at university. Her story shows that even when you detach yourself, when you bury things, when you run away, when you hide, eventually, even though it might take 20 years, you have to face up to your actions.
Wild Iris is set over Easter. How significant is that?
It’s Easter Friday when Eve is sinking into confusion and despair, drinking her way into her past, and I’m sure the symbolism isn’t lost there. I’m not sure there is redemption in the way you might anticipate in the book, but there is hope – it just depends on the reader whether or not they find it.
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What does your debut have to say about mothers?
When Eve is a little girl she is taken in by Gerty, a taciturn, strict Presbyterian old enough to be her grandmother. Her mother is a shadow, a mystery in the book until much later. When Eve grows up and becomes a mother herself, she experiences two things on the birth of her son: overwhelming unconditional love and the fear she will be a terrible mother. My first (unpublished) book – although completely different – dealt with the idea of an absent mother too. It’s a subject I keep circling.
Did you discover anything surprising through writing the novel?
Eve is a solitary child and doesn’t fit in; she feels like other children have a template for living but she doesn’t know the rules. However, she has a rich inner world and is brimming with curiosity, fascinated by language and etymology, a watcher. As an adult, she remains a passenger in life, while certain behaviours intensify and she is eaten alive by anxiety, self-medicating with alcohol. I didn’t realise that in this and in lots of other ways I had written a woman with autistic traits until I’d finished the book, and it raised a lot of questions for me.
Was humour important to you?
I really hope the reader gets a laugh out of some of Eve’s observations. Despite the serious subject, the novel is a bit mischievous. I hope too that it’s full of the joy of small things.
Which projects are you working on?
I’m fascinated by time, the way the past begins to inhabit us as we age, and this is a theme I’m exploring in a new manuscript, which is in the messy early stages.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” – Emily Dickinson
Who do you admire the most?
People who live with chronic pain.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d close down every puppy farm in Ireland.
Which current book would you recommend?
I’ve just read Rituals by Danielle McLaughlin and I loved its candour and wry humour.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
My daughter gave me a hardback notebook and on the cover she made a pen and ink portrait of Bob Dylan smoking a pipe, with a treble and bass clef streaming upwards.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Snoopy.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
I lived in Italy for some years when I was in my 20s. At one point I lived in a house on a hill just outside the walled town of Urbino. I still dream about it.
Your most treasured possession?
I don’t have one but I sometimes wish I’d taken something from my parents’ house after they died, but at the time it didn’t occur to me. I’d like to have the hymn book my father used to play piano from, or maybe a cutting of a rose from the garden. Things are just things, though, and the older I get the less “stuff” matters to me.
What is your favourite quotation?
The opening lines of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey give me the shivers. One of the ancient stories, palpitating with life.
“Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.”
Wild Iris is published by Dedalus Press
