Living the dream: Alvy Carragher on EM Reapy

In December 2012, I decided to become a writer and began the desperate submission, rejection, rejection, rejection process. That was how I first stumbled across Elizabeth Reapy. She edited an online publication called Wordlegs for new writers and in 2013 she published my first poem.

I was working in a customer-service type role at the time and had to leave the desk and go for a walk because I was shaking so hard. In hindsight that seems melodramatic, but that first yes, means more than almost all the other yeses stockpiled. It's the first person reaching out to say – you're not crazy. Or, perhaps more accurately – I'm crazy too.

Reapy became one of the writers I wanted to be as good as. I remember googling her stories, and reading through whatever I could find online. I’d always felt compelled to read novels and stories about the Holocaust, the oppression in South America, or the Irish Famine, letting myself wander only into the ordinary lives of people through poetry. But here, sitting on my computer I found people I knew hiding in Reapy’s stories and was caught off guard. These were narratives that were not only beautifully written, but full of characters I knew intimately. People who felt like they’d been sitting at my mother’s kitchen table over the years, knocking back and forth the problems of their lives, and sorting themselves out.

I waited for her book. A couple of young writers I knew had read early drafts of Red Dirt and said it was this amazing novel partly told in the second person, but that Liz was struggling to find someone to publish it. I remember bumping into her at a reading in Dublin, shortly before she signed the book deal. She was considering quitting writing and doing something else. She didn’t seem sure what else she could do and I didn’t really know what to say. I offered some sort of bland sentiment but internally, I was worried, if someone as good as Reapy was struggling to make this writing life work, then what hope did the rest of us have?

It came as a relief to many young writers when Reapy got her publishing deal. I still remember how excited I was the day I could finally place an order for her novel online, and again the day I got to hold of the scorched red and yellow book in my hands.

I wanted to see what she was capable of, given the span of a novel, to develop what were already perfectly honed characters. To me that book is also a small piece of evidence that it is possible to continue following your dream, even when you’ve almost abandoned all hope. Her success felt like it was paving a sort of way that the rest of us might attempt to follow.

I snatched whatever spare time I could, on buses or in the canteen at work, to travel across the pages of Red Dirt and I finished it in days. Relentlessly pacey, the book was as gritty as it was funny. And again, I sat down with people I knew. Here was a version of my best friend from my hometown, stuck out in the outback in a hopeless farm job, terribly lonely, but doing better than she might be in the Irish recession. Here were all the lads from school thrown together by circumstance, with nothing in common but their Irishness and current situation. As gripping as the plot was, this was what caught me. The unlikely friendships, the serious despair, the drugging and drowning out of it all. This novel told a familiar story, one any Irish person can relate to. Everyone knows someone who has had to go.

What Reapy offers is a peek behind the smiley Facebook pictures of friends on Aussie farms, a glimpse of what drives those anecdotes about wild nights and picking fruit in bland impossible terrains. She effortlessly weaves the hopelessness faced by those out there, the scary and bleak situations Irish emigrants can often end up navigating alone. That feeling of not wanting to stress anyone out back home. The stubborn willpower of people trying to make a bad situation work.

What I love about Reapy's writing is that there is always some sense of optimism at the end, and a little bit of humour peppered throughout. Her debut stands with the best of Ireland's contemporary fiction and I will continue to look up to her as a writer. I look forward to whatever she writes next, and am delighted to see her work finally receive the attention it deserves.
Red Dirt by EM Reapy is the Irish Times Book Club selection for May 2017. This debut novel won Newcomer of the Year at the 2016 Irish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the 2017 Kate O'Brien Award. Over the next four weeks, we shall run a series of articles by the author and fellow writers on Red Dirt, culminating in a public interview with Elizabeth Reapy by Laura Slattery of The Irish Times at The Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square, Dublin 1, on Thursday, May 25th, at 7.30pm, which will be uploaded as a podcast on May 31st on irishtimes.com
Alvy Carragher is the author of  the poetry collection Falling in Love with Broken Things (Salmon)