 We had an amazing day at the Irish Writers Weekend yesterday, the sessions were all phenomenal and I hope you'll find the same today. Obviously we're starting with the first session today with Susanna Dickey, Megan Nolan and then the day runs on so pretty scrutinised the programme. Just a reminder that we have two sessions later in the main building rather than here. So you'll have an option on which to go to. We have a wonderful poetry session at 11.30, I don't even know my own programme, 1.30 is the poetry and then 3.15 is the tribute to the late Niall McDevitt. Obviously sessions all the way through here concluding at the end of the day with the film screening. So the festival is very delighted to have the support of Culture Ireland, the Embassy of Ireland in London and incredibly the support of the Doyle Collection Hotel who've housed all our wonderful writers this weekend and made them extremely happy indeed with their surroundings. So that's one thing off my plate. But today's session has been about writing other selves. It's Susanna Dickey, it's Megan Nolan and our chair is Sacha Daboul who is the former director of International Festival of Literature and a writer in her own right. So please welcome to the stage our panel. Hello everyone and thank you for the whoops, really appreciate that level of enthusiasm on a Sunday morning. I think that's entirely fair enough. John was saying welcome to the British Library for this brilliant weekend of Irish writing. This is our second day of our first ever edition but long may it continue. If anything just for the excuse to bring a bunch of Irish writers to London and have a really fun time. I'm Sacha Daboul and I am really thrilled today to be joined by two of I would say Ireland's most exciting new voices in fiction and other areas Megan Nolan and Susanna Dickey. A little bit about the format of our event today. We'll kick off with some readings and then Susanna and Megan and I will have a chat and then there'll be time for questions from the audience as well. So I'll probably start off with a bit of an introduction but you know once more with feeling a big bouleau bus and a welcome to Susanna Dickey and Megan Nolan. I have said bouleau bus about five times. I've got here I can't help it. I feel like because it's an Irish writers weekend that means a round of applause in Irish for any non-Irish speakers. I just can't stop saying it. It's like a children's TV presenter. Well done. So Megan Nolan is a writer of essays, reviews and fiction. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Right Review, The Sunday Times on The Guardian. Do you currently write a fortnightly column for The New Statesman? No, I do not believe so. That was a while ago. But your debut novel Acts of Desperation came out in 2021 and your second book Ordinary Human Failings is out next year. Would you like to start us off with a wee read? Oh yeah, sure. I'm going to let us know a bit about the book as well if that's okay. Yeah, of course. So Act of Desperation is my debut novel and told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who's a young woman in her 20s in Dublin. And she kind of begins this obsessive love affair with a man called Kieran who becomes the point of her life and focus for all of the ways that she's lacking direction and a purpose. And he kind of becomes the central meaning of her life. And this part is just after he's left her for one of many times. So yeah, I'll just read it. It's maybe like three or four minutes long. The loss of someone you love can make you go mad in the best of circumstances. But I did not just love Kieran but loved him darkly, wrongly. Losing someone you love in those ways can turn you not only mad but wicked too. When he left me, I dreamed of the two of them sometimes woke up sweating. I thought of going to his house and hammering on the window until they let me in. I dreamed that march of killing her and woke oddly calm thinking repetitively, well, stranger things have happened. Well, stranger things have happened. I'd slipped into his room as they slept and stood looking at them from the doorway. Moonlight was on their faces and made them look beautiful, already dead. I wrapped her beautiful dark hair around my fist and cracked her skull against the wall, one, two. And because it was a dream, I was strong enough to move her entire body in a violent wave with one hand. Her mouth was open and dribbling and bubbling and there was a black stain on the headboard behind and her long, thin arm was twitching and grasping uselessly until it wasn't. Besides her, Kieran watched calmly, his eyes raising to meet mine once she had stopped breathing. And then he turned back towards the wall in the same position he always slept, dragging the blanket tight around him. At night sometimes I called Lisa, the only person I could say the truth to, the truth that was so basic and so large. I need him, I need him, I sobbed to her. I can't do it, I'm not able to do it, meaning to live, to go on living without him. And I loved her for not bothering to contradict me or to tell me that I didn't need anybody, that I would get over it. She knew intuitively, knew always that she herself did not need anybody else to live. But this difference between the two of us didn't make my experience any less real than her own. She had seen how actual the need was with her own eyes. When once I gasped, I'm alone, I'm so alone, I'm scared, she didn't pretend that I wasn't. I know you are, she agreed. You are. I looked for other people who had felt like me, hoping for comfort or clues. My Google search terms were things like obsessive love, famous cases of unrequited love, incidents of obsession. I read about a story I had heard first on a podcast years before about a man named Carl Tanzler, a medical professional, though not a doctor, in Florida. He had fallen in love with his patient, a Cuban American woman named Maria Elena Milagro, in the 1920s. She had suffered from tuberculosis, which had also killed one of her sisters. Tanzler was instantly obsessed with her, offering her his dubious medical expertise and radiology equipment, going to her family home to administer additional treatments. He showered her with gifts and jewellery, declared her the love of his life, the realization of a series of visions he had seen of a mysterious, dark-haired angel. She offered no reciprocation. Her family undoubtedly must have found him an oppressive and disturbing presence, but allowed his advances as long as they held some potential to cure her. But it all came to nothing and she died in 1931. Tanzler paid for the funeral and constructed a mausoleum. In 1933, he visited the site of her burial at night and used a car to remove her decomposing corpse, putting it in his car and taking it home. There he used pins and wires and a ham-fisted, cage-like construction to keep her disintegrating bones together and wrapped them with gauze and muslin heavily coated in fragrance to try to drown out the persistent smell of her decay. He made a mask, blank and smooth, supposed to replicate her real features, but terrible in its inadequacy. Neighbours saw him through his window dancing with the figure of a woman. He was brought to trial but never sentenced and Maria Elena's body, such as it was, still dolled up with this horrifying artifice and inadequate mummification, was put on show in a funeral home where thousands of curious members of the public would go to view the spectacle. The first time I heard the story, I was angry. To demand ownership of a woman who doesn't love you, even when she is dead. To take that dead body and make it yours through hideous force, hideous care, hideous attention. It seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your permission and turn you into something you had never been, which had nothing to do with you. Now, as I read it again through my bewildered grief, I wonder if I was any better than him. I wondered if I ever had been. Perhaps I had just never loved someone madly until now. Perhaps I had always been as violent as a man. Wouldn't I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him? Wouldn't I sacrifice not just myself, but himself to get it? Wouldn't I make him everything he wasn't? Make him soft and tender and domesticated and weak so long as it meant I could convince him to be mine again. I read a case study of a woman, patient M, who suffered from erotomania in upstate New York in the 1970s. The woman was the child of first generation Chinese immigrant parents and a diligent student at a Christian college. She had a strict but normal upbringing, supportive parents, friends, a handful of supervised dates with boys. In her sophomore year of college, she began to take tutorials from a man, Professor X, in his early 40s. The man was a professor of theology, married with two children, all involved in the local church and community of which patient M was also a part. Patient M began sending letters of a personal nature to Professor X, telling him about her difficulties with schooling, her family and other relationships. At first, he replied, try to offer her comfort and spiritual guidance, but quickly her correspondence increased up to 10 letters a day, and he began to be alarmed by their overly familiar tone and strange references to affection and a shared bond that he had no part in. Though her family, her college authorities and eventually the police would warn her to leave Professor X alone, patient M continued and increased her campaign, perceiving their attempts to be proof of her theory that the professor's wife was determined to keep them apart. She began to stalk him at his office and his home until she was expelled permanently. Her letters continued to show that she believed Professor X loved her and was kept from her only by the constraints of their Christian culture. One July morning, professional acquaintances and friends of the professor were shocked to receive a wedding invitation, the marriage of him and patient M. The more distant of them presumed that he had been divorced and was planning a shock and wedding before he got hold of them and explained the strange situation. It was at this point that patient M was taken into institutional custody, after which her face is unknown. Several weeks after her detainment, her parents received a phone call from a local Chinese restaurant, wondering where the wedding party was, for she had booked a sit-down meal for 30 to celebrate their union. Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you for reading that part specifically. It's one of my favorite bits. Susanna, would you like to go next? I'll do the intro. So, Susanna Dickey is the author of Tennis Lessons and Common Decency. Her poetry has been published in the TLS, Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review. In 2019, she won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and in 2021 was long listed for the Sunday Time Short Story Award. She's also an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize granted for a collection by a poet under the age of 30 and her debut collection will be published next year. So, Common Decency is about two women living in the Siam apartment block in Belfast, one floor up from one another, down from one another, Lily and Siobhan, both of whom are kind of experiencing self-atrophy in different ways. Lily is grieving her mother who has died recently from pancreatic cancer and she is very much retreated into herself in response to this grief. Siobhan is experiencing a sort of preemptive grief because she's in a doomed relationship with a married man and she's sort of retreating into the memories of the initial stages of their courtship because she sees him so infrequently. So, both of them are kind of regressing in this way, like very much focused on the past rather than their present and are sort of spiraling into increasingly self-destructive behaviour. So, I'm going to read a bit where Siobhan is reminiscing on meeting Andrew, who is the married man. With every muscle in her body she willed him towards her and when she saw his feet next to her chair she felt telekinetic as though her lust was sanctioned by unseen forces. He said, how is it? And she said, I don't know, I can't read. And he laughed. She turned the book over and was surprised to see that it was Daisy Miller. He said, I really love the portrait of a lady and she grasping in the chambers of her memory for any information said it's good but my favourite is the turning of the shrew. He laughed again. He has an easy laugh which she theorises comes partly from his innate need to please people but also from a genuine pleasure he takes in living given the chance. He said, would you like to have a drink with me? And she said yes. And they de-camped to another archipelago of chairs in an empty lounge. They spent the next two and a half hours cross-legged on a sofa facing one another. He seemed young to her but not in the way she now knows her students to seem young. Brash so as not to betray their ignorance. He seemed young like conversation wasn't about using the other person's contribution as stepping stones to his own. Young like it didn't matter to him whether he spoke at all. He told her about his wife and daughter on the first night and later she was irritated with herself for being shocked given his wedding ring given the disproportionate gratitude he showed her which could only have come from a man who hadn't felt wanted in a long time. They held hands for three uninterrupted minutes on the second night while he told her that he'd never leave his family, that he couldn't. They kissed on the third, closed mouthed in chaste, his mouth seasoned with chip vinegar. When he checked out on the final morning he left a note for her at reception with his email address rather than his phone number as though that might absolve them. They exchanged emails every day for a month. A fortnight in she wrote that she loved him. A fortnight later he wrote it back. A month later he asked if they could meet. The day before they saw one another she spent the afternoon on Royal Avenue trying on skirts and blouses. That morning she curled her hair and put on layers and layers of mascara till her lashes were huge and rigid. When she saw him walk through the station doors from the platform onto the concourse she felt pangs of regret all the ways she could have looked better. He took four equine bones towards her and then her face was pressed to his neck. Afterwards he would reminisce about how it felt to hold her and hear her breath catch in her throat. A lot of their moments together are like this. They feel scripted in their enormity. He struggled to achieve orgasm with a condom on. They make them so restrictive he'd said, plaintively contemplating his strictured penis. So after she'd accompanied him to the station she went to the walk-in clinic and acquired three months worth of combined contraceptive pill. When the doctor asked if she wanted some free free prophylactics she replied no thank you with the smugness of someone who has captured monogamy. Something about him made her different recalibrated her emotional vocabulary. She was suddenly tender and saccharine prone to lengthy pontificating about her feelings. If he devoted a paragraph to telling her how meeting her had changed his life she devoted two. It became an emotional one-upmanship. Who could feel more and express it better? Which led to an agonizing sense of exposure when she was the more superlative. Soon it stopped being a conscious decision and she was the person she'd been emulating. She had become his emotional protege. After a couple of days spent together she'd returned to her dark sticky bedroom, the atmosphere like Sorbet and the surfaces piled with dishevelled coursework and she'd weep. She'd weep for the injustice thrust upon her, for the pain of wanting him, of being denied him. They still talk often about how they met. They discuss it at length, the immediate attraction, the initial resistance to the immediate attraction, the ultimate futility of such resistance. She talks about how beautiful she looked even in her hotel uniform with her hair pulled back. She says no there's no way because she knows her small featured egg shaped face is one that benefits from some hair around it. Yes he insists and then he says that it wasn't just how she looked, that from the first conversation he felt understood in a way that he never had, that she delighted him, that she was inimitable and clever and witty, that she made him feel young, that she made him feel wanted. She reciprocates. She tells him that he's the most handsome man she's ever seen, that she's never wanted anyone the way she wanted him. Through repeated framings of their history they solidify their love as mythic, canonical, almost preordained. This belies the more sordid elements of their pairing and casts them as beyond logic, beyond pedestrian questions of morality. She thinks they both mean it when they say that they are the loves of each other's lives, or at least they think they mean it, which she supposes is the same thing. A couple of months in she came to understand the negatives of being the extraneous attachment to an intact couple. She was on her first placement in a school that elicited the same unsavory response from everyone it was mentioned to. A response fueled by some composite of cultural tribalism, stereotyping of location, and sufficient anecdotal material to affirm those stereotypes. That said, the school did lack resources and things were difficult. One Friday afternoon, during a film screening, one child had a seizure. Siobhan quickly learned that 10 and 11 year olds are an unsettling mix of cynical and deranged. They know enough about the world to feign an authority, thereby making it apparent how little they know about the world. She arrived home with greasy skin, a throbbing shoulder, and a faint smell of urine on her clothes. When she messaged Andrew to ask if she could call him, the response came an hour and a half later. Sweetheart, you know we can't talk on the phone when I'm at home. The following day they messaged for several hours about his daughter's tantrums, a newly acquired fear of zips, and then he had to disappear to cook spaghetti hoops and replace the fastenings on her fleece with velcro. Tara called to ask how the placement was going, but somehow Tara's comfort felt less worthwhile than his would have been. She answered Tara's sensitive probing questions with non-committal mumblings, said she was too tired to talk. This was something else her relationship with Andrew had done. Invalidated the attention of the other people in her life. She needed his attention, only his. Thank you. It's funny because I know that YouTube were looking through readings just before I went on stage, so I'm aware that you did not plan that, but those readings just spoke so beautifully to each other. It's amazing, and I think it really sets up our conversation perfectly because both of these novels to me really capture obsessive love and obsession in a way that I think not many others do. And yeah I guess I'm interested to know where that kind of came about as a topic that you wanted to focus on for the book, for both of you. Megan do you want to go first? Yeah, so yeah it's kind of nice listening to that reminding me that like I really love Susanna's novel and part of that like I feel like we shared that concern with like the attraction of that resistance and like how exhilarating and sexy and eventually awful that like attempt to override resistances. And I think yeah so I wanted to write a relationship from beginning to end with sort of the initial idea that I had for the novel because I think I was about 25, 26 when I started to write the novel and I had just become single for the kind of the first time in my life and I was trying to understand that the end of a relationship wasn't the end of the world and I wanted to write the finality of a completely dead relationship in a novel in a way to explain to myself that it was okay for that to have happened in the world. And I was interested in romantic obsession and in that like my life sort of lacked a lot of narrative trajectory after school. I dropped out of college very quickly and didn't really know how to live or what to do with my time or what I was good at or you know what the world, how the world could find me good and so romance had to kind of become the narration to my life and then every time that I had fallen in love it became the point of myself and how I spent my time. And that kind of all encompassing totality that I had ended up in giving my relationships was very devastating and stopped me from kind of having a life for a long time. So yeah I was sort of trying, I was trying to like correct my own life by writing this in a way and I guess I wrote to heighten like more visceral and more disgusting version of things that I had experienced to try and like repel myself a little bit to like make myself not want to be in love anymore. Yeah it's interesting that you mentioned it kind of coming from you know personal experiences but out of a move because reading it and reading around it, I do see and this happens a lot with writing by women and people being like oh well this must be just a book about Megan and you're like well actually to me the book very very consciously is not about you like it feels like there's a distance between the emotions of the unnamed narrator and the person writing the book like there's a space there and that felt really important to me. Yeah definitely yeah I think that there was um you know there was enough time had passed between the sort of age of the woman in the book and then also the extremity of those feelings when I experienced versions of them myself that yeah I was able to to like create some some like heightened dramatic version of reality but I do I do want to say like because I know it is true that that women get asked that question a lot but I think in my case it is only fair because I've like used all of my biographical details I think it would be unfair of me to be like to be put out by people asking that or thinking about that but yeah definitely part of what was like fun in a way for me about writing the character was to make it a kind of you know theatrical version of myself or a past self of mine and to and to like lean into all the things that I hate about myself and to make them really blatant you know. Yeah and how about you Susanna? Um yeah I mean um I think something I'm really interested in is like I guess sort of she-im as a kind of um propulsive like um kind of effective force and there's this writing that talks about how she-im can arise from like your object cathexis the thing upon which you're primarily focused being taken away from you and you still having all the feelings towards it but now know where to put it and how those feelings then transmute it into like she-im um and I think for both my protagonists that's something that's happening they've both um have the kind of person around whom they've centered their emotional lives either already departed or seemingly in the process of a slow departure um and how you know and and so much of the book is about narrative um narrativizing either narrativizing the lives of other people or how we narrativize our own lives to justify our behavior and I think there's probably nothing more so than a kind of relationship like this one um that Siobhan is experiencing with this older married man um like a relationship like that requires narrative to to enable yourself to keep going through it because you're not having sufficient experience to justify it you're seeing him very infrequently everything logical is telling you that this is a bad thing to be participating in so you fall back on narrative to make it make sense to you to make it make sense within the context of your life um and yeah so I was you know interested in exploring that and kind of this obsession shameful like like catechus way um and yeah it sat as a kind of then um sat in opposition to what lily is doing um but they're both kind of um a kind of opposites to one another but also incredibly similar in that their feelings are the same but about such different losses um and yeah and I think probably I you know I'm touching on what the second question you just asked Megan um I think probably a lot of what was able to fuel my writing of that relationship was a time in my life when you know a lot of bad things coalesced I didn't have very much money I was in an incredibly dysfunctional relationship and I had no sense of purpose um and I used all those things uh also to justify having no friends or hobbies um and you know it's it's really great when that happens because five years later you can write about it uh yeah and yeah that's avoid it sounds like you you have friends and hobbies now so it seems really positive um you two are my friends that's right um I loved what you said there about how if you're not getting enough of an experience you have to kind of cling to those things and create a narrative and a journey and I have to say while picking up questions or anything but you know this interview um I feel like both of your works are kind of like a tool a lot of of you know female millennial stories of of the moment or whatever but actually I kept thinking of the tv show crazy ex-girlfriend have you guys seen it yeah it's like especially there's a song called love kernels which is like the funniest right yeah whatever it's just about like it's like I will give you the bare minimum and you will just like drink it up yeah um because I also think that for all that these are you know serious books with with moments of pay-thousand stuff I find them incredibly funny at points um and I was shocked when kind of reviewing notes before the event some of the reviews were like no these are very serious there's not someone said that there's no humor in in your book and I was I was like what are you talking about this is hilarious so I wondered yeah what what do you guys feel the function of humor in that is and was it important to you to include it I know I I honestly would have would have no I was very worried that it was um completely humorless myself as in as in because like um my my writing I wrote essays for for a couple of years before I wrote this book and uh they were all quite serious and not not completely lacking in any humor but but you know they're about very serious things that are very um painful a lot of the time but in my actual life like I I like to have a laugh and then like honestly like I feel like the point of life isn't for me it's not writing it's like honestly to have a laugh and and like that's what I like to spend my time doing and so it felt increasingly weird to me that all my work was kind of in opposition to that and so when I was writing acts of desperation um I finished it and just thought god what a fucking bummer and like uh I was I was happy to have written it and I and I had I had to write it but I was also kind of sad that I was putting another thing into the world that contradicted what I feel like I'm essentially like in a lot of ways but then my my editor suggested because I wrote a column at the time that New Statesman column which was sometimes funny she was like can you try and make it a bit funny I was like no honestly it's kind of hard to impose add a few guys exactly yeah so I did I wished I could have done that but but I wasn't able to kind of um yeah I couldn't after the fact go and and add in some like humorous anecdotes or whatever but but yeah I I do agree that some of it is funny and um and yeah with a bit of distance now when I read back on it there are things that I laugh at in it that I didn't at the time and that's also because it's like from the perspective of a very self-important and narcissistic young person and like yeah and I was a bit younger and probably more narcissistic when I started writing it I think and I hope and uh so maybe like even the little bit of distance because it's now five years since I wrote a lot of it almost all of it actually so even like that little bit of distance I think makes me find it funny in a way that probably I didn't at the time yeah yeah yeah and Susie how about you well I mean there's also that great scene where Kieran trips over a bucket and splits his trousers you see you see his heart shaped underpants fillowing in the wind many banana peels yeah um like I also I too also enjoy kicking back with a beer and a joke I heard it here first women writers actually like I love you think it's great well I mean I think you know because we are both writing um these quite narcissistic um solipsistic people and I think that really is very funny you know to an external perceiver there is nothing funnier than a person who is just so devoted to their own self-seriousness and so the humor kind of just arises I think organically from that um but also you know like these are you know we're writing people existing within the world and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a good you know realist novel dealing with some of the most miserable of subjects that doesn't at times find humor because people are fundamentally predisposed to finding humor as a sort of relief from that misery and I think to try and obliterate that from a novel would be to miss out on some fundamental aspect of how we cope of how we like respond to trauma to um grief to you know to heartbreak um so yeah yeah I mean I don't think I'd set out um to you know try to include humor in it but I just think by nature of what you're writing um also I'm just a really funny girl I'm trying to think now like can I think of any like contemporary novel dealing with similar things that is completely humorless that is like absolutely perfect yeah I'm not sure Gwendolyn Riley yes is oh my miserable but those novels are still so yeah yeah you're right you're right yeah although I find them probably they're like the extreme end of the spectrum like I probably have to read them in tiny little chunks yeah which is too grim um some of the the parts that I find the funniest uh in both books actually are are kind of about about like the artifice of being a human woman and like those moments where um both the unimprotagonist and um Siobhan um prepare themselves for a man and it just I don't know I've been thinking a lot recently about about about aging um and the fact that now we have this kind of other generation Gen Z who are in adulthood and who uh I feel like they've just they haven't come up through the same absolutely like batshit world of early 2000s feminism which really taught you that like you this is this is the utmost value in life is just to spend all of your time on the creation of this kind of mask of femininity um but there's an absurdity to that and and that I felt was captured really great in both in both novels and I don't know I don't even know if you I feel I feel like I know you're a millennial but I don't know if you're a millennial I'm actually 14 you're 14 oh jeez congratulations I looked I looked terrible a wonder came um but yeah they they both to me seem to capture someone who was kind of created by those structures would you agree yeah yeah I think um there was someone in water food run from when I went back uh the first time I was able to go back after COVID um my book came out in March of 2021 so I hadn't really I wasn't able to like do anything when I came out and then the first time I went back to water for this woman that I know who's uh yeah who's maybe like 21 or 22 was like yeah I really like the book but like what what why is she like that like why why does she care about that I think so you grew up with like healthy relationships and therapy didn't you yeah and I was like that's really nice that she actually can't empathize with the character at all you know like she she actually is quite confused if she was confused as to why she wouldn't just be like all right then if you don't want to go out with me fuck off or whatever you know and like she just couldn't really in any way understand what I was getting at with the character which I found kind of great you know um but yeah then also I don't know it's an interesting one because um I don't know I think there's also a little bit of Gen Z like reactive backlash to feminism though at the same time like yeah recently I was in New York and there was this there's this whole sort of subset of uh kind of like downtown reactionary cool people who are reacting against like uh even though it was kind of a nightmare for us growing up in many ways and like women's magazines were still really insane and like telling you to lose weight and be pretty or whatever but also it was like very much understood in my childhood and in my home that like feminism was good and yeah you know equality was something we should strive for and you know I feel like even when it wasn't enacted that was still like a given and then yeah I don't know I do talk to some people women younger than me now who find I guess like that that they find it to be like a little bit scolding or whatever and so react against that and and and go like you know what actually no I'm going to be a a traditional wife and that's like my yeah my reaction to all to all of the what they perceive to be like a little bit um prescriptive but you know interesting yeah because also I feel like like the period the early 2000s period to me was very much that post-feminism like well we have it all we don't need it like yeah fine and then you had the post-post feminism where we were like no actually yeah yeah this isn't okay and now we're in the yeah post-post or maybe it like maybe like 23 year olds are just stupid and there is a tipping point there's a I think especially uh sorry we've gone off topic and yeah I promise but I do feel like there's a tipping point at like age 24 25 where you've grown up and even socialized as a woman and everyone's like feminism is important you have rights you could do whatever you like and then you go into the world and you're like yeah this is bullet yeah yeah I know this is true and then you're like fine we're doing feminism now so maybe they just haven't hit that tipping point to carry on um yeah and I also feel like the kind of um very sort of conservatively minded will never cease to find kind of new heights of kind of conservatism in response to like the most incremental of steps forward in terms of progressiveness you know it's like oh um you know uh potentially we're narrowing the wage gap the very very natural response to that is to you know summon up this cabal of young men who know I want to murder everyone yeah you know it's like it's it's incredible how I kind of reactionary conservatively minded people can be and sort of progressive changes that really will have no practical impact on their lives can um kind of elicit such ire such fury that the reaction is to go like full-scale violence and and like just and it's it's it's remarkable and you know I do think like this weird trend now there seems to be for like the stay at home girlfriend thing yeah and and you know that's the kind of uh female response and then you've got the kind of Andrew Tate thing happening with young men is that his name Andrew Tate yeah I think so yeah the bold awful man yeah um yeah who works out all the time and definitely hasn't been late ever but um yeah you know those are who grow out of just the most like minor of achievements for look like liberal thinking and it's it's insane um yeah but yeah um you know to come back to like this idea of kind of um primping you know because I've got these two characters in comedy since they who are very very different in that Siobhan is obviously focused on her like ablutions in the service of being loved because she's desperate to have romantic love and Lily that's not her concern at all but you see in the book that in her kind of adolescent years she developed this sort of body dysmorphic thinking that her mum was always like a temperance to her mum would like say you know nobody's looking at you nobody's looking at you you are you are normal you are not a monster and then kind of knowing her absence those thoughts are being permitted to run rampant and that's not even kind of in service to a typical trying to win a man thing that is just by virtue of being a product of her environment those thoughts kind of implant themselves and then manifest in this sort of self mutation and yeah and yeah I wanted to explore kind of high self hatred or like um yeah being so um focused upon your physical form isn't always necessarily just in response to a romantic ideal by being a product of your environment as a person yeah that's brilliant and thank you so we will be taking questions from the audience and probably come to you just next but before we move on I would like to touch on language and also Irishness given the context and and I both of you are are within the diaspora now right because you also live in London Susie and yeah I wanted to ask you about about how you feel your language kind of sits within the greater tradition of Irish language uh Irish language writing as in hibernate English writing not in the Irish language and do you feel like that's influenced your writing style does it come through or do you feel like like your novel's kind of sit in that uh like I don't know empty space in the middle of the Atlantic very like mid-atlantic cool novels live yeah I think increasingly well increasingly I've only written one of the novel apart from this but in my second novel it felt like I really wanted to speak in an in an Irish way and or basically there's like a kind of way of speaking in Waterford that I wanted to capture and and I think in in my debut I didn't really do that I think I think I was still like kind of living in the internet when I wrote this book and I didn't really know where in the world I actually was going to settle and where I would spend most of my time I'd only just moved out of Ireland really but I wasn't sure if I would stay in England and I just felt a bit like I didn't have a real nation and I was I was like traveling a lot not in a fun way but because I had no money and so it just like going like cats it for people or whatever so yeah I just felt very unword and and I feel like my brain was very online at the time in a way that I think it's a little bit less now um so yes to answer your question I think the first novel is doesn't feel like especially Irish to me I think the story could have taken place in any number of of settings and the reason that it's specifically in Ireland is only because I didn't feel the authority to like go well she lives in Brussels or whatever you know like it was because I didn't know any other places to set it but I didn't like Ireland isn't like key to the story I don't think and then in this new novel yeah I just I just felt like interested in wanting to like capture some of the rhythms of the way that my family speak and and because I miss Waterford and I really love Waterford and and so I just kind of wanted to like pay a bit of tribute to it in a way and like and I liked the idea of people there having this novel to read that is set there also well some of it set there um so yeah I think it is important to me but it hasn't always been and I don't know if it will continue to be but but I think it was it was like very yeah very important to me to do it at least in one book to try and capture that yeah I think that's it's interesting that you're talking about like kind of citing the novel within Waterford and within Waterford's like linguistic idiosyncrasies because that's like there's kind of that zooming in and in Ireland that like every every small town every every county every region has its own linguistics and idiosyncrasies and that do fit within the whole as we know English but actually are so specific to themselves and I have no idea what those are for Waterford yeah look forward to discovering them and then Susie you're originally from Derry but the book is set in Belfast and so perhaps that speaks to you as well yeah um and I think something I'm coming because I think it um initially I would have thought about it explicit like um entirely in terms of language um and something I've noticed uh especially with poetry because um I wrote this long poem a couple of years ago that was in Hendicah syllables which is where every line has 11 syllables and um I was living in London at the time and was showing it to kind of English friends and had an English editor on it um and I realized that words to which I gave two syllables were words to which they gave one and they would say oh you know this line doesn't have 11 syllables it has more and I was like well it doesn't my voice so no I'm not going to kai-tai to your kissing point I'm not going to kai-tai um but yeah uh you know um I'm gonna remain faithful to the way I say words I'm not you know and poetry I guess canonically has um in the UK you know is so dominated by the kind of men of English letters um who would be saying these words different from differently from me and I was like well no I'm going to kind of think about how I say the words and I'm gonna um use syllabics accordingly um but even in terms of form I'm starting to think about it because um I've been reading this book at the minute called Enduring Time um by Lisa Beretser and um she opens it with um a quote by Denise Riley that is um about the death of her son and she talks about how after a sudden unexpected grievance time pools it becomes a circle without a rim and this book is all about how um kind of the modern ideology of time this idea of temporality was kind of born in the 16th century with the idea of wage labor and production and this was where time became reduced to this linear concept rather than something that is flexible and can be altered um and as the kind of colonial project went on this linear idea of industrial based time was imposed on more and more kind of places and peoples and the people from nations that were colonized were relegated to kind of antiquity because they didn't initially subscribe to this capitalist idea of time and yeah there's this idea that like linearity and um kind of um like set progress based time is as you know as the norm and it shouldn't be because time is entirely constructive and subjective um but yeah so yeah this idea that I've been thinking about it in terms of the the novel the arc of the novel um and because this novel is also about grief I wanted to kind of challenge that idea of of time as uh as a smooth arc and tried to capture that time pooling thing because I think also by nature of being irish um you know causing from the north and people in the north there's a very split I guess perception of the north of Ireland as being um a colonial project um and and so it was interesting to think about it in those terms but I do think yeah and you know how I want to start approaching the novel is to not subscribe to this like you know time as a fixed thing that we understand in module modules like not a modular entity something that is flexible and subjective to grief and can be altered and changed um and I think yeah that's that's buoyed up for me also with irishness that's absolutely brilliant I'm gonna read that book um okay I think we have time for a few quick questions we do have roving microphones um so what you'll do is if you put your hand up then I will call upon you um so let's see we actually want to put the back here could we start with this person up here we've got lots so we'll see if we can get around to everyone but we might not be able to hello hello thanks very much um just picking up on your last point there susanna do you think time heals um if time is not if time is not linear or may not be linear yeah I love that yeah see because I think there's this idea that you know recovery from grief from trauma will just happen as a consequence of times passing and I don't think that's true you know in the same way time isn't necessarily always going towards progress you know we're finding this right now in terms of the climate crisis which is happening as a consequence of this very um progress focused idea of time you know production time will lead to something better we need to produce in this time to make the future and the result of that thinking is that you know our future is now in jeopardy um and so I don't think time necessarily is a salve is a bam it all you know what will come down the road is entirely um dependent upon the actions you take in the immediate moment um which I think is why in this novel you know you have this woman grieving her mother but she's not she's dwelling within it she's focusing entirely on her memories she's not taking any active steps to heal herself and so time's not going to do it for her so as a consequence time doesn't get to pass in that way um how we interact with time is entirely you know of our own choosing so no brilliant thank you uh who what other questions do we have we have a lot of hands can we get this written on the left here thank you very much um just here thank you and please keep your hands up just so that we can maybe uh like for the next questions thank you Susanna it's really fascinating to hear you talk about um you know men of English letters in the world of poetry and obviously a katana tradition that you must you know inherently feel you're writing against and I just thought that two of you um you know your um I think you kind of said both Gen Z millennial post feminist novel not irish novelists and it seems to me that's a kind of category that the market has found and is promoting quite vigorously and I just wondered if you had any comments on what that feels like um particularly maybe thinking a bit about the kind of irish tradition and you know a kind of post field day post Celtic tiger sort of um denouement I'll go shall I yeah no you go oh um no yeah it did feel very strange to me to have the novel I mean of course there has to be categorized but it did feel strange for it to be uh marketed in a certain way and it felt ultimately quite frightening for me to feel that my career is dependent on a moment in publishing and so I've definitely reacted against that with the next one and completely like I just said this novel in the 70s in Ireland basically it's a family drama and it's completely non fashionable and like traditional really and uh and I think that was informed by my discomfort at being marketed to do with myself uh and again it's very understandable because it's a quite uh autobiographical novel but yeah I didn't um feel comfortable with my body being the way that it was that it was positioned in literature so yeah I think I've definitely reacted against that now um yeah because I mean you know if I'm being honest I'm very aware of the fact that I got picked up for publication because of Sally Rooney I was part of like a sudden kind of upsurge uptaking of young female Irish novelists because everyone was hoping to recreate that and I reacted against that by very bravely writing a novel that very few people read even fewer people liked but um I think yeah I'm in the next one that I'm working on and you know I'm doing something similar in that I'm trying to write something that is so unlike anything that could because you know critical culture unfortunately noi and marketing is it's very reliant upon comparison and so I am noi trying to write something that is incomparable to anything that might be popular that sounds great what is it about you say any more uh well its working title is Sex Horse please keep that I absolutely love that that's brilliant and I feel like that's also all we need to know right you just set it up perfectly and someone already has a microphone in the second room pardon me yeah it's sort of a question following on from the last one because as a kind of an older feminist I haven't read your books and I'd really like to and I think I probably prefer your second books to the ones the ones you're just writing now because I just felt I didn't get saliruni it's like oh my god these young people today super privileged super educated you know actually not poor either you know I mean honestly well waste of a life they were living you know like just obsessing about you know married men and trying to steal them from other from other I mean like oh the narcissism of it really freaked me out really turned me off and I just did not okay the films were different normal people was a bit different because they were much younger so I kind of forgave them but like you know it's like you're writing these books about aspects obviously of your younger selves and you're describing looking back and thinking oh I've kind of got over that now like you know I'm really different now I've lived through that you know and I I know better and you know you talked about your friend who didn't have any empathy at all and you were surprised I mean you know what and I just wonder what your own attitude is to the characters in your book I mean do you still kind of like are you still with them are you asking us to feel sympathy or just go oh my god grow up I think that's up to you isn't it as in as in I don't have a feeling in in my head about how you should take the character like people have very divergent feelings about her and and if you hate her and you kind of find that fun to read then that's great but you know if you feel some sympathy for her then that's also fine I I I don't I don't like her but I but I have sympathy for kind of any person and I yeah I don't I don't feel like scathing towards her I think I think being narcissistic and young is that is not new and it's not just us like like I think it has different expressions now but but I don't really believe that that I don't know that that people in the past weren't also self-obsessed when they were young younger and I can understand that like that I think that maybe like the constant need to self-describe that the internet encourages it makes it worse and makes it more apparent to other people but but ultimately I think yeah being being a narcissist is not specific to a generation yeah I mean I certainly don't you know the novels I love rarely have at their center characters I like you know I think a well-written awful person is brilliant and I think yeah I mean I I you know I have written two incredibly self-destructive people in this book neither of whom I like you know big thumbs up to their actions but you know I'm hoping to kind of write their self-destructive tendencies in a way that doesn't maybe necessarily make sense to someone outside of that experience but you can see the internal logic of their thinking as to why they're behaving in this way and you know I think you it's you know there are different ways of approaching it I think it's interesting to kind of look at which I think we're both trying to do kind of that narcissism within like the wider kind of economic milieu you know like how like self-destructiveness within a kind of precarious housing environment precarious environmental environment kind of yeah how how all these things kind of come together to make a person even worse you know how and I think that is what kind of might make you know these novels different from a novel written about a narcissistic self-destructive person 50 years ago is that it's how all these different disparate socio-economic factors feed in to that solipsism that's self-destructing yeah so yeah I mean yeah I mean they suck people I wrote they suck I think you're totally bang on though and like when reading commentings just see what struck me is that the the self-obsession and the kind of the narcissism in the book was not because because as well I would say some very like lazy reviewing of both books would be like no you know these people are this way because of the patriarchy and you're like actually they're this way because of like late-stage surveillance capitalism and the internet and the patriarchy that's a very specific context and the other thing is you did a beautiful interview in The Independent earlier in the year where someone was like oh you know these messy millennial women weren't we done with those and and you very rightly hit back and were like well we've been reading books about messy millennial terrible men for like a thousand years so you know there's space for many different explorations of that identity very small-round and there's somebody with a microphone here oh we're out of time perfect okay well I'm really sorry about that lads and but we will be selling books in the British Library after this and Megan and Susie will be signing and thank you so much for your attention for your care for your answers and for your lovely questions thank you thank you thank you