And I meet people who say, "You must work
really hard," and I'm like, I don't think I've ever worked a day in my life, I really
don't. Even the jobs that I've had, I was really
lazy at, and did not work hard at all. And now at this job, I feel like incredibly
lazy so it's that sense of when I'm doing something that I feel is just easy for me
and it's not even that it's easy, but it's just what I would be doing anyway, it's like
it's not separate for me from just my everyday life. It's like the way you would just listen to
music, the way you would just do that, it's not something that's difficult for you or
that you need to get paid in order to do it, it's just part of what you do, the texture
of your life. And for me that's the same, it's like I make
up fictional people and write about their fake lives. I've always done that. [music] Books really saved my life. We're so happy to have you here. I guess I've got a bunch of questions. But maybe I'll just start off with an easy
one. I'm curious, you're the editor of a literary
review in Dublin, could you tell me about what you look for when you are looking for
a fiction for the magazine and who do you publish and what's your vision for the magazine? Yeah, so The Stinging Fly is a magazine in
Dublin, it's been around for 20 years. I just came on as editor at the beginning
of last year, 2018, and we put out two issues a year, so I've put out two issues under my
editorship, both in 2018. And the first issue that we published, so,
I suppose The Stinging Fly really made its name, publishing new Irish writing. So we take submissions internationally, and
we do publish international writing. But I guess what's unique about The Stinging
Fly is its sort of its predominance in the new wave of Irish writing that's emerged in
the last sort of 10 years or so, The Stinging Fly has really been at the center of that
and I can say that 'cause I wasn't involved at all then. So we've published a lot of the names that
are associated with that new generation in Irish writing Kevin Barry, Lisa McNerny, Collin
Barrish writers like that coming through The Stinging Fly. And so, we're very committed to publishing
writers who have never been published before publishing new writing both Irish and international
and we have open submissions obviously, and we get a lot of submissions as you can imagine. And my first issue as editor, I read 750 stories. Yeah, which was like a lot, [laughter] but
I really enjoyed it and it made me think a lot about the question that you've just asked,
like what am I looking for? And it's a question that you obviously bring
to the table as soon as you begin reading the stories. You read the first 10 and you're already asking,
What am I looking for? But by the time you've read 500 you're asking
the question in a new way. [laughter] And I really started thinking a
lot about like what is a short story, why am I reading so many of them, and what is
the form of the short story, and what makes that form work and what makes it not work? What I'm really interested in, and obviously
I just bring my own subjective tastes and preferences, and that's all anyone can do
I guess in that situation, what I'm really interested in is writing that speaks to the
sort of present historical cultural moment, so work that's in dialogue with other contemporary
work and work that feels fresh and new. That obviously doesn't mean every story that
I wanna read has to be set now in 2019 and have a lot of social media in it or anything
like that, but I am interested in work that I feel is speaking to the present moment as
it unfolds. And that can happen in a lot of different
ways. I'm also interested in stories where things
happen. A lot of the stories we get on submission
are stories in which nothing happens. Those can be interesting too but it takes
a really masterful writer to make nothing happening interesting, whereas even a writer
like myself can make it interesting, if something happens. So yeah, I tend to be interested in stories
that have a sense of change or development embedded inside the text of the story, that
like when we meet whatever the characters at the beginning of the story they're slightly
different in some way, by the time we leave them in a way that feels plausible. So I guess that's kind of what I ended up
looking for. And I'm sure I had lots of other little quirks
and preferences in terms of the style that I was attracted to, and the kinds of thematic
content that I was most drawn to, as an editor, but those were the kind of enduring principles
that I found myself returning to as I read all those stories. And when you are talking about new Irish writing,
do you consider the, or is it considered that the work that you do is part of this new wave
and how do you see it, like how is it defined in contrast to, well, who is it in contrast
to, is it in contrast to the great Irish writers or is it in contrast to what was going on
40 years ago? Right. That's I think a really interesting question
because in Ireland we talk kind of a lot self-consciously about the new wave of Irish writing. And so there's definitely a recognition that
there is a kind of boom of Irish writing happening at the moment, and I guess I would date that
from about 2008 onwards. And I think the reason that date is significant
is because of the financial crisis. So that changed Irish society in a few really
important ways and I think those aftershocks are still being felt in Irish society now. And so, during a period of rapid economic
and social development, the literature that emerged with that has felt different from
what preceded it, but not in a sense that there was a really definitive break because
writers like Calum Tobene, like Ann Anwrights, Sebastian Barry are obviously writing now,
and were writing before 2008 and writing work that certainly is in conversation with the
stuff that's the new generation that's happening now. So I don't think it was like we hit pause
for a couple of years, and no one was doing anything and then we came back after 2008,
and started writing good books again, but I think there was, there was like a change
in the kinds of literary conversations that were going on after that. And I suppose the book that the change that
probably is most symbolic of that change for me is a collection of short stories by writer
called Kevin Barry, and the stories the book is called, There Are Little Kingdoms. And that book, I think, was enormously significant
in the sense that it was very influential on the wave of Irish writers that came behind,
including myself, and because it was doing something that felt like... Just intrinsically slightly different from
what had preceded it, in the Irish literary landscape. And so, I think that Kevin Barry book and
then the books that came after it, both Kevin Barry's and the work of other writers who
were influenced by him, and in conversation with his work, I think have changed Irish
publishing and writing. Yeah. So you were studying, you didn't MA in American
literature, who are some of the writers that you read, that you would say, taught you how
to write, if I could put it that way, or influence the kind of work that you are doing now, was
there because you have this sort of very spare style was that something that you were interested
in I mean that's a very American kind of... I'm conscious of that. I think growing up, my idea of good writing
or interesting writing was heavily Americanized and the kind of writers that I was drawn to
reading were North American. When I was a teenager I read the JD Salinger's
book, Franny and Zooey, and that for me was like a touchstone of like that is the kind
of book that I wanna grow up and be able to write like that is the book. And so, that's written in not really a spare
style, but in a sort of colloquial and, and also a lot of the book revolves around dialogue
and conversation and it's a real interest in human speech throughout that book and throughout
a lot of Salinger's work. So that was sort of what I thought of as being
the most interesting and weirdly, the most modern or contemporary because I just haven't
read a lot. I guess my cultural references were small,
and it was like I didn't have a very systemic way of thinking about literature as a teenager,
and I'm just kind of randomly find books. And then think, "Oh yeah, this is it, the
perfect book. So that was what I did with Franny and Zooey
it took me a long time going to university, and studying literature in a slightly more
serious way. To think about historical movements and schools
in literature and stuff like that and then finally developing an idea of voice and style
within that context. But certainly in my early development as a
reader, I just thought Americans were cool and I wanted to be like them. Yeah, and maybe that's partly what drew me
to studying American literature at master's level as well as I have always had a fascination
for American writing and still do. So that must be very gratifying to have American
critics and readers so interested in your book. I never thought about that. Yeah, I guess that is pretty gratifying. [laughter] So your new book is called Normal People,
and re-reading both your books this week, I saw that the phrase normal people actually
comes up a lot in both books. So in conversations with friends for example,
there's four or five times, came up one was when I couldn't make friends as a child I
fantasize that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other students who had ever
been in the school before. A genius hidden among normal people. We all feel that way. I'm just curious, how was that phrase normal
people useful to you? Yeah, it used to be really useful to me. And then I called my book that... And now it's immediately falling out of my
every day vocabulary. Because I can't use it in normal conversation
anymore, which is wounding. I never intended that, that phrase to be the
title of the book. When I was working on what would later become
normal people I didn't have a first novel. I had no... Nobody had ever read conversations with friends. It was sitting on my laptop, on red and I
started working on this new project about these two new characters, and I thought the
working title for that second long work of prose was "Scenes from a friendship", and
then obviously conversations with friends developed into a proper novel and was published. So you worked on them simultaneously, more
or less? Yeah, I came up with the idea for the first
one first and sort of worked it nearly to completion and then started writing, the second
one, and then later got a book deal, so... And then finished the first one, and then
finished the second one. Exactly. How many years was that whole process? The whole process. What do you mean the whole process? Well, from starting writing, what became conversations
with friends, to handing in your manuscript? And for normal people. That was almost exactly three years. Okay. Yeah, so started writing "Conversations with
Friends" 2014... Late 2014, I wanna say like October 2014,
and handed in my manuscript for "Normal people," October 2017. So that's three years. Perfectly three years. Yeah okay. Yeah if my maths is right. And how old were you at that time... What were the... I guess I was 20... I can definitely work this out 'cause I know
what year I was born. I was 23 when I began writing "Conversations
with Friends" and add, three years on I was 26 when I handed in "Normal People." Okay. Alright. Did you have titles for them, when you were
working on them? Yeah, so I had the first novel was always
called "Conversations with Friends", but I didn't know that it would ever be published. I just saved it under that title on my documents. And then kept it there and then started writing
something new when it was sort of still in draft form, so had I had written the first
draft, maybe written a second or third draft and then put it away for a bit and then started
work on this new project which I called "Scenes From a Friendship." And then I kept working on that and later
on, of course, the publishing world became involved and "Conversations with Friends"
went out into the world and was an object for selling shops. And then at that point, I had to think of
a new title that didn't send him so much like the title of my now existing first book. And I went through a lot of different ones. None of them really worked. And I'm not necessarily persuaded that this
one works either. But it's the one that I'm stuck with. And so it means that I have to think about
what is this piece of text that has attached itself to the body of my novel. I don't really know, I guess I'm saying that
the characters are normal people and... Or that they're not, but it's funny because
in conversation, I do tend to use the phrase 'normal people.' It has occurred, obviously, in my first book
as you pointed out. And I like it and I like to describe myself
as normal in conversation like, "Oh, I wouldn't do that. I'm normal." And so I find the word "normal" so much more
appealing and attractive to me than words like "ordinary" or "regular" or "usual." I just think there's something about the word
"normal" that I like, and so I'm kind of sad that I gave the word away to the book, 'cause
I can't use it anymore. We're used to that word. I know, exactly. The title of your book. Yeah. Exactly. I really like the title, and I think it does
work 'cause you think, is the title saying that these are normal people, or that they're
not normal people? It works in an interesting way, that title. I know that you're a big Henry James fan and
among other 19th century novelists, and you've said in interviews that you feel frustrated
with the limitations of the 19th century novel. What limitations do you see there that when
you're writing, you think, "No, I can't exactly do what I love in those books," because what
does the 19th century now will not let you or not let one do? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So I'm interested in how the novel emerged
as a form and sort of what historical and cultural pressures created the novel. And I see the emergence of novel in the late
in the English language, 'cause I'm not really familiar with any other traditions of the
novel, emerging in the late 18th, early 19th century kind of as a product of the industrial
capitalism that was beginning to emerge at that time also. And acting in a way as a philosophical reflection
of or potentially as a sort of philosophical help mate to that kind of capitalism, which
was a new way of organizing society, and the novel reflected back that new way in a sort
of philosophical sense. And gave people a way of thinking about and
understanding the new social forms that were emerging at that time. And so the novel is a deeply individualistic
way of telling stories. Like it differs from story-telling, forms
that preceded it. I think not exclusively, but largely because
it focuses on individuals, the psychology of individuals. And obviously part of the reason that's still
so compelling to us is because we're still stuck in the capitalist phase, we haven't
moved beyond that. And in terms of our material relations so
it kind of makes sense, we haven't moved beyond in terms of our cultural products, so we're
still stuck with the novel. And that's fine. I like novels, but I do feel they are a product
of particular historical and material circumstances. So there are some things that I feel concerned
by. When I find myself doing things that work
in a novel. Why do they work, do they work because they
reproduce particular ideas that I don't actually want to be reproducing. Do they work 'cause they're echoing the status
quo in a way that feels satisfying, but not actually confronting the status quo sort of
meaningfully. And I think like in the 19th century novel,
you can also say that that that's true of gender in a big way like female characters
who are really subversive, who really offer a challenge to the patriarchal living conditions
of women in the 19th century, a lot of the time end up dead in the 19th century novel. And including in Henry James and obviously
in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, in the Idiot, these women who really managed to subvert
and transcend those sort of confining rules of society end up under the train. So I do... I do find that fascinating that those women
cannot be confined by the limits of the novel, that they cannot actually survive their insertion
into the form of the novel. I do find that really fascinating and I think
we've overcome that now, we don't have to... We don't have to kill those characters anymore,
and that's a big win. But I do, but I do wonder I mean... I do think in other senses. Thank you so much. That the novel hasn't really managed to go
beyond the boundaries that... The kind of limited formal plot boundaries
that were sketched out for it in the teleology of the sort of 19th century novel. And that concerns me a bit, 'cause I'm not
always aware of what I'm replicating when I'm writing a novel 'cause I'm not necessarily
able to get the critical distance from it while I'm doing it. Well, one thing that seems different to me,
which seems like not... I don't know if it's not a replication or
if it's the opposite, or something, but I feel like the novels that you're talking about
the problems for lovers in those novels is that there are these institutions and they
have to break them in order to experience love. They have to have affairs or whatever. Whereas in your novels, it sort of seems like
those institutions don't even exist. And the characters in some sense are struggling
to love in the absence of any institutions. And in some ways that seems like that's an
opportunity for them to experience true love, but also in many cases, there's this drop,
and then there's no love. Because the institution does provide some
kind of continuity. Do you see that there's something... And I don't know if that's because they're
young, or because it's this moment in history or if it's because how you feel about the
novel that that happens in both books. Yeah, I think there has been... And I know, speaking from an Irish context,
and apologies if I'm repeating myself, but there have been obviously these huge social
cultural developments. And one of the institutional forms that's
no longer applicable in the way that it would have once being historically is obviously
the institutional power of the Catholic church. So that's deteriorated hugely in its power
over Irish society, and the texture of everyday life in Ireland is no longer structured by
the church in most meaningful ways. And so then I think what my characters are
confronting to some extent is like, what has replaced that value system? I think most of us would agree that that set
of institutions was incredibly repressive and of course violently abusive in many cases,
but as an organized body of philosophy what came to replace it when it's sort of just
attenuated out of existence? And I think that those are the... Yeah, those are probably some of the questions,
my characters are confronting. What is the philosophical answer? We no longer have religious dogma. And we have a very individuated capitalist
and social framework which doesn't really provide a moral ethos or a philosophical set
of answers or even really a philosophical set of questions. So I think, yeah, my characters are probably
navigating a social world in which the dominant moral frameworks have fallen away and haven't
necessarily been replaced by equally philosophically complex solutions and like... And I think that's definitely yeah, that's
definitely a concern for me in the abstract, but I often think, my abstract concerns do
end up in the books, even when I don't necessarily intend to put them in there like I end up
circling around the questions that occupy me, even though my fiction takes place on
such a small scale like in intimate relationships, between people in a series of rooms. But I think that the questions that preoccupy
me as a person in my normal life, also sort of bleed into the novels in one way or another. Yeah, and how could they not. When you're editing... So I know with "Conversations with Friends,"
there was a 100,000 words or something after your first... After you got it all out. Any process of editing is in moving towards
something. What are you trying to move towards? I find your novels, very suspenseful. There's a lot of other qualities, there's
a strange quality in which rooms, you said they happen in rooms but rooms don't seem
very important to you. [chuckle] Dialogue does, the characters trying to understand
what they're thinking is very important. When you're taking a 100,000 words to 60,000
words, is it that you see the final book in your mind, and you're trying to make it that
shape or what are you doing? Yeah, most of the time my drafting consists
of like I begin a draft when I meet these characters and usually they'll have some kind
of little intriguing dynamic that will interest me and I want to know more about the dynamic
between them or they'll be meeting each other for the first time, in which case, I wanna
know how do they get to know each other in what direction does their relationship sort
of spin-off. And most of my editing takes the form of having
sent the characters down the wrong routes. So I'll just make a decision to have them
get together or not get together or fall out or have some conflict and then I'll write
40,000 more words on the basis of that and then realize they never should have had that
conflict to begin with. So then I have to go, way all the way back,
delete the 40,000 words, meet them back at the point, where I made the wrong decision
and then send them into sort of another room as it were, and follow them somewhere else
instead. So that's what the editing mostly is for me,
it's almost never a case of trying to cut down words or reshape things, it's just a
case of having made the wrong decision at some point and trying to find out where I
made the wrong decision, so I can unravel everything, I did after that and just go back
to that point. And what makes it the wrong decision, what
makes it the wrong direction? It's that it gets less good after it. [laughter] It's like I'm reading the draft and I'm like,
"This is pretty good." And then I get to a point and I go, "It's
just not good anymore." So where did it go wrong? And sometimes what's really annoying, is you
have to cut stuff that is good because what comes after it, doesn't work, so you can give
your characters a really interesting from my perspective as the writer but interesting
for me, argument where you can give them an interesting confrontation or you can put them
in an interesting situation they've never encountered before and that can work, but
what it does is unbalance their equilibrium in a way that makes the rest of the novel,
not work. So you have to go back and take it out and
find some other direction to send them in. So it is, it's very much a case of being prepared
to delete a lot of what I do, and I delete more than half of what I do. So for both of the books I kept, a deleted
scenes file, and in both cases, the deleted scene file was longer than the actual work. So I have to just be prepared to do that and
not be precious about it, just be ready to delete basically everything all the time,
and not to allow it to demoralize me, and that can be a challenge as well, 'cause it
is demoralizing deleting. I assume some of you in the audience are writers. Deleting 40,000 words if any of you are writers,
that's a lot to be deleting. [chuckle] So that can be demoralizing. But yeah, so it's just a case of... And keeping the faith that I can find something
to make these characters do that will unlock whatever I'm trying to learn about them. Right. And that's how you feel like that writing
the novel is a process of trying to learn who these characters are? Yes, yes, and I guess to be honest with myself
also to make them learn something about who they are. So it's not enough for me simply to meet them
and follow them around for a couple of days, where not much is going on in their lives,
and then leave thinking, "I know those people really well now." [chuckle] Something has to happen to them that makes
them learn something about themselves or each other. I have to have a sense that something has
changed for them. And I don't know why I have to have that sense,
sometimes I kinda blame myself on it because I think a lot of the writers that I really
love reading, they're not constantly chasing the sense of change and development, they're
not always looking for the moment of revelation or epiphany. They're able to just write about the stasis
in people's lives. And that's an interesting thing to read about. So I don't know why I'm always chasing after
change and development, it's like I feel I need to be doing it and I don't know why I
need that, but it is what I do and I do judge myself by that standard, rightly or wrongly,
most of the scenes that I write I'm interested in whether they've actually changed anything
and if the scene hasn't changed anything, usually it's not working for me as a scene. So that's kind of my method which I'm attached
to, because it's what I do, but I'm not attached to it philosophically. I think, I could probably find other better
ways of working, but that's the one that I use at the moment. It's interesting 'cause you keep coming back
to this questioning of your motives and you... Or your philosophical position, which is your
instinct really. Yeah. And you wrote this interesting essay, was
it in the Irish Times? Yes. Sally wrote this really interesting essay
in the Irish Times where she was talking about... It was sort of like an apology for writing
her novels. And you basically... I wanna quote you because it's... You wrote a good piece. Thank you. You said, "There's a part of me that will
never be happy knowing that I'm just writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic
objects at a time of historical crisis." I would agree with myself there, yeah. [chuckle] It's like what's wrong with that? So, the question that comes up for me there,
is there a way to write books that moves them beyond being simply decorative aesthetic objects? Novels, I don't mean any kind of books I mean
specifically, novels. Can you see that in the future... Future books or... Yeah, well, I ask myself this question a lot. And I think if my aim was to intervene in
political discourse then I would write works that straightforwardly attempt to make that
intervention and just lay my case out, because I have a lot of trust in people, and if I
want to make a point I would make it. I wouldn't make it by telling a complicated
story in which fictional people move through rooms a lot of the time. I would just say whatever I wanted to say
and see if people agreed with me or there were counterarguments that I could respond
to, that's the kind of... That's the kind of way I would go about it
if my intention was simply to make an intervention in a particular form of discourse. I don't know that I have anything to add to
discourse in that way. I think all my beliefs are just taken from
things I've read written by people who are smarter and have thought a lot more about
these issues than I have. And so most of the... Most of... And I have, I have what I would describe as
strong convictions. But I don't think that they're new, so I don't
know that I have much to add to... I don't think I have many interesting interventions
to make in the discourse in that way. What I do have are ideas for novels And then
I write them and then I castigate myself for not having made more sophisticated interventions
in political discourse, but it's... But it's... And I do think that it's a serious question,
like what is the point of making art that may be obliquely political or maybe what I
would say attentive to political circumstances which is the sort of least that I would ask
of myself in the work that I do. But what is the point of doing that when we're
at a time of crisis? And I don't know what the answer to the question
is, and I don't think that the answer is necessarily in the novel for all the reasons that we've
discussed and also because if you're writing a novel for that reason, you should be writing
something other than a novel. And I think that does make a question. I guess one answer might be that it's easy
for a lot of us, to see what we're struggling against, but it's not always so easy to remember
what we're struggling for. What is the meaning of human life, why even
go on with all this. Why are we caught up in a struggle if there's
nothing pleasurable in our lives, nothing that gives us joy, and for me and certainly
not for everyone, novels, are one of the things that make life worth going on with. And so I suppose that that means I have to
believe at some level that it's worth somebody writing them and if I can be one of the people
who writes them and so much the better for me, I don't know. So I guess that's the answer that I have to
persuade myself off, and I don't know that I have persuaded myself. There's something that the humans are suspicious,
I feel like, of things that come easily to them. So writing, novels seems to be... Not that it's not hard work, but something
that is native to your brain or your spirit or something and there's a way in which we
can be so suspicious of that 'cause it's easy for us. And feel like something that's that easy can't
have value. Not to say that your critique of the novel
is not legitimate, but I also think that's also an element for me when I see... When I talk to artists or people who are good
at extremely good at something, that it's almost like it's just breathing to them. There's a way in which it just... There's a quality that of undervaluing it. Yeah, I do find it largely easy. I do find it kind of easy. And I meet people who say "You must work really
hard," and I'm like, "I don't think I've ever worked a day in my life," I really don't. Even the jobs that I've had, I was really
lazy at and did not work hard at all. And now at this job, I feel like incredibly
lazy, so it's that sense of like when I'm doing something that I feel is just easy for
me and it's not even that it's easy, but it's just what I would be doing anyway. It's not separate for me from just my everyday
life, it's like... The way you would just listen to music, the
way you would just do that, it's not something that's difficult for you or that you need
to get paid in order to do it, it's just part of what you do, the texture of your life. And for me that's the same, it's like I make
up fictional people, and write about their fake lives. I've always done that. And I presume I will always continue to do
that. So it just feels like that's part of... And I actually need that. It's like a psychological coping mechanism
of some sort. It helps me to make sense of moving through
the world and living life, I need to make up fake things, and write about them. And so the evidence of that need has now become
my livelihood, and that's fine, but it is hard to feel that it's like hard work for
me 'cause it's just not. Yeah. Something that I think is hard work. You've had a lot of success with these books,
and I wanna quote you, something 'cause you were a top debater in Europe and one of the
reasons that you stopped doing that you wrote in this really interesting article in the
Dublin review, you said, "Success doesn't come from within, it's given you by other
people and other people can take it away. In part, that is why I stopped competing. I didn't wanna give up the feeling of flow
that perfect self-eliminated... Self-eliminating focus, but I didn't wanna
perform it for points anymore. Academic life had presented me with much the
same problem. Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could
still think of things to say when there weren't any prizes." So you wanted to get out of the world of prizes. [chuckle] And now, ironically or tragically
you find yourself back in it as a fiction writer. Prizes all over again, yeah. Is there... [chuckle] What can you do? Is there some sense... [chuckle] is it is
your characteristic life experience? Is there some sense of an interruption in
this private joy, flow, ease with the introduction of this structure that you've entered as a
published and successful novelist in which you are being given prizes and the expectation
is, "Well, surely, Sally will write books that will win us more prizes," and is there
any feeling of... Well, how do you feel about being in yet another
some sense competitive unfortunately realm? Yeah, I do feel... Well, first of all, I feel like it's too early
for me to say 'cause it all happened quite quickly and I definitely think I'm still acclimatizing
to it and finding ways to think about it, I'm not necessarily a very quick thinker,
because it's been going on for a year or two and I still haven't really managed to think
about it in any way that makes sense to me. So I'm still trying to feel my way through
it and to come up with ways of thinking about and conceptualizing the world of publishing
and the fact that my books are out in the world, and in a way that I feel comfortable
with, and can stand by, and also a way that means like I can answer questions like this
in a superficially plausible sounding way. But there is... And I think it's a section from your book,
"Motherhood" where you talk about the sense of feeling like when your work was out of
the world it becomes kind of dirtied. And I do... And that resonated with me so much when I
read it. The thing is that it's an enormous privilege
obviously to be able to make a living from writing and I'm very, very thankful for that. But it does mean that I become the ambassador
of my work in a way that I don't feel qualified to be or equipped to be. When I was working on my own writing fiction
to amuse myself, I still really wanted it to be good, I never wanted to do with sloppy
work just even for myself, I was always trying to get it to be better. And I would edit my own work even when I didn't
think anyone was gonna read it, because that's what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be doing something I thought was
good. But I never had the sense of myself as a person
having to speak on behalf of my work, always answer questions about my work or to even
stand in any kind of relation to my work. Because it was just something different from
me that I didn't feel connected to. And the thoughts and opinions and feelings
that I might have and the experiences that I happen to have undergone in my life, didn't
really seem relevant to thinking about that work or reading it. And now, of course, I am indelibly connected
to the work that I have written because it was written by me. But I didn't feel that to be the case when
I was writing it, I didn't want it to be connected to me in that way. I guess I would love, and I think a lot of
writers would love if the text could just speak for itself and I would never have to
interact with it, or engage it in any way. And not because I don't... Not because I'm not interested in my books,
but because I feared... I have a fear of not doing justice to them
and because I fear speaking about them in the wrong way and I fear my own authority
speaking about them. I don't... It's not something that I... I don't necessarily want to be seen as the
authority on my own books. I'm sure there are people who have much more
interesting things to say about my books than me, but it so happens now that I've been placed
in this relationship with the text because I'm the person who sort of produce them and
I do find that a tricky thing, honestly, to think about and to make sense of for myself. So that's something that I have found hard. And also going back to the thing about success
being given to you by other people and... Yeah. I'm not wanting to take seriously the books
as cultural products, like not wanting to know them in that way, wanting always to know
the books the way that I wrote them and to have them in my documents folder and to know
them in that way, but never really to know the books as objects of discourse out in the
world and I think that's just because I have to keep my head down and write the next book
and do the next thing, and that exposing myself to the eyes of the world in that specific
way would be harmful for me as I try and do something new. But I don't know why I think it would, but
I just think it would. We have five minutes before we take questions
from the audience. These things always go so fast. I'd like to talk a little bit about love and
true love because I feel like that's the topic of your books. And the one thing that I find interesting
in your books is that you have a fascination with the inappropriate match somehow. [chuckle] Yeah. The popular boy with the unpopular girl or
the poor boy with the rich girl or the young woman with the older married man, and I think
traditionally when people are interested in mismatches it's because they're trying to
say something about desire, how desire is kind of random or it doesn't go along with
our... Who we think we should love but I don't feel
like that's what's going on in your books. I feel like the reason that the mismatches
work is because they find a realm of privacy with each other because they're mismatched
their relationships don't further any of the systems that they're part of. It doesn't further, the hierarchy of popularity
in the high school, it doesn't further like the bourgeois whatever, marriage, and that's
why they have a sense of privacy with each other, and that's what they're going for in
love. That's my reading of the books and I wonder... You're shaking your head, I'm wrong. No, it's such a good reading. [chuckle] I haven't... I haven't... I'm so interested to hear you say that. I'm so conscious of returning again and again
to clandestine relationships. Yeah. I really have written a lot about relationships
that take place for a multitude of reasons, in my stories and in my novels, that take
place outside the gaze of the social world, that are kept secret from people's families
and social circles, and I've never thought about that specific reason that you've just
outlined, that there's actually something about the privacy, that that gives those characters
that allows them to conduct their relationships in a different way, that actually by exempting
themselves from the surveillance of the social world, they're allowing themselves to have
a kind of romantic relationship that isn't transactional because it can't be because
no one is witnessing the transactions that are taking place. There is no currency exchange going on, because
it's away from the world of transaction of give and take, it's away from cultural capital
and social capital, and marital capital and all that. I've never really thought about it in the
way that you've just described before, and I think there's something really true about
it. And I have been curious, why do I keep writing
about secret relationships? I mean, you could say it's because I like
writing about things that have a little frisson. That's interesting to me. And so, if something secret there's always
a little bit of a question mark hanging over it. Why is it secret? How long will it remain secret? And those are fun things for a novelist to
play with. So that's definitely partly what's going on. But I think there's also a deeper concern
there. I'm not just doing it for my own fun, but
I am actually interested in relationships that take place away from the public, away
from public scrutiny, away from social surveillance and why? Why am I interested in those? And I think you've hit on something very true. It's that by taking them out of the realm
of sort of transactions between personal capital, that there can be something that transcends
that kind of transactional relationship completely. And I'm very attracted to that idea and I
think that's probably very true. I think that's really interesting. You're writing a screenplay of "Normal People"
for BBC Three? I'm curious, if you wanna talk a bit about
that. Say whatever you want about it. But my real question is, this flow state that
one gets into when you're writing or when you're doing anything that sort of... When you're doing your debating, when people
are doing anything that where they lose a sense of their own self-hood, and they're
just sort of in the moment, do you get into the flow state when you're adapting normal
people for the screen? I have managed it, a couple of times. Yeah, I have and it's very different because
it's much more collaborative. I've been working with really great people. And I've been really excited by their ideas,
but the collaborative work intrinsically is so different from what I've been doing up
till now. So you're not writing it alone? No, I'm not writing it alone. So you've got a room of writers that you're... Yeah, so not a room. So I kind of wrote drafts of the script, and
then another screen writer gave notes on that, and then we worked together. And so it's not like a whole gigantic team
of people, or at least not yet, but I have been working with other people on the scripts
which I definitely need it, because I've never written for the screen before, so there's
a lot of technical stuff that I didn't understand, but also other people have really interesting
ideas about what would you do with it which I'm interested to hear, and because I'm kind
of just... I'm the one who came up with the way that
I told it in the book. So obviously, I'm sort of fixed on that. And I know people who don't bring that baggage
to it, can have more interesting ideas about different ways of retelling the story. So that's all been good. But I do find it harder, I think because I
just have a novelist's brain. I find it harder to get into that sort of
flow state you've described when I'm not in total control of what I'm doing, so for me,
it's like, if I've got my word document open, and I'm master of that domain, I can move
the commas wherever I want them to go, then I can access that state quite easily. But if I'm collaborating with another person,
and I regret this in myself, so I'm not certainly not bragging about it, I do find it harder
to click into that state because I guess I just naturally work better alone or I work
differently alone, but it has been an amazing experience and it's also very gratifying to
see that people bring their own readings and interpretations of these characters and are
excited about working with them, because these characters, Marianne and Connell, the protagonists
of my second book, they're kind of very dear to me. I know they're not real, but they're dear
to me anyway, and it's very touching for me that they've become dear to other people,
I suppose. And so that part of it has been hugely enjoyable. Yeah, it's a very different way of working
and it's not one that necessarily I find is innately easy to understand as I find the
novel, but I do find it very exciting. Great. One last question before we go to the audience,
'cause I just want... You've said before that when people ask you
about your connection between your own lived experiences and what you write about, you
said something so beautiful and I... You said that when people ask that question,
you feel they're trying to take away the accomplishment of writing these books from you, they're trying
to take that accomplishment away, as though... Can you say something a little bit more about
that when people just say, "Well, is your whole novel true, did that happen to you,
did you have this kind of same relationship?" Yeah, I mean... What's underneath that, do you think? Well, I think there are different things underneath
that. I think some people may ask... Some people may ask from a... Because they themselves have had similar experiences
and then they just wanna connect with me as a human being, and I totally understand that. I do think some people ask because they want
to be reassured that I didn't make it up, because there's something, I think that people
would feel more comfortable sometimes if they thought that I just sort of passively lay
there and all this stuff happened to me and then I went and wrote about it later, but
I wasn't the active agent, the instrument of having invented this reality. I think that there's a way in which that that's
something that's easier to understand or absorb or that they would prefer to be talking to
me, if that's who I was, rather than me talking to me as a novelist who invented it all. And so I think... But that's not to say that I think everyone
who asks questions like that is coming from that particular perspective but I do think,
sometimes that question is a way of wanting to be reassured that I didn't make all this
up in my brain, because it would make people uncomfortable to think that I did that for
any number of reasons. What reasons? Well, because it's kind of an intimidating
thing to do. Why would anyone do that? Like, I think it's a weird thing to have done
in your brain. So it's a weird thing to have invented all
of these people who don't exist, and put them through their paces, and made them suffer,
so much and stuff. Why? It's a weird, it's a weird thing to do, and
I think people find it a little bit creepy or uncomfortable, and it would be more reassuring
for me to say, "Well, no, no, this is just stuff that happened to me and I had to write
about it for cathartic reasons, to get it out." But I'm afraid I made it up, guys. [laughter] I made it up. And I can understand... I can understand... And also, as I say, I think there's just a... There's also just a sort of inward fascination
sometimes to just know whether, where novelists get their ideas or like, are they drawing
on their real life? So there are a million different reasons why
people might ask that question. But I think, yeah, there's maybe a discomfort,
maybe it's a gender discomfort sometimes, maybe it's to do with my age sometimes, I
don't know why, but I think, yeah, sometimes it's a sense of not wanting to credit me with
the invention of all these circumstances and wanting to believe that in fact, they are
derived from my having simply lived an exceptionally active life. [chuckle] Yeah, which I haven't. So yeah, I think maybe I think maybe that's
answering the question, I'm not sure. Yes.
