Tell us about your new novel, Into the Wreck.<\/p>\n
Into The Wreck is told from the perspectives of five family members \u2013 Anna, Gemma and Matthew, their mother Yvonne and their aunt Amy \u2013 with partly overlapping chronologies. It\u2019s the weekend before the funeral of the children\u2019s father, who has died by suicide, and they\u2019ve gathered in the childhood home in Donegal<\/a>. Over the course of the five chapters, the characters grapple with their own insecurities, all while trying to grieve for a man who has always been kept at a certain distance from them. There are also some jokes.<\/p>\n What does the wreck, which features in the title and the text, signify?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think the wreck signifies any one thing, but it\u2019s a vessel that comes to provoke the anxieties of a family struggling to express themselves. It also represents in some ways the plethora of suppressed histories harboured by families across Ireland<\/a>. <\/p>\n The story is split into five sections, told from the perspective of a different family member. How did you hit on this structure and what are its pros and cons?<\/p>\n To intersperse their perspectives would have been to formally imply a degree of reciprocal communication that just isn\u2019t there. The characters are rendered in these monologic sections because that reflects the boxes they\u2019re trapped in. The downside of this might be that the reader doesn\u2019t get to experience every character\u2019s reaction to each of the book<\/a>\u2019s events, but then, the characters don\u2019t get that, either. I didn\u2019t want to create too a conspiratorial relationship with my reader, whereby we\u2019re omnipotent and consistently know more than the characters. The point is that we\u2019re limited by what we\u2019re able to disclose, and if that feels unresolved \u2026 I\u2019ve never been especially interested in resolution. <\/p>\n What can the books people read reveal? Anna reads Rachel Cusk and courts Alex by performing paragraphs of Sally Rooney\u2019s Normal People, reimagined in the style of DH Lawrence. <\/p>\n Anna is caught between intellectual precocity, and self-destructive immaturity. Her reading choices reflect that \u2013 the Cusk Outline trilogy is more like autofiction than any realist novel, in my opinion, because it sublimates the self in this wash of external encounters, drawing attention to its own artifice. That feels apt for Anna, who is trying to \u201cwrite\u201d her own story in a linear way, but has to contend with the uncontrollability of being a body, acted upon. She is intense self-curation and inescapable impulse \u2013 she\u2019s clever but desperate to prove it, and so her books are lifted directly from the contemporary and 20th century canons. She is also rampant and horny, and nobody embodies that like Lawrence. <\/p>\n The North\u2019s divisions and violent past are mostly noises off, but there is a sense of living in an aftermath of damage, \u201cthe poison of this place\u201d. Matthew, by contrast, is exercised more by impending doom \u2013 climate change.<\/p>\n If Yvonne gives a voice to the North\u2019s very specific historical harms, then Matthew speaks to the broader and more generalised dangers faced by the world at large currently, the North included. A big theme in the book is trying to voice the past in a way that facilitates an understanding of the present, and as someone born not long before the GFA, this is a subject I\u2019m fixated on: understanding the conflict in the context of broader questions of class disparity and colonial power, but also seeing how those same hierarchical structures are responsible for climate collapse and mass displacement as a result of climate collapse. <\/p>\n Yvonne is sceptical of Amy\u2019s poetry, \u201cjust blocks of prose-looking absurdity\u201d. \u201cIn Yvonne\u2019s day, poems had line breaks, and something resembling a rhyme scheme.\u201d Your debut collection, ISDAL, won the PEN Heaney Prize. Tell us about it and your approach to poetry.<\/p>\n ISDAL<\/a> was an attempt to examine how language is used to narrate the lives of women, particularly after they\u2019ve been killed. Women continue to die at the hands of men across the North, and I was trying to think about how language gets weaponised to reduce, dehumanise, and vilify victims. Poetry is the form I use to try and keep my own thoughts capacious and flexible, to keep thinking critically about how language is one of the means by which the world is shaped. <\/p>\n Tell us about your two previous novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022).<\/p>\n They\u2019re pretty good, I think. I worked very hard. I love them because they\u2019re so representative of where I was at the point of writing them. They feel like a young person\u2019s novels, and I admire that about them \u2013 they\u2019re messy and unsure in some ways, ambitious in others. With each book I find myself more invested in writing Ireland, so it\u2019s funny that Tennis Lessons didn\u2019t even name Derry as its setting \u2013 I didn\u2019t feel qualified to write the place where I live. <\/p>\n [\u00a0Susannah Dickey: \u2018I get really bugged about how the North is discursively infantilised\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Common Decency is angry and more lateral; it\u2019s all about me trying to become a writer, rather than someone who wrote a book. Ireland is present, but you can tell I still feel anxious about the weight of interpretation. Into the Wreck is more sure of its questions, because I\u2019m more sure of the questions I want to ask. <\/p>\n Three novels and a poetry collection by the age of 33 is a remarkable achievement.<\/p>\n Honestly, I\u2019m fit for nothing else. <\/p>\n Which projects are you working on?<\/p>\n I\u2019m finishing up a new poetry collection \u2013 it\u2019s about the challenges of trying to be a top shagger during a period of mass ecological death. <\/p>\n Who do you admire the most?<\/p>\n I currently hold a huge amount of respect for Francesca Albanese. Also, the Italian dock workers who have been blocking arms shipments to Israel. <\/p>\n You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?<\/p>\n Palestine Action will no longer be listed as a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act. <\/p>\n Which public event affected you most?<\/p>\n When Veronika the cow scratched herself with a broom<\/a>. <\/p>\n Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?<\/p>\n I want to force Evelyn Waugh to watch me eat a load of bananas<\/a>. <\/p>\n The best and worst things about where you live?<\/p>\n I live about 100 yards from the Errigle Inn, and I live about 100 yards from the Errigle Inn. <\/p>\n