Originally Published in Print, April 2022.

 

Your work seems defined by journeys of self-discovery. In Skin, your protagonist travels abroad and hates herself. In Red Dirt, the four protagonists have a very debauched and isolating experience. Why did you choose to subvert the idea of travel being idyllic?

 

I was trying to portray my own experience of travel. When I travelled I thought it was going to be amazing, but I found that there were very sad and lonely and great times too. I was trying to put a more real, authentic experience to this topic. Especially with Skin. This vision of a solo smooth back packing was definitely not my experience. As well as that, my confrontation with privilege when I was travelling was something I was interested in.

 

The inequality in the novel wasn’t really resolved. I found it quite jarring. 

 

I wanted to make it real. I just wanted to follow a thread of someone getting to a place with tangents along the way. I’ve been told that it’s fragmented by other people. The novel was picked up on an early draft. If I had more time, I don’t think I would’ve changed the episodic nature of the novel. Maybe I would’ve added fancier writing. 

 

I really liked that feature. The protagonist’s story isn’t linear. She makes the same mistakes again and again. I found the idea of healing and the psychotherapeutic influences sprinkled through the novel really compelling. I’m still thinking of the line “what matters is not the event but how you interpret it” at the end of Red Dirt. I’m wondering how much of that was important in your development of the narrative. As well, I felt like the line was its own lovely gift to the reader. 

 

I feel like it’s trying to do all of those things. Epiphanies are the biggest ideas in the novel. That line came from Hopper, who is kind of a seer in the novel. The idea of mindfulness and coming down out of your own thinking is important to the characters. It’s funny because I’m a therapist now myself . 

 

When I was writing Red Dirt I was travelling to the places that feature in Skin. I was burnt out from writing Red Dirt and being on that publicity train but I was still writing ideas down every day. And then I thought I could write a story around it. Skin came from wanting to move away from beauty standards. It’s about self-love. And learning to like yourself. And stepping away from all the bullshit and finding your own purpose.

 

I liked how her journey to self-love was a constant struggle for her. It didn’t feel sentimental. I liked how it was a very slow process. The novel came out at a time when body positivity was gaining traction in popular culture. Do you think that influenced the novel at all?

 

I actually had to google the body positivity movement when I read your questions! Those themes were something I was very interested in when I was younger. I quit smoking and I put on weight and I didn’t understand what was going on. I thought I’d learn about health like I had to learn about writing. So I got really into health and fitness as well as the standards around beauty ideals. I found confidence the more I started working out. I guess in that way Skin would be more autobiographical than Red Dirt. I guess the body positivity thing… I’m not so sure about it. The negativity has to be explored too. Otherwise it’s just avoidance. 

 

I love the holistic idea of self-love being a long process. Usually the simplified urges to just “love yourself” are there to sell you things. 

 

Before you love yourself, it can be useful to figure out why you might hate yourself. And to explore who made that decision and was it even you. It usually isn’t you. It’s all social constructs and bombardments and traps. It’s very insidious, especially for women. It can be for men too. But to be conscious of these standards is important. And you can know that you buy into some of it but it’s important to know where the line is and where you stand on it. At the time, I didn’t know where I stood. 

 

I was really impressed with your writing style and how lyrical it was.

 

I wouldn’t consider it lyrical. My writing style is trusting and intuitive. Trusting my voice and then the craft comes after. Checking if the page makes sense, if there’s emotional resonance, if the plot is working – it all comes after. 

 

Your style is so punchy. I read Skin in the space of a day. Your prose style is so fast. 

 

When I was in Queen’s University Belfast doing my Masters, I had no comma button on my computer. So if I wanted to use one I’d have to copy and paste it. Then I was praised for short sentences.  I like being pulled into a story and have sentences be clean but deep. So I try to emulate that. 

 

Your sentences are so readable.

 

I guess an influence I could trace that to would be Roddy Doyle. When I was fifteen, I read the Barrytown trilogy. This opened up Irish writing for me. Before him it was all lyricism and misery. But with Doyle it was humour and accents and movement and people. I still remember being in the library of my school reading The Commitments and being in awe. So I suppose that might be why my sentences are like that. 

Would you consider anyone else as having an influence on your writing? 

 

I loved Dick K. Smith, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl as a child. They say those stick with you. They’re the most important writers because they’re the ones that get you into books. When I was backpacking I had fourteen books in my bag. Alice Munro’s selected stories were always my go-to. 

Then when I was writing Red Dirt, Denis Johnson was a big influence. I was in Australia and I was listening to all these podcasts on craft and writing. I heard “Emergency” on the New Yorker fiction podcast. At the time I was in Australia working eleven hours six days a week in an orange factory. “Two Men” was also read on that podcast. In the story, the narrator lets you down. I wanted to play around with that device. I did that with the character of Murph. He was giving signs throughout the novel. The red flags were all there. 

 

Murph’s turn around at the end felt like such a punch. I found it interesting how Fiona chooses to follow Murph despite all the warning signs. She goes on to make the same mistakes as she has done in the past. An unreliable and scary man still appeals to her after leaving an abusive relationship. The patterns of behaviour haunt her. 

 

Catching these patterns is the book’s turning point. I think it’s both a psychological and spiritual thing. 

 

Can you tell me about your screenwriting work?

 

Red Dirt was almost going to be a movie. When I was seventeen, I wanted to write movies. When I was twenty-seven, I sold my first short. Now, I’m thirty-seven and I’m screenwriting again. It’s funny how you go back to where you started. A lot of outlining and planning is involved because so many people are involved in the process. The alarming thing is that a film you’re working on might not be made. I hope it is made. It’s set in the Gaeltacht in Connemara. I think it’ll be really surreal seeing everyone working on the set of something I imagined. 

 

Do you have any plans for returning to novel writing?

I have two novellas that I’ve outlined. One I wrote a few years ago. I talked about it all the time and I lost interest in it. But now I’m going to be writing it in an Irish context. One of them is pre-colonial and the other is post-colonial in a way, so maybe they’ll work together.

 

I found those ideas about race in your novels interesting. I was wondering how you feel about approaching that subject. 

It’s something that has interested me for a long time. The Irish and British dynamic has always been totally fascinating to me. In one way, it was terrible – the brutality that happened. But at the same time, the New World voyages must have been so exciting. The sense of them discovering a whole new world has interested me since I was a child. Of course, the new world already existed for those who were indigenous to those places and unfortunately, those journeys were solely to conquer and rule and extract. 

 

Thanks so much for talking to me. Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to share with TN2’s readers? 

I was Mayo Writer-in-Residence last year and I made a podcast that I’d love to share with your readers. It’s called The Note Waves and you can find all the segments on Writing.ie. I go into topics such as the creative process and self-care along with numerous writers from County Mayo.