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The Bibliophile: Two Nice People

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It’s Short Story Month, and we’re celebrating with one of the excellent stories from the recent linked collection Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. For those who missed it, our managing editor Vanessa wrote an unbeatable introduction to the book in an earlier post, which accompanies an interview between Maggie and publicist Ahmed well worth checking out, so I shall simply say we hope you enjoy this slice of Old Romantics’ arresting charm.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Two Nice People

I was burying my little boy in sand when the policeman came right up to us. He cut out the sea and sky and I thought, what have I done now?

‘Hello there,’ he said, bending to our level. He was a shiny, compact kind of man, got up in hi-vis, shell tracksuit bottoms, sporty trainers; his summer uniform, I guessed. He didn’t wear the hat, but I knew from the badges on his arms and chest.

‘How are things here now don’t worry—because these days with everything people might see a policeman and think, Oh, I’m in trouble or something.’

‘Heh—no.’ I sat up straight and folded up my legs in such a way that he would not see any pubic hair. My swimming togs were very old and didn’t fit me properly. How many of them were here this time? I looked around but it was just this one policeman. ‘I’m Sergeant Pat Hourican,’ he was saying. Or Houlihan? O’Halloran? I didn’t really want to know his name.

‘I’m on duty up at the station on the main drag. And—hello there? This is your little fella?’

We both looked at the boy, buried to the waist. He was patting, imperiously, the sand around his body. Sand had got in everywhere, into his hair, his ears, eyebrows, nostrils. Once he noticed we were watching him he broke away and walked up to the dune to pick up stones and things. His only piece of clothing was a UV tank top with clouds and rainbows on it, and his little ass was coated in wet sand.

‘We’re obviously contented anyway, ha,’ the policeman said. He looked at me again. ‘Now, it’s a hot day, and very crowded out here.’ His eyes were bright like candle flames; his nose and cheeks were sunburned, as if all he did was patrol beaches.

‘Are ye visitors to the area, or . . . ?’

‘Yes. I come here all the time, I grew up here. We’re not just on holidays.’ I wanted to convey my separateness out here, and the policeman nodded; he understood.

‘I hear you, not exactly blow-ins.’ He edged closer on a taut calf muscle. ‘So. I just had a call there at the station, and I came to check if you were alright.’

‘Oh!’ Somebody came, I thought.

‘A call from a gentleman you may have met on the beach today.’

A gentleman. I couldn’t think of any gentleman.

‘A man who was a little bit concerned.’

‘Oh dear.’

The policeman nodded regretfully. ‘About the two of ye here, yes.’

‘Oh.’

The policeman looked inside me now, and I felt very peculiar, very bad, like I was being poisoned by my own friends. The boy was busy, collecting shells, seaweed, bits of rope and other debris. I saw the sleepy crowds, the tide, white horses, shimmering sea. Our patch of things. Mangled towels, opened suncream, sand-coated flask. Lunchbox, no lid; chocolate-smeared Wagon Wheel wrappers, one filled with a sand pie. In the game, you had to eat the sand pie and be sick. But I hadn’t played the game this time. Why had I not played the game this time? My book, a classic love story I was keen to finish and have read, was discarded, face down on its pages.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I’m just responding to the call,’ the policeman went on. ‘So I hope it’s OK if I have a word with you here, ask a few questions. Just to find out what the story is.’

He took a pad of paper from a pocket in his jacket and he gave me a gallant little nod.

It was a half-truth, that I grew up here. We used to come here on our holidays, to a farm along an avenue where sheepdogs leapt, blackberries clustered in the briars, and bright-green cow-dotted fields, hiding flat white mushrooms, led right down to the rocky shore, and to the sea; and on hazy afternoons straw bales were tossed by the farmer onto trailers and the air was thick with pollen and wild perfumes.

The previous winter, I’d ended up very suddenly alone with my small son. Now it was time for freedom, time to be seen—maybe to be given some reward for tough endurance. Always I felt owed some happy time, some crock of gold, had no doubt but that it awaited us. The Airbnb, a bedroom and kitchenette, was clean and tasteful, and the farm just up the road looked much the same as I’d remembered it. They let us pick eggs and give a carrot to the horse. The weather was incredible, in fact it was a dangerous heatwave, with red warnings on the news. Every day we dragged ourselves into the car, and to the beach to cool off in the sea.

Today was the hottest day. In France, that week, four people died, and two in Spain. Here, people went around in a daze.

Up on the cliffs, the cars were sprawling from the car park onto the road and grass and golf links. The bins were overflowing, and long drooping queues of colourfully dressed families trailed from the Mr Whippy and chip vans. CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES, the sign read. We parked in a ditch and, holding hands, climbed the steep path down the cliffside to the beach. A sign said: DANGER, SUDDEN DROP BELOW.

On trips alone with my small son, to a beach or park, on planes or train journeys, I used to go up close to other families or friendly looking people. I had a beady eye for friendship on these traipses, for that gleam of openness and understanding that just might lead to company. At this beach, I pulled the boy around, checking faces under hats until we found a spot. It was a whole extended family. Mums, dads, aunts, uncles and kids, passing around crisp packets and soft drinks. The women stretched out on towels, the dads having conversations looking straight ahead of them, out to sea, the boys throwing a ball or digging a moat. They had castle moulds, pirate ships, sticky rackets, balls, snorkels—and we hadn’t thought of bringing any beach toys. I placed our bags in their periphery.

DANGER, COLLAPSING SAND DUNES. CAUTION, INCOMING TIDES. I unrolled our towels, shook the sand away. I set out the boy’s lunchbox: a peanut-butter sandwich sliced in triangles; four apple quarters turning brown; two Wagon Wheels, both already melted in their packets. And his turquoise water flask, decorated with pink octopi. The flask was stainless steel and the lunchbox bamboo, so—doing everything the right way here.

We had absolutely everything we needed. I looked around for something missing, something to stoke my anxiety, nothing came to mind. I got hold of him, coated him with Factor 50, put his cap on, stretched his limbs into his swimming trunks and rainbow top. He took his swimming trunks back off again, and sat down to play. He took his cap off, threw it away. Sun lit up his golden hair, and the shadows of his long eyelashes swept his face in lavish streaks.

I took out my paperback and looked for my page. I had forgotten water. His flask was full, but none for me. I looked up at the cliff, and the distance made my mouth feel dry. I lay back under the burning sun. You can’t have everything. I reached for his flask, but he got to it first.

Carefully, the boy unscrewed the flask, looked inside it, then tipped it upside down into the sand. He shook it hard to empty out the last few drops, then buried all the water, squatting right into his ankles. I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and pulled myself to standing.

‘Come on.’ I took his hand. The tide was so far out it took forever, pebbles pushing at our heels, before we reached the water. We waded out and farther out. The sea was shallow, murky, strewn with seaweed and dead crabs. We went a little deeper, then with his arms around my neck and his legs around my body we plunged in. The waves surged and tossed him up and down and he broke away, gasping, flapping his arms and kicking his legs until he was completely separate from me, gulping and spitting seawater, laughing, showing every tooth inside his gums. I’ve never had the strength to test it, but it seems there is no limit to the fun this boy is capable of having. He snips up cables, opens teddies with a joyfulness he shouldn’t be deprived of. Sometimes he bursts out laughing in his sleep.

There is not much to report about the day now that I’ve sat down to try. The sun shone, birds called; I worried about the sun, about sunburn, I worried that I didn’t worry half as much as someone should. I worried about all the wrong things. The group beside us, they knew how to live—their bored and diligently playing children, a woman drinking Diet Coke, reading from her phone, on her back a tattoo of a bat with its wings spread.

He was running up and down, playing in the water of a little stream that trickled from the cliffs into the sea. It occurred to me that I should put his cap back on, and his swimming trunks. The sun shone down, and I turned from right to left to let it cook me on both sides. I felt its hot rays cutting through the parting on my scalp. Fizzy drink, I thought. Iced lemonade. Cold beer. Ice cubes. Cold glass of water.

The men, arms draped around knees, had their conversations. Talked of these extremes in temperature. Of boats at sea—or county councils. Planning applications, objections to the plans. They talked about the schools, they talked about the coaching—the hoops you had to go through. Most likely all of that. One had dark hair. I moved along the towel to get a closer look. He had a beard. He had a beard and yet—the face. Easy-going—small, hooked nose, cheeks stretched now, dark impressive beard—eyes that seemed sad, or just afraid. He was heavier now, but distinguished, by the beard, kind of—time had passed, but he’d remember me as well. I’d already pulled myself to sitting and was clambering forwards on the sand.

‘Excuse me? Hi?’

They turned to look at me.

‘Hi. Did you study Arts in UCD? Ten years ago—no, fifteen.’

The bearded man leaned back. His friend or brother glanced from me to him, the bearded man pointed at himself but I knew already. His face, up close, distorted into someone else’s.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at his friend or brother. ‘We’re from—!’ The name of a town. I hadn’t heard of it. His friendly Northern accent forgave everything. They laughed it away. I laughed back, and they turned back to face the sea. The boy at his marsh of sand, pouring in the seawater, mixing up his elements. Running to and fro in an ecstatic hurry.

I held up the book to block the sun, checking on him with one eye. My novel was insufferably long and heavy in my hand. I’d been reading this one for about four years, even though it was a classic and a bestseller. The book jacket, its technicolour drawing of a frightened woman running from a burning house, had come apart from being

carried around. I’d seen the Netflix adaptation, so the story held no mystery anymore, I knew who murdered who and why they did it, knew there was a shipwreck coming, two shipwrecks, that in the end a human skeleton would be fished out of the bottom of the sea.

I read a paragraph from start to finish, and the effort could have killed me. Half the words were cast in shadow, and the tiny print felt harmful to my eyes. The boy was lining up some rocks along the stream now, rushing, in great hurry.

DANGER, GOLF BALLS FLYING. I thought to take a little break from looking, so that I could be right here, just sink into this time. One eye was still open; now it drooped and rested closed and everything was calm. This way I could employ my hearing at its most acute. I could appreciate the heat, and air, the sound of waves, for what they were. DANGER, OR CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES. You can really open all your senses, absorb the moment, take time, when you’re allowed to close your eyes. I stretched an arm, found the book, and placed the pages on my face.

‘DO YOU HAVE A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND??? A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND???’

Loud like torchlight or a speeding car. I sat up.

He was on his hunkers, talking in a phone.

‘SHE’S HERE, I’VE FOUND HER.’

Pink man, yellow thinning hair. Short, doughy build. He had a job at hand. He didn’t have a whistle round his neck but it seemed that in some other situation he would have had a whistle, and a first-aid pack, and ID.

‘HE’S WITH US, HE’S OVER BY THE WATER!’

The beach had emptied. I reached around for things, then threw myself to standing. My legs were stilts. My legs weren’t working properly. Half-words fell out—not what I’d have said if I’d had time to collect all my thoughts. But I understood the urgency, and I would not begrudge these people their distress. One foot found the sand, and then another, and I ran, with difficulty, on stilts.

My little boy was standing, seeming very little and confused, at the shore, beside a woman in a sarong. She was talking in a high-pitched voice about the water, eyes wide in mine, with her hair neatly brushed and her hand on the shoulder of my little boy. I pulled him in and picked him up.

*

The policeman wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this either, I was to understand.

‘And do ye mind me asking, are ye alone together on your holidays?’

‘Oh yes. But lots of help around. Lots of family.’

‘Oh yes surely, good to hear, it takes a village doesn’t it.’ He made some scribbles in his notepad.

‘A village.’

‘Well to rear a child, doesn’t it.’

‘Oh, sorry, yes. You’re telling me!’

‘And how did ye get down here, was it in the car today?’

‘We parked illegally, Garda.’

‘Well I think now you wouldn’t be the first, heh heh.’

‘No, heh.’

‘The car park is choc-a-bloc, alright.’ He seemed to look inside me, with a tilt, and the most inveigling compassion.

‘Are you alright?’ He looked in my pupils and gave a quick high-pitched laugh.

‘Garda,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Right. Well, this afternoon I received a phone call. What happened was you, ehm, your child, came to the attention of a gentleman on the beach here, and a lady, two nice people. They said to me that you were there with a book, that you had your face inside the book. Physically, inside the book. Not just looking at the book, but unconscious, underneath the book.’

‘I was reading, Garda.’

‘OK, listen, when you got up off the ground, you seemed disoriented. They said you weren’t making any sense, they said—look. OK—I’ll tell you. They said you looked a bit dishevelled.’

‘Dishevelled.’ We both looked down at my appearance, which was of course dishevelled, a worry almost. All our stuff. Scattered everywhere. I shut my knees together and hugged them to my chest.

‘But look sure, you seem very well. And he’s a great lad.’

‘I am very well. I’m—I’ve just been burying my kid in sand here.’

I reached out for my beach bag, and opened it, and found my sunglasses. Tears burst out behind the frames while he told me about his kids.

‘They are a handful, boys. I’ve two myself at home, I have your sympathy, I’m sure.’

‘They’d send you to an early grave,’ I wept, laughing. Tears burst from my face. He wasn’t to know.

‘Oh, you’re preaching to the converted you are.’ He shut his notepad.

Before he left, I asked him where the two nice people were. I would like to thank them one more time for coming to our rescue. He pointed at the cliffs, where the rocks were clustered in a jagged ring, where the man and woman had been watching. I shook out our towels.

On the way home, we stopped and bought the last remaining can of 7up and two Cornettos from the petrol station. The moment we arrived back in the Airbnb, it filled with sand. I stood at the shower, rinsing down the boy, who twirled and laughed under the warm spray. I scrubbed him clean, washed the sand into the plughole, dried him off, then unwrapped his ice cream while he hopped from foot to foot with his arms outstretched.

That night he watched YouTube Kids while I finished all the bottle in the fridge. Then I uncorked something special, organic and spumante I’d saved specially for the holiday. The evening darkened, the boy fell asleep. I picked up the phone.

‘No, this time I’m going to ask you some questions!’ I was on the grainy bedspread, in déshabillé, dishevelled if you like, white flesh exposed to nobody, hair tangled in saltwater, a cone of melted ice cream tipped over on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to want phone numbers,’ I said. ‘Names and phone numbers!’ The boy slept on like a little angel. I drank the wine down to its last few vinegary droplets and flopped back, laughing, and waves crashed on my skull.

In good publicity news:

  • UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in the Adroit Journal: “One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book [UNMET] feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader.”
  • On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in The Walrus.

The Bibliophile: Romance is a season in hell

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I’ve recently returned from my first London Book Fair, an event I found as chaotic, and stimulating, and frustrating, and inspiring, and just plain old fun as Dan had indicated I might. Talking with editors, agents, and translators from all over the world gives me only the paradoxical sense of its smallness: no matter the size of their organization or their territory, the language of their books or the size of the advances their authors command, everyone working in publishing faces a comically similar set of problems practical and existential both. And no matter how fatigued by the whirlwind of interaction or taciturn their sales strategy, it’s easy to get a smile from someone simply by asking about the last book they really loved, or the one they’ve just encountered that they can’t wait to go home and read. Books! We love them! What could be hard about that?

Well, for one, there’s the persistent need to successfully articulate that ardor. There’s no question I find more difficult to answer than “What are you looking for?” And there’s little else anyone wants to know about an acquisitions editor. Poetry’s not, for once, the problem: After reading the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts submitted during two open submission periods, I’ve settled on “an original and urgent relationship with language.” As anyone who’s encountered a two-year-old knows, the problem with answers is that they beget more questions, so: What do I mean by original? That I’ve never seen it before, or have encountered it only rarely and think there should be more of it. (Thus far no one’s asked what I’ve never seen before, though I would appreciate that level of faith in my clairvoyance.) By urgent: the sense that this utterance had to be made, that the poem is the only way the poet could find to stop speaking, or—and this is what I tend to prefer—the only way to start.

When it comes to fiction, my instinctual answer inclines towards breathtakingly vapid. I’m supposed to be able to specify subgenres and subjects and the sorts of authors I prefer, but the truth is that I just want it to be good, and good . . . I guess I know it when I see it. By the third day of LBF, exhausted by the frenetic pace of my schedule and slightly alarmed by an ill-fitting manuscript I’d just glanced at after feeling confident its representative and I were simpatico, I finally just said to one agent, “I want the sentences to be good.” Luckily she turned out to be a poet as well, and only laughed and nodded and turned straight to a page in her catalog, knowing what I meant.

In our age of malignant certainty, when we have perfected the practice of judging just about everything and everyone we encounter by cover or codification, maybe failures of discernment aren’t the worst sin. But they don’t make for very interesting insight into publishing, and so I’ll beg off answering via poetry once again: “No ideas but in things,” Dr Williams wrote, so let me present this thing. What I’m looking for is Maggie Armstrong and her debut story collection, Old Romantics. This is the first fiction title I acquired start to finish, from soliciting the manuscript to signing the contract. It is simultaneously a book of hideously entertaining—this being the exact descriptor that caught my eye in the catalog of the inimitable Tramp Press, Maggie’s UK publisher—literary short stories, wickedly funny in their honesty about love, sex, family, class, ambition, work, motherhood, and a linked collection with the emotional and narrative heft of a novel.

Photo: Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. Cover designed by Fiachra McCarthy.

The stories in Old Romantics all concern a woman named Margaret and follow her chronologically, if without strict continuity, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date . . . Characters, as well as jokes, recur even as the narration switches between first and third-person. These are stories—and a heroine—that doggedly insist on Romantic, and romantic, ideals, yet repeatedly defer to the illusory nature thereof with cold-eyed Modernist clarity, and then leap agilely into a postmodern metafictional mode to arrive at an unvarnished and complex portrait of a single woman trying to understand, and to be, exactly who she is. It’s a Künstlerroman unlike any I’ve read before, about a female artist who must first come of age, and then to terms, with the life she’s been assigned by virtue of her gender: only after all of that can she come to her calling. It’s a trajectory little described, perhaps very well because so many women who aspire to lives in the arts are derailed along the way, and in Armstrong’s hands it is moving and funny and a triumph of invention and simple determination.

Did I mention funny? Witness fictional Margaret struggling with her prose style whilst the real Maggie demonstrates an incomparable metafictional wit (emphasis mine): “I found the sight of such bland sentences distressing—they all began with I, and ended me—and slammed the notepad shut as if its contents had offended me”. “It was a lightweight story I was working on,” Margaret continues, “to do with infantile and everyday desires, a slow descent into disappointment, with attempted anal penetration at the close.” The marshalling of syntactical expectation as the list progresses from the benign to the shocking, the soft chime of rhyme (slow / close; infantile / anal), the trochaic crescendo of “anal penetration at the close” to end the sentence, combine in an intelligence, ironic wit, and musicality I can’t ever seem to get enough of. In another story, a youthful Margaret makes some bad decisions and finds herself alone with a more experienced, intoxicated and/or unscrupulous man, a confusion of agency and passivity that Armstrong articulates through a blackly comic grammatical enactment: “This had taken place. Patch had had sex with me.” And throughout, brilliant description and metaphor abound: “A fluffy female bathrobe hulked around the door”; “She gazed back at him like a sedated hawk”; “Her chest banged like a broken toy.”

What am I saying here? The sentences are good. Really, really good. They are what I’m looking for, and I couldn’t be more proud that we can call them ours.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

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Old Romantics comes out on Tuesday—just in time for April Fools’ Day! To celebrate the upcoming release, here’s publicist Ahmed with an interview with Maggie Armstrong.

Photo: Maggie Armstrong. Credit: Bríd O’Donovan.

A Biblioasis Interview with Maggie Armstrong

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this collection came about?

Well I have been writing short stories for about ten years, possibly fifteen. I used to perform at spoken word things around Dublin, but I was working as a journalist at the time. It wasn’t until 2020 that I actually started to publish stuff. This book came about from those short stories. A publisher came to me, had read one in a magazine called Banshee and asked if I had any more. That was Sarah from Tramp Press and that led to this collection.

I heard you had made some changes to the stories since the collection was first published in Ireland last year. Could you tell me about that?

Oh, sure. I was sort of thinking they’d be subtle changes that nobody would notice. They were so subtle.

So why did you make them anyway?

Because I’m never happy with anything. I will perennially rewrite everything. I feel terrible for editors that I’ve worked with. It feels like I’m disregarding all of their hard work and insights, but I just can’t help myself once I get my hands on something. A text seems to read differently and sound differently every time you look at it.

I knew that while I was revising it that it was sort of fruitless because I’ll never be happy with a published book. I like getting up and reading stories and I always change words here and there every time I read something live. A text remains malleable to me forever.

How would you define an old romantic?

An old romantic is a damn hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self-delusion. Or a fantasist who’s swallowed a love potion and been let loose on the town. This kind of character is not great to have in your personal life, but it’s a rich study for fiction.

I can see that in Margaret. A lot of the stories seem to test Margaret’s sense of reality with her ideals of romance. What kind of role does romance have in Margaret’s life and what does this say about her?

I think romance drives all of her actions and appetite. It dictates her decisions and it often robs her of agency. Feeling controls her rather than thought. Some of us are driven by a feeling rather than by practical considerations, which can be interesting to examine. To follow the path of a life somehow enslaved to desire and feeling and what possibly amounts simply to dopamine, the hormones, the chemicals that are sometimes leading us one way or another.

What kind of change do you see in Margaret as the stories progress?

There’s a book that I really adore by Elizabeth Bowen called The Death of the Heart. It was published in 1938 and it’s to do with a young woman called Portia whose life is on the margins and who moves to London and falls in love and is jilted and rejected by her much older lover and she has to grow up overnight and realize just how cold and hard this world is. And I think that happens to the anti-hero of my book. The heart is shattered halfway through. We see as soon as Walls comes on the scene, he’s a real menace to her belief system, and he really dismantles this fairytale of being swept off her feet. He dismantles it and leaves her high and dry and puts her life at risk in a speeding car. He is a destructive person given to extremes. That’s when we see a change happen. I think the axis turn of those stories is pivotal. Once there is a situation where there is control and cruelty in a relationship, nothing is ever going to be the same. And then of course our protagonist goes from out of that frying pan into the fire of Sergio who she has her children with.

It’s like the labyrinth, or the snake pit, where you go in and cannot find your way out. You know the Minotaur?

The myth where Theseus goes down into a labyrinth to fight the creature?

Yes, exactly. In the underworld of dates and liaisons this book tries to depict, I feel like it’s all Minotaurs and all monsters and there is a maze you’re trying to get out of. Romance is a season in hell from which you emerge a broken and changed person. Oh, that sounds so terrible.

I’m wondering if you could also speak about the form of these stories and the genre of autofiction in general. These stories obviously invite comparisons to your own life, but they also take metafictional turns with sly comments from the narrator or characters acknowledging that this is fiction. It’s a unique take on the genre.

I love a first person voice. I love the intimacy and the immediacy of slipping into someone’s consciousness like that, and indeed unconscious, and moonlighting as them. I have just adored, and maybe I shouldn’t even start mentioning names because then I can get carried away, and I have mixed relationships with all of them, and these aren’t necessarily my influences, but I’ve loved Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Ben Lerner. I’ve loved Karl Ove Knausgaard and the whole phenomenon of the life saga that he put on paper. That great project of oversharing that he went about really struck home with so many people.

I was never able to write a story until I did it in a first person voice. I had tried out the omniscient narrator thing and it went very badly. It always read like some Edna O’Brien pastiche, like I was just copying from my literature textbooks. The first person felt more like a guilty pleasure and I never believed anyone would publish it. I never thought it was something that anyone would take seriously. I felt it was somehow frowned upon in literary circles to write autofiction because maybe there’s an assumption that if you can only write your own story that you lack empathy, that you’re not able to imagine what other lives and communities are like, or maybe that you lack imagination because you simply can’t think of any other plots. Or just that you’re in love with yourself, because you find yourself so fascinating that you would genuinely be content to spend your entire day narrating your own life.

So all of these felt like obstacles to calling this real work. Then I just went for it. I thought to hell, I’m really enjoying writing this. And the finished product has no resemblance to my own life. It may be inspired or be drawn from it and the only reason for that is because I have pure unrestricted access to my own experience and consciousness. I can access it just sitting here and through my extremely unreliable memories and notebooks. It’s all there and it’s very rich material I find. I’ve always found life hard. It never came naturally to me, just being a person in the world. I have often gotten into scrapes and funny situations. I was exhausted by just my own escapades or my own sagas that I just thought: listen, at least I can get a bit of copy out of them.

I suppose writing more what you’d call autobiographical fiction is a bit of a highwire act. And it’s a dark art. I can’t vouch for the ethics of fictionalising the real, as opposed to pure invention. You have to be very careful what goes in your stories and what stays out. I’ve learned just because something terrible happened does not mean that it’s fair game for fiction.

You say you could only start writing in the first person, but some of the stories are in third person. Why the switch for some of them?

Honestly, I became disturbed by the material that I was reading. I no longer wanted to be associated with the author of these stories and did not like the tone I was taking. I felt particularly the story “Trouble” where you have extraordinary upheaval and cognitive dissonance, with a young woman, aka my fictional alter ego Margaret, who’s having an affair with a real charlatan and at the same time entering into a very serious relationship with a highly unsuitable married father of two. Reading this kind of dark testimony, it was like the room started to turn. I felt I couldn’t any longer inhabit this voice because it was all just so odd. The narrator’s level of dislocation from her actions did not feel honorable. So in order to process it in the form of a story, I needed to tell it in the third person. Does that make any sense?

Photo: First page of “Trouble” in Old Romantics.

Almost like you needed some distance to really be able to tell it?

Then even the distance of the third person didn’t feel quite right. The protagonist’s name is Margaret so clearly some of these things kind of almost happened to me, but then that’s weird to talk about yourself in the third person. Children talk about themselves in the third person, and mad Shakespearean characters. It was just an odd voice. That’s not to say I’m admitting that these are entirely myself. It’s a very distorted claustrophobic universe which happens to be very familiar to me and similar to the tiny universe of Dublin where I’ve lived my whole life.

Also there’s something about an “I” voice that’s hard to pull off, where you have to remain sort of likeable to your reader and vaguely charming to hold their attention and keep their commitment to the book. The kind of stuff Margaret was up to was not likeable nor commendable.

Margaret also spends a lot of time trying to be a writer and thinking about all these important authors. The classic Irish ones (Joyce, Beckett, O’Casey) and the Russians (Dostoevsky, Chekhov). But she seems disenchanted with them or maybe just the idea of them. What kind of influence have they had on you?

All of the big books that appear in these stories come in for a reason. I grew up with parents who read constantly and voraciously, particularly my mother. Her face was behind a very big book as she sat on the sofa most of my childhood, or she was howling laughing or reading passages aloud. Her favourite outlet from her four children was going to her book club. We grew up reading a lot and time was frittered away with literature.

Then I went to study English, and I had quite a lot of attention difficulties at school. It was a very odd choice to go do something academic because I love doing practical things and I always struggle to sit at a desk, but I read English for four years at Trinity. Nothing but books. Weighted and crushed by books. I have to a comical degree been haunted by books my whole life.

Both of my parents died in the last few years and we recently dismantled their bookshelves, which was a very sad and truly physically demanding job. Carrying boxes of books with my children buckled in the back and trying to manage everyone and all the books. I continue to not know how to keep track of books everywhere I go. This is kind of long-winded, but I’m not sure how to see that whole tradition of Western literature now and the great doorstoppers that we grew up with. They were written by men of letters, let’s say Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, who had no domestic responsibilities, who likely had servants, maids, cooks, secretaries in some cases. They didn’t have the internet, they had few distractions and the intricacies of their sentences within these formally robust paragraphs testify to that. I’m just interested that the novel form has held for so long and that we’re still expected, while our lives are so fragmented in so many ways, and our attention is so divided and splintered, we’re still expected to make sense of the world through the bastion of the novel, a form which was invented in far more fallow circumstances.

Is that why you chose to write linked short stories as opposed to a novel? I suppose people could read this as a novel, since it follows the same character, but they are distinct and also stand on their own.

Yeah, they’re great for short attention spans. A short story is perfect for the age of TikTok, a platform I have never in my life even glimpsed. I’m too distracted by other things. But I think the short story form sort of chose me. Many writers of course begin with short fiction in their apprenticeship. Same as with any craft. My nephew is studying carpentry at school—he started by making a spice rack, not a bed or a cabinet. I will one day soon make a cabinet, I’m sure of it, but I would never have got anywhere with a project more mammoth than a spice rack. Actually I was doing both short stories and novels at the same time, I’ve written two novels that I’m never going to publish, they ended up so unhinged and full of plot holes. With stories you can free yourself of the wider responsibilities of world-building. Then it was just a happy accident that Old Romantics turned out to be a linked collection. One of my fears was that all the stories were all similar and had a similar emotional thrust and that the same character was recurring. They all had the same obsessive, monomaniacal quality. And actually, that turns out to be not the worst thing about it. That’s what has really hit home with a lot of people. People enjoy tracing the adventures of short story characters as much as they do those of any series. I mean I really love John Updike’s Maples stories, Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, all linked collections.

What are you hoping people take away from reading these stories?

I hope people take nothing but a pleasant memory of being lost in a book briefly.

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