Sally Rooney on Normal People: In Conversation with Kishani Widyaratna

[00:00:00][Applause] so I'm thrilled to be here this evening with Sally Rooney of whose work I'm such an ardent fan and whose work has made me feel and think so deeply about the way we live now and the way we live with one another her vivid and compulsive fiction has made me consider a fresh some of the most vital themes of the human condition whether they be our needs and desires frailty shame being harmed and causing harm freedom and independence the giving of care and of course love itself it's a pleasure to be here today to celebrate the paperback publication of normal people I'm sure that everyone here has read the novel so I won't bore you with describing it in any kind of detail but just to say that I think that something studies as it's amazing in the book is depict this kind of like very close in teary aura T of the characters but also their kind of interactions and through that we come to know them very deeply but also we kind of come to know their context and the way in which different forces in society act upon them so whether these sources may be class or capitalism or patriarchy or all kinds of different things that they have no control over or volition that kind of exquisite and close portrait is something that feels quite uncommon in this moment but also kind of taps into like a very rich lineage of the 19th century novel and also some kind of really brilliant American writers to me it's quite remarkable novel of craft and ideas but also of heart so it's an honor to have you here this evening to dig into it a bit more deeply and to kick things off Sally's gonna read for us a small section and then we'll have a chat and then we'll hand things over to you so please do now start thinking of your questions no comments please thank you for that very kind introduction I'm really pleased that you're here kitchen really God we're doing the event together and I'm really pleased that you're all here thank you so much for coming I'm gonna start with a short reading from can everyone hear me okay yeah I'm gonna start with a short reading from early in the novel so the two protagonists Connell and Marianne are still teenagers at this point and they're in school together and they're sort of conducting a clandestine relationship outside school which people in their school don't know about and I don't think you need a whole lot more context than that so I'm gonna read just a brief scene not even the full scene actually just a little bit of it last week Connell mentioned something called the ghost Marianne had never heard of it before she had to ask him what it was his eyebrows shot up the ghosts he said ghost estate Mountain View it's like right behind the school Marianne had been vaguely aware of some construction on the land behind the school but she didn't know there was a housing estate there now or that no one lived in it people go drinking there Connell added Oh said Marianne she asked what it was like he said he wished he could show her but there were always people around he often makes blind remarks about things he wishes I wish you didn't have to go he says when she's leaving or I wish you could stay the night if he really wished for any of those things Marianne knows then they would happen Connell always gets me once and then feel sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy anyway he did end up taking her to see the ghost estate they drove there in his car one afternoon and he went out first to make sure no one was around before she followed him the houses were huge with bare concrete facades and overgrown front lawns some of the empty window holes were covered over in plastic sheeting which whipped around loudly in the wind it was raining and she had left her jacket in the car she crossed her arms squinting up at the wet slate roofs Joanne look inside Connell said the front door of number 23 was unlocked it was quieter in the house and darker the place was filthy with the toe of her shoe Marianne prodded at an empty cider bottle there were cigarette butts all over the floor and someone had dragged a mattress into the otherwise bare living room the mattress was stained badly with damp and what looked like blood pretty sordid Maryann said loud Connell was quiet just looking around do you hang out here much she said he gave a kind of shrug not much he said used to a bit not much anymore please tell me you've never had sex on that mattress he smiled absently no he said is that what you think I get up to it the weekends is it kind of he didn't say anything then which made her feel even worse he kicked a crushed can of Dutch gold aimlessly and sent it skidding towards the French doors this is probably three times the size of my house he said would you say she felt foolish for not realizing what he had been thinking about probably she said I haven't seen upstairs obviously four bedrooms Jesus just lying empty no one living in it he said why don't they give him away if they can't sell them I'm not being picked with you I'm genuinely asking she shrugged she didn't actually understand why something to do with capitalism she said yeah everything is that's the problem isn't it she nodded he looked over her as if coming out of a dream the you cold he said you look like you're freezing she smiled rubbed at her nose he unzipped his black puffer jacket and put it over her shoulders they were standing very close she would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted he knew that when I go out at the weekend or whatever he said I don't go after other girls or anything Mary Anne smiled and said no I guess they come after you he grinned he looked down at his shoes you have a very funny idea of me he said [Applause] I absolutely adored that moment in the book and that particular scene on the ghost estate which happens very very early on maybe only a few pages into the book because to me it feels like that moment on the ghost to say is like a it's like a miniature of the whole novel in terms of the kind of political context of kind of post crash Island of their particular dynamic their kind of understandings and misunderstandings of each other and also the secrecy and I don't know if if that is that feels like that way to you or if it if that's a different kind of understanding I don't know yeah I definitely think there was some reason why I wanted to set a scene on a ghost estate and and speaking as a novelist sort of novelistic II what the ghost estate did for me was very much what you're describing it allowed them to have this sort of secret interaction but without reusing the same scenery of their houses which have already used quite a lot at that point so it's nice to take your characters out of the familiar scenery and put them somewhere new and as a novelist that kind of gives it gives a new dynamic to the scene and it allowed me to do things with them that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise but I mean obviously there is also the kind of conceptual concern that you're talking about and you know I'm someone who's very interested in the effects of the economic crash on Irish society so I can't say to myself oh I wanted to make some kind of commentary on and you'd like the Irish housing crisis or the property bubble or something because I don't think the scene really offers that commentary I suppose all it does is allows the landscape of and like just the material geography of post-crash Ireland to sort of intrude on the narrative and become part of it in that way and I again like I wasn't doing it for any like it's not like the characters it's not like it's really offering any political point about the ghost of stage I have nothing to say that it necessarily it's just and that first of all it was useful for me to put it there and then once I put it there I realized the characters would never go there without at least trying to talk about what that kind of geographical space represented in their lives and so that yeah that let me do something that I found interesting and I think that also you get that there's something else that's kind of revealed in that moment is again it's it's a scene with with this kind of very kind of creeping dialog where each person says like a particular sentence and edges things on in the dynamic and you get this kind of like very live sentence of two people interacting in their understanding of each other and when I read normal people I was really taken with these two characters because they feel so vivid and so real which is what so many people are saying in terms of their like reading of the novel and so I had felt like the two characters of carryover of Marianne and Connell not carry on and where their engines at whisper kind of pushing forward in terms of the plot flowing from but actually you kind of I guess I've read that you start out from a dynamic and I'm interested in that relationship between the dynamic and the characters and whether one comes first or the other or whether they kind of emerge together yeah it's such an interesting question for me because I can't really conceive of character separately from dynamic and that's both speaking as a novelist in the sense that I never ride my characters in isolation and I don't I can't think of a novel that is about a character in isolation it would be a very experimental novel very much a break with what we consider the novel to be doing and generally novels are about situating characters within social settings and obviously within intimate relationships personal relationships and families as well and so that's sort of like that's how I conceive of character a character to me is someone who is engaged in one or more dynamics at a given time and and I can't actually imagine what it would be like to write about a character who was just on their own all the time like he would be a real challenge as a novelist and it's not it's not what I think of when I think of my characters they become who they are through their interactions with other people and then so the other side of that is that like sort of speaking conceptually or philosophically I'm much more interested in the relationship as a unit of social life yes the individual I'm not really attracted to individualism as a philosophy and I'm not really interested interested in the individual as a unit in the novel either I'm much more interested in coming up with an interesting relationship and then allowing that relationship to change how I think about the people who are participating in it so like you know Connell could come across like a very different person in a different relationship with a different woman or in or a different man it would be he would comic because of his you know and because of the particular power disparities or because of how he felt about the other person he could come across like really differently from how he comes across in this book and so this specific book isn't really about him and his psychology or Mary Ann and her psychology it's about the dynamic that emerges between them and trying to trace and sort of as attentively as I could the developments in that yeah I don't know if that I hope that I know it I think I have this kind of like I'm like chicken and egg which one came first it's like which one did Connell come to you first admirer and come to you first well and actually they first they first like walked into my brain I wrote this story which was like a failed short story which never went anywhere and it says when there maybe 24 25 I guess the age I was when I was writing it probably and and they're attending some kind of political protest or rally together in Dublin and it seems they haven't seen each other for a while and Mary Ann's maybe coming home and and there's some tension between them and they go to this protest and then they then there's a scene after the protest and that was the full story but there was no sense in which I was interested to write about this woman or this man we died each other they never get they never like they never occurred to me without each other yeah it was very much that what I wanted to write about was that relationship and in order to write about it intelligently or try to I had to UM you know grow and develop an understanding of who they were separately as well to some extent and so this there's a story and that it was published in the won't review yes just called out the clinic which also features these characters it kind of it you rate this first story that was abandoned and then did you write at the clinic yeah exactly yeah so I wrote this first story that was abandoned and and it just didn't work as a story it wasn't again that the dynamic wasn't interesting to me because it was but the the particular moment that I chosen to meet these characters was just not the moment it just wasn't like the right place and time to meet them so I decided to try meeting them in another place in time and and what I what an end up being was that Maryann needed to get at wisdom tooth removed and Connell like drives her to the dentist and so that was like the the moment and for whatever reason it doesn't sound like that compelling of a pitch but it did work for me I did find like I could do something that again to me felt interesting with the characters in that particular set up and you know I don't know why but anyway that that once I met them in that moment then I found myself including I haven't read the serene a long time actually but I found myself including in in the paragraphs references to things that happen yeah previously in their lives and so after I finished writing that story I was interested to know what I had been hinting at in those paragraphs and so I kind of like looped back and went to meet the characters much earlier in their lives when they're only eighteen and I and I started to do it just really from Connells perspective and in us what I thought was gonna be a story called funny girls and and then it just turned into a bit just turn into a book these things happen for any kind of saudi-iranian megaphones I do really recommend that you pick up that issue of the white review which has the story because it is amazing for the fact that it exists will misses a miniature of the novel there are so many things within that story all of these little traces that you've sort of planted for yourself as Easter eggs which illustrate to then let go and hunt back which I find like kind of it suggests that the novel was inside you that whole time which is it's fascinating that the imagination works but it is all there so if you're extra week and you want more normal people material go get that I think that there's also within that stories it's very much about the dynamic between Connell and Marianne and in that sort of dynamic it feels like so much of what they're negotiating is kind is kind of how to be together as like a man and a woman like it feels very gendered and it's big ups because it's like a sexual relationship um and it sort of feels like it touches on some territory from conversations and friends which is quite like a feminist territory I think which is how can men and women be together how can how do women and women relate to one another how can we escape like very much more kind of traditional modes like there's lots of references through normal people where for example Connells mothers like when we were a certain age people were just together or not I don't understand why you keep breaking up and getting together and I feel like there's some of that negotiation of that how can you break out tradition relationships but what mistakes might we make in trying to break out this very traditional form yeah that is absolutely I would say almost the dominant question of everything that I've written so far and like how can people be together that's the main question that I've been asking yeah and and I haven't obviously come up with any answers but that's not really my job and yeah I think I am fascinated by like I think theoretically in the discourse were maybe like at a place where you know there's a shared acknowledgement that relationship forms of the past and we're not necessarily for everyone like not not um not that they're like intrinsically repressive forms like the nuclear family and things like that and but that's the but that the coercive aspect of them was was socially repressive that everyone was forced to participate in relationship forms that were not actually suited for everyone and so those like I mean I think there's an increasing sort of acknowledgment that like stuff like that rigid gender roles and stuff not good and but but the questions that remain much less sort of like coherently answered are like well then what you know and so let's say we do away with all those repressive relationship forms of the past what do we replace them with and I that to me feels like quite still an open question and I don't just mean like in the sort of theoretical obviously I wasn't trying to write in either book I wasn't trying to read a tract on what relationships of the future or even the present moment should look like I'm just interested in exploring what they do look and feel like in the maybe in a cultural moment where certainties around relationship forms have deteriorated slightly having said that like I think you know and the rain Connells mother does remark to him at one point oh when I was your age we were either going out with someone are we weren't like and uncon replies well where did I come from them because actually and Connell has never known his father and the ring got pregnant when she was 17 and and I think his response is apt in one sense because really what he's saying is although the fictions in which we participated socially like the dominant fictions were that you were either in a monogamous relationship or you weren't that was never actually the reality of how people lived their lives that was how we said we were living our lives but it but it's not reflected in people's real experiences people's real experiences were a lot more ambiguous and uncertain than that a lot of the time the same way that ours are now except that now maybe the labels that we play something's reflect that ambiguity to a greater extent so I mean the thing clicked there has always been like you know monogamy has been a big ideal for a long time I don't know that it's been a big reality for a long time and so I'm interested in the yeah I'm interested in the slippage --is between the language that we use and what it actually describes I suppose all writers are interested in that right but I'm interested in it specifically when it comes to relationships yeah and I think and I'm loathe to ask you about normalcy because I am very aware that Sally's just come back from the States but she's been in a big pressure on I'm sure that everyone is asked about normalcy but it feels personal in terms of what you're talking about when you're talking about these traditional relationship structures and that they were kind of more present in name than in practice and it also feels like there is this concept of normalcy that runs through the novel and within the particular psychologies of Marianne and Colonel aware Marianne feels very much that she's not normal and that she's kind of debased in some way and Connell is sort of struggling to maintain his kind of facade of normalcy but there are lots of ways in which it feels like so much of what they're going through and who they are is actually very normal and is very relatable yeah and I feel like there's like there's an interesting play within the novel and what the concept of normal isn't almost just squashing it entirely yeah I mean there's a quote which I really ought to look up because I'm gonna I'm gonna mangle it really badly and paraphrase it but and in Margaret rabble's novel the Millstone and the narrator says at some point something like I'm sure the experiences that I was having were very ordinary experiences and if they weren't it wouldn't be worth writing about them and I remember being really struck by that when I read it because it felt so true to me and what I'm what I really love to read about and to write about our experiences that are in fact completely banal but that don't necessarily conform to our narratives about what normality is so like experiences that maybe feel weird while they're happening but are in fact like utterly run-of-the-mill because they happen to pretty much everyone and and I mean you're so right in that the two main characters I should say the title was a very late addition to the text actually the last piece of text that got attached to the novel was the title so it was not like I was started with that and then wrote from there and but I do think the two main characters have very different relationships to the idea of normality so as you say Marianne feels totally alienated from the idea of normality sometimes she seems to feel like she's a little bit better than normal people sometimes she actually thinks she's a lot worse than normal people and Connell I think at various points in the novel just desperately wants to attain what he sees as the status of normality that's like what he aspires to and when he falls short of it he becomes very anxious and so they do negotiate different relationships with the sort of the normal and but at the end of there they are both really just very normal and nothing that happens to them is exceptional at all everything that they undergo is just like mundane and but that's what I'm interested in I mean obviously my own life is also very mundane and and it interests me because I'm living it so I do I am interested in writing about like just regular stuff and and I don't know why that is I mean I think I'm interested in inhabiting the idea of normal and sort of trying to expand or subvert or question it from within it rather than saying rather than stepping excited and trying to observe it from there if that makes any sense I don't know if it does no I think I think it's I think it's also interesting because I think that so much of the so much of what they go through in the novel is them struggling with with what is normal so they kind of the sofa like falling in love sexual desire just the transition from school to university these are quite normal experiences but so much of the internal monologue is them struggling to kind of modulate either these internal feelings or these external experiences and that kind of close kind of psychological portraiture that you do really reminds me of people like like Sheila Hattie or Ben Lerner and that also sort of feels quite contemporary I don't know if like you I think that you like sheer as well yeah and Ben learners work very much yeah I mean I also just I mean I think that's an extremely flattering comparison and for me and I think and the reason that I feel that way is because I think that writers like Sheila heti like Ben Lerner they're really like changing the technology of the novel in a way that I feel like I'm not like I think they are really trying to work out a new way to write a novel and write a new kind of novel because you know cultural conditions and material conditions have changed so the ways that we respond to those in narrative or in art or whatever should change as well and and I believe in that I don't know that I've accomplished that though I think that my work is more formally conservative not button not by my intention and but I think like stepping back from what I've done and looking at it critically I think it is quite um it is quite like a novel you know it is quite like a story being - I'm like it has all the hallmarks of what you would call a novel so I think it's less I mean yeah I mean obviously I'm pleased to hear you make that comparison those are values that I admire and look up to very much and but I worry that what I what I'm doing isn't really as radical as what they're doing in terms of the form that I've so far managed to sort of make for myself I would like to just like just do something more formally challenging but I don't know how I feel like I'm quite limited by I feel like I'm not actually in all that much control of the creative process so that's something that you probably hear a lot from writers obviously I feel like I just have to write whatever comes into my head and so then when I step back from it I'm never sure about its relationship to sort of in the other part of my brain the philosophy of the novel and so that's that's a that's a relationship that I have to negotiate kind of for myself and but there are definitely contemporary writers who are doing really interesting and subversive things with form and and those are the writer's honestly who I'm most interested in reading I think I really yeah that's interesting but I think I think even if there aren't lookin these kind of formally overlaps there is very much this charting of like the movement of emotion and thought which I think happens in both business and also in your writing and I don't think that necessarily the formal thing is so important but there's this effect on the reader which is that you feel like these people think like you think for example and also this kind of quantity quality of almost like a of anxiety I think like these two characters are quite anxious characters in some way that feels representative of like a kind of contemporary mode like we live in a kind of like anxious yeah time I don't know if that's something that you if you feel like that relates to something in our contemporary moment or yeah definitely there is I mean thematically yes um anxiety and like precarity and ambiguity in relationships also I would say yeah I mean a range of thematic concerns and also I guess you would say those are writers who are working in what you might loosely call auto fiction yes and that's not a tradition that I'm directly engaged with here but at the same time though I don't think there's a whole lot of distance between me and my characters like I don't think that I'm standing behind my characters sort of judging them or like trying to point out their foibles for the reader or like winking at them behind the readers back as if to say oh aren't these people idiots not like you and me and I think I'm sort of just there with them and then and then often I am actually conflated with them in people's responses which I completely understand I think it's because I have made that decision to eliminate there's no or if there is it's not intentional ironic distance knowing me in these characters or very rarely and it's not something that I ever employ intentionally because it's not what I'm trying to do what I'm trying to do is just sort of um I wish I knew what I was trying to do I think what I'm trying to do is sort of just observe them and sort of be with them in a non-judgmental just sort of observational capacity letting it play out and then describing it sort of as neutrally as I can and just just laying it out and giving them all the tools that I have so not like I mean making them just as capable of analyzing their own emotional lives and their own interactions with others as I would be which is sometimes a fair amount and sometimes not very much but not trying to withhold anything from them just kind of giving giving it all to them and then by extension to the reader and so I think that's like that's probably a technique or an approach that I that I learned from reading like auto fiction and contemporary nonfiction or like works that that blur the boundary between fiction and nonfiction and that that in some sense I managed to take that and bring it back to what is in my case very conventional fictional narrative which none of it actually happened in that sense yeah I think that's so just because I actually read to normal people at the same time as reading outline like I read them on the same trip and I remember and I looked back at things I had written in time and I was kind of it and had wondered if anyone else had seen had felt like they were almost like opposites of each other like with that kind of a trilogy and I know that you've also written about the photo elegy and kind of that the protagonist is sort of kind of removed almost though she's almost absent you don't have really have a true sense of perspective it even said you have all these other characters swarming around her and you have them this confessional mode that they just seem to be in where they just sort of tell all about their lives and their experiences and then in your fiction instead we have this kind of like hyper subjectivity or mystic this kind of like incredible closeness and it's I found it interesting the way that it felt like those two modes are both sort of perhaps reaching for a sense of truth or reality but through from very different directions I don't know if they're if in terms of this adopting a kind of realist style if you are if you have a senses are you like questing for something that is like a portrait of something that is real and true do you have that as their because of us it's fiction so that's a good question yeah I mean I sometimes ask myself like what are my actual ideals when I'm writing I was in for a zine for my fiction um like when I'm going along in during the writing process I'm just asking myself does this work so like I'm putting two characters in a scene and they're having a conversation or they're having an argument and all I'm asking myself is does is this working if it's working I keep on writing it and then if it's not I just I do something different so I take someone out of the room or put something else in or make them have a different kind of conversation and always answering the question of whether it works on the page and then obviously the really interesting question is what do I mean by it works like what is that mm-hmm do I mean that it feels true like do I mean that it conforms to a sense of reality or plausibility but I don't really think that that's all I mean because it's possible to write a very plausible scene that is extremely boring to read um and that for me wouldn't be something I would say works so it can't just be lifelike in a limited sense and it has to have for me it has to have like a kind of energy but like what is that energy I'm now just replacing the word works with a different word that I also haven't defined and it just has to feel I guess part of it is and I think this is another question that I asked myself is I have to feel as though there's something happening or unfolding there's some kind of change or development that I'm watching in process it doesn't have to be big it doesn't have to be like people's entire lives are in the balance obviously the stakes in my novels are incredibly low and but it has to be something something has to be changing we're developing in some way um and I'm interested in why because it's not like in the novelists like like in outline a novel I admire very very much Rachel costs novel and there isn't necessarily a sense that things are changing Road for developing in that way and yet it definitely works whatever that means so I don't know why I'm so attached to the particular values that I that I bring and it's it's purely kind of intuition and instinct and I wonder like is there is it even valuable to try and break down what that instinct is telling me I don't know and but it is it's definitely an interesting question those are just the sort of like instinctive values that I bring when I'm in the writing process and there are obviously culturally conditioned they're you know they're there I developed them through reading novels so it's always possible that they could change yeah I think that it's interesting to hear you talk about this what feels like quite an intuitive way of writing because you also obviously are there while you're following your characters you're following your narrative there but you have ideas and politics and beliefs outside of your craft and the way that you have developed your a particular technique in craft and I'm quite interested in the way that those two things interact like you're a well-known Marxist I mean yes I'm interested in how your politics interacts with your with your fiction right yeah I mean for me it's definitely another one of the questions that kind of dogs me and my work I'm I think obviously what I'm doing is not sort of straightforwardly didactic and not really didactic at all and if I wanted to convince people to share my ideology I would just write a panther called how to share my ideology describing all the stuff that I believe and that's obviously not what I've done and I think so then it's oh then it raises a question which for me is interesting which is like what is it to write a socialist novel and or like a Marxist novel feminist novel whatever that might be um because it's obviously not necessarily with the intention or at least not for me of convincing people who come to read the novel to share that particular framework I suppose it's just being attentive to the way that the world is structured through the lens of those ideological frameworks and that's like as a Marxist I think that class is sort of the structuring principle of our social life so then when it comes to writing a novel of course I have to be attentive to the way that class structures social life otherwise I'm not writing about the world that we really inhabit and I don't give myself credit for doing it like really well or anything and but just trying to do it is obviously part of and the sort of tasks that I set myself to at least be sensitive to an attentive to and to try to observe the effects of those broad systems like class like gender and on the very minut sort of again low stakes small-scale interactions between the characters and because otherwise that my characters would just be sort of floating and void like if they didn't have and flat positions within a class system if they didn't have positions within a gender system they wouldn't be like real characters as I understand them because we live in a world that is structured by those systems so it's about an openness to observing those principles in action but not necessarily making any conclusions about them like I'm not writing this novel to show that the patriarchy is bad I'm just writing it with a with an attempt at openness and when it comes to describing how that system if you want to call it the patriarchy actually works in the lives of women and men and yeah so I think but it's not necessarily that I'm happy with that answer I think that that's just sort of a description of the approach that I've used so far but I feel like it's very tenderly done within the novel so when you have Connell getting his scholarship for example and the way that he described in like a very real sense the material effect that that will have on his life I found that like incredibly like moving and but then it also hit something it feels that you have like fun with it as well like I mean you have his descriptions of everyone who's being like quite posh that they're not actually reading any of their books you'd have these very sharp occasions of it for example in conversations friends when Francis is emailing Melissa at the end and she says you know I wasn't trying to I wasn't trying to trash all I first trying to steal it and you get this sense of the way that the class dynamics are driving the characters it's not just that the forces are sort of acting inflicting things on them but they condition them in some way and I found that quite interesting that like there you have this mix of forces which is partly that human desires then partly these external forces yeah and I mean it's trying to observe the interactions between the two and always also trying to observe the relationship between the individual and the category or the class that they belong to because like when I'm writing say Mariana in this book I'm not trying to write about like women and stuff that women go through like I'm not trying to write about her as an example of womanhood or a young womanhood or young Irish womanhood like that doesn't it doesn't interest me to do that at all what interests me is to have this person in this particular set of relationships in which she finds herself within her family within her school and so on and and to watch her navigate those things with with the sensitivity to these sort of what is sort of irreducibly individual about her that's not that can't just be explained by the interaction of the forces that you described but also observing how those forces and shape and condition her responses to things so I mean I'm always like I'm always sort of cautious of having the characters be seen like because I try to pay attention to systems like class and gender that the characters will be seen as like representatives of their class or gender and which is not the kind of thing that I'm interested in it's not like a parable where Mary Ann represents womanhood or anything and boss of course I also want to observe and process how it feels for her just as this just as the strange irreducible individual person that she is to be caught in the matrix of all these operations of power yeah and something else that you've also I feel like you kind of have that that that lens is within the fiction but it's something also that you've spoken about outside of that within the industry so you you're the book whiz or stones book of the year last year and in your speech you thanked the booksellers but also you thanked people in the wire houses delivery drivers it feels like you also have this interaction with the book as like a as a product like the pub publishing is a trade I don't know how as the book becomes more successful does your relationship to it as a product does that change or yeah I mean and I feel somewhat conflicted and about my participation in the system like of publishing and because you know as you and I know it's a profit-making industry I am also and I don't think that that and have been very open about the fact that I don't think that that is a good way to produce a healthy creative or artistic culture I don't think that in terms of and producing worthwhile challenging interesting works of art I don't think the profit making model is good and I also think that it has all these ethical problems right that I would identify as and from a Marxist perspective and that at every point in the in the chain of production there are sort of like there is an ethical crisis really and so I think it's unhealthy for the Arts I think it's unhealthy for our society generally and I think capitalism in total is killing the planet so I yeah I mean so then to what degree am i participating in this system I don't know and you know I act I actually don't know and and so I mean I'm obviously in a position where I can say that I believe those things but since I can say that I believe them and there are no consequences we can assume that my saying that doesn't actually make a difference to anyone and because if it did no I wouldn't just be allowed to come out and say it I mean if it actually threatened the system that I'm talking about as in the system of of profit-making and it wouldn't be it couldn't be so easily accommodated within that system so I mean you can have these gestures of resistance but ultimately those gestures are all in service of selling this which costs money and and I don't really I feel very uncomfortable with that and you know yeah I don't know what the answer is I don't know what I'm sort of artists writers critics or whatever can do outside the system which seems so capable of accommodating absolutely every gesture of resistance to it I mean I think that that's that's like a quite fundamental question isn't it but I mean it also seems like it's it's almost like a question that is the answer is that it's impossible okay is impossible to have something that would function outside the capitalist system because the cattle system is all in companies every and everything can be kind turned into a profit and everything can become a has like a currency of value so even beyond the material value of the book there's a fantastic scene in normal people were economists at the reading and he's talking about the books becoming units of cultural capital for individuals that they are these like bourgeois class signifies and yet you right yeah and yet you want people to read your books do you I know I do yeah I mean I'm pleased that people are reading them and I find that I do find that kind of touching on a personal level yeah I mean yeah so for those of you who haven't read it there's this scene where one of the protagonists goes to a literary reading it's not really reading like this it's in a college in a university and but in other ways this may be a little bit similar and um someone introduces the rider the rider gets up and reads and then I think there's a Q&A and and connell who's a university student at the time the fields that the entire thing is sort of bourgeois pantomime and that the that the writer has been completely captured by the elitist academic institution and that the writing has essentially become a way for people to bond over their superior class status together um and I think he like I'm writing that as a novelist not as a polemicist I didn't that as a novelist because connell the individual character has come from working-class background he's moved from a small town and he goes to the most elitist university in Ireland and he feels very alienated and and shot out from a lot of what he sees there and that process of alienation interested me as a novelist as someone who is interested in his in his psychology and in the development of his relationships that process interested me so it wasn't like I felt I was sort of shoehorning in my own personal criticism of literary readings and although certainly I've experienced a lot of the same feelings that he had then and it was that it felt like it felt like something that was worthwhile within the text of the novel and if it hadn't worked I wouldn't have put it in so it's not like my dedication to you know like insert the piece of ideology in the book overrode my instincts it's that I think it emerged from the novel form and that's as much of a criticism of me really because I'm not capable of doing anything that the novel can't make room for and I think the novel made room for that for that criticism of the novel if you want to call it that and which shows that the novel is a very capacious genre really and but yeah I mean I think it you know I was interested more when I was writing that I was interested more in how Connell felt and then I was in articulating my own critique I have plenty of spaces where I can do that yeah I want to I don't need to hide them in my novel and little did I know that meant that a lot more people would end up reading it but I didn't know that at the time and yeah I just felt like it worked and and so that was why it ended up in there and I think that that speaks to my sort of the question that I'm always asking myself about the relationship between my politics on the one hand and the stories that I'm trying to tell in my books and but I think this story's perhaps that you are trying to tell there is something within them that is also speaking about the human condition and is also speaking about the way we live now in terms of interdependence and I feel like that is a very meaningful story to tell if we're living in this time of like neoliberal and division or this kind of thing and you've said that you hate individualism that to tell this story of the way that people are always connected that there are always there are always different forms of codependency and it is impossible for us to just be the single individual units that feels like quite powerful idea to me well thank you and but I also think if that was if that was the idea that I were trying to get across again I would just write like an essay or a book like exploring the idea of interdependence II in a non-fictional way like talking through my sort of I don't know philosophical approach or whatever but instead I wrote a novel and I wasn't writing the novel to try and illustrate a message or even to dramatize a principle sometimes I wonder if I was trying to dramatize the principle that people can change one another that is sort of like the mission statement of the book and maybe it does maybe the book does actually kind of dramatize that and but I hope does so in a way that's open to the problematics of it as well yes and yeah but I I mean I do I do write about interdependence II I do try to write in a way that's um that sort of recognizes the myths the stories that we tell ourselves about our own individual identities and how those stories don't always quite match up with the way that we feel and the way that we live our everyday lives and but still at the end of the day I'm writing I'm just writing stories I'm not trying to make a point or convince anyone of anything and um and I don't I don't believe in a lot of what we're a lot of the present sort of dominant discourse about by novels and narrative fiction generally as being sort of a way of creating empathy I don't know that I really believe that and I think it would be nice to assure ourselves as writers that everything we do no matter what it's saying has a great political purpose because it teaches people to love one another and that would be really nice I don't know I don't know that I I don't think that it's true and I'm I also think that the political value of the concept of empathy is a little bit nebulous for me and you know I'm interested in structures and systems from a political point of view I'm not necessarily interested in I'm very interested in compassion and empathy but not necessarily from a political systemic point of view so I think I'm sceptical of a lot of the claims made for literature in those contexts and I don't want to sort of uncritically participate in those claims either I mean obviously I am someone who loves books and but I I mean I think there is a way of giving ourselves too much credit for loving books you know and take it like a sort of overstating and what we're really doing by reading books or writing them and so I think maybe I've become a little bit more inclined to limit my claims for what books can do and just because it just because maybe of an anxiety of sort of over selling the claim and for literature as an agent of social change yeah I mean I think that's is probably why something to be circumspect I think certain narratives around empathy and also representation can sometimes feel quite thin because what is the actual effect and like a material sense in the world so I mean I mean I agree with you but I wonder if we might talk a little bit about what you're writing now so you just had a story published in The New Yorker and I've seen an announcement for a fellowship which has has a working title for your next book in which is beautiful world where are you I wonder if you at all want to talk about that yeah it's um it's early days with that one and I'm trying to write a new novel um and I have sort of you know we've been talking about dynamic and characters so I have sort of four characters which means however many dynamics and and that for me is interesting and and it's fun to move the pieces around the board at the early stage and what I have found in the process of trying to write this and again it's still very early on and it may not end up actually being a novel and is that unlike the first two and with those with those books as they eventually became and kind of the first thing that arrived was the like voice the way of telling the story so like when when I started writing conversations with Franz friends I had Francis's voice in my head straightaway and the first few paragraphs that I wrote of that book were like as they are now pretty much exactly the same without a sentence change even the first few pages it's really exactly the same because I knew how she spoke in in terms of her narrative voice and then I kind of worked from there in terms of the stuff that I was interested in the dynamics and the themes and and concerns and similarly then when I when it came time to write this you know I've described how I met these characters in different situations but when I went to write about their school lives I fell very naturally into this close third-person narrative style alternating between them that all kind of just came like and like it just a natural it was like I knew what story I wanted to tell and it was just a natural way that it occurred to me to tell us and with the thing that I'm trying to write now I've had a much longer process of trying to work out how do I tell the story of these people whose perspective do I tell it from and why and how so and and like and again questions about when in their lives I want to meet them like where does the real story of their dynamic begin and so all of those questions have made this a much more a much slower process I think the the substance of the idea is similar to stuff I've worked on before in terms of it's it's about intimacy it's about love and complex relationships and my kind of thing and but in terms of what I'm trying to do with tone perspective or form it hasn't come quite as naturally to me and sometimes that makes me feel like it's just not gonna work and maybe it won't and and sometimes it makes me feel like maybe I'm what I'm trying to do is to find a way that's slightly less formally constrained than the first two have been and not a whole lot in the sense that I'm still very much working with scenes and and stuff and and and the previous two books are very much structured around scenes so I think a lot of that will remain but and but trying to find asking myself questions about what narrative is and what is like what is tone and what is perspective who is actually telling this story and stuff like that not that I didn't ask myself those questions before but I just answered them very early on in the process and moved on whereas now they've taken up a lot more of my thinking time around this checked em but I've really enjoyed I'm really enjoying it I'm enjoying spending time with these characters and and that for me is like that's all I need if I can enjoy being with the characters then ever all the other difficulties will solve themselves and I'll just spend as much time with them as I can write as much about them as I can and and you know bring them into different scenes bring them in bring them into different European countries I do enjoy doing math and and then you know see what they get up to over there and and then that and they probably will actually do that again and this one two and three if there is a next one and so yeah I mean I think that's sort of loosely what I'm trying to do and then also I guess and probably weren't expecting this long I guess that's since I started writing this in 2015 and since then I don't want to put sort of I don't want to get too much into this sort of global political crisis but I have become much more aware of a sort of global political crisis and and much more Keaney aware I think just as a just as my own totally personal individual thing much more keenly aware of this sort of environmental crisis and the what seems now like the inevitability of and some kind of environmental collapse if not outright civilizational collapse although personally I think that's very likely and radical shifts in the way that we live and so like what is it what is it to write a novel on what feels like the precipice of that moment and like what is the novel for at a moment like that and and I guess although I was certainly critical social systems in at the time when I was writing these books I didn't feel as convinced of or as frightened about what I now see as the extreme likelihood of full civilizational collapse and and so I guess those ideas and those anxieties are definitely informing the substance all than I think my approach to the the thing that I'm working on now whether it turns out to be a novel or not I don't know and I think that we're already excited about that thank you I don't me speak on behalf of everyone but I think that we'll have to hand it over to questions now so if there are people that have been thinking of their questions building them up in their minds you can raise your hands into the air Claire is here with a microphone she will come towards you raise them home so we've got one person over here and to you you work away yeah hi thank you very much thank you um I'm interested in your approach to the mechanics of storytelling you've spoken quite a lot about experimenting with settings dropping cards into different places where our dynamics does that comment irritably or did you pick up various kind of experimental techniques along the way or is it all in your imagination - how does that work yeah that's that's a really good question thank you and I think it's it's definitely I've sort of developed my taste for a what a story should be just by reading other novels and by like watching films and stuff and developing a sense of like how narrative works and then just getting like a little feel for it and then and then so so then that that defines what what I'm trying to do so what I'm trying to do is tell a story in a way that feels like narrative Lee right whatever that means and and and that has been shaped by my sort of engagement with like cultural traditions so then within that I guess I have I just have like an intuitive sense of things like not wanting to repeat the same setting too many times so like if I'm having my characters the golf to not be working with to two particular characters and following the development of their relationship in some way which a lot of the time will be there having conversations about their relationship together so how do I kind of like vary that up and make it a bit more interesting on the page they can't have all their conversations in bed just gets like boring and repetitive to read so and also they look at the ceiling too much don't read my books checking how often they look at the ceiling cuz they do it a lot and but so so then it's like I'm I can know and I can feel when that's happening when that's getting repetitive and then I think okay well let's pull them out make them go to a book launch if it's conversations of friends or make them go to a like a Deb's fundraiser in normal people put them in a different social setting put them around people so make them be around each other's friends maybe their friends don't know that there's something going on usually in my novels that has been the case so and things like that yeah I tend to just have a feeling for wanting variety in the mechanics of the story and then using particular techniques to attain that variety and obviously one of the techniques that I've used twice so far and potentially three times is making my characters go on holidays together and like that can be a nice change of scenery because and the novels that so far have been set in Dublin and and Dublin for me has been a very fruitful setting I enjoy writing about it very much and but it is also like limited by certain geographical and material sacks so it can be nice to take them out of that and put them somewhere sunny for instance and so it's it's generally just like I have an instinct for what I want in terms of the variety that I'm trying to achieve in terms of the directions that I'm trying to push the relationship in and then I sort of feel like I'm scrolling in my mind through different options for where the characters can meet or run into each other or em and then often where they end up meeting and will determine a lot of the content of what they end up saying to one another so it's like an interesting kind of little experiment for me having said all that night we'll just add one more thing most of what I write I delete so most of the time when I come up with an idea for where to put my characters or what to have them say to each other it's not good and I delete it and I go it goes into my deleted scenes file and and in both cases for this book and for the last book the deleted scenes files were longer than the book so my experiments it's like trial and error but emphasis on error so that's sort of my my like method and then very much feeling my way through for what works yeah thank you thanks um I guess for me the the reason I swallowed your books whole like I think a lot of people have is that they sing with life what with all of whatever you've both been talking about for me that's what was most compelling they just they were alive and just I want ask a question about the you you you talked about formal constraints that you feel you're still within which to me especially the one that just came out in paperback normal people it didn't seem formal at all that's besides that incredibly close third person miss the fact that it's so much in present tense and also without speech marks I think to me how did you arrive at that and why did you why did that seem like the way you wanted to write that book yeah well and that's thank you that's that's another very good question I dispensed with speech marks quite some time ago so there's no speech marks in the first novel either I don't know that I've ever published fiction that did have them no I definitely haven't and I used to use dashes to introduce dialogue and then shortly before I sent them I think it was shortly before I sent the manuscript of conversations his friends to my agent Tracy and I did like command s on the file and deleted all of the long - as I had been using just took them out completely and then reread it and thought yeah it's fine I don't it's like it's perfectly clear when the characters are speaking to each other no I wasn't confused so and so I just decided to leave them out I guess because a lot of my work is dialogue and for me speech marks just looked intrusive on the page because they're so often there'll be like pages and pages of dialogue and this I didn't like how the speech marks looked but then it was also about and not wanting to sort of seal the dialogue off from the like wanting the dialogue to take a sort of natural kind of flowing pace with the with the the the text of the narrative itself the body of the prose itself so I think that was what sort of led me to make that decision in terms of why I wrote it in present tense that was because I was using a lot of flashbacks and it's a lot easier if you're putting the flashbacks in past tense then you can put your main body of your narrative in present tense and the flow between them is really easy if I had written it all in past tense then I would have had to see the flashbacks in like past participle and that gets like really ugly and complicated to read after just a few sentences so honestly it was a very mechanistic decision it wasn't particularly like creative it was just like here's what I want here's what I want to have happened between these characters and here's how I want to present what has happened now how can I make the individual sentences as sort of smooth and unobtrusive as I can and they think for me the the the answer to that was put it in present tense have the plan have the flashbacks take place in the past don't use any speech marks don't use things like italics and stuff like that insofar as possible just present the text plainly to the reader and and that felt to me like the right way to tell the story that I wanted to tell and like they're just kind of in a way minor stylistic choices but I guess they spoke to what I was trying to do which was to make myself my own presence as the author sort of as unobtrusive as I could and just allow the story of the characters to be dominant in the in the text if that makes sense hi so I have two questions cuz I'm obsessed with you so normal he will was really personal to me when I read it and like it's a book I like to spoke really deeply to me so I guess my first question is that I mean I guess might one of my favorite parts about reading and writing is that through writing you sort of discover things as you go along and you discover things about yourself and other people so I guess my first question is did you learn anything about yourself or did you any learn anything about kind of life generally from writing normal people and then my second question is the ending of the novel is amazing and I love rereading it when I'm having a shitty day so I was and I felt like the stuff with the potted plant at the end of the novel and people changing one another it felt kind of like the mission statement of the book and sort of like kind of the philosophical kind of full circle of the book so I was wondering if that was intentional and also kind of the ending is quite open-ended in many senses because there's no decision really made at the end so I was wondering how you came about writing the ending as well those are two questions yeah sure so I'll go the second question first and then if I can still remember the first question I'll answer afterwards and so the second question is about the ending how I came to write the ending of that book and so I've talked a little bit about my trial and error process and and often I find what happens is I'll send my characters like in the wrong direction and then I'll hit an obstacle and then my job is to see how far I have to rewind the sort of path they've gone down and before I can meet them again and send them down a different path so sometimes I'll write like I'll have them make a decision in Chapter three and then I'll get to chapter eight and then I'll realize oh it's what happened in Chapter three that's wrong that's why I'm having the problem I'm having now chapters 4 5 6 etc seemed fine on the surface but in fact chapter 3 had created a structural issue that needs to be resolved so 20,000 words are gone I'm back to chapter 3 which is really quite an early chapter and and that happened a lot and that happened a lot in the writing of normal people and and in conversations with friends as well and so the ending was for that reason really the last thing that I wrote because when I got there I didn't have anymore or couldn't see any more structural issues remaining to be resolved it felt like I brought the characters to the point that I wanted to get them to and without taking any wrong turns along the way so it was when I wrote that that I knew I had sort of finished my novel of course there was work we don't editorial work and but the but the body of the novel itself and the story that told was complete at that point and for me and I and I did and it is a no it is a kind of an open ending certainly in terms of the relationship between these characters I think it's almost an entirely open ending we don't know what's what what the future holds for that relationship and but but I think what we do know is that it has had some degree of a formative effect on both of them and I suppose as you point out that's kind of and that's the principle that the novel is dramatizing like I was saying earlier and the the effect of this relationship the formative effect on these two people for the rest of their lives and is I think hopefully feels true by the time you get to the end of the book like it's all very well to say oh people can have a profound effect on one another but to actually see that in process between two people who feel real and is something different I think whether I accomplished that I don't know but I think that's what I was trying to kind of get out to do and in that in that ending and the yeah and the image of them being plants in the same soil that yeah that's all for me like kind of through a central image of the book really in a way and and then your first question was did I learn anything new about myself while writing it yeah well when I wrote the first book I learned that I could write a book and very important lesson as it turns out and and I really took that with me into the writing of this one and and then I learned I could write a second one so I'm still waiting to see if I learn the lesson that I can also write a third and but yeah I think it's funny like I'm sure I'm sure that I have changed a lot as a person since I wrote those books but it's difficult to see from what feels like still quite a close vantage point conversations with friends only came out two years ago which is relatively recently and so it's difficult I think for me to get a to get a feel for and what those books have done to me as a person and but yeah but thank you for asking and there's something also in the chronology of how you wrote these books in that you wrote normal people sound that it went in a drawer and no no wait so and then but then you wrote you started working on normal and then conversations yeah yeah so it's where both of the books written by the time conversations came out no no I finished normal people like five four months after the publication of conversations with friends so conversations and friends came out when I had like a good bit of normal people John it was nearly ready but it wasn't quite ready and then I kept working on it through the whole publication thing which was good and and then I mean it was good for me to have something going on in my own brain that and when I had a book coming out I would really recommend that and if anyone does have one and and so then it was the October of that year that conversations with that normal people was finished and so it meant that quite a lot in the bulk of the work was already done before I had any books published at all and that is true and that would that will that will regrettably never be the same again so here we are but it's interesting cuz I was that Patricia Lockwood piece which I mean I know you didn't invent Patricia as well which is how do we right now and there's this beautiful bit towards the end when she writes about the purity of attention in that space when you're writing before any book has been published yeah I love that I love that I say loves that paragraph yeah it's very beautiful I wonder if there's like if there's a way that you're thinking about those ideas you're going into this third book now I'm writing it after you've had these two books come out into the world and I'm sorry and then we'll get back to questions yeah I mean certainly I am having to think about that um and it's something that in many ways I wish I wasn't thinking about because and because it's it's created something of a gap between my experiences and what I would call normal experiences and the whole thing of having a book camed and then having another book come out is like something of an unusual experience and and so it means that I feel myself to be a little bit and at odds with sort of like yeah I mean I don't know I guess I feel worried that it has shaped my my life my everyday life and my experience of the texture of life to the extent that I now want to write about that and I don't know that I I mean I want to write about it because it's that's how I make sense of my life is by writing not literally about the things that happen to me but in some way sort of obliquely about the things that happened to me and putting them through some process and having them come out as fiction and so I think it's the base unfortunate in a way and I mean it's hugely fortunate in almost every other way but I do kind of worry about it what it means for my work because I'm now aware of the fact that these books exist out in the world and are discussed in particular terms and ways by other people and that I'm that I'm running the risk of situating my own work that I'm literally doing on my laptop in that kind of cultural conversation that's going on and I don't want that to happen at all so yeah I mean there are little problems like that but we'll get over there good good to hear it hi you spoken a lot about individualism and the relationships between people for you it's all about how they change each other and they unfold I was wondering in a perhaps ambiguous may be a personal term what is your rapport and how with your own characters how does that unfold obviously they're your babies I presume you've created them they're beautiful flawed marvelous characters but and what is it for you that comes from writing these characters and what relationship do you have with them do you have a favorite you know how involved are you in the characters or is it more about the story and them as a unit yeah thank you for that question and it's a bit of a it's something that I asked myself and the answer is slightly disturbing to me in the sense that I believe that I am my characters and I think that they are all to some extent refractions of and/or angles on my own psychology and my experiences of life I know that while I was writing from their perspectives I was drawing very deeply on my not my experiences but on my feelings my impulses and like my thoughts and I felt incredibly close to them to Francis in the first book and to both of the protagonists in this book I felt like that I was them that's a disturbing answer because there is a love story between them and what the hell like what is that about that's really strange I don't know like why why am I trying to dramatize a love story between two characters who are in fact both psychological projections of myself who would do that it's just weird and I so I still haven't figured it out am I in love with them or are they me or both and so I don't I don't know I feel like a strong degree of affection for them and maybe that's the kind of affection of healthy self-esteem um or maybe I exaggerated the extent to which they are myself because that's how it feels when I'm writing about them like when I'm inhabited by carnal brain or Marianne's brain it helps me to feel oh this is actually just me and of course it's not a lot of things happen to them and a lot of the things that they do the behaviors that they act out are not things but I either have ever done or honestly would ever do and so they're not really me so so maybe it's just that I need to tell myself that or that that's the narrative that makes most sense to me when I'm writing about them and that actually they are sort of totally external to myself and that the kind of affection that I feel for them is actually like a borderline interpersonal but of course they don't exist so that's complicated too and but yeah I mean you've really got me there I don't know why I don't know what the answer is but thank you for asking I know I know so we've got time for just one more question so oh and there are loads so okay hi what's the significance of illness in your work I notice you write about it quite a lot sorry yeah thank you for that question and I do write about illness I do write about and sort of physical pain and suffering as well and yeah and what is the significance of it I think for me I tend to UM I tend to want to push my characters into situations that they feel sort of uncomfortable in or that they feel that the boundaries of their control over the situation are being tested and one of the ways that I do this and the way that's probably most key to the to the narrative structures of the books is bisexual through sexual desire so my characters feel that they lose control of themselves and of and of their relationships and of their social positions when they're overwhelmed by what they feel to be sort of uncontrollable and like uncontrollably strong desire for another person and and then the other way that I do is is is through observing what it feels like for them to experience pain suffering and illness that they have no control over so and sometimes this takes the form of sort of like mental illness suffering sometimes it's physical illness in the first novel France has suffered from endometriosis and sometimes the characters have sort of unspecified on healthy relationships with food and so I think it's about trying to UM see what it feels like for these characters not to be in control and why is that interesting to me I guess it's it's partly to do with my skepticism of agency and I'm really skeptical of individual autonomy I'm much more interested about what happens to us when our into autonomy fails than I am about the successful exercise of autonomy and and so for that reason and illness is is something that I return to and then interests me from that perspective because it doesn't allow us the comforting myths that we are in fact in control of our own destinies right most often Alyssa's just visited on us and from outside nothing that we can do about us and and all we can try to determine is our sort of response to it and how we negotiate it with ourselves and with the people around us so I think that's what it is I think it's almost like it's the flip side of the of my interest in desire is my interest in sort of pain and in fact actually the two can often be related and in the end the stuff that I've done so far and so yeah I think you've definitely identified a central thematic concern there thank you for your question well sorry thank you so much if it you've been so expansive and so generous with everyone's questions and I certainly feel like I've learned a lot about your work and it was very exciting to hear about the next book which we are all hot be awaiting so it can't come soon enough thank you [Applause] you