I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately and, as always, I find that after a long, intense spell of being immersed in writing fiction I need a complete break.
This break tends to be baking (yum! everyone benefits!), gardening (nice looking sunflowers growing happily!) and, after a few days of being brought from mind to body, reading.
Photograph of five books: Trading Time by Owen Martin, Let me tell you what I mean by Joan Didion, The Unlimited Dream Company JG Ballard, The End Of The World is a Cul De Sac by Louise Kennedy, Yours ‘Til Hell Freezes: Kevin Barry by Síofra O’Donovan.
I’m enjoying the other world immersion and the mix of genres I’ve selected. I am enjoying, to quote Roland Barthes
the change in the level of perception…both reading and writing are redefined together.
I am also looking forward to my next few Writers Chat interviews which are based on reading some of the books in the photograph above.
Whatever you are reading – be it book, newspaper, online, hardcopy, paperback, on screen – after immersing yourself in another world, relish the change in your perception of your world.
Lisa, Welcome back to my Writers Chat Series. We’re here to chat about your second novel Bright Burning Things (Bloomsbury: London, 2021) which Lisa McInerney has so accurately described as ‘a meticulous portrait of a life unravelling’.
Bright Burning Things – Cover Image
SG: Let’s start with Sonya’s narrative voice. It’s through her – often unreliable – lens that we encounter those around her: her son Tommy, her father, Lara, David – as well as the unfolding of her story. Tell us about developing a narrative voice so strong that it literally pulls the reader along, turning page-after-page.
LH: Thank you for saying that. Honestly, I didn’t know whether she would just turn people off (although I fell in love with her writing her). She’s so unfiltered and raw and angry and damaged and full of contradictory feelings…and intoxicated so much of the time that I felt like I was as out of control as she was when I was writing it. I went back to my younger, wilder, drinking days and also my acting days. I let her do all the talking. It’s a bit like possession when a character like that grabs hold of you. Method-writing in a way. I improvise when I write and like to let myself be surprised by my characters. Sonya shocked me as much as I imagine a character ever could. And that has to be a good thing, right?
SG: I think it really is a good thing – it meant the story came as much from delving into her character as mining from your creative self and the authenticity shows in the wonderful flow. The title Bright Burning Things is perfect for what it represents and how it encompasses both Sonya and Tommy – living itself, even. Did this come early or late in the process?
LH: The title changed at the very last minute. I love it now. Originally it was called OVERSPILL and stayed that way for a long time in the process, as it really is a study in intergenerational trauma and addiction. I prefer Bright Burning Things though as it’s more suggestive and allegorical in a way. The imagery of fire burns bright from the first chapter to the last – all unconscious on my part.
SG: I love when that happens – the wonderful symbols that can emerge from the process and when they work so well as they do here.
You deftly capture the strains that can exist between parents and children – in both Sonya and Tommy’s relationship but also Sonya and her dad. The strain, I felt, was also about identity – drinker, actress, mother, daughter, lover – as much as expressing emotion, as she says when her father praises her “Emotion has finally caught up with him, taken residence inside him – I wonder if this is a sign of him getting old.” Can you talk a little bit about that?
LH: Sonya’s relationship with her father and with her own self are at a moment of high tension when we meet them. As you so rightly observe, Sonya is in the grip of an identity crisis. Who is she really? She doesn’t feel a sense of belonging with her father and stepmother, she has lost her former career and she has been thrust into the role of mother with no memory of her own. I wanted to be with a complex character for whom the classic tale of recovery just won’t fit. I think Sonya faces up to all these parts of herself during the course of the novel, including unresolved grief from her childhood. She is finding some way towards managing her extreme emotions herself. Interesting how little emotion her father shows and how much she acts out of this. A cry for attention, perhaps?
SG: Much of Sonya’s troubles stem from her addiction to alcohol which exacerbates the intensity of her sensory experience in the world – including blacking out, neglecting her son and dog, but also caring too much – she worries about the suffering of animals who died to put food on our plate, and at during rehab her “night-times [are] filled with the ghosts of the orphaned children who once lived within these walls, still trapped.” Can you talk about how the world for Sonya, is “too much” but also how she cares “too much”?
LH: Yes, this heightened sensory experience is almost hallucinogenic at times for her. I think most of us know the ‘horrors’ of a bad hangover. She is either permanently intoxicated or hungover when we meet her. Being in the grip of addiction has a surreal, hyper saturated quality to it, both for the person suffering the addiction and for those around them. She has manic states that come about because she doesn’t eat properly, and her blood sugar levels are all over the place. Alcohol, obviously, plays a huge part in this. Everything is extreme with Sonya and when her acting career is removed from her life, she has nowhere to channel these impulses. She feels everything too intensely, including animal suffering, which is something her mind attaches to.
SG: That’s interesting the way you phrase that – as something her mind attaches to, part of what’s happening to her mind and body as opposed to a rational, conscious or ethical choice.
Sonya is an actress and in times of stress, she remembers roles she played – dancing in “an avant-garde production of Pride and Prejudice…wearing a corset, a crinoline-style dress, shot silk, pale blue, and suspenders” whereas now – after rehab – her “new character is called ‘Ms Sanity’ and Sanity has to hide her truth at all costs, Sanity has to smile and suppress, Sanity has to present a neatly packaged front to the world.” It struck me that her experience of the world revolves around controlling the experience she gives her ‘audience’, a skill which helps her assert herself in the face of subtle coercive control from the men in her life. Can you speak about this theme in the novel?
LH: That’s a really interesting observation, but not what I had intended! I had wanted her moment of reckoning with David, who is a coercive controlling man, to be devoid of artifice on her part, and a time where she accesses her authentic self. I feel by the end of the novel she has found her true voice somewhat and doesn’t feel the need to hide behind masks and roles. I think she even refers to this herself: ‘I find the voice I wish I could have found with my father…’ There is a clarity and a strength to her at that moment she asks David to leave. She is not in conflict with herself and knows who she is. You are right that she is very aware of the power she exerts as an actress, but in rehab she accesses some part of her that is real, for the very first time. This is an important step for her in becoming the strong woman and mother she is meant to be.
SG: I think we are speaking here about the same thing – she has found her authentic self but she knows how to use her skills for her own advantage now. I loved the imagery associated with Sonya’s mother who it seems to me, was not unlike Sonya – the Catherine wheel, the joy of life itself – the opposite to her father’s way of living – hiding truths, not speaking of darkness – and I wondered if (and from the last line of the novel “Silence falls like a velvet curtain. Swish”) we will meet Sonya again.
LH: I feel like we’ve had enough of Sonya (or I have) for now. I love books that end on a note of ambiguity, of promise, providing a talking point for the reader. Will she manage her impulses, will she be a safe mother for Tommy, will she be safe for herself? The final line was harkening back to her actress self. I think I wanted to suggest that all parts of her could come to bear and that she could be a mother and an actress. That it really was ok to be herself, that she didn’t need to reject any part of herself. In fact, I wanted the final note to be a celebration of all that she is: extreme, electric, talented, colourful, loving, maddening!
SG:And the final note is all that because Sonya is all that – right down to the choice of the last word “swish”.
Thank you so much for such generous and insightful answers, Lisa. We’ll finish off with some fun questions:
If you had to choose – Herbie or Marmie? Herbie was one of my all -time favourite characters to write. I am dog mad.
Do you write with or without music? Both, depending on my mood and how loud my neighbours are!
Coffee or tea? Tea all the way.
What are you reading now?In The Dark by Anamaria Crowe which is being published by Turas Press in May 2021. It is an extraordinarily beautiful and moving novel about life and love during Franco’s war-time Spain. The language is lyrical and mesmerising and I am enthralled.
Bright Burning Things Advance Copy (Love the lime green colour!)
Thank you to Bloomsbury and Cormac Kinsella for sending me an advance copy of the stunning Bright Burning Things (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Purchase Bright Burning Things here and keep up with Lisa on Twitter @LisaSHarding.
Ethel, welcome back to my Writers Chat Series. This time we’re here to discuss your short story collection In The Event of Contact.
ER: I’m delighted to be back, thank you, Shauna. This is my first interview for In the Event of Contact and I’m so grateful for your enthusiastic response.
Cover of “In The Event of Contact” by Ethel Rohan
I’m honoured to learn that this is your first interview about this collection, which won the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and is due to be published in Spring 2021. We’ll therefore skate around plot spoilers as this really is a collection of tight-knit page-turning stories.
SG:The title of this collection and the opening story “In The Event of Contact” place the reader in a liminal space where instinct rules and also confuses. ‘The caged bird knew’ we are told after a series of startling events involving Ruth–who can’t bear any form of touch–her family, and the mysterious and dangerous Mr Doherty. Can you speak a little about this theme of gut and instinct in the collection and why you chose this title.
ER: These are stories of primal fears and urges, and of fight or flight responses. In the title story, menace and danger are intuited by the most attuned of the story’s characters, its narrator Elizabeth and the cockatoo, Jimmy–I’m fascinated by animals’ keen senses and highly intuitive intelligence–while other characters are not so much confused by their gut and instinct but dulled to its messages and guidance.
Our gut and instincts can keep us safe and help us make our best choices, yet too often we under-utilise this capability. I’ve found my body often knows more than my mind. When I need to make major decisions–will I emigrate? Marry? Jump careers? Keep writing?–I tune into my gut for the answers. That involves getting quiet and still and feeling out whether my dread and confusion are coming from my mind or my gut. There’s a calm that settles inside me when I listen to the knowingness of my heart and not the angst of my head.
I have strong memories as a child of intuiting tension and the sinister. I can feel threat and danger in my gut, and remember being perplexed and appalled by how adults often appeared oblivious of the same. I wish my sensitivity and instincts were duller, it makes for a lot of anxiety, but like every curse there’s an element of gift, too, and I don’t think I would be a storyteller, or nearly as empathetic, without that ability to feel deeply and see into people.
As for the title, I worked on the titular short story over years and could never get it quite right until I hit on its final title and then everything else offered itself up. The collection was also created and compiled over many years and again it didn’t come together until I fixed on the title and that gave the stories their beating heart. The title is a twist on our expectations of the familiar phrase: ‘in the event of [my death, fire, other emergency]’ and I love turning the familiar in my stories into the strange and surprising. Once I decided on the collection’s title, I knew what did and didn’t belong in the final manuscript. It’s at the centre of everything, really, isn’t it? What and who do and do not touch us. And how. These are largely stories of crises of consent.
SG: You’ve said it perfectly, Ethel. Crises of Consent. Well, I very much enjoyed how the collection explores connection and disconnection by way of the families we marry into and the countries we move to. Much of what is explored is identity and compartmentalizing – being present in body but not in mind and showing different parts of ourselves to different groups. Was this something that emerged when you gathered these stories into a collection or was it present as you wrote these stories?
ER: In storytelling we’re creating and revealing characters and worlds, but we’re also revealing ourselves, whether we like it or not. I’m guilty of serial compartmentalization–mostly as a daydreamer and sometimes as a coping tool, like I’m physically present but my mind has checked out–and clearly that tendency bleeds into the plots and characters of my stories and was very much present as I wrote each of the stories in this collection.
As an emigrant, I’m also familiar with fracture, that sense of being divided between places and people. That splitness is exacerbated by the pressure to present different versions of myself to meet various expectations (like being Dublin enough, Irish enough, good enough, humble enough, nice enough, smart enough, cool enough, and not too American). Unfortunately, our tendency is to bend ourselves in order to be accepted. Until, that is, we free ourselves of that oppression. So, yeah, these are intrinsic themes that show up repeatedly in my stories. Even before I immigrated to San Francisco, as far back as my earliest memories, I’ve suffered a feeling of never quite fitting in and belonging–always at the edge of things, looking on. So while it’s never my intention as I set out to write–I’m eager to be open to each character’s unique journey–the coerced and marginalized inevitably show up in my stories.
SG: Thank you for such an open and honest answer, Ethel. The collection is also concerned with what is known and what is hidden, and we realise how powerful the unsaid is. Your characters communicate a great deal through what they are silent about. Can you talk a little bit about how dialogue serves to reveal and hide character motivation and narrative truth?
ER: I love dialogue, and in the past year have at last written a feature script. Something I really have to work on in revision, though, is dialogue that’s too direct. As much as I hate confrontation in real life, I do tend to tell it straight, but that’s the exception rather than the rule and is therefore rarely true of my characters. Subtlety and nuance are much more truthful and powerful in storytelling, anyway, not least because they align with the universal experience of how much is left unsaid, and how much suffering these absences of aired feelings can cause. Despite our singular gift of language, we humans tend to be reticent, uncommunicative, and passive-aggressive–largely because of toxic messaging around being tender and revealing pain. That hiding, that inability to thaw and talk from deep within, causes so much damage, including the cover-up of a multitude of personal and systemic wrongs.
SG: In “Blue Hot” – with its pitch-perfect title – the narrator tells us “Boys are attracted to girls who look like they’re loads of fun, or who seem especially tragic. I’d read that in a glossy magazine. Or maybe I’d heard it on the radio, TV, or bus.” And this troubling message echoes the signals she receives from her family and friends about relationships and physicality, and with dire consequences.
When you’re creating characters, do you find yourself following character archetypes based around the era in which the story is set, or do you base them on what or who you know emotionally?
ER: Typically, I know very little going into each story. I start with some spark that urges me to the page and go word by word from there, filling in the blanks. That spark is always centred around a particular character and my process is to follow the character from scene to scene and see what they reveal about themselves and their world. So, while I don’t think of myself as writing archetypes around era, every character is affected by their who, what, when, where, how, and in particular why. Those internal and external factors colour everything about the character and their perspective. Messaging, particularly early in life, shapes us, and too often misshapes us. A central thread in “Blue Hot” is pervasive patriarchal messaging that devalues women and promotes toxic masculinity.
SG: And you tackle that central thread so well. It truly had a physical impact on me.
Place and space also feature heavily in the collection – in particular Dublin, your hometown – as well as parks. In “Wilde”, the Merrion Square park is used to springboard us into the encounter the narrator has with Oscar Wilde. In the final story in the collection, “The Great Blue Open,” we begin down on the ground in the park and finish with the narrator seeing herself from above. How important was the sense of place – and space – to you as you wrote these stories, and during the editing process with the team at Dzanc Books.
ER: Place and space get back to what shapes us and leaves its mark–imprinting, if you will. Place affects people. Enormously. Particularly our birth place, and those places we call home. As does space. I was just talking with women friends the other day about how I spent decades taking up as little space as possible, be it on buses, planes, in buildings, and on the street. I was always making way for others (particularly men) and giving them the right of way and more than their fair share of space while denying myself the space I needed and which was my due. Now I’m like, Move Over! As for parks, I love trees and woods and open spaces–anywhere with Mother Nature and all her glory. I think if we studied, valued, and emulated her more, this world would be a far better place and we humans would be a far superior and happier race.
SG: Move over, folks, and welcome Nature. I like it! So let’s finish, Ethel, with some brief questions:
What book is on your nightstand now? Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.
I have it on my nightstand too (waiting!) So, mountains or Sea? Sea.
Wine or Whiskey? Both.
But not together! Do you have a favourite book of 2020? Cleanness by Garth Greenwell.
I must look that one up. Finally, what is your one writing wish for 2021? Money.
Ethel, I wish you much success with In The Event of Contact. Thank you for your generous answers and with gratitude to Dzanc Books for providing me with a copy of your stunning collection. The official publication date for Ireland and the UK is June 3, 2021, and elsewhere May 18, 2021.
Shauna Gilligan Writer 