Interview with Lisa McInerney
Lisa McInerney’s debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, is a knockout. It follows the lives of people on the fringes of Cork society, all linked by a murder, and it’s the kind of book that makes you wish there were more like it.
Lisa’s accolades include the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliot Prize, proving that critics are just as enthusiastic as readers when it comes to her gorgeous, gutsy prose. I talked to her about her start in blogging, awards that honour women, and her plans for a trilogy.
The Glorious Heresies is one of the most accomplished debuts I’ve read in years – an ambitious, multilayered story that examines family, love and religion with humour and intensity. Where did the idea for the novel come from?
Ah, thank you! Where it came from is difficult to explain, and in a sense I think bigger stories tend to bombard their writers from all angles, but its strongest origin point was probably an image I had one day when I was trying to come up with a short story idea: that of a woman of late-middle age on a city street, amazed at how life went on around her despite her having just done something heinous – she had killed a man. Maureen had existed as a character in my head for years, and as with all of my characters I was looking for the right story for her. Lightbulb moment!
You had an award-winning blog, The Arse End of Ireland, before The Glorious Heresies. Did you view blogging as an apprenticeship? Do you ever miss it?
It was an apprenticeship in very specific ways: it taught me to write to deadline and it taught me to trust my voice, but otherwise there is, as anyone might imagine, a significant difference between writing succinct comedy posts and a novel. It was also a distraction and that was the reason I eventually killed it; running a blog, even a mildly successful blog, takes a lot of time and care and the time and care I was giving to the blog was time and care I wasn’t giving to my fiction. I was always a fiction writer, just one that took a brief holiday in online gonzo. I don’t miss it one bit.
What was it like to win the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction? How do you feel about awards that specifically honour women? Did you feel any increased pressure following your recent wins?
Ask me in 2017 what it was like, because it hasn’t yet started to feel real. It is, of course, a massive honour and the best validation a writer could ask for (if I’m mad for doing this, at least I’m not alone in that madness).
As for awards that specifically honour women – or any award with entry restrictions, let’s face it – I have thoughts enough to fill a book. In short, I think all literary awards are valid: they celebrate writers’ work; they act as trusted recommendations for readers; they’re wonderful for the industry. I can’t think of another prize that has to continuously justify its existence. I won the Desmond Elliott Prize and no one asked me whether it was valid to have a prize to celebrate debut novels. I was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and no one asked whether a prize celebrating works by authors aged thirty-nine and under was fair to forty-year-old writers.
We have made a lot of progress when it comes to fair representation of women literary writers since the Baileys Prize was launched, yes, but women writers are still faced with challenges based on their gender, and there are some readers who still worry that a book by a woman will be personal or domestic and not tackle Great Literary Themes (what are Great Literary Themes, anyway? White themes? Male themes? Middle-class themes? I have so many thoughts). People have told me The Glorious Heresies is a ‘male’ book, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that really means, and I’ve wondered if it means, really, that it’s a scopious work? I don’t know.
But yes, increased pressure! There’s a wee bit of disassociation in play; I don’t think of myself as a prize-winning literary writer, so I’m anxious that the next novel won’t let down the people who do.
“Of course, it’s different nowadays, but back then being a trollop was full of occupational hazards …” Your characters experience bitterness and disillusionment towards religion, yet still cling to symbols of their faith. This often backfires – in the case of Maureen, her holy stone sets off the novel’s disastrous chain of events, and Georgie’s attachment to a scapular is similarly detrimental. I wondered if this was a way of reflecting the state of Ireland, as you see it, in the aftermath of the Catholic Church’s reign?
A lot of the Heresies characters have an unfortunate grá for icons, whether they’re of the stony Catholic variety or the living, breathing, blonde girlfriend variety. I’m not too sure where that came from; it wasn’t entirely intentional. I think the most powerful themes are often those the writer didn’t know they had. And we’re very much surrounded by vestiges of Catholic faith in Ireland, whether in the physical realm or in a social context, so I think in writing about contemporary Ireland it’d be much harder to intentionally leave these symbols out than unintentionally include them.
We are very much a country moving from Catholicism to post-Catholicism; that’s the reality of things. Maureen is the character who’s most defined by a lack of faith, and so her collection of tacky Catholic kitsch and interest in religious fakery makes a lot of sense. Georgie wanted something of her mother that her mother wouldn’t miss, and as her mother was an older woman from a traditional background, it made sense she might have a forgotten scapular tucked away somewhere. But yeah, neither attachment works out so well. It’s an interesting point!
The sections written in first person, and dotted throughout, are spectacular, searing and raw. I was curious to know if they existed from early on, or if they were something you added in a later draft?
They went in at the very last minute, and for the life of me I can’t remember where the idea came from. I imagine at the time it was almost a self-indulgent thing; I knew Ryan was the heart of the book and I wanted to hear directly from him. And also I think that first person, present tense makes a lot of sense when you want to capture that sense of wild obsession that defines a lot of teenage romances.
Your dialogue is wonderful – authentic but not distracting, and colloquialisms are treated with a lightness that blends seamlessly with your style. Is a knack for dialect something that comes naturally to you, or were you conscious of getting it right?
I guess it comes naturally. Some writers are mad for the vernacular, and I’m one of them. But then, we’re great talkers, aren’t we? Irish women. So on that basis it’s not a surprise that I love to write dialogue. Physical setting, though; I really have to work hard at getting setting into my work. It’s the kind of thing I forget if I’m not careful.
The city feels, at times, like an enemy to the characters. Was this intentional? Were you ever tempted to set The Glorious Heresies in Galway, which is closer to home?
It was always a Cork novel, because these were always Corkonian characters. I’ve spent half of my adult life in Cork – I don’t really know Galway city well – so it wasn’t a surprise when the characters coming together in my head had Cork accents. They’re also peripheral characters, and often someone who exists on the periphery of a place does so without being happy about that isolation. Life in Cork city goes on with or without my characters, and I wanted to be clear about that: the city runs on the macro. The little lives don’t make a difference to it. That’s the way of cities.
I thought all of the characters were brilliant, but my favourite by far was Ryan. Did you have a favourite character to write?
Ryan! I know a writer shouldn’t have favourites but I do: he’s the character that interests me the most, because he’s got so much potential and no idea what to do with any of it. It’s interesting to be able to explore a character who has so much energy, so much intelligence and so much going for him, and yet persists on applying all of these advantages in all of the wrong ways. He has such a capacity for damage, Ryan. He can wreck all around him, and frequently he does.
I was delighted to hear that you’ve writing a trilogy and that Ryan will make a return, because I felt there was more to him than one book. Had you always intended to do this, or did you find yourself missing the characters after the last page? Can you give us any hints as to what happens in the next novel?
I’d always intended on writing three Cork books, functioning as a loose kind of set, featuring overlapping characters. But no more than three, I think! After that I’m really going to have to jump out of my comfort zone and write something drastically different.
In terms of the next novel, I don’t want to say too much, because we’re still shaping it, my editor and I. But Ryan does reappear, and he makes all of the right decisions and goes on to live a peaceful and fulfilled life.
Or maybe he makes an even bigger hames of things. We’ll have to wait and see.
Ryan and Karine’s relationship – its early days and subsequent transformation – was fascinating and heartbreaking to read. Its tenderness contrasts beautifully with the bleak, violent nature of the novel. Did you find it challenging to write about young love from Ryan’s perspective?
Not especially, but I know why. My firm belief is that everything should come from solid characters the writer knows inside out, and I know Ryan very well. I know his background, his upbringing, his likes and dislikes, the way he makes sense of the world. We react in ways informed by our perspectives; once the writer knows the perspective, she can see how the character will react. The trick, I think, is to keep yourself out of it as much as possible. There’s a lot of idealised avatars instead of characters in literature, and the writer’s responsibility is to let the characters move around their world without telling them how. At the age he’s at in Heresies, Ryan knows he adores Karine, but hasn’t yet figured out that adoration isn’t the healthiest response to someone you want to live your life with. He’s all zealotry and gut reaction.
“Fashion came round in cycles. Shitehawks, she guessed, stayed the same.” Maureen is the oldest character, and frequently the most hilarious. She seems less concerned with the possibility of getting caught for her crimes and more bothered by her own guilt. I was curious as to where this sense of fearlessness came from – whether it was a consequence of her age or if, like her son Jimmy, she feels untouchable?
I think there’s a little bit of age at play. I think that society has an unfortunate habit of rendering women invisible at a certain age, and if not invisible then certainly believing them relatively harmless and relegating them to the background of the everyday. Older women are often perceived to be worthy only of benevolent supporting roles.
What’s interesting about Maureen is that she sees that. She’s very much an outsider – circumstance made her so years ago, but she’s grown to appreciate it – so she notices things that other people might not. She knows no one thinks her capable of great deeds anymore. If anything she feels untouchable because of her age. She may not be right, of course. But she certainly thinks she is.
You’ve had short stories included in the anthologies Town & Country (edited by Kevin Barry) and The Long Gaze Back (edited by Sinéad Gleeson). Do you find the process of short story writing much different to novel writing? Does one form come more naturally to you than the other? Any plans for a short story collection?
They’re two very different beasts indeed! I feel I’m still very much learning how to be a short story writer and I’m very interested in listening to established short story writers talk about their craft. Lucy Caldwell said something that fascinated me at this year’s Borris festival: that the short form made a great space in which to experiment. I think she’s right and I hope that I might be able to coax out something new and scary the next time I focus on the short form. I find long form writing comes a lot easier to me, at least at this time. Who knows what will happen down the road. I don’t have plans for a collection, but the idea of a collection no longer seems that intimidating …
What is your writing routine like? Do you have any writing rituals?
I work to a thousand-word rule. On writing days – and I don’t write every day – I don’t permit myself to clock off until I’ve hit a four-figure word count. And yeah, I might come back the day after and delete three-quarters of it, but you can’t edit your way to something good without having a shapeless mass to work on. I have a writing playlist, too – mostly instrumental stuff, a lot of it by Nobuo Uematsu, Joe Hisaishi, Mokadelic and Jeremy Soule. And I play a lot of Solitaire while I work out sentences.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Obstinacy is a great quality in a writer. You have to be selfish about your time and space, or else the work won’t get done. Distractions abound and I think writers, being sensitive souls, are easily convinced to be generous with their time and their space. Whatever your concept is, it’s yours alone, and no one is going to write it for you. If this is work, then treat it like work. Protect the time and space you have to work with, and feel no shame about saying no.
What has been the best part of the novel writing experience?
Ah, I always say you know you’re a writer when the only thing that makes you more miserable than writing is not writing. So the best part comes at the end, when you get to share your novel with readers. At this point the novel is a whole, shaped by hard work with (hopefully!) a brilliant editor, and no longer a desperate, shape-shifting yoke you’re convinced will kill you. So I love reading at events. I love a chatty pint afterwards even more.
From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016
About the Author
Lisa McInerney is the author of The Glorious Heresies, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Town & Country (Faber), The Long Gaze Back (New Island) and Granta.com. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, was published in 2017.
