Lucy Sweeney Byrne in The Gloss

Check out Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s brilliant interview on life, writing & Paris Syndrome at The Gloss! We love the section on the writing of her debut collection …

On Paris Syndrome

I’ve been living and writing some of the stories in Paris Syndrome for almost a decade, and most of them were gestating in some way or another long before that. Everything I write is, in a way, both highly planned and organic, in how it comes to be. Before writing a piece, I’m under-thinking and dreaming and writing all around it, sometimes for years. I’ll find sentences for it bubbling up in my mind as I’m cooking dinner, or hanging out washing, or I’ll suddenly realise what the crux should be when out walking. Often, I won’t have any idea how much I’ve been obsessing, until I’m fit to burst, and finally have to start writing. Then, all going well, there’ll be a deluge. Then, it all has to be rewritten, of course, a thousand times, and then cut to shreds, so that maybe one, or at most two, of the original sentences will manage to survive untouched. Probably none will survive, from beginning to end, and whatever I was quietly obsessing over for all that time will end up as something else entirely. The stories in Paris Syndrome were like this. Making them into a collection happened very naturally, because really, I just write about the same thing over and over, cloaked in different scenarios; being lost, being dangerously free, dangerously alone, always seeking, and never finding. They’re a compendium of my twenties, and the act of writing them – the purpose they provided me in those years – is probably what got me through the experiences recounted within them. Having said that, I was forced to learn that living so as to have something to write, is not a strong enough reason to keep going, and, conversely, writing to justify your life won’t save you. There has to be something else, and there really wasn’t, in my twenties. I’m delighted that the stories are now finished, that those years are over, and that I have a book to show for them. One that I can present to my grandparents as proof I was, in fact, doing something vaguely constructive.

Read the rest of interview here!