when i started writing the first novel i had just started studying a master's program in in dublin where i did my undergraduate degree um [Music] it was a program in literatures of the americas so american literature uh north south and central america um and i had been studying for about well a couple of weeks i suppose um when i started writing the short story that would later become conversations with friends um [Music] and [Music] it was great because i mean it was a great time for me because i loved writing the novel and because at the way that my masters was structured i had time to write and i was reading a lot i was you know doing a fair bit of academic work and reading but i also had plenty of time to focus on my own um writing so it was really the ideal sort of situation for me and obviously the novel is a college novel it's about college students and i was still very much at that stage in my life even though i wasn't an undergraduate degree i was still i was studying and so being on campus being in the physical locations that i was writing about probably contributed a lot to the kind of the way that the novel turned out i didn't have any other life that i could write about and that's i mean i haven't ever as a writer really been able to write about worlds that i don't know very well um and so i've lived quite a small life i have never lived outside ireland i've lived i grew up in castle bar and county mayo i moved to dublin when i was 18 and i've lived there ever since um and those are really the only places that i've been able to write about and i think to be able to set a story in a place um not so much in a geographical location but in a community and i need to have a really strong sense of how the people in that community behave how do they speak what are the kind of manners and social rules that dictate social interactions in this setting um and i'm limited in my ability to observe that i feel like i need to know something really well before i can pick up the kind of observations that interest me as a writer so it wasn't in any sense that i thought oh campus life is fascinating i can't wait to write a novel about it it was just that that was the only life that i knew and so to develop the kind of observations that i felt were feeding into the book not in terms of events or real people but just in terms of um sort of forming an accurate picture of how people behave and interact in that setting um that was the only thing that i had to work from those are the only tools that i could sort of bring to the table so it didn't come from any particular fascination with my own life it was just that that was the only life that i had available to me um so i'm going to read a little bit from my first novel conversations with friends and i'm going to read a little bit from the middle of the book so um i guess i should explain before i begin sort of what's going on at the point where we enter the story and it's narrated by a young woman called francis who's a university student and she sort of just embarked on a relationship with a man who was married and she's now she and her best friend bobby are now staying with them in a a sort of holiday home in france and so that's the point at which we meet the characters and i'm just going to read it a short section and if that's okay the next day we were clearing up the breakfast dishes and melissa asked nick if he would take the car to some shopping complex outside town to get new deck chairs she said she had planned to go the day before but she forgot about it nick didn't seem wild about the suggestion although he said he would go he said something like oh that place is miles away but not with any particular conviction both of the books are written about um the protagonists are at an age where they're leaving home for the first time um so i was interested in those books and observing that turn in life from childhood into young adulthood or from adolescence into young adulthood and where your parents and family are no longer the predominant influence in your life from day to day so like in both conversations with friends and in normal people um these characters have lived with their parents up to the age of 18 and then suddenly they're now on their own and sort of navigating the adult world for themselves and so i guess that's that maybe that's why the family recedes a little bit into the background because that was the specific moment in these people's lives that i wanted to know more about how do they make their way now that they're no longer in a in a taking a position within a family hierarchy where they are nominated as sort of the child in the hierarchy and they have this adult influence ahead of them that's now being removed and they're they are living as an adult on their own and they have to make their own decisions for the first time in their in their lives so that interested me how do people get to know themselves when their position within a family has been removed from their immediate influence i mean obviously they still know that they are the daughter of whoever or the sister or whoever but it's not it's not the dominating influence from day to day and i think that's why it's not in any sense that i don't find families really interesting um i do and i think the novel is a form that's particularly good at exploring families um and it's something i definitely want to write about more and i think um connell's relationship with his mother is probably the closest parent-child relationship in in any in either of the books and and it's one that i really enjoyed writing about and felt like i could have even written more about and and i really liked it so um it is very important i am really interested in it but so far i think because of the the time of life that i have been interested in writing about um it hasn't been it hasn't been happening in the sort of domestic family sphere he was washing up the dishes in the sink and i was drying them and handing them to melissa to put back in the cupboard standing between them i felt clumsy and unwanted and i was sure bobby could see i was flushed she was sitting on the kitchen table swinging her legs and eating a piece of fruit take the girls with you then melissa said don't call us girls melissa please said bobby melissa gave her a look and bobby bit into her nectarine innocently take the young woman with you then melissa said what like for my amusement said nick i'm sure they'd rather go to the beach you could take them to the lake melissa said or you could go to shuttle or drone is that likes they're still open he said they discussed whether the place in chatham adrenal was still open then nick turned to look at bobby his hands and wrists were wet i guess it's probably i'm trying uh to observe in a in fine sort of precise detail um people's intimate lives and and to do that as as well as i want to do it whether or not i succeed in doing that i don't know but to do it as well as i want to would mean noticing also the impact of social structures like class like gender and how those ideas which seem so large and so abstract and really difficult to even understand and how they weigh on how they put specific pressures on personal relationships that can seem totally exempt from them so when you're when there are two people alone in a bedroom no one is thinking about class or gender but the structures are there and so i guess trying to observe as closely as i can those intimate relationships means also trying to observe the structures that make those relationships possible and that limit what their possibilities are in my own life um the way that i think about the world that we live in is probably through mostly through a sort of marxist framework um and i'm never quite sure how to make that way of thinking sit alongside the fiction that i write i don't know what it means to write a marxist novel i don't know and i would love to know um so even though that is the that's the sort of analytical structure that helps me to make sense of the world around me i can't necessarily always accommodate that structure in the form of a novel and so it's kind of something that i that i struggle with and i think about a lot when i'm writing and one way that it um that it influences my work which obviously you note is that i write a lot about social class and but i don't think there's a straightforward way of doing that i mean i guess you could say um that that the idea of a marxist novel probably has to do with writing about um you know working class characters and certainly that is one approach to the to a socialist novel um and i think it's it's it's obviously it's obviously very important but it also raises important questions about what do we understand the working class to mean the people that i write about um tend to be kind of precariously situated in the economy and like they're usually college educated like i am um but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are financially stable or secure and and again i mean that just goes back to writing about the world that i encountered when i came out of college when i had enough of a developed brain to notice what i was seeing around me those were the only tools the only material that i could draw on to make sense of um to use in a in a book so it's difficult for me to try and um to try and make sense of the way that i approach social class in my books and the way that i try to approach it in my in my life like in my critical or analytical life um but it is something that's very important to me and i think what's what's really important and sort of the best i can do is to try and observe how class as a very broad social structure impacts our personal and intimate lives like how do we carry material realities and economic realities into our interpersonal relationships and one way is through commodities i mean how important commodities and items of physical objects become to us a sense of ownership over objects a sense of possession also the transactional nature of relationships how it's so difficult to escape the transactional framework of capitalism which dominates you know our our whole existence how difficult it is to escape that framework when it comes to our personal lives how difficult it is to get outside a transactional way of thinking and try and build intimacy with other people that isn't dependent on sort of a notion of buying and selling and so i guess those are the things that i'm trying to do but i'm also you know i'm i'm very limited in what i'm and what i'm good at if i'm good at anything i'm certainly not good at everything so i have to try and use the small things that i can do um to try and hone those and to make them work for me in the in the context of the novel the car had been sitting in the sun all morning and we had to roll the windows down before we could even get in inside it smells like dust and heated plastic i sat in the back and bobby leaned her little face out the passenger window like a terrier nick switched on the radio and bobby withdrew her face from the window and said do you not have a cd player can we listen to music nick said sure okay bobby started looking through the cds then and saying whether she thought they were his or melissa's who likes animal collective you were melissa she said i think we both like them but who bought the cd i don't remember who said you know we shared those things i don't remember whose is bobby glanced at me over the back of her seat i ignored her francis she said did you know that nick appeared on a channel 4 documentary about gifted children in 1992. i looked up at her then and said what nick was already saying where did you hear about that bobby had taken one of the pastries out of the box something with whipped cream on top and she was spooning the cream into her mouth with an index finger melissa told me she said francis was also a gifted child so i thought she'd be interested she wasn't on any documentaries though she also wasn't alive in 1992. i went downhill from then he said why is melissa telling you this stuff she looked up at him sucking the whipped cream off her finger in a gesture that seemed more insolent than seductive she confides in me she said i looked at nick in the rear-view mirror but he was watching the road i'm a big hit with her said bobby i'm not sure it'll go anywhere though i think she's married just to some actor said nick it took bobby three or four bites to finish the pastry then she put on the animal collective cd and turned the music up really loud when we got to the home supply store bobby and i just smoked in the car park when they went inside to get the deck chairs he came back out carrying them under one arm looking very masculine i crushed my cigarette under the toe of my sandal while he opened the boot and said i'm afraid this lake is going to be a major disappointment when i hear the discourse around like the creative brain and stuff i feel very skeptical of that i know that there are um there are obviously reasons to be interested in what makes creative people creative and all that but i also feel like i just hate the idea that you know people are born with a particular brain that means they're creative and then all the other non-creative people just don't have the right kind of brain i don't i don't believe in that i think that you know human beings are endlessly creative there's not just one specific kind of person who's appointed creative at birth um but having said that i do i do think i was you know i was always writing through my childhood and my teen years um not because of my special brain but because um that was the only thing that i was good at and it was the thing that helped me to make sense of my life and the world around me um i was never an extremely social person i have often felt a little bit outside the social world that i find myself in at any given time so i guess writing was also for me a way of trying to make sense of the world i was looking at like not really always understanding the people around me but finding that through writing i could come to an understanding of other people so it wasn't that i was writing because of a special gift i had but more writing to fill in a particular lack that i felt in my life and and i think trying again and again and in different ways and in different forms to fill in that lack meant that i was always practicing and the more i practiced probably the better i got at writing prose so i i don't think it was that i was born with special skill um but maybe um you know i developed in my childhood a particular desire for whatever reason to to try and make sense of things using language and i've always been trying to do that ever since um so i i don't know what else i could do i mean i certainly don't necessarily think i'll be writing novels um or only novels forever and but i can't think of anything else i could do that didn't involve putting words down in some kind of order because that's the only skill that i have ever managed to get to any kind of um any level whatsoever for me i i find that the writing is the whole thing and when i finish a book um i might have a couple of weeks where i sort of pat myself on the back and say oh i finished a book after that i start really quickly to forget about that book and i want to write something new um this this time i'm now working on something kind of i'm working on something again now but it took a long time it took a few months after i finished the end of the last one um but when i'm writing something new that's all i want to be doing it's all about that process of finding out where it's going to go following following these characters on their particular journey following the ideas that interest me through the text and trying to push myself to do something new with those ideas and and so it's hard because all of the all of the discourse around writers and writing is always about the finished book and to me it's like oh what so i that's finished it's it's not that it's not interesting to me anymore but it can never be as interesting as the thing that i'm doing now otherwise i'd still be writing it so it's almost like finishing the book is is a way of saying this is i'm done being interested in this i've i've brought it as far as i can take it from my own interest and that's it full stop it's i can't do it anymore and so when you've reached that point that's the only point at which readers can have it but it's also the point at which it's finished for you um so it is it's so for that reason i think the writer is in a strange position with regards to the rest of the literary culture because you you know in my case you don't really want to talk about what you've done already you want to talk about what you're doing now so yeah i mean the book is a strange thing because the book is like what the writer has finished with um it's not it's not in my case what i'm thinking about i'm always thinking about the next thing we sat on the grounds by the water in the shade of a willow tree and ate cream pastries bobby and i took turns drinking from the bottle of wine which was warm and sweet can you swim in it bobby said the lake yeah i think so said nick she stretched out her legs on the grass she said she wanted to swim you don't have your swimsuit i said so she said there's no one here anyway i'm here i said bobby laughed at that she threw back her head and laughed up into the trees she was wearing a sleeveless cotton blouse printed with tiny flowers and her arms looked slender and dark in the shade she started unbuttoning the blouse bobby i said you're not really he can take a shirt off but i can't she said i threw up my hands nick coughed like an amused little cough i actually wasn't planning to take my shirt off nick said i'm going to be offended if you try to object said bobby francis is the one objecting not me oh her said body she'll live then she left her clothes folded up on the grass and walked down to the lake the muscles of her back moved smoothly under her skin and in the glare of sunlight her tan lines were almost invisible so she appeared whole and completely perfect the only sound after that was the sound of her limbs moving through the water it was very hot and we had finished the pastries the light moved and we were no longer in the shade i drank some more wine and looked out for bobby's figure she's literally shameless i said i wish i was more like that i find it really hard to explain and i don't mean outwardly i mean even to myself why i'm interested in the things that interest me um when i meet a character as in when i come up with a character in whatever mysterious process that involves um i feel like there are things i want to make them understand about themselves um and i wonder whether that's because the character is a projection of me and so by going along with this character as they find things out about themselves i'm also in some allegorical way learning things maybe completely different things about myself um so it's like i'm going along with them on this journey and by watching how they encounter these problems i'm thinking through the process of how i encountered these problems even if the problems are only a cryptic allegory for problems that i've been through in my own life in some way and so maybe that's why it was some it was some relationship though not any direct relationship and not one that i can understand or put into words between francis and myself that made me want to force her to go through things to see what kind of person she would turn out to be at the end of them maybe through going on that process with her i was finding something out and i didn't have any fixed idea of of of who she would turn out to be it wasn't like i thought oh francis is a when we meet her in the beginning but i want her to be b so we'll just bring her from a to b it was like yes she's a in the beginning and i kind of had a good idea of who she was and it was just like an open-ended question like who would she be if all these things happened to her um and maybe in answering that question i was trying to answer something about myself um but i don't know and it certainly wasn't that i felt it was a form of self-help or that it was a form of catharsis for me personally like while i was doing it i was all on the technical level like i want to get every sentence right i want to get every paragraph right like i want the jokes to be funny and it was never it was never it never felt like i was going through some psychological turmoil i found the process of writing it so enjoyable and the same with the second one i loved it and so it didn't feel at all like i was wading through the darkest aspects of my own soul at all um but i guess there must be some of that going on because otherwise why would i be so attracted to forcing these individuals who don't even exist into going through these you know difficult difficult things conflicts and uncontrollable events pain suffering what they all go through in both the books pretty much every character um there must be something in that for me but i don't know i don't know what it is um i want to find out how people get through life like when things happen whether they're bad things or good things how do people actually get through that and i think maybe like for most people who are not drawn to be novelists um it's just like the answer is obvious or it's intuitive in some way and maybe there's something like missing for me i don't know what the answer is i don't know how people get through life and i have to fill that gap by making up stories that try and explain that concept back to myself and if there's any value for other people in those stories i'm very grateful and happy but i don't i don't ever think that's why i'm writing it by the end of the first novel um francis has probably come to a place where she values openness and directness and even vulnerability more than she did at the beginning and but that's not necessarily me making a value statement about openness or vulnerability it's not like i'm saying no i've taught my character a lesson she's learned it's good to be vulnerable i don't always know that i believe that it is i just think i threw all these situations and difficulties at her and that was what she seemed to get out of dealing with them that it's it's possible to be vulnerable and to make yourself open to to pain and to bad experiences in order to be open to joy and unhappiness um but maybe that's true for her you know in this specific time at the age of 21 maybe 22 when the book is over um you know in in dublin ireland at that particular historic point it's not like i'm trying to get some great lesson about human kind or the human condition out of it it was just trying to figure out in the very specificity of what's happening to her at that moment is there something um can she learn something even if it's a not a general lesson even if it's just something really specific and i think she does but it's hard for me to put into words exactly what she learns but it is about communication and i i yeah i'm worried sometimes that my fixation on how human beings communicate is like can kind of be boiled down to something like it's so hard to say what we mean and i i hear that a lot about my work like you know i i write about how hard it is to say what we mean and i totally understand why people take that away from the book but or from either of the books but i don't think that i ever really meant to make that point um i guess that i think it's hard to mean anything um and yeah and it's hard to know what you yourself actually mean i don't think that it's a case of that i'm wanting to write about like it's hard to be honest i think i'm wanting to write about how language doesn't seem maybe to be a good way of conveying meaning and also how it's just not always clear even to ourselves what we actually want to say um but i'm very interested in communication but maybe i'm not coming at it in the right way or something i closed my eyes and that strange pattern form behind my eyelids the heat poured down over my hair and little insects purred in the undergrowth i could smell the laundry scent of nick's clothing and the orange oil shower gel i had used when i stayed in his house that was awkward yesterday he said about the girl at the airport i tried to give a cute impartial smile but his tone made it hard for me to breathe evenly it sounded like he had been waiting for an opportunity to speak to me alone and immediately i was in his confidence again some girls just like married men i said he laughed i heard him i kept my eyes closed and let the red shapes in my eyelids unfold themselves like kaleidoscopes i said i didn't think that was true he said lo i love you i was afraid you'd think they were being serious you didn't like her i said louisa oh you know she was nice i didn't dream about her at night nick had definitely never told me that he dreamed about me at night or even that he especially liked me in terms of verbal declarations i didn't dream about her at night was the first thing i could remember him saying that implied i had any special status to him at all so are you seeing anyone at the moment he said i opened my eyes then he wasn't looking at me he was inspecting a dandelion between his thumb and forefinger he didn't seem to be joking i held my legs together very tightly well i was for a while i said but i'm afraid he ended it he twisted the flower stem back and forth smiling and reluctant smiled he did nick said what was he thinking you know i have no idea i know some writers feel like though the book's not finished until you know people have read it and i don't know if that's true sometimes for me i mean sometimes i feel um the book is finished when it's given me what i can get out of it and then if other people are interested in reading it that's great but i don't know what they see in it and i can never get inside the experience that they're having when they read it so that sometimes the book seems like something that's dead to me like i i don't know what it is anymore it's it's it's an artifact of some kind and it can be passed around but it can't be what it was when i was writing it because it's not it's not living anymore and it can't change so how i mean how do you at the same time i think part of the reason i write is this sense of not wanting life to just go past without any record it's like what we were talking about um reading over your emails or feeling a connection to having a sort of digital archive that documents the fact that you existed and read emails and responded and that you had other people in your life and that you had signed up to newsletters like this sense that life has left some trace and the idea of life just disappearing without a trace um it's not that it frightens me but it's just that i almost feel like a kind of almost like a weirdly moralistic duty not to let that happen it's almost like it would be it would be lazy of me like oh you just had all those experiences and what you didn't do anything you didn't do anything with them you didn't try and turn them into something like you didn't get any product from that i feel like when things happen to me i i have to i have to get something it's funny i last year the year before last i am [Music] i was really slightly overworked and very tired and i was working i was dehydrated i hadn't had any water to drink and i basically i fainted i collapsed out of my chair and i fell forward out of my chair and broke my nose um and i woke up on my own kitchen floors like covered in blood it was very dramatic very upsetting and one of my first thoughts was like uh i'll be able to write about that now yeah because i've never i've never collapsed out of a chair before and broken my nose so now that it's happened i can write about it because it would be difficult for me to write about something that physically dramatic if uh you know if it never happened um and actually a character as you'll know a character does break their nose in my in one of my books i won't spoil which um but it's it's that it's that much ingrained into me that that instinct of like when life happens to me then i can take life and i put it into a process that i don't understand and then i get something at the end of it which belongs to me um and i need to feel that i think otherwise i would i would feel a little bit lost and that's not to say everyone should write novels i definitely don't think that but it's almost that i don't know how to orient myself in life without that i need that i need to feel that i can make something from my experiences because otherwise i don't know what they are maybe it's like a way of consoling myself for the meaninglessness of life like knowing the world gonna die and it all means nothing it's in order to not think about that or to not feel that i can feel this instead that i have that i put i put life into a box and there's magic in the box and then at the end i get something i get something some product that i don't really understand or know what it is and i need to have that feeling and i always have had that feeling and it's something that i think of almost like a duty i was listening to tai chi cole speaking at the festival yesterday and he spoke about feeling that artists have a duty almost a sacred duty and it's language that i would never ordinarily reach for or use myself but when i heard him say it i thought oh yeah um there's something about that that makes sense to me because i do feel like i have a duty to do this but it's not like i feel the world needs me to do it in my case it's more like i need i need it um but it is like a feeling of duty like an obligation he looked at me and i was afraid of what expression my face was making i'm very happy you're here you said it's good to see you again i raised an eyebrow and then turned my face away i could see bobby's head dipping and rising in the silver water like a seal and i am sorry he said i smiled mechanically and said oh for hurting my feelings nick sighed as if placing down something heavy he relaxed i could feel his posture changing i lay back and let the blades of grass touch my shoulders sure if you have any he said have you ever said one sincere thing in your life i said i was sorry that was sincere i tried to tell you how nice it is to see you again what do you want i could grovel but i don't think you're the kind of person it would appeal to how well do you think you know me i said he gave me a look then like he was finally dropping some long pretense it was a good look but i knew that he could practice it just as well as any of the others well i'd like to get to know you better he said we saw that bobby was coming out of the water then but i stayed lying in next shade and he didn't move his arm from where it nearly brushed my cheek bobby came up the bank shivering and wringing her hair out when she put her clothes back on her gloves soaked through on her skin until it was almost sheer we looked up at her and asked how the water was and she said so cold it felt incredible on the way back in the car i rode in the front seat and bobby lay with her legs stretched out in the back when nick and i looked at one another we looked away quickly but not quickly enough to stop us from smiling from the backseat bobby said what's funny but she asked only lately and didn't press for an answer thank you [Applause] you