First Line Fridays: part 1/5
Behind the scenes of a short story collection: this week, there are bad boyfriends and sympathetic wicked stepmothers.
Hello, readers of this newsletter/blog/thing. I have a new book out this year, a short story collection called In The Movie Of Her Life, and while I do not wish to bore you too much about it, or to let it distract me from the other things I use this yoke for (i.e. having feelings about other people’s books, having feelings about libraries, having feelings about TV shows), it did feel like it might be interesting or helpful or something to write a bit about the book, and the writing/editing of it, here.
So, welcome to First Line Fridays, which will run fortnightly for the next couple of months - going through each of the stories and their first lines, with some notes and observations. It’s been fascinating to revisit these again, beyond the intensity and too-close-to-it-all-ness of being in edit mode. Let’s go.
My Mother Gets On With Things
“394.88 Suicide”
Starting off cheerful with this one, I see. The opening story is broken into sections, each with a different Dewey Decimal number and subject, because I am a nerd, and because the titular mother is the sort of librarian who likes that ordering of chaos, who would rather have the books neatly on the shelves without any human ever touching them.
I like playing with format sometimes - thinking about what happens when you interrupt a story with something a bit different (a section told as a script, say). Later in the collection there is a story that’s composed of documents, fragments for the reader to piece together.
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The Roommate
“You shouldn’t have brought her home.”
Hello there second person, I love you more than is reasonable. I know you can annoy some people, reminding them of choose-your-own-adventure books in a bad way, but I think you are pleasing when you work, and I hope you do here. In this story you’re letting us see the narrator kind of look at herself from the outside, watching what happens when she brings her roommate for a visit to her hometown, and people presume she’s a girlfriend rather than a just-as-a-friend situation.
I really like the premise of this story because the thing about Ireland, historically, is that so much has gone unsaid, or else it’s couched in certain acceptable or coded ways - suffering from your nerves, fond of the drink, special friend. The narrator here is bringing a girl home to meet her family - and assumptions are made. And then suddenly it makes her wonder. And maybe pine.
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Crumbs
“There are always those who will blame others for their misfortunes, my father said the day they killed him.”
That is a lot in one line. We’re stepping into fairytale land here, with a retelling of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ from the ‘wicked’ stepmother’s point of view, because I am an absolute sucker for wicked-stepmother retellings, and versions of fairytales where we get a more complex account of the girls and women involved. Some of my favourites/influences: Olga Broumas’s Beginning With O, Emma Donoghue’s Kissing The Witch, Francesca Lia Block’s The Rose and the Beast, the poems of Anne Sexton and Carol Ann Duffy.
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In The Movie Of Her Life
“Conor’s nosebleed wakes her up.”
Oh, Conor. Conor is boyfriend to Lucy, the protagonist of this title story, and she deserves so much better. Of course this story opens up with Conor needing her in some way.
With this story I wanted to write about making-art-versus-day-jobs, which is a mild obsession of mine, and explore the tension between ‘going all in’ and ‘being sensible’. I am, I think, a fan of being sensible, which is a very un-artsy thing to say, but ‘go big or go home’ is something you get to do only when there are safety nets in place (often it’s a thing with a time limit on it, even if you do get to do it).
Anyway. Oh, Conor. You gobshite.
Next instalment: some terrible women and the end of the world. In The Movie Of Her Life is published by Doire Press and will be out next week (official launch date, for any Dubliners reading, is Thursday, 3rd April, 6.30pm in The Teachers Club on Parnell Square - if you’re around please do pop in!)
Love this!