First Line Fridays: part 5/5
Behind the scenes of a short story collection: witchcraft and hauntings in the Dublin rental market.
And finally! The instalment of First Line Fridays, delving behind the scenes of my new short story collection, In The Movie Of Her Life.
Good Tenants
“When I get in from work, the soles of the boots are the first thing I see.”
This is a story about a pair of purple boots, and also the Irish rental market. A lot of the characters in these stories are in their 20s and 30s, living in what they hope are temporary, not-forever homes, and dealing with either flatmates or partners who are more often than not a tad headwrecky in some way. Stories need conflict and tension, so ‘two mates who get on’ is a less interesting option to explore - unless there’s another enemy one could throw into the mix. Enter the landlord’s daughter, in her purple boots, and a dollop of witchcraft.
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La Veuve Robespierre
“You are older now, and still you wear black, but the colour behind your eyelids is always green: that particular shade so often smudged behind lenses, and Maxim peering at you or perhaps the world from behind his spectacles.”
This is strictly speaking a historical story - it is, in fact, Sexy Robespierre, because I am insane - but it feels close to the fairytale retellings in terms of voice. This opening line draws heavily on Hilary Mantel’s review of Ruth Scurr’s Robespierre biography, Fatal Purity, in the LRB, and the story itself pulls on that book, Mantel’s own fictionalized account of the French Revolution, A Place Of Greater Safety, and Stanisława Przybyszewska’s play, The Danton Case.
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This Is Not The Story
“The boy who gives me the second leaflet reminds me of Jack, how soft his hair is without the gel in it.”
This is a story very, very specifically set in December 2012, with references to the death of Savita Halappanavar and Kate Middleton’s pregnancy announcement (earlier than ideal due to the awful time she had with hyperemesis gravidarum), and I suspect written quite soon after I was handed anti-choice material somewhere on the streets of Dublin. It’s such a period piece now - the character goes into HMV! Where DVDs are on sale! Holding paper things that don’t have QR codes on them! - but I like to think ‘time capsule’ or ‘specific’ rather than ‘dated’.
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Girls Will Be…
“We don’t hate Grace.”
As with ‘Colony’, this was a story that I’d had a vague idea about for a while and then actually sat down to write when asked to contribute something to an anthology - this time Empty House, focusing on climate change. As with ‘Colony’, it’s a futuristic setting - but the format here is the collective voice, the ‘we’ of the girls who are in school with Grace, the misfit of the piece.
First-person plural is not one I love as fervently as second-person, but it can work so well in certain situations - particularly capturing that group mindset of adolescents (Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Sarah Bannan’s Weightless) - so it felt like it might be a good fit for this, where the individual girls deflect their responsibility for anything that might have happened back to the collective.
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Haunted
“‘Come back to mine,’ he says in those last weeks before it all falls apart, his hand hovering at the hem of my skirt.”
In flash fiction especially, first lines need to do a lot of work. Is this too much? Too foreshadow-y? But we’ve only got two pages before the actual falling-apart happens.
This story has a ghost in it, because why not. Also a reference to the documentaries of Dr Brian Cox.
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Mother
“You never wanted a baby until theirs arrived.”
We begin the collection with a mother story and we finish with one, and you can judge for yourself which of the characters is more messed-up (but I think this one). This features fictional academic essay titles, which is something I have far too much fun with, and also, again, that second-person perspective.
One thing I was conscious of with this, when thinking about the order of the stories - and it’s something I’ve worked on from the editor side, too - was mixing up the different point-of-view options, so that you didn’t have a stretch of first-person stories and then a bunch of, say, second-person flash fiction pieces. You need variety, even if there is still a sense that all of these ‘bits’ somehow still belong together.
Aaaaaaand we’re done! Thank you for reading. In The Movie Of Her Life is published by Doire Press and is out now. Nice things people (and newspapers) have said about it have been gathered up here, and I’m on the latest episode of the Burning Books podcast here.
Congratulations on your new book! I love to get some perspective behind how the stories came to be, thanks for sharing that. Best of luck with it, I look forward to reading it! 💕