This is the Ritual was launched earlier this year. How has it been since then?
For about three weeks after the launch, it was all the media and publicity. I tried to say yes to everything, strike while the iron is hot. I’m already thinking about the wearying business of what I might write next.
Can you say anything about what your next project is?
Just for my own reasons, and neurotic suspicions, I’m fearful of saying too much, but I would say I have something in mind that I already have a structure for and it would be something fairly different to Here Are the Young Men, my novel, and This is the Ritual. Without wanting to jinx it, it’s neither X nor Y.
Is it important for you to make each book different?
Maybe it is just the way my mind works. I’m not into forcing myself to write straight-up literary fiction or something like my novel. The writers I admire are the ones who are very comfortable moving across forms, from novels to essays to short stories and literary criticism. It just seems to me these days that the most exciting things in contemporary literature are not happening in straightforward fiction. For me, the most exciting things are happening in that liminal space between memoir and fiction.
You have described This is the Ritual as a series of linked fictions. How did the collection come together?
They were all written over a period of two to three years when there were a number of obsessions that I was fixed on. Often I was writing them when I was writing Here Are the Young Men – the novel took a long time to write and I needed to take a break. It got to the stage where I knew I had a book, and that’s when I chopped out the stories that didn’t fit, even if I thought they were good. It is like you are making a playlist – how do you make it flow?
Many of the characters in the collection are writers. Why does one called “Rob Doyle” make an appearance?
A lot of it comes back to what I like when I’m reading – writers often put in these distancing barriers when they may be writing autobiographically. But when you put yourself in there, the heat in the room goes up. I just think the reading experience becomes a bit more intense and loaded. With Here Are the Young Men, nearly every interviewer asked me “which character are you?” People just assume your fiction is autobiographical. And if the masks don’t work, then don’t even wear the masks.
What impact would you like This is the Ritual to have on its readers?
I would be happy if readers had an experience of intensity and fascination. Some of the stories are comical, but even the comical ones have an emotional or disturbing quality to them.
Was it cathartic to write these stories?
Yes, it had a profoundly relieving effect on me in some way. It was the same with Here Are the Young Men, which was a story that had to be told. Even before it was published and I shared it with a few friends, there was a huge sense of getting a weight off my shoulders. There is a sense of wanting people to see your painful obsessions. When you’re obsessed by something, you want the world to be obsessed by it too.
Your writer characters are alienated and misanthropic. Are they writers because they feel alienated and misanthropic, or are they alienated and misanthropic because they are writers?
It’s a cliche, but people who spend their lives hunched over a screen, or the page, tend to be wounded in some way, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be positive, because you can use it – Norman Mailer once said about Gore Vidal that he “lacks the wound”. A lot of the writers I have met tend to be tormented, even if they have found a way to sublimate it in some way. Again it’s a cliche, and there are exceptions, but people who become writers tend to suffer from hypersensitivity and that is a very debilitating quality to have to make your way in the world. Writing is the one domain where it becomes useful. I think the characters I am writing about are reflective of the type of people I have been drawn to in my life. With my characters, there is a lot more self-destruction going on than there is destruction. They are all complicit in their own marginalisation.
Do you need to be alone to write?
Yes, but that can go to excess. That can be obsessive too. I have been living alone in Rosslare and it is as isolated as you can get, except for the internet. When you have got the internet, it is a threat to solitude. And it is so insidious, when your thinking becomes part of the groupthink. I don’t think that interesting or great writing comes from conformity to the whims of the crowd.
But you can isolate yourself for too long. There was a two-year period when I did that and it was not good. Eventually, I stopped writing, because I had no stimulus. At the moment, I feel like I have a very nice balance going on, though I am planning to go abroad again at some point in the future.
What is your writing routine like?
It depends on whether I have a project on the go. If I have a novel or a story or an essay, I get up in the morning and try and get something done first thing. Discipline comes very easily to me when it is something I want to do, but when I try to force it, the writing becomes a bit dry. I always carry a notebook with me, even if 99 times out of a 100 I won’t use it. Often the best ideas come when you are out walking on the beach and then you have to write it all down before you forget.
This is the Ritual is published by Bloomsbury and Lilliput Press
