Where's the 'you'?

The obligatory personal essay

Jove decadent by Ramon Casas (1899)

Ciao a chairde,

I’m lucky: I only started writing journalistically once the confessional essay’s online golden age had passed. It was already going out of fashion when I wrote my first novel in 2017. By the time the book was published in 2020, editors were too immersed in the current pandemic misery to demand my feelings on being raped a few years prior. (True story.) They did want to know why various immutable qualities of mine were hard for me: autism/ADHD, queerness, being mildly ambidextrous. (True story.) But the requested tone was ultimately upbeat, an angle that became harder to offer as I progressively lost my mind. (True story.)

Traces of that era do remain in book promotion, as Caroline O’Donoghue just pointed out powerfully in the Bookseller. A ritual sacrifice is expected of any woman who’s written a novel: an essay timed around publication about some big sad thing from her own life. It may or may not have anything to do with the book. It rarely reads like she was dying to write it.

At this point, I’m not even convinced that the personal essay sells books. I hear from the odd person in a signing queue that they came to my fiction through my journalism, but it’s as likely to be through an article on fossil fuels as a depiction of my antics at Berlin sex clubs. (I have never yet been offered enough money to actually write that one. Come at me with your best bid if you dare.)

Publishers can’t put figures on these things; marketing a book consists of rampantly throwing mud in the hope that some of it will prove adhesive. Even after the fact, they can’t tell you definitively which splatter corresponded with a given spike in sales. Overwhelmingly they’re people who sincerely love books, who could be making more money doing literally anything else, who care about contemporary fiction and are trying to promote it within existing compromised systems. On your end as a writer, you’re trying not to be blamed, to be a team sport. The personal essay is more often a gesture of collegiate goodwill than a cynical, targeted strategic act. The people asking you to write them are usually underpaid themselves, stretched too thin and trying their best.

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A keen reader of personal essays may well be disappointed by my fiction. My novels are quite knowingly stylised, quite knowingly their own weird thing; I’m happy for my sentences to draw attention to themselves, and I don’t particularly care whether the characters or events come across as ‘realistic’. The books aren’t supposed to read like the spontaneous outflow of emotion that a fan of personal essays might expect.

During a panel discussion on Mrs Dalloway at the Irish Writers’ Centre last month, I found myself articulating something that had been brewing inside me for quite a while.

‘There’s an assumption that all young women writers are supposed to be seeking empathy’, I said (or something like that — no doubt I’m paraphrasing). ‘I would have thought it was obvious to any vaguely sentient reader that I’m more interested in playing with form and language than in making people feel for the characters. And critics don’t always know what to do with that. Sometimes my reviews are like, “She’s more interested in showing off how smart she is than in moving you emotionally”. And like … yes. I am smart. And I’m not very emotionally intelligent. So why wouldn’t I play to my strengths?’

That particular audience loved it. Nor do I think they’re an anomaly. After all, people seem to enjoy this Substack — many more than I expected to when I started it nine months ago, expressly to write about things I didn’t think would pitch well. The clue’s in the name: Naois content — a pun that itself assumes familiarity with Irish phonics. (I do generously explain the joke in the pop-up intro; never let it be said I am not accessible.)

When I started doing Substack, I was aware that the expected thing — per the Irony-Poisoned Chaos Girl idea that people sometimes project onto me* — would be to write about my love life and the time I got into Berghain without queuing. I don’t mind throwing these things in where they’re relevant, where they serve some wider point, but the central energetic force behind my writing does not come from a desire to understand things that have directly happened to me. I’m more intrigued by topics I have to approach at a sideways angle, with my own access less than guaranteed.

Readers, I think, are less prurient and more intellectually curious than the industry too often assumes. If that’s not the case, then why are you all still here?

*I suspect it’s because they think I’m the narrator of my first novel. So strong is this belief — that women only use first-person narrators as self-expression, never as a formal device to evoke a particular mood or to usefully constrain the storytelling — that people imagine things that aren’t even in the book. ‘But you both did English at Trinity!’ they say. In fact there’s no mention of where the character went or what she studied. I’ve never written a Trinity novel and probably never will, though I am frequently cited as having done so. The commodification of literary fiction fosters assumptions that could be rubbished with a quick ctrl+f.

*

So what to do about the obligatory personal essay?

It’s not as easy as ‘stop writing about yourself entirely’, because do I want the freedom to occasionally cite lived experience — not as my sole form of authority, not as the only thing I’m ‘for’, but as one source among the many others I use. Though I hope (don’t we all?) that the snippets of real life in my non-fiction appear effortless, I’ve always considered how much I wish to include. The difficulty is that interviewers take what you’ve written as a starting point, and expect you to expand from where you left off — which is often the outer limit of what you felt okay disclosing.

You lose yourself in publishing a novel. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures of me that I never saw before they went to print and that I do not own the rights to. (‘There are indeed many photos of me, but none I have the license for’ is an email I frequently have to send editors.) I hid tagged pictures on Instagram soon after my first novel came out; it unnerved me that strangers’ opinions were accreting into a version of me I couldn’t control, such that one swipe would reveal a composite sketch of how the internet saw me. Overwhelmingly those opinions were positive. Still I resisted the loss of agency.

Since then, I’ve acquired a certain stoical acceptance of the whole thing. I don’t do things I’m aware will make me uncomfortable. Sometimes I do things I think I’m fine with, then later realise I wasn’t at all — but I use this data to set better boundaries the next time.

Anyway, hope all that makes some sort of sense.

Beir bua,

N

P.S. two things:

1. If you’re a creative/cultural worker who’s Irish or Ireland-based, sign this pledge for Palestine by emailing culturalboycott@ipsc.ie.

2. My friend Daisy Onubogu has started a podcast about identity, culture and neurodivergence that you can check out here.