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The winner of the Sunday Independent-sponsored Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, talks about dreams, boundaries, porn culture, trauma, and how they fed into her debut novel ‘Snowflake’
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Louise Nealon says we need healing for what society has put on us. Picture by Darren Kidd/PressEye
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Victoria White
Louise Nealon was 18 when she dreamed a dream that belonged to someone else. “The dream wasn’t very vivid. It was just an overall feeling of being disembodied. What I remember much more than the dream is the feeling of disappearing completely from myself.”
This may sound like an experience of mental breakdown, and Nealon, now 30, did indeed suffer from anxiety and depression as a student. But she deliberately returned to the surreal experience of dreaming someone else’s dream as the inspiration of her first novel, Snowflake.
She says now that sharing her dream world with others by writing has helped her back to good mental health. As a writer she can be “authentically” herself.
Her decision has been validated by the recognition that Snowflake has received since it was published this year, and which culminated this week in her winning the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards.
She says she’s “thrilled” even to have been on the shortlist with the five other books that were nominated, all of which she loves: Diving for Pearls by Jamie O’Connell, Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin, Una Mannion’s A Crooked Tree, Fiona Scarlett’s Boys Don’t Cry and Eimear Ryan’s Holding Her Breath.
Eimear Ryan and Nealon are close friends. Both play camogie – Ryan is an inter-county camogie player for Tipperary, and Nealon played camogie for her native Cappagh, Co Kildare. Indeed, says Louise, Ryan gave her her first “paid gig” as a speaker at an event promoting women in sport.
She jokes that the votes of her camogie club helped win her the award but in fact the public vote is balanced by that of an “academy” of literary experts including writers, librarians and book sellers and Sunday Independent literary editor Madeleine Keane.
Such an award, says Nealon, validates the work of writers and “celebrates all the different ways we can use our imagination to make a living”.
Nealon’s career as a writer really began to take off when agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor spotted her Seán Ó Faoláin Award-winning short story ‘What Feminism is?’ in the Irish Times in 2018 and got in contact.
Last year their combined efforts paid off handsomely when Snowflake was acquired for a six-figure sum by Manilla Press along with a second novel, which is still a work in progress and about which Nealon is keeping mum.
The film and television rights have been sold to Element Pictures, the company that turned Sally Rooney’s Normal People into the multiple award-winning television series.
Since the book deal was done, Louise Nealon has been living other people’s dreams all right — those of most writers on the planet.
The novelist says she still “hasn’t got her head around” this degree of success and is worried that servicing the publicity machine is going to give her the full-time job of “pretending to be a writer”. She explains: “I try to make intelligible answers but I’m way too close to the book to put it into words.”
But her current success has been very hard won. She spent her 20s trying and failing to tell the story of a woman who dreamed other people’s dreams, including a year at Queen’s University, Belfast, doing a master’s degree in creative writing.
The novel only really took off, when, as she says, she “met” her characters and “grounded” the action in her native Co Kildare.
The story of Snowflake unfolds on a small farm where a young woman, Debbie, comes of age under the shadow of a mentally unstable mother, Maeve, and under the care of her uncle Billy, who lives outside in a caravan. Maeve and Billy are both clairvoyants, but while his powers of divination are sought after by the local community, hers are by the same token ridiculed.
Debbie is given a ticket to freedom in the form of a place on an English course in Trinity College where she makes friends with a rich townie called Xanthe and slowly works her way back to loving and understanding her home and her family of mystics.
Nealon wrote the book on her parents’ dairy farm in Cappagh, Co Kildare, where she grew up, close to the Meath border between Enfield and Kilcock.
While her family has been supportive of her writing, the wider society seemed money and career-obsessed to a girl coming of age in the time of the Celtic Tiger.
A couple of weeks ago, she visited her former secondary school in Kilcock and, she says, her English teacher recalled asking the class, “Who’s going to do English in college?”
No hands went up. From the back of the class, one girl said, “I want to be able to buy nice things.”
Contemporary Ireland left little space for a dreamy girl whose father named her, “the Fairy”. Being a dreamer didn’t seem like a viable option, she says: “In the age of social media, it’s all about presenting a very clear picture of yourself to the outside world in a way we didn’t before. It was a watershed moment when Facebook took off. I didn’t really place much value on my social life until I realised that everyone else had one and I didn’t. I started to feel really down.”
What the disembodied eye of the smartphone and the pornographer’s camera have done to sex for young people is made terrifyingly clear in the novel. Her characters don’t have very much sex but they obsess about their ability to please others.
The reality of sex as a performance for young people is far from funny, however: “It’s not what the man expects of the woman, it’s what she thinks he expects,” Nealon says.
One of her funniest images is in her short story ‘What Feminism is?’ when a young woman speaks of her experience of sex as feeling like the corner of a hot press into which a bulky sleeping bag is pushed but keeps falling out.
She describes young women preparing for sex like they would for an exam but adds that young men are also “victims” of societal demands which previous generations simply did not feel. “It’s incredibly damaging and it’s something we’re not talking about.”
When I suggest that the relationship between men and women is undergoing a traumatic readjustment Nealon laughs and quips, “That’s why I’m single”, but she declines to comment further.
Relationships between women seem to interest her even more than relationships between the sexes. She loves Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels which she says broke the taboo on describing female friendship in all its intimacy, jealousy, love and hatred.
“I got into the habit in my late 20s of voicing my jealousy of my female friends and it really helped our relationship. I was surprised when they also said they were jealous of bits of me. I discovered we all had really low self-esteem and we were always projecting what we wanted to be onto each other,” Nealon says.
She is fascinated by the dynamic between younger and older women. “I see so much beauty in older women. I admire my mother so much and it hurts me when she doesn’t see what I see. But I’m repeating the same pattern.”
Nealon believes intergenerational trauma is also at the heart of Irish women’s lack of self-esteem. “My grandmother had to give up her job when she got married. It’s not that long ago. We’re actually part of a much longer journey and all these superficial changes in society, if we choose to go deeper, they’re small changes.”
Going “deeper” is, she says, where “mysticism comes in”. Nealon is a strong believer in tapping into the spirit world. “We don’t know everything,” as she puts it. Maeve, Debbie’s space-cadet of a mother, whose most memorable scene involves jumping into a coffin and landing on top of the corpse, is a mystic character that Nealon based on “worst case scenario for me if I didn’t… didn’t…”
Rein yourself in, I suggest?
She describes using objects like sea shells and Brigid’s crosses and dandelions during the writing of Snowflake as “port keys” into the world of her characters, the points at which Nealon’s world “kind of crossed” with that of her fictional characters.
When I suggest she means they’re symbols, she insists they go much deeper: they’re keys into the “spirit world” of her fiction. How firmly she believes in this alternative world is clear in the way she talks about her characters as if she didn’t make them up. “Debbie lives down the road from me in Kildare,” she says casually.
Nealon grew up on the farm with her brother and three sisters in what sounds like a comfortable environment. “I need to make clear,” she says, “that I didn’t grow up in poverty. And neither did Debbie.”
When she arrived in Trinity College Dublin at the age of 18 she found, however, that she and her background were looked down on. As does Debbie.
It’s a real ouch moment in Snowflake when Debbie crosses herself after seeing an ambulance go by and her friend Xanthe remarks that it’s a “cute” thing to do. Nealon, too, found she was patronised at Trinity and expected to be much more innocent than the townies.
She takes the opportunity in Snowflake to make sure that farming and the land get their due respect. Vegans who say “dairy takes babies from their mothers” don’t really win the argument with Billy who responds, “What are we f**king meant to do? Leave the calf there for it to grow up enough so mammy and son can start riding each other?”
She doesn’t mythologise the land either, but the novel makes an argument for people to connect both with the land and with each other. And above all to make time for the survival skill that is daydreaming.
I suggest that she’s really arguing against an economy that seems to demand more and more hours from its workers and leaves no time for thought, let alone dreams. She agrees that she’s “privileged” to be able to spend her days writing but says she worked hard for it.
Grateful as she is to win the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year award, she’s dying to stop doing interviews and go back to write full-time in her home in Belfast, a city she learned to love as a master’s degree student and “isn’t finished with yet” because it’s “gas” and the people are “so warm”.
Maybe she’s finally learning to follow her own prescription: “I think that women being radically kind, not to each other, but to themselves – and supporting each other in that – is a starting point for the healing that we need to do for what society has put on us that’s not us.”
‘Snowflake’ is out now from Manilla Press
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29 novembre, 2021 0 Comments 1 category
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