Interviews

In 2014, just before she went big, I interviewed Caroline Kepnes, whose debut novel You had just been released. The interview is below:

David Ewald’s Interview with Caroline Kepnes (2014)

Then, in 2016, after she’d gone big, I interviewed Kepnes again, this time in the wake of the release of her sophomore effort, Hidden Bodies:

David Ewald’s Interview with Caroline Kepnes (2016)

In between those two interviews, I conducted one in August 2015 with the Irish novelist Paula McGrath, whose debut novel Generation had just been released. The interview follows below:

DE: How did Generation come to be? What sparked the idea for this novel, and the concept of a narrative told from multiple points of view?

PM: Story and structure evolved together. Generation began as a single short story about a German couple squabbling at a Farmers Market, as told by Joe, the stall-holder. When I was asked to write more about Joe, I wrote “Yehudit”, his post-war immigrant mother’s story. I had the vague idea that the theme of the stories was migration. This led to the next story, about Carlos, a seasonal worker on Joe’s farm, and the next, about Áine, a bored Irish divorcee who travels to Chicago in search of adventure. However, this story did not feel like a short story, especially when it stretched past 15,000 words, and ultimately, it became the core of the book. There was a lot of rewriting of the earlier stories at this point, so, in a sense, the novel began in the middle and worked both forwards and backwards.

It wasn’t until I knew whose story would finish the novel, and from this, whose story would begin it, that I understood what I was trying to do. This was also when I realised where the idea for the novel had come from. The second-person story which opens the book is based on my father’s experience mining uranium in the fifties, in Sudbury, Ontario. But the spark came when, many years later, he revisited the town, and the mine which is now a museum. He came home wearing a sweater embossed with the museum’s name, and at the time I thought how strange it must have been for him to be a tourist where once he had laboured. Though it sat dormant somewhere in my subconscious for seventeen years, this was the germ for the novel.

DE: In fall 2013 you published the story “Yehudit” in Eclectica. Did you know at the time that this story would become a part your debut novel? How many other pieces from Generation did you first publish in literary journals? Do you recommend that writers publish excerpts from their works in progress, or does that even matter?

PM: No. At the time, I was under the impression that I was writing a short story collection. “Yehudit” was written in response to the Farmers Market story, “Auslanders”, published in The Ofi Press in 2012, and these were the only two excerpts published. In the stories which followed, the links multiplied and I realised that what I was writing was actually a novel.

Novels are long, lonely journeys, and having part of mine accepted for publication by a journal like Eclectica was invaluable in terms of validation and confidence-building. However, while there is the argument that novel excerpts give a flavour of the novel, I generally find them to be an unsatisfying read. I was delighted to have the stories published as stand-alones—which, at time of publication, they were—but because there are several, quite different points of view in the novel, I don’t think they give much sense of what the novel is about.

DE: Your prose is often quite poetic. Would you agree that Generation seems to be just as much, if not more, about the writing itself than it is about the story or plot, or do you have another take on this?

PM: I’m excited when I happen upon a book in which story, language, and form come together in just the right balance. This is the sweet spot I aspire to. I love poetic language, but it has to serve a purpose—in both my reading and writing—whether that is to give character, or to create a mood, or to provide balance or relief .

The language I use—my style, I suppose—comes naturally, but I have to keep a tight rein on it. For Generation, I pared sentences back in the editing to leave a clean, airy feel to the writing. Generation is about the space between the characters and their stories in place and time, but it’s also about maintaining space within the language.

I had to work hardest on form and structure. I turned to formal theory to explore differences between short stories and novels and everything in between (and beyond), until I was convinced that I was in novel territory. Then I agonised over structure; the spaces between the stories, and the passage of time, are an important part of the overall narrative, and I needed to find a structure which would serve this purpose, yet I was conscious that an overly clever structure can seem gimmicky. I was gratified when cover designer Harriet Sleigh—using old astronomy charts featuring place, time and relationship to represent the point-of-view characters—captured what I had tried to convey.

As to plot, I like mine slight—Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H.; Duras’s The Lover; Joyce’s Ulysses—but however slight, without story there is no novel (see ‘unpublished novels’ below).

DE: You finished an MFA at University College, Dublin. How great (or little) a help was the MFA in finishing—and publishing—your debut novel?

PM: I would have finished it without an MFA—I had three unpublished novels under the bed already and an almost finished fourth—but it would not have been the same novel. I found the immersion experience invaluable, along with tutor and peer discussions, and library facilities. The (optional) combination of critical with creative work was very productive for me. I also enjoyed the pedagogical side—teaching is an excellent way to learn.

DE: As an Irish author, you probably brace yourself for the inevitable question “Which Irish writers have influenced you?” You don’t have to answer with Irish writers per se, but who has influenced you—and how?

PM: The earliest influence was the poets: Yeats, Kavanagh, Clarke. I think that by learning the poems “by heart”, as we did as children, rhythm and language somehow got absorbed into the bloodstream.

Edna O’Brien’s life and writing were a big influence on me (see my Eclectica essay). I’d been reading Joyce and the lads, as the canon dictated, and I could not see any way in for an Irish woman. In the mid-nineties, I did a Women’s Studies MA with a thesis on O’Brien—who had disgracefully not yet been included in the canon—and she was the perfect antidote. Her language, and her courage and conviction, continue to inspire me.

I owe a debt to so many, in different ways, for different reasons, at different times, including W.G. Sebald, Amy Tan, Anne Tyler, Sandor Marái, Raymond Carver, Joyce, Beckett, Calvino, Renata Adler, Jennifer Egan, Claire-Louise Bennett, Eimear McBride…

DE: Speaking of influence, travel, in addition to time and family and sexism, plays a large part in Generation. How much has travel influenced your writing—and Generation in particular?

PM: Travel—and time—gave me the perspective necessary to write Generation. I couldn’t have written this book if I had stayed put in Ireland. Nor could I have written it when I was twenty-two, living in Los Angeles, trying to be a writer, but my experiences there informed Generation, eventually.

DE: What’s next for you?

PM: I’m working on a novel currently in three novellas. It’s had a bit of a hiatus with all the excitement of Generation, and the school holidays. I have high hopes for September.