Chapter Sixty-Two
Emma Donoghue
Room with a View
When Emma Donoghue claims she’s never written with the goal of being a bestseller, you can’t help but believe her.
Since earning her Ph.D. in English in 1997, Donoghue has been enthusiastically amassing a body of work inspired solely by her personal passions, with little concern for the market. As diverse as she is prolific, she’s written historical novels; literary criticism in the forms of articles, essays, and three complete books; countless short stories and fairy tales; both historical and contemporary fiction exploring lesbian themes; and plays for stage, radio, and screen; in addition to editing anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
That impressive range goes beyond form and genre. A Dublin native now living in Canada with her partner and two children, the forty-one-year-old has published in several international markets, with varying degrees of commercial success, over time garnering modest awards and even her first taste of bestseller status in the United States and abroad for 2000’s Slammerkin—the story of a prostitute in eighteenth-century London, inspired by an actual murder case from 1763—which showcased her ability to enthrall readers with her reimaginings of real life.
And then, in September of 2010, she published Room.
Room wasn’t just unlike any other book Donoghue had written—it’s unlike any other book, period. Told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy who was born to a kidnapped woman and knows nothing of the world beyond the room in which they’re held captive, Room is a haunting, powerful tale of the effects of isolation as well as the bonds between mother and child. The public may have first taken notice when Donoghue admitted she’d been inspired by the notorious Elisabeth Fritzl kidnapping case, but readers and critics alike soon recognized the book for its remarkable achievements in voice, perspective, and story. The international bestseller landed Donoghue on the 2010 shortlists for a trio of giants—the Man Booker Prize, Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award, and Galaxy International Author of the Year—and won both The Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for the year’s best Canadian novel.
But if you think this means a new, mainstream direction for Donoghue, think again. Read on for her take on the intersections between inspiration, work, and unexpected success.
You’ve had a prolific career, but Room has garnered unprecedented attention. What’s that been like?
It’s like when you get a new haircut, and suddenly all your friends are going, “Oh, I’m so relieved you’ve got this haircut! This is ten times better than your hideous old hair!” You’re obviously thrilled that people like the new haircut, but also mildly insulted that clearly everybody despised your previous haircut. I remember the [literary director] of the Man Booker Prize, Ion Trewin, said of me something like, “Here’s this woman who’s been writing for years and getting nowhere, and now suddenly she’s on the Booker list.”
And you know, I still maintain I was not getting nowhere. I think to support yourself as a writer is a great mixture of merit and good luck anyway, and I’ve always felt a great connection with my readers—they’re just far more numerous this year. So I’m bemused by the sudden increase in my reputation, but from my point of view, I’ve been a success since the age of twenty because I’ve never needed to get a job.
Are you already feeling pressure for the next book?
Definitely. Some journalists even slightly scold me, like, “Now you’ve learned how to be commercial. Will you do this again next time?” And I say, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” There would be no surer way to write a complete failure of a book than to try and in any way recapture Room. Bestsellers are completely unpredictable, and you certainly don’t manage to be original by looking over your shoulder at your possible readership and trying to guess what they will like. The only way to succeed as a writer—in literary fiction, anyway—is to follow your personal obsessions. And once in a while, your obsession will happen to overlap with the obsessive interests of a lot of readers.
In a publishing climate where writers are often advised to develop one niche, you’re quite diverse. Is that something you consciously strive for?
You know, maybe I’m lucky nobody ever told me that. I know what you mean, in terms of marketing and making a brand of yourself. It would be logical to develop one niche.
But I’ve always had a very good agent who’s always emphasized the sure interest of each book or play. She’s never approached my work with that hard-boiled, Will this appeal to your previous readership? attitude. I know my publishers are occasionally a bit bemused by, you know, what am I going to throw at them next, but nobody’s ever said, “Oh, Emma, you have to give us more of the same thing.”
How would you describe what drives you as a writer, or what lies at the heart of all the writing you do?
I think I’m what in the academic world—when they’re talking about historians—they call a revisionist. Revisionist historians take a particular era and look at what the prevailing wisdom on that era is, and find a sort of countermovement and a different way of interpreting the same evidence.
Sometimes I literally do historical revisionism, like if I take eighteenth-century London and focus my narrative on a working-class prostitute [as in Slammerkin]. And sometimes I do a more symbolic revisionism where I try and find voices for people who have not been very much represented in contemporary literature. I am certainly interested in the marginal, in outsiders.
Another thing that’s coming up quite a lot is emigration. … I’m interested in people who, like myself, have ended up far from home, and in the parallels between that geographical journey and the other ways people end up far from where they started. [And] I have an obvious interest in women’s history and women’s lives, but not an all-exclusive one.
You write books at a steady pace, and still regularly publish short pieces. I assume that means you’re often working on more than one piece at a time?
Yeah, I often am. I think some writers are very intense in their process. I’m not like that at all. I’m much more in the tradition of Jane Austen, who wrote on her lap, and whenever visitors arrived she would just put a cushion over her work and chat. I’m intensely absorbed in each project, but not such that it disrupts my life, and it’s not one at a time. I can be writing intensely on one thing in the morning, and then something else in the afternoon. I wouldn’t usually have two novels on the go, but I would certainly have the writing of one novel and then research for the next one.
I think that’s the main way I avoid writer’s block if I’m feeling a bit sluggish or uninterested in whatever my main project is, I will either go do a bit of research, or write a short story. These things give me little breaks from the slightly claustrophobic monotony of working on one project.
Your novels, as varied as Slammerkin and Room, have been inspired by an element of truth from real life—
It’s funny, Room has such a tiny little connection with fact.
It’s been sort of blown out of proportion.
Oh, it has. I was naive—I didn’t realize that if you get associated with a notorious case in any way, the next thing you know, it’ll be, “Fritzl Novel Wins Prize,” which makes me shudder. I hate being evasive, so I thought I was better off just saying up front, “Yeah, it happened to be the Fritzl case,” but I don’t know. It would make me wary of writing anything else which has any connection with the headlines.
But I’ve often written closely based on fact [in my historical fiction]. So it’s sort of ironic that I ended up being punished for the hint of fact in Room when [it’s] one of the least factual books I’ve written.
What is it about a story in life or in history that will compel you to tell it, or to imagine what might have been?
I get this burning curiosity—really just for my own benefit I want to find out what happened. And when I get to the cliff edge where the fact runs out, I switch from historian to novelist, and I start to think, Ooh, I can imagine what happened.
You might say I could have just made it up in the first place, but I find it more thrilling if my inventions are rooted in fact. I find that moment where the facts fall away a very stimulating one. Because often the historical facts are just so wonderfully unpredictable and gritty.
So how do you decide when research is warranted?
I research at least five things for every one thing I actually write. The key moment for me is … that click when I suddenly see who my main character will be, and in a way that tells me what the story will be, too.
How does your formal education in literature influence the writing you’re doing today?
Well, it’s not like it’s necessary—I’ve met wonderful writers who’ve barely finished school. I don’t know any good writers who don’t read a lot. Whether you get it through reading or from an education, it comes to the same thing: You have to immerse yourself in many other people’s words and ideas before you will be able to express your own very well.
But doing a degree in English taught me how to analyze texts, and it made me more clear-sighted about my mistakes, because I can write a bad review of my own work in my head very easily. Doing a Ph.D. made me uninhibited about research. [And] it gave me years of uninterrupted work time.
What about your father—being a literary critic and a professor, has he been an influence?
Definitely. He’s very wide-ranging in his intellectual interests. He’ll point me in the direction of interesting texts, and once or twice he’s given me ideas for particular stories. But mostly the effect he’s had on me is that I grew up confident of my power to write books, because my father’s name was on the backs of books all over our house, so it just seemed a thing to do, you know? Grow up, write some books, go get published. I realize this is not the normal attitude!
Do you think about readers at all as you write fiction?
I think about them in the most helpful sense: I’m aware at every point of, okay, what does the reader know yet? That hint I dropped, will the reader have picked up on it? …
The most important conversation I ever had on that subject was with my agent, when I first met up with her. She told me that my [debut] novel Stir-Fry was good, but that I’d written it clearly for an audience of Irish women. And she said, “Your readers could be anyone in the world, so rewrite the book assuming nothing on their part.” Since then, I’ve tried to think of my readers as just about anyone.
So many writers find that the middle of a book is the hardest part. What helps you to push through?
I often get a bit bogged down. Or sometimes the first chapter can be a killer, because there’s so much information to include. I sometimes wish I could say to readers on about page 5, “Please bear with me! All this will pay off!” …
But then, yes, there’s another possible slump, which is in the middle. Sometimes it means that you’ve planned it badly. I’m a big planner, and if there’s a boggy bit in the middle, sometimes it’s that that chapter doesn’t need to be there.
Do you outline?
I do, in quite a lot of detail. I find if you plan, it allows you to leap more dramatically from one necessary moment to the next. I also write down what revelations the reader is getting at each point, so I can see whether I’m giving away a lot in chapter one and then no new information until chapter five. What you’re trying to do is to keep up the reader’s energy at every point. You’re looking for spots where things would sag or get lost or come off the rails.
You have a great deal of experience publishing internationally. What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned?
My experience of the publishing process really does vary wildly from book to book. When your book is not doing well, it’s just deeply, deeply quiet. Whereas when you’re successful, suddenly publicists are constantly ringing you up. So right now I’m experiencing the industry a bit like children constantly wanting me to tie their shoes. But they’re being really, really nice to me, as well—you feel like a star. The more usual experience is just very quiet.
Something I’ve learned is to take charge of representations of my work. I’m careful to write a blurb that will be the basis of the cover blurb. The terms you set in your initial synopsis, they’re going to turn up in reviews for the rest of that book’s life. … So it would be unwise to write your book and then just say to publishers, “Oh, you do all that.” You might think a book would be self-explanatory, but in fact, people are going to summarize it, sometimes in a single sentence. So if you’re the one who gets to set those terms, then you can really stop the book from being misunderstood.
Your career has taken so many turns. What would you say to writers who are frustrated with where they are?
We all have bad times. Two of my novels weren’t published in Britain, because my career there had fallen into oblivion—and that was just before Room.
I suppose getting focused on how to achieve success is really not the way to write great books. Keeping your mind on, you know, what is the story you would really love to tell, that actually is the best route to success.