Photo Credit: Una Roulston
Review by A.N. Higgins
Emma Donoghue is the author of eleven novels for adults––including Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize––two novels for children, and five short story collections, as well as various plays, screenplays, and works of nonfiction.
Donoghue’s most recent novel, The Pull of the Stars (HarperCollins, 2020), is set in a maternity flu ward in Dublin during the pandemic of 1918. The novel focuses on three main characters: the narrator, Julia, a nurse; a volunteer helper named Bridie Sweeney; and Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a doctor and revolutionary based on a real historical figure.
We spoke about the two topics of the day—pandemics and sociopolitical revolutions.
A.N. Higgins: You published your first novel, Stir Fry, in 1994, only a year after same-sex sexual activity was decriminalized in Ireland, and eleven years before queer marriage was legalized there. What has it been like for you to see such vast social change in Ireland over the course of your life and career? Did you believe that it would happen, or have you been surprised, or both?
Emma Donoghue: The social change that has taken place in Ireland has way surpassed my expectations––the sheer speed of it! It’s been very exciting to see, in a single generation, so much change.
Ireland has divisions, but it’s very intimate. I think a lot of people just came out to their families one by one and it meant that their grandparents were the ones who ended up voting for queer marriage. It had a transformative effect.
Also during that same period, I think Ireland switched from being a society characterized by secrecy and discretion and zipping the lip to being a society of exposing bad things to the light and radio call-ins and government inquiries into past scandals, so I think the improvements in LGBT rights have been part of a more general transformation of Ireland.
I was equally thrilled by other changes. I flew back from England to vote in the divorce referendum in 1995. And then when the eighth amendment got repealed, that was another thrilling day. So it’s been quite a trip!
ANH: Your most recent novel, The Pull of the Stars, discusses the Catholic Church’s mother-and-baby “homes” in Ireland. The pandemic is the most obvious parallel between 1918 and 2020, but I’m wondering how you see similar struggles over control of women and babies playing out in the world today.
ED: When I’m writing historical fiction, I don’t need to add in bits from today—there are already so many echoes. Like many Irish people, I’ve been very aware since the mid-90s of our appalling history of locking up our own people. Here in Canada, I’ve watched with great interest similar conversations about the residential schools. In Ireland, we punished our poor in the same way that in Canada the settler population punished Indigenous people in residential schools.
When you go on a journey to the past, you’re not only bringing your baggage, but you’re bringing your interest and your questions. You’re always going to produce a book which is kind of a meeting between that world of the past and this world of the present.
ANH: So you now know what it’s like to live through a pandemic—is there anything you would change about the book, knowing what you know now? Anything you wish you could add?
ED: Strangely enough, no. But it’s not that the book is perfect, it’s just that I think that the basics of any pandemic are probably the same, though all the subtleties are different.
For example, Julia doesn’t wear a mask because people didn’t yet know how masks might work successfully, so they were wrapping random things around their faces. Or sometimes people would wear a mask outside but then when they went into a building they’d take it off.
The book is based on all the research that I could do about how it was in 1918, and what’s been eerie to me is how many things have struck a chord with me since COVID-19 started, particularly the rhetoric of politicians, the victim-blaming or defeatism—“Oh, obviously the poor are going to be vulnerable to these things,” or, “What can you do, it’s a pre-existing condition”—that kind of attitude coming up in each era.
I basically understood that stuff from paying really close attention to the texts from 1918, so I wouldn’t change what I wrote. That’s not a boast, it’s just, I did a lot of research!
ANH: As you’ve mentioned, and as COVID-19 has demonstrated, pandemics, like just about everything else, are political. The Pull of the Stars is set in 1918, two years after the Easter Rising, and four years before the Irish Free State was established. Could you speak about your process of researching specifically the political atmosphere in Dublin at that time and its influence on your characters’ experiences of the 1918 pandemic?
ED: To my generation of people in the South, we thought of extreme nationalism as what was motivating the IRA to shoot people in the kneecaps, so we had a revulsion against nationalism. My family never sang rebel songs. We didn’t have an Irish flag. We were proud enough of where we lived but the idea of “Ireland for the Irish!” just repelled us. So I’d really never written a book about the national question.
So with this book, I really tried to keep the politics out of it at first. I thought, I want to look at the relatively timeless issue of [people] having babies and then add a pandemic to that.
But my American agent said to me, “You know, if you’re writing a novel in the era of Trump, Emma, you cannot keep politics out of it … Your book can be escapist fluff or it can be about the stuff that really matters to us—and nobody’s apolitical these days.” So I allowed Julia to get to the beginning of a political awakening.
That’s another thing I hadn’t anticipated about this year, that I’d see so much of what happened in my novel play out in the headlines today. The pandemic is giving people a chance to say, “Since we’ve hit a hard reset anyway, don’t we want to change some things about our society before starting it up again?”
ANH: Julia muses that “the old world was changed utterly, dying on its feet, and a new one was struggling to be born.” Her words feel very relevant! After COVID-19, what kind of new world are you hoping for? And do you think that the aftermath of the 1918 pandemic offers us any clues about the kinds of changes that might be coming?
ED: The pandemic has led to environmental questions, and questions about our daily lives, like, do we really want to go back to commuting and air travel and all the other things we’re prevented from doing?
But [I didn’t] necessarily expect this pandemic to lead to a major interest in anti-racism. And cases like George Floyd—if you take me as a random white viewer, I’ve been noticing cases like this for about five years, but not for twenty years. And I’m sure they’ve been happening all the time. In 1950 there were probably way more Black people dying under the knees of racist policemen, but they weren’t getting reported.
Why is it that this year so many of us responded so strongly? It’s fascinating and very hopeful that at a time when people are worried about things like, “Are there germs on the mail or on my groceries?” they also might worry about much bigger questions––the metaphorical diseases that are damaging our society. Just as the germs spread invisibly, concepts and new ideas can spread invisibly, too.
ANH: Pandemics, as we’re learning, create a strange sense of time moving both very quickly and very slowly. The Pull of the Stars takes place over the course of just three days, with moment-by-moment descriptions of what’s happening. At the same time, the novel feels fast-paced because of the urgency of its events. On top of that, there’s a two-day love story with an arc that felt very real. Could you speak a bit about how you made decisions around pacing?
ED: I did think a lot about time. All the way through, I was thinking in terms of labour. I remember when I was giving birth to our two babies realizing, this is bearable because it comes and goes, it’s not constant. Here comes a contraction, and now a little break. So I tried to do the same thing to my reader—tough times, and then a little tea break. Horrors, and then a bit of humour. There was an in-out breathing and squeezing rhythm to it all. I thought, okay, we’ll need one really big break before we head into the last stretch, which is so dark. So I put that scene on the roof between the second and the third days.
One of the things I wanted to capture about childbirth was its unpredictable timing. It’s not an illness, it’s a phenomenon. I wanted to explore all the different ways in which it can be strange or unexpected. A long labour is gruelling, but could be fine at the end. A short labour coming on too fast can be medically dangerous, even though you would think it’s great to have it out in twenty minutes. So I thought, I’ll have one that’s too short, one that’s too long, one that’s facing the wrong way, one where the mother dies, one where the baby dies.
I put in one experience of my own—I was the woman whose placenta wouldn’t come out. In my case, a doctor came in and saved me after a couple minutes. Afterwards, I suddenly realized, that was the moment when I would have died if this was the eighteenth century.
ANH: Which is your favourite of your books, and why?
ED: You like the ones that are successful because they bring you to parties! But then you like the ones that are unsuccessful because you feel compassionate towards them—they’re like your little babies that nobody appreciated. So, I’m very fond of two of my novels that sold really badly: Hood, in 1995, and Landing, in 2007.
ANH: I love Landing!
ED: Almost nobody has read those two! They’re both highly autobiographical and I really enjoyed them. I tend to feel a protective fondness for them. Whereas, when books have commercial success, it feels like they’ve grown up and left home—they don’t need you so much anymore.
Also, when you have commercial success, you’re aware that it’s because of the work of lots of other people as well—the cover designers and the publicists and so on. It feels like a communal success because you’re so aware of the elaborate effort being marshalled. Whereas, if a book goes nowhere commercially, it feels like it’s just yours.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, Emma Donoghue is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). She moved to England, and in 1997 received her PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, she has earned her living as a writer, and has been lucky enough to never have an ‘honest job’ since she was sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with Chris Roulston and their son Finn and daughter Una.
A. N. Higgins is a queer writer living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is an MFA Candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CV2, Pandemic Publications, untethered, The Maynard, Lida Literary Magazine, and The Anti-Languorous Project.