Virago Press

Recipes for Disaster: Emma Donoghue on the inspirations for her new collection of stories about taboos, Touchy Subjects

This book began about twelve years ago, the day I was in a department store in Cambridge, looking through a rack of silk dresses. An old man made some pleasant remark that I didn’t quite catch, and I murmured vague agreement; only when I’d gone outside did I realize that he’d thought I was pregnant, because they must have been maternity dresses. An utterly trivial incident; yet I brooded over it, and went home and wrote a story called ‘Expecting’ about a woman who gets caught up in a nine-month pretence. But don’t we all do this – get tied into knots, cringe and fret and tell ‘little white lies’, all to avoid some simple truth? That story grew into a collection called Touchy Subjects, a sort of primer on contemporary discomforts and taboos.

Everyone has their own private list of what makes them squirm, of course, but Touchy Subjects includes many generally ‘sore points’ such as death, religious conversion, and the class divide (an executive forces himself to call an ambulance for a homeless man, for instance, in ‘Good Deed’). ‘The Sanctuary of Hands’ was based on the disproportionate embarrassment I felt when, on a tour of some Neolithic caverns, a fearful man with ‘special needs’ got me to hold his hand.

A great example of a tiny thing that can cause havoc is female facial hair; I drew on my memories of having a girlfriend with a distinct beard when I wrote a story, ‘Pluck’, about a man’s near-breakdown triggered by a single hair on his wife’s chin. Money can be unspeakable; in one highly autobiographical story, ‘The Cost of Things’, a woman has enormous difficulty admitting to her partner that there’s a limit to how much she’s willing to pay for their cat’s medical treatment.

Sex is still hedged around with taboo, even in these supposedly tell-all times. ‘Team Men’ is my take on the David and Jonathan love story, updated to the hothouse atmosphere of a boys’ soccer team; ‘Speaking in Tongues’ is about a one-night-stand in which the discomfort is not that they are both women but that one is 34 and the other only 17.

Half a dozen of these stories turned out to be about whether and how to have babies, not just because it was a private preoccupation of mine during the years that led up to the birth of our son, but because little about families can be taken for granted nowadays. So I found myself exploring the awkwardness of a man trying to produce a sperm donation in a posh hotel bathroom, and the rage of a woman whose husband decides he wants children only when she is turning 43. After a friction-filled visit from my mother when I was in the middle of months of post-partum weepies, I wrote ‘Through the Night’ about the generation gap that yawns between exhausted young women doing ‘attachment parenting’ and their own bewildered, pragmatic mothers, who remember dosing their babies freely with alcoholic gripe water.

Writing these stories gave me a rush of catharsis, certainly: in ‘WritOr’, for instance, I allowed myself to recount savagely all my most irritating experiences of being a writer-in-residence. But if you do it right, autobiographical fiction should bring more insight than relief; I never felt a story was finished until I was filled with a certain rueful compassion for all the characters, no matter how much I’d taken the piss out of them. Taboos aren’t about right and wrong, after all; they are painful knots in the collective consciousness, and they call for a careful and
tender touch.

Copyright © Emma Donoghue, 2006

Emma Donoghue on writing Slammerkin

When I began my career as a writer eight years ago, I saw my primary interest in writing fiction as quite distinct from my secondary interest in historical research. Since then I have continued to publish non-fiction (on women's history and the history of sexuality) alongside my novels, being a writer and a scholar by turns, as it were.

In my first three plays (two for stage and one for radio), set in the 1820s, 1880s and 1660s, my two interests were already coming together; I found myself drawn to creating modern theatre out of obscure historical sources – a diary, a newspaper article, records of a witch trial. So much of women's history, in particular, will never be unearthed now – the 'hard evidence' never having been gathered, or being long lost – that it seems to me that fictional forms may offer the best hope of bringing the hidden past to life in all its fullness and contradiction.

Though my first two novels were contemporary and my third book of fiction was set in the never-never land of fairytales, I've been increasingly attracted to writing fiction set in previous centuries. Not contemporary stories wearing antique masks; not conventional period sagas; but a kind of literary fiction that would be rooted in a highly authentic historical setting, with characters who think like people did then, while dealing with themes that will grip modern readers. I am slowly putting together a sequence of short stories, entitled Histories of Nothing, that are based on peculiar little episodes in the lives of forgotten women of the British Isles from the 1320s to the 1900s.

In an encyclopaedia of Welsh women's history, I came across a brief entry on a teenage girl who killed a woman in Monmouth in 1763. At the British Library I tracked down several newspaper reports and her published confession. One of the sources claimed that Mary Saunders committed the murder because she longed for 'fine clothes'. At first I planned to base one of my short stories on this case, but the more I let myself dwell on the idea of a teenage girl who killed out of a passion for dresses, I realized that it would take a full-length novel to do it justice; hence Slammerkin.

The eighteenth century in particular has always fascinated me, and my fondness for it deepened while I was doing my PhD on eighteenth-century fiction at Cambridge between 1990 and 1998. At the aesthetic level, I must confess I find its fashions – stays and satins, ribbons and wigs – quite irresistible! The eighteenth century was an unpredictable and eccentric period, still much less familiar to modern readers than the nineteenth, but a time of equally startling social change that included a massive tension between country and city, as one was emptied to fill the other. If the typical eighteenth-century life story could be described as a young adult moving from the country to the city, I wanted to try dramatising this contrast the other way round, so in Slammerkin I decided to plunge a 1760s Londoner into the backwater of the Welsh Marches, where pagan customs still marked the passage of the seasons.

It might seem at first glance that nothing 'happened' in the English countryside in the 1760s, but forces were gathering which would burst out in various revolutions across Europe only twenty years later, and what I wanted was to set those forces in motion at the microcosmic level of a single household. The more I thought about it, the more Mary Saunders – born into rough cloth but hungering for lace – seemed representative of so many others in that century when the idea of upward mobility was just becoming possible. People like the Joneses were clawing their way into the new middle classes by hard work and education, rather than inheriting their roles by birth as in the old days; others, like Mary Saunders, fell through the gaps in the social ladder.

For women, of course, upward mobility has often been less about what they work at than which men they sleep with, and so I decided to make my protagonist a prostitute, because no other trade would provide such a vivid illustration of the bargains struck for the sake of ambition or survival. Prostitution and its attendant traumas would also help to make sense, I thought, of the fact that such a young woman committed such a bloody murder.

If Mary Saunders had been cold-blooded and mercenary, attacking a very rich woman, she wouldn't have interested me. Statistics show that people tend to murder their peers, and those they love. What I wanted to discover was how an ordinary girl could be driven to an extraordinarily brutal crime, caught in a sort of net of old hurts, betrayed affection, and inter-class rage. Instead of contrasting the very rich and the very poor, I wanted to show how it is the person just above you on the ladder who treads on your fingers. In a sense, Mary kills Mrs Jones because they could have been allies and friends, and almost managed it, but were driven apart in the end by money and all it represented.

I suppose I wrote Slammerkin because I wanted a challenge, at this point in my career. After publishing two modern novels which drew on settings and themes with which I was intimately familiar – novels that were relatively similar in their single point of view, contemporary Irish language, and focus on rather tempestuous lesbian relationships! – I needed to strike out onto new ground. The challenge I set myself was to write a novel set in a different country and a different century, with multiple narrators, a different set of themes, a more dramatic plot and darker tones; I needed to hear what I would sound like without the usual chatty, quipping Dublin voice.

I knew Slammerkin would be a disturbing story, with no happy ending or easy moral, but it was one I felt compelled to write. Mary Saunders's is one brief life, out of so many puzzling and fragmentary records left to us, that I felt it had to be told – or rather, imagined.