The open ending, with Vivian and Penelope going off on a new adventure together, makes the question obvious: Will you ever return to the character of Vivian?
Not right now, I’m all Vivian-ed out—it’s a pretty intense head to live in for a year! But in the future, who knows. I’d need to put her in a different setting to mix it up a bit. There is something very exhilarating about writing a character like Vivian and consciously stripping away your expectations and assumptions to try to see the world afresh—and that’s something I’d like to come back to.
What’s your writing process like?
Currently unpredictable. When Eggshells was published in Ireland a couple of years ago, I described my writing process as mostly trying to write one thousand words a day and just pushing through regardless. That was true for Eggshells, but my process now is much more sporadic. My day job involves getting up at 4:45 a.m. and my writing time comes after work, but I’m fighting a constant battle with sleep urges. And trying to ignore piles of dirty dishes and laundry and the shopping list. Some days writing wins the battle, some days housework and real life wins out. I try to write in chunks before the critical side of my brain kicks in. That way, I end up with an unwieldy sloppy great big beast of a first draft which requires a lot of reworking and editing before it’s readable.
Did you always want to be a writer? How did you get started?
It somehow never crossed my mind that I could be a writer; it seemed like something that other people did. I’ve always devoured books, and I wrote stories as a child and was encouraged hugely by my parents, but somewhere around adolescence the urge to write was overtaken by other urges. Then I got sidetracked by studying, traveling, and working until my early thirties. I had been running marathons and was training for an ultramarathon when I injured my knee, which put an end to my running. I needed a new obsession so I signed up for a creative writing course with Greg Baxter, who instilled a horror of lazy clichés and hackneyed phrases in his students, which helped to cut out a lot of excess verbiage in my writing. I wrote a few short stories and essays, but failed miserably in my attempts at publication, so I hit the streets and focussed on the novel.
What’s next?
I’m writing that difficult second novel, which is taking a lot longer than the first novel did. The current novel has two main characters, which is refreshing after the intensity of living inside Vivian’s head. This novel is set in Hamburg, in Germany, a location I happened across when I visited a friend who lives there. I was ripe for a new setting and Hamburg was it. And there may be more trips to Hamburg required—for research purposes, of course.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAITRIONA LALLY studied English literature in Trinity College Dublin. She has had a colorful employment history, working as an abstract writer and a copywriter, in addition to working as a home helper in New York and an English teacher in Japan. She has traveled extensively around Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. She was short-listed for “Newcomer of the Year” in the Irish Book Awards in 2015.
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