Sunday Independent interview by Emily Hourican

‘I wanted to be the witch’ – author Liz Nugent on embracing her dark side

Interview

Emily Hourican

March 5th 2023

Author Liz Nugent is talking about ‘magical thinking’ – that bubble we place around ourselves, to protect us from the many random, terrible things that happen.

That bubble, once burst, never reforms.

We’ll come back to the how and why of the pain – but first, as far as the effect on her writing goes, I wonder is there a connection? Nugent’s books (she’s about to publish her fifth; the four previous have each topped bestseller lists and won Irish Book Awards) are dark. Very dark.

She is a master at creating vicious characters and very troubling situations. There are certain very bleak images from her books that are still with me, years after reading them.

“I don’t particularly enjoy small talk. I’ve a fear of Dundrum Shopping Centre ”

And yet, in person, she is warm, friendly, thoughtful, charming. So where does the darkness come in?

“People who know me say: ‘I can’t see any of you in your books,’” she agrees. “They say: ‘You don’t seem like the type of person who would write books as dark as that.’ And when I do public interviews, people are often really surprised that I try to keep it as light as possible – I’ll have a laugh and joke on stage.”

So is it glib to ask if a lifetime of pain, and the troubling imagination are connected?

“I wonder that too,” she says. “I often wonder, is there something that happened in the original brain haemorrhage that set this all off? I fell down the stairs when I was seven – sliding down the bannisters, that’s what caused it. I remember going back to school after that, and we were doing a play in school. Everybody wanted to be the princess, and I wanted to be the witch.”

“Or,” she continues, “was it simply being a woman growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, seeing what was happening to Ann Lovett, Joanne Hayes?

“That was a scary time, when the Pope and Ronald Reagan survived assassination attempts. The nuclear arms race, which was terrifying to 12-year-old me. I went to sleep every night wondering would I wake up. I was often scared as a child,” she says. “I was absolutely petrified.”

And there’s another possibility. 

“Was that dark side just always there? Maybe it had nothing to do with the fall or that upbringing?”

Anyone who has read her previous four novels will know Nugent has a knack for creating brilliantly nasty characters – but this time, with Strange Sally Diamond, she’s doing something different. “She is the nicest character I have created, and I really love her,” she says of Sally, who is genuinely appealing, from the book’s opening line: ‘Put me out with the bins,’ he said, regularly. ‘When I die, put me out with the bins.’

Sally does exactly that, setting in motion a chain of events that are fascinating, and traumatic, that drag her appalling childhood – of which she remembers nothing – back into the light, and pull at threads that lead halfway across the world. Through it all, Sally picks her way as best she can.

The result is a novel that is both a relentless page-turner and also a thought-provoking reflection on life as we live it now.

“I wanted to write a female Boo Radley, from To Kill a Mocking Bird,” Nugent says. “And of course, being me, my mind just takes me to the dark side...”

What is it she likes so much about Sally? Her answer speaks volumes.

“I think it’s to do with the fact that she is partly me without a filter,” she says. “Like Sally, I don’t particularly enjoy small talk. I’ve a fear of Dundrum Shopping Centre.

“I’d never wear makeup if it wasn’t socially expected that I do. I don’t know if that’s on me – I know I don’t have to wear makeup. But when you go out or you’re doing a public thing, you feel a sort of obligation to present yourself in a certain way.

“I also cut my hair really short, because I realised I was spending so much time looking after it and I decided I just wasn’t doing that anymore. I’m not brave enough to embrace the grey yet, maybe someday.

“Sally is me, unfiltered. She says the things I sometimes say. I have so many instances of saying the wrong thing in my life to people, of unintentionally insulting people because I read the situation wrong. I don’t have a condition, not as far as I know. But I’m sometimes really bad at reading the room. I get it wrong.”

At one point in the book, Sally pretends to be deaf in order not to have to talk to people in the village. “When I wrote that, half of me was thinking ‘I wish I’d thought of that,’” she says with a laugh.

Seriously, I ask?

“Not really. I like people.”

Liz talks then about her father’s funeral, which took place during Covid. She has a different take on something that, for many people, was one of the hardest things about the pandemic restrictions.

“I was really grateful, because there could only be, I think it was 18 people at the funeral. He had nine children, and if it had been a proper funeral, I would have had to shake hands with hundreds of people. I thought it was really nice we could have that small, private family funeral. There was something really intimate about it.

“Everyone says: ‘Oh, the Irish do funerals really well.’ And they do, if you like that sort of thing. But I would rather do something small and quiet and more restrained than shaking hands with 100 strangers.”

And yet, for all that she loves Sally, Liz puts her into situations that are very bleak.

“I had to write a different ending because the Americans thought it was too dark ”

“The opening is kind of comedic, and then it takes a turn,” she agrees. “I love the fact that there are no clues on the front or back of the book that tell you what to expect. And I’m glad that there are no trigger warnings either.”

Yes, trigger warnings on books are now a thing. And given that Strange Sally Diamond deals with kidnapping, imprisonment, assault, rape, abuse, suicide, and more, you might expect it to carry one.

But, as Liz points out, “I never talk about anything graphically. I never put the reader in the room where these things are happening. So if you think this is really dark, that’s because your imagination is working. And that’s really good – to get the reader’s imagination working.

“Most people will assume that much darker things happened then happened. Though it’s pretty clear it was horrific.

“For years I said I would never write a book about sexual violence,” she continues, “and I haven’t – because there is no description of sexual violence in the book.”

It’s an interesting distinction. There is no description of sexual violence, and yet the book is steeped in the notion of it. And there is no accident in that.

“In today’s society, women are being devalued further and further,” she says. “I think women’s progress has been retarded, and people like Trump legitimise that, in the way they behave and what they say, and it is just so shocking and horrible. 

“I read an article recently about women in Oklahoma put in prison after they miscarried, because they were seen smoking or drinking before the miscarriage. And I read it and I thought: ‘This is Gilead.’”

Interestingly, the American edition has a slightly different ending. “I had to write a different ending because the Americans thought it was too dark. So there is one extra chapter, at the end.

“It’s not a happy ending,” she hastens to add. “It’s a hopeful ending.”

The US, she says, rejected her third novel, Skin Deep. “They thought it was too dark.”

A lot of the negative reviews of that book, she thinks, were because the main character is so unlikable. “How could she walk away from her son? How did she not bond with her child? Women – mothers in particular – are judged far more harshly than men.

“Because I don’t have children, I think my friends who do have children feel they can say to me what they can’t say to their parent-friends, and some of them say: ‘I love my kids. Don’t get me wrong. But if I had my time again, I wouldn’t have children.’ It is the great unsaid, especially for women.”

“My handwriting was consequently very slow, so I never finished an exam paper”

Nugent, one of six, grew up in Dublin and went to school at Holy Child, Killiney. She didn’t go on to university. Last year, when she was awarded the James Joyce award by the UCD Literary and Historical Society, she said this was due to two factors.

“Firstly, I was a terrible student and a troubled adolescent and secondly, because of a physical disability which meant that almost as soon as I learned to write, a catastrophic brain haemorrhage affected my right-hand side.

After years of painful physiotherapy, I had to abandon all attempts to use my right hand to write and gradually learn to use my left hand. My handwriting was consequently very slow, so I never finished an exam paper.”

Instead, she trained as an actor, then worked as a stage manager with Riverdance before moving to RTÉ where she worked for many years on Fair City. During this time she met her husband, musician and sound engineer Richard McCullough.

She began writing – initially an animation series of TG4, then a radio play, and then in 2006 a short story which made the shortlist of the Francis McManus competition. She adapted it into her first novel, Unravelling Oliver, an instant bestseller.

Since that childhood accident, pain has been a constant companion.

“I always express my pain as discomfort, as I’ve lived with it for so long. Later, I had two ill-advised operations, leg surgery, one when I was 12, then again when I was 21.”

Then, last year, she was left her with a dislocated kneecap and a broken tibia.

“I was walking into Judith Mok’s house – she wrote this brilliant book recently called The State of Dark, about growing up Jewish in Holland – and I just fell. I was wearing brand new boots which I just haven’t really been able to put on since bad associations. I tripped over something.

“I was 45 minutes before the ambulance came and I was just screaming. That level of pain, I would not wish it on Donald Trump. Well,” she considers, “maybe...

“I was outside Judith’s apartment and I couldn’t be moved because my kneecap was around the back of my knee and completely out of place. People brought blankets because it was November and freezing. My whole leg was in spasm, all the way up into my right arm.”

She isn’t a candidate for a knee replacement, “because any surgery would set off a terrible chain reaction”. Instead, she’s waiting to hear if she can try ‘deep brain stimulation’.

“It’s kind of very minor brain surgery,” she says. “There’s not a lot of risk. In fact, the neurologist told me the biggest risk is disappointment that it won’t work. It’s a relatively new therapy, and the hope is that it will stop the spasms I experience.

“For example, I sit with my right foot foot flexed, involuntarily – which might not sound like much, but it’s exhausting, because it’s constant. Deep brain stimulation will stop that, and that would give me a lot more energy.”

“I hate being told I’m brave. Or I’m an inspiration. Like as if I had a choice”

First, she needs to be assessed “by a psychologist to manage my expectations, also by a speech therapist because there’s a lot of stuff that can go haywire with brain surgery and speech. And a physiotherapist who will tell me what I can expect.”

She has a lot to contend with. (“I can only type with one hand. I type with my left hand because my right hand doesn’t work...”) but that doesn’t mean she wants to be told she is brave. 

“I hate being told I’m brave. Or I’m an inspiration. Like as if I had a choice. Do you think I should just go to bed? Would that be the unbrave thing? If I was less courageous, would I just stay at home for the rest of my life and never go out?”

After last year’s accident, she had to “lie still and wait for the bones to knit. That’s why I was in hospital for so long.” She asks then if she can give a shout-out “to the staff in St Vincent’s, and the rehab people at Royal Hospital Donnybrook. I couldn’t have had better treatment, as a public patient.”

And yet, she is adamant, “I don’t want to dwell on disability.” And, with a laugh, “I’m definitely more daring when I cross the road. I think: ‘I can’t get knocked down. I’ve already been through it. There’s no way...”

Instead she’s already thinking about the next book.

“I already have the opening line: ‘For the second time that month, I woke up with the wrong husband.’ I don’t know who’s saying this. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman. I know nothing about this character. But I have to let that settle, and then find out.”

‘Strange Sally Diamond’ by Liz Nugent, is published by Penguin Sandycove and out now