Readers Place

Roddy Doyle interview/review

Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Karen Sbrockey

1. Do you see yourself as a political writer?

Yeah, I do. I don’t actually force the issue because I write about Irish, urban characters and they drag the politics behind them, not the other way around. Celebrating pregnancy outside marriage, in the case of The Commitments [working class life], and The Snapper, is a political thing.

Paddy Clarke, I suppose, is the least political of my books. But even in the Irish context, marital breakdown is often considered a modern problem. And I wanted to force the reality that it’s always been a problem. I wanted to make a rosy period [the ’60s] in Irish history clash with what’s considered to be a modern reality.

1. You were the first Irish person to get the Booker. That’s amazing. Isn’t that strange?

No, it’s not strange as such. It is, to an extent, surprising, but while I’m the first Irish person to win it, I was by no means the first person outside Britain to win it. For example, I was shortlisted in 1991 and Ben Okri, the Nigerian writer, won it. And Salman Rushdie won it years before that and Nadine Gordimer won it and J. M. Coetzee won it. So plenty of writers from outside the three countries of Britain have won it. It was just pure luck that I won it.

1. Growing up in Dublin, with all the writers and all the artists from Dublin, in school were you immersed in that background?

No. In fact, going through school, with the exception of a few set courses, very staid, very dull, and again, if memory serves me, a few short stories, a few poems by Yeats, a few short stories by Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor, and in the final years I was there, ‘Playboy of the Western World’, that was about as much literature, Irish or Anglo-Irish literature, [as] we were given. I went to university and I studied the others, but I’ve newer felt that Dublin’s a particularly literary city – my home, basically. Now obviously, these literary figures are from there. Most of them got out as quick as they could.

1. You’ve said that Anne Tyler and Ray Carver were influences for you.

Certainly, if you like, you could just as easily ask me who are your favorite writers. And they – Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver – would be in the top ten, certainly. But whether they’re influences or not, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s much in common between me and Anne Tyler. Now her work, I adore it. But there may be [something in common] in terms of subject matter, between me and Raymond Carver. But you know, I’ve only written one short story in my life. So, I mean, I’d love to be able to write short stories, but I just don’t think they’re there, or they’re not in me. But there’s a whole wealth of American writers whose work I really admire and revere. My own individual books, written by me, have been inspired by individual books.

1. But you hadn’t had any formal writing training?

That’s not uncommon. Certainly at the time there was no such thing as a formal writing training course in Ireland. I know it’s very common here in America, and there are a couple of well-known courses in Britain: in Norwich [at University of East Anglia] for example, with Malcolm Bradbury, but it didn’t exist at the time in Ireland.

1. How would you characterize your own work as art?

It’s literary. It’s literature. Every word – every choice I make in regards to words – is a literary decision. I don’t … it’s not up to me to decide whether it’s low or high. Everybody’s their own critic, whether it’s good or bad or somewhere in between.

1. What is your writing routine like? Do you write every day?

Yeah. I write from about half-nine in the morning to about five o’clock, with variation, but Monday through Friday. When I gave up teaching, I decided I’d maintain the nine-to-five routine because it fitted in with my family’s routine, and everybody else’s routine. I stop at five because the woman employed to take care of our children goes home at five. I take over if my wife isn’t there. I take over anyway. I write the minute I sit down. I’ve never been fussy about where I work, as long as I have, not stone silence, but a certain amount of silence.

In the past I used to just write the whole thing through and revise, because I was writing, not against time as such, but especially during the teaching time and particularly when my children arrived – the one and then the other – there was less and less free time to write. If I had started by revising what I’d done the day before, I’d never have got anywhere. Now, by degrees, I tend to go over what I did the day before and sometimes if I want to knit it all together, I go back even further. I’m not as fussy now about getting a page and going on to the next one. I know at times writing good work doesn’t come easily to me but actually sitting down and writing does.

1. Why do you write? What meaning does writing have for you on a spiritual, emotional level?

Why do I write? Well I suppose the simplest answer is because I love it. And I’ve written books that I thought – I’d like to think – have entertained people, that have shown them worlds that they didn’t know existed or that they sensed, but didn’t know. I’d also like to think that people have recognized themselves in the books. In an Irish context, I’d like to think that people reading my books are seeing their area, not geographically necessarily, but their type of place, for the first time between the pages of a book.

1. And should one write from the heart? Write what one knows?

Oh, no. No. I don’t believe in that at all. I think if it’s taken literally, I think it’s a dreadful piece of advice. Because none of the books I’ve written have been about what I know, in the literal sense. If it’s taken in the broader sense, yeah, that’s fine. But I think that piece of advice, which probably started off as a good, benign, piece of advice, has become something of a tyranny. This idea that you have to go out there and live and then come back and write about it – that’s one way of writing, but it’s not the only way of writing.

COPYRIGHT © 1999 Fairleigh Dickinson University COPYRIGHT © 2000 Gale Group