With a voice that captures the changing face of contemporary Ireland as easily as the British Isles in the 1300s or London in the 1700s, lesbian writer Emma Donoghue is known for taking on fascinating times and characters. Since the success of her first book, Stir-Fry, published when she was only 25 years old, Donoghue has written four other novels, including Slammerkin and Life Mask, three collections of short stories, two books of literary history, two plays, and edited two anthologies.
A five-time finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards, her latest book, Landing, was recently nominated for an award in the bisexual category. Donoghue returns to the historical novel with her next book, The Sealed Letter (due out later this year), which takes place in 19th-century London and features the feminist Emily Faithful. I recently spoke to Donoghue about The Sealed Letter, how motherhood changed her writing, and why books about lesbians are important.
AfterEllen.com: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? Emma Donoghue: Probably when I was about 14, which is absolutely simultaneous to discovering I was a lesbian. The two have always been connected for me.
AE: Growing up, did you look for lesbian writers or stories to read? ED: I did, and I could find nothing until I found a hideous Dutch novel when I was about 18 at the university bookstore. It was the most lurid, grim thing about a woman leaving her lover to go back to her husband in order to get pregnant. You think she’s dumped the girl and then she comes back and says, “Ta da, look, I’m pregnant and we’re going to have a baby!” And then her husband walks in the door and shoots her dead.
I’ve never been able to track [this book] down. I paid good money for this, but later on in a fit of disgust I threw it away. [laughs] I should have kept it.
AE: So then was it important for you to represent lesbian characters in your own stories? Is that something you thought about when you first began writing? ED: Absolutely. I wrote poetry until I was at university, and that’s fine because you don’t need to specify the gender – it’s like pop songs where you can just say “you.” But as soon as I started writing fiction, like most young writers, I had to write about what I knew, and so obviously lesbian content was going to be in there at least some of the time. From the start it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to write closeted fiction.
AE: Do you find that most people know or think of you as a “lesbian writer”? ED: Not so much anymore because I got my biggest block of new readers with Slammerkin. That is one of my books that happens to not have lesbian content. I think lots of straight women who came across that book in their book clubs and so on probably just think I’m a historical fiction author. And then I have my loyal lesbian contingent as well.
AE: It’s interesting. I often hear minority writers asked if they resent being placed in a specific category – whether it has to do with sexuality, race or even nationality – but I sometimes wonder about pride. Many readers are desperate for books with lesbian story lines or even characters. Do you ever feel proud that your voice and access contributes to an area of literature that’s still relatively underrepresented? ED: Absolutely. Getting back to the word you used – “resent” – I refuse to resent it. On policy I don’t resent it.
First of all, as a lesbian reader, I was so hungry for it, so who am I to get all snotty now? Also, there’s really nothing to be ashamed or sheepish about. Just as Toni Morrison needn’t get sheepish that she’s writing about black people, I have no reason to be sheepish about writing about queer people. As long as I write about them well. I often include straight characters, whereas so many straight authors never include queer characters. So I think I’m doing fine in terms of the diversity of sexuality.
Of course, it’s occasionally inconvenient if your work is perceived as only interesting to lesbians, but that’s really a problem of marketing or readers’ perceptions. When I first started to write and publish, I was aware that there were lesbian novelists out there who were terribly embarrassed or awkward about it.
But even writers who are women – I used to read interviews with them and they’d say, “Don’t call me a woman writer!” That attitude or fearfulness of being labeled, I think, is more of a limitation than the label itself. If you are perfectly happy to accept the label and keep publishing good stuff, then other readers will come to you.
AE: What do you think of the current state of lesbian fiction? Obviously, and thankfully, it’s changed since you first bought that Dutch novel at university. ED: [laughs] Yeah. It’s funny. I went through a few phases as a reader. First of all, I was grateful for any lesbian content, so I bought all the early lesbian mysteries, even though I’m not a huge mystery reader. There came a point, maybe in the mid-’90s, when I thought, I don’t have to buy every title. My hunger abetted. It’s like that moment in a meal where you realize you have to slow down.
But in recent years, because mainstream publishing has gotten so much more open to lesbian content then it used to be, we’re seeing some really wonderful work being done by writers like Ali Smith. It’s a great moment because writers like her, or Sarah Waters, had they published 10 years earlier might well have been stuck in that pigeonhole. But they have reached a broad readership, which they absolutely deserve because of their writing. The lesbian content doesn’t seem to be getting in the way, and that’s a thrilling moment. The era in which you have to be terrified of the label is gone.
Even if you are labeled as a “lesbian writer,” it doesn’t mean anyone’s going to tell you not to write about other things. Ali Smith’s work moves through a spectrum. It’s not like she focuses on lesbian themes every single time. She does it when she feels like it.
[Sarah Waters] is particularly fearless. She didn’t think, “I should leave out the gold-plated dildos, and that will help me get published.” She just did her thing. By taking on the most tiny of genres – lesbian historical fiction – and by doing it with great razzmatazz, she’s ended up with this mass-market readership. She’s a model for how to view your career: Just go about your business with enormous passion, and readers will follow.AE: Who inspired you when you were first starting out? ED: The one who was really important to me as a role model was Jeanette Winterson. At university, when I first started to write fiction, I came across The Passion and that was the first really good lesbian novel I found. That was a breakthrough for me. I actually thought: “Oh, you don’t have to write trashy murder mysteries. It is possible to write a superbly literary book and be an out lesbian and not give a damn.”
AE: What is the most difficult part of writing? ED: I do hit a boggy period in the middle of a book. There’s drama in the beginning and drama in the end, but there’s a certain amount of story you have to tell in the middle. In the first chapter you often have to give a lot of information, and you want to say to the reader: “Bear with me, I promise you’ll care about these people in a while, but you have to just bear with me and get to know them.”
I think I’ve gotten a bit better at my writing process over the years, and so I’m enjoying it far more. With my first one, Stir-Fry, I went through eight drafts and I was really sick of it in the end. But now I do a lot more planning for my plot, and I really mull over what should happen and when. Mothers always say this, but having kids forces you to be more efficient and work out what you’re doing.
AE: How else has motherhood changed you as a writer? ED: I used to really spread myself thinly all over many dramas. I used to write radio drama and some stage plays and I always had a lesbian history project on the go and lots of fiction. I was like a kid in a candy shop. Now I feel I have far less time, especially because our youngest child is only 6 months old. I write one thing at a time.
It’s made me chose fiction because, first of all, you can write it anywhere. You don’t have to work with a theater company. But also it’s my favorite, so if I have to temporarily pick one, then fiction is it. I’m not sure it’s changed the content as much. I hoped it would make me deeper and profounder, but no sign of that yet. [laughs] Perhaps just a bit more irritable.
AE: Tell us about your upcoming novel, The Sealed Letter. ED: It’s a courtroom drama about a divorce case, so my sources are the newspaper reports from the time. It’s a mucky divorce case. That gives the plot excitement I don’t usually have, because my novels are very character-based. It’s tighter, tastier, and it only takes place over about two months. It is more suspenseful.
Basically, it’s about a feminist who got involved with a bad girl. A very respectable early feminist from the 1860s, Emily Faithful, who set up a women’s publishing house. Her best friend, this slutty wife of an admiral, calls Emily as a witness in her divorce case. It’s this wonderful collision of worlds. It’s about being called into court by the woman you care deeply for [but who’s] obviously been bagging her way through the British army.
AE: Sounds fantastic. When will it be released? ED: It comes out in Canada in April, and then in the States in September.
AE: What’s different about writing a historical versus contemporary novel? ED: For me, the contemporary ones tended to arise out of my own life and the life of my friends. They’ve been more autobiographical. My historical ones have often been a bit meatier in terms of plot or situations. Of course people suffer and die today as well, but for some reason I tend to do slightly lighter and funnier, more chatty novels about now.
AE: Is it easier to write about sexuality in contemporary or historical terms? ED: Less needs to be analyzed [in a contemporary novel]. What was fun about Landing was it didn’t need to do the sort of “coming out, agonizing over sexuality stuff,” because both my characters had been through that already. I could be very playful and explore ideas. Like the fact that so many butches I know have one important man in their life, often their ex-lover. That’s a pairing you wouldn’t expect, but it’s a common lesbian pattern.
In a way it’s easier because you need to analyze less nowadays, but what I love about writing about sexuality before the 1900s is that the labels didn’t really fit on neatly. Even though there were some labels, they didn’t always get attached. If you were a woman living with a woman your neighbors didn’t all say, “Oh, yes, those lesbians there.” You might get some neighbors who thought you were charming, virtuous women, and others who thought you were peculiar social losers, and others who thought perhaps you were sexual perverts.
But there was a real range of interpretation, and that meant people were in a way freer to have really odd love lives. Quite often women could love their husbands and yet be madly in love with their women friends as well and not have to choose in the same way. Of course there would be jealousies and difficulties, but they didn’t have to pick a label. In a way it’s very postmodern to go back to the premodern, because the repressive grip of identity politics relaxes. It is so much more open to interpretation and much more muddied.
AE: You’ve said that you don’t necessarily know where your ideas come from, but how do you generally begin a book? What is your process as a writer? ED: I usually find I’m starting to get preoccupied with a certain character in a situation. Like one novel I want to write is a lesbian custody battle because not only have I been having kids and a lot of my friends have been having kids, but I know a few people involved in terrible tussles for the legitimacy of their motherhood. Often [my ideas] grow out of the circumstances of my life.
AE: As a new mom, I was interested to learn about your film Immaculate Conceptions: Inside a Lesbian Baby Boom. Why did you make this film? ED: I had seen a few short films about queer parenting, and they were very blandly celebratory, like “Look, we can do this too!” [Whereas] me and my friends were having heated discussions about issues like known donors and who was going to be the birth mother and what they call you. There are anthologies of prose writings, but every video I saw was just “look at our cute babies,” so I thought I’d do a video in which I’d ask all those rude questions to my friends.
AE: Which of your books do you think would translate well into films? ED: Oh [laughs], I think about this stuff because of course I get offers and suggestions. People write to me and say that they want to film Hood or that Slammerkin must be a BBC series, and I get all excited. A couple of them have gotten to the point of meeting with producers and option deals.
At one point I was convinced Slammerkin was going to be made by a Hollywood producer. I was thrilled visualizing the Oscars, receiving the award. [Laughs] It never happened. I’ve learned to not let my fantasies run away with me when it comes to film, because it’s simply so expensive as a medium that people have to be really sure of the commercial appeal of what they’re making.
I had an awful experience of adapting my first novel, Stir-Fry, to screen. I was hired to do so and went through many drafts and each was worse than the next, because each was more mainstream, more straight. At one point, it seemed it was more the story of how Maria gets a boyfriend, with a little lesbian kiss on the side. I realized it was because it cost so much. It could still happen, and I would love if a film were made of my work. It can be done so well, but I’m not holding my breath.
AE: Well, if you were to allow your fantasies to run away for just a moment, do you ever imagine specific actors playing your characters in a film version? ED: Even those would change over the years as some of them get too old. When I was in talks with the Hollywood producer for Slammerkin, he wanted Angelina Jolie for Doll, the prostitute.
AE: She’d be a great Doll. ED: [Laughs] But as time goes by, we’d need younger faces.
For more on Emma Donoghue, visit her official website.
