Tell me about your new work, The Black Pool, a memoir of addiction and recovery. Was it cathartic or triggering to revisit the depths and dark places of your recent past?
I had a fairly mad recurrence of withdrawal symptoms towards the end of editing: bowel stuff, headaches. Catharsis is an artifice, a drug, injected by plot structure, to induce terror and pity. By rejecting plot, I wanted to exhaust a voice by transcribing it, and arrive at something deeper than catharsis. Psychoanalysis teaches us this anti-plot method.
You wanted to avoid the misery memoir and redemptive story arc?
It’s despicable when people write to “represent” a “community” with this tone of “but don’t forget – I’m the best one”. Bootstrap stuff. Vile.
What were your literary influences? Dante? Burroughs? Is there a danger of romanticising life in thrall to drink and drugs?
Dante, always. Burroughs, never (poser, nepo baby, annoyed Samuel Beckett, friend of TV intellectual Susan Sontag). The big influences on The Black Pool: Stewart Lee, Thomas Bernhard, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, Greg Baxter’s Munich Airport, the testimonies at the back of the AA and NA books – plotless utterances in the dark, something horrible said so deadpan that it comes out funny. Happens in AA meetings. May not happen here.
Tell us about your novels, Call Him Mine (2019) and sequel How to Be Nowhere (2020). You see crime fiction as “the flip side of modernism”?
The clipped, telegraphic style; the preoccupation with class and other structures, which render the individual a shimmering epiphenomenon; the reduction of meaning-production to a question or degree of paranoia. The children of Dos Passos write crime novels.
In an Irish Times essay, you wrote of the power of art to be like a bomb or grenade.
It always impresses me how much people can sleep, given the horror. I don’t want a literature that deepens that sleep.
You’ve covered Latin America for outlets including Esquire, Al Jazeera and the Washington Post. What were the highlights?
Hanging out with recovering addicts in Michoacán, early 2016. One lad who had gotten clean in jail drove me one-handed to where they were building an extension on a halfway house. Tawny hills, red Tuscan light, hair-raising stories. Pure serenity.
You are the creative nonfiction judge for the next issue of literary journal The Four Faced Liar. What do you look for in an essay or piece of prose?
Propulsion. Relentlessness. Colm Tóibín’s essay about his illness in the LRB: the tuning-fork.
You have an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. What did it teach you?
Compassion. Precision. You want to be a better writer? Read other writers with a desire to help them get better, too. We’re only ever able to see our own problems when they’re in others. We only solve our own helping others solve theirs.
Tell us about the ‘tache and the tattoos.
Former a joke that got out of hand. Latter a healthier form of self-damage.
Which projects are you working on?
A historical novel set in Argentina, late 1960s, early 1970s, about young revolutionaries. A satire of literary Dublin featuring apes. A modernist novel about orgies, jealousy, and Holland. A second short-story collection (first out in October). A second poetry collection (first out next year).
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Various graves, to make sure they’re dead.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Two hundred words a day, minimum, without fail.
Who do you admire the most?
Abubaker Abed.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
Globally? Free Palestine. Ireland only? Pass the Occupied Territories Bill.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
Sean McTiernan’s SF Ultra: he’s a master. I don’t watch current stuff but Out 1 by Jacques Rivette haunts me. Let’s Dance by Lucy Sweeney-Byrne and Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney.
Which public event affected you most?
Mexico City protests, late 2014, after the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa teacher trainees. Truly believed the government was going to fall. But alas.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Can’t tell you: people will visit.
Your most treasured possession?
Old notebooks.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
I like frightening visitors with my duct-taped, bescribbled copy of Finnegans Wake.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
The living ones know who they are. The dead ones do, too, because we make fun of them.
The best and worst things about where you live?
Best is the quiet. Worst is I forget to leave.
What is your favourite quotation?
“As my epic comeback nears its zenith, I can’t help but look back at the low times when there was no hope or light. There’s an old expression that has guided me through the dark valleys and hazy cul-de-sacs of life – nut up or sack up. It means when life gets you all swirly and thought-ridden, shut it out.” – Kenny Powers
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Shem the Penman.
A book to make me laugh?
Poor Ghost! by Gabriel Flynn. But a pained laugh.
A book that might move me to tears?
An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame. But laughing, triumphant tears. Go on, Janet.
The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting is published by Sceptre
