Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers.

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something.

Rebecca
Writer Junot Diaz said: “When the world is burning, spending a little time with one’s people — in our case: book lovers — is no small gift, precisely because the world is burning.” So that’s what we did with our live podcast recording a few weeks ago. We spent time with our people: fellow book lovers and the extraordinary Emma Donoghue.

Natalie
Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue is the author of 16 novels and numerous plays. She’s a regular on the New York Times bestseller list, and her acclaimed novel Room, longlisted for the Booker Prize, was adapted by her into a screenplay and went on to receive four Oscar nominations. She’s done it all, and we couldn’t wait to ask her everything. Her latest work is The Paris Express, which we couldn’t put down.

Rebecca
So here we go. Our first live recording: reframing risk and reinvention with Emma Donoghue.

This book is about trains from the inside out, as you re-imagine a 1895 French railway disaster. And I was just curious, just to start, now that the book is out in the world and all that train knowledge is so deep in you: what do do with all that? Everything you know about trains now — what do you do?

Emma
Well, this may be a disappointing answer, but I’m sure I’ll lose most of it because, you know, the brain is like those early forms of computer technology we used to use like floppy disks where, you know, the space was limited. And so for each book I become an absolute obsessive on certain subjects, and then I have to make room. So yeah, sometimes when I’m publicizing a book I get fuzzy on the details because I’m already on to the next thing or the thing after that. So right now my head is entirely full of, say, Northern Irish emigrants to Canada in the 1840s because I have a play coming up about that. And then my brain is also full of pigeons for the next project. So trains are, like, two boxes behind.

However, I’m still very interested in the trains, and indeed before I wrote the novel I knew nothing at all about trains. I just knew I liked being on them as a form of transport, and I’m a nervous driver so trains are ideal because I’m not the one in charge. But of course, by writing about a famous train crash like the Montparnasse derailment from 1895, it was a great way to get the combination of a dangerous scenario and the way trains as a form of mass transit bring together hundreds of people and, in a way, yoke the fate of all those people together. So yeah, I got very, very into trains with this particular novel. And women keep buying it for their train-loving husbands.

Rebecca
Oh, is that what you heard? Actually, you make trains really interesting. Like, I didn’t expect to be so fascinated by trains and, like, the inner workings of it all. I was like…

Emma
I mean, to write a book simply set on a train, you don’t need to know how a train works. But I knew that some of my main characters would be the driver, the stoker of the furnace, and the two guards. And they really needed to know how it worked, because one thing I learned from reading Émile Zola’s famous novel about trains is that the company always put the same driver and the same stoker and the same train engine together. Those three needed to be intimate with each other to know how each other worked. Because depending on, you know, the vagaries and the habits of your particular train, you needed to know how much extra coal and water she would need as you came up a big hill, that kind of thing. So it was like this intimate three-way partnership. So I actually did need to know things like the stoker would always wear wooden clogs instead of boots so that his feet wouldn’t go on fire because of all the embers on the little metal platform where he and the driver stood.

So yeah, I actually had to understand the details. So I pored over many a diagram on Wikipedia of, you know, steam and pressure and valves. And I also was so grateful to elderly British men who make videos of themselves restoring their train carriage. You know, it’s all very Thomas the Tank Engine — the mood or the kind of benign, obsessive details. You know, like, “This is where I pull this handle,” and I’d be watching the video and going, “Oh great, I didn’t know how that handle got operated on.” I couldn’t tell from any of the written sources, but video got me there.

Rebecca
It’s actually too bad your kids aren’t little anymore because you could have really channeled — like, “Choo choo.” So many fun nursery rhymes could have happened at the same time.

Emma
Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

Rebecca
I suppose this was from research, the fact that first class would be further away from getting crushed if you had an accident?

Emma
They tucked first class in the middle of the sequence of carriages so that neither a crash from behind nor in front would harm them. So they were like the brie in the sandwich, you know?

Rebecca
And padded.

Emma
Yeah, exactly. Everything was padded and opulent and so on. Whereas in third class, there were tiny little holes in the floor that the company bored to make it drafty and uncomfortable in the hope that you would be forced to pay more for a second class. Yeah, a train is just such a living image of the unfairness of society, you know? It’s segregated — and yet they all are risking the same thing if the train crashes. It’s a nice combination of inequality and a unified fate.

And I decided I needed a double danger. Like many of my books, this one is based on fact. So I really began with, like, “Why did the train crash that particular day?” And the reason I picked this particular accident to write about is that it crashed not because of some, you know, freak, you know, weather or anything, but it crashed because of speed — the need to stay on track. It seems to have crashed because that day it was delayed a mere 10 minutes by one rich asshole passenger, you know, who basically asked if the train could make an unscheduled stop in his village near his country home to pick up his private train carriage. And that delayed them by 10 minutes.

And, you know, coming from Ireland, I was inclined to think, “Paris,” you know, “Of course it would be 10 minutes late.” But no, in 1890s France, a 10 minute delay was unacceptable. So then the driver and the rest of the crew felt obliged to speed up to make up those 10 lost minutes.

Rebecca
Right, because their bonus or their money was…

Emma
Yeah, their bonus. The driver and the stoker could make up to 40% more every year if they stayed punctual as well as not using too much coal and water. So the crash of that train is really a little sort of allegory of runaway capitalism and, you know, the pressures of work, the pressure to please the customer, you know?

But I decided to double the jeopardy by putting a bomb on the train as well. Because when the crash happened, my sources were sort of two dozen newspaper articles about this crash, and several of the journalists had asked the locals, “What did you think when you heard that terrible sound?” And several of them said, “Oh, we thought it was a terrorist bomb.” Even by the 1890s, this was already a kind of a routine hazard of big cities. And I thought, you know, “What?” So then I thought how interesting if there had been a bomb as well, just to complicate it.

Rebecca
It reads a bit like a kind of a caper. Has anyone ever said that? Because you see it coming, but it’s very satisfying. Like, “Oh, it’s a bomb, and now the train is going to crash.” You know what I mean? So it’s very well done.

Emma
You know, I was getting thrown by early on in my research when I realized that most of us picture stories that happen on trains as kind of from Hitchcock on, right? So those trains may seem different to ours, but they’re actually very similar in that you can move through the train — carriages are all connected, there are corridors, there are bathrooms, and there are dining cars. But in 1895, trains had none of these things. So they were like separate little boxes all tied together, but you couldn’t move between them while you were in motion. And at first I was really stumped by that.

But then, I thought… I was thinking of it as almost like a musical chairs game. While the train is in motion, you have to stay in your carriage and talk to the people you’re with. But at a stop, you could, like, leap out and try and find a toilet or a sandwich or, in one case, some extremely speedy sex. So yeah, it was kind of like that — you know, sit tight and then jump out. Sit tight and jump out.

As with anything I’ve ever written, the limitations prove to be kind of liberating to the imagination. You know, once you get used to the terms of your book — like, whatever it is, whether it will be, “I need to stay inside the brain of a five-year-old,” or, “I’m going to have dozens of characters,” or, you know, “I’m going to, you know, stick my characters on an island and not let them leave.” All these limitations actually then make it easier to write once you’ve sort of leaned into it.

Rebecca
I mean, when I was doing my MFA, there was always this caution that if you had more than one protagonist, you were creating an unnecessary challenge for yourself. So it was like, I’ve always wanted to do multi-perspective stories. I continue to do that even though I have in my brain, you know, “This is not a good idea because you’re making it harder.” But in Emma’s book, I think I counted 27 characters. And I don’t know if you call them all protagonists, but you were very much defying that rule.

Emma
Yeah, there are no rules. This is true even in the film world, which is more known for its rules because there are practicalities and there are financial limitations. But I remember when I was trying to make that, you know, leap into film writing in my 40s (to speak of risk and reinvention), I knew that my novel Room, there was some interest in making it as a film, so I thought, “Well, I’ll do it fast myself before anyone can stop me.” So before the book actually came out, I scuttled off to the library at Western, because I lived down the road in London, and I got, you know, 20 books on screenwriting. And I was like, “I can tackle this myself and try and write a draft before any serious film professionals can come near me.”

So that’s what I did. But as with the zeal of any new convert, I was really trying to follow the rules, where I was, like, making sure my climaxes were in the right place in the act and so on. But then when I actually started working on the film Room with the wonderful Irish director Lenny Abrahamson, he was like, “Oh, forget the rules.” You know, he and I never talked about what page the climax should be on, you know? Because he’s, you know, a true filmmaker. And so to him, it was all about just finding the right moment rather than, you know, obeying the conventions. And in particular, any time we disagreed, he’d say, “Let’s go back to the book. Go back to the book.”

So the idea that the novelist who’s adapting her work for screen is always trying to make it like the book and the director is always saying, “No, let’s set it in, you know, Namibia,” that’s just not true. I think, you know, on both sides of that writer-director line, what you care about is getting the story just right.

Rebecca
Was one of the books Save the Cat?

Emma
I’m sure it was.

Rebecca
It was a classic book, Save the Cat, that has you, I think, writing, like, the climax on page 90 or something. That’s very specific.

Emma
That’s funny. That’s funny.

Natalie
No, that’s great. It’s interesting because Rebecca’s coming to you from the angle of writer. I’m coming to you here as a researcher. I just think that part of what made this specific book, and so many of your books, so attractive to me was the detail that you put into that work as a researcher. I’ve got a number of my researching colleagues here who are sort of like, “Yes,” because this is what we do. That’s how we spend our time. But you’ve said, first of all, that historical fiction always asks questions about today. I wanted you, if you don’t mind, to elaborate on that? Because I think from a research perspective, there’s something really interesting.

Emma
Well, I used to feel slightly self-conscious that, you know, some of the characters I was creating in historical fiction were probably less typical of the time than they would be of now. Like, a lot of us nowadays write novels about very badass women in the past, for instance. And, you know, probably the past was not full of explicitly badass women, because they would all be burned as witches. So we have a certain bias towards the badass, the spunky, the fiery, the troublesome, you know — rather than all these happy wives and mothers, you know?

But then I realized that’s inevitable because yes, what historical fiction or historical drama or historical filmmaking does is it’s kind of a stretching out of your hand across those generations. It’s always going to be a meeting between the mind of its writer and its modern audience and the past. And even if you’re very scrupulous about looking for historical material, you’re going to find the material that speaks to you. So I now don’t feel embarrassed at all about the fact that what you end up with will be a kind of a combination.

And I don’t mean I’m sort of a halfway point. For instance, if I’m writing a dialogue in a novel set 500 years ago, it’s not that I go for a form of speech which is, like, 200 years ago. It’s more that I try and go for a form of speech which could have been used back then — like, all the words that they used then, but I try and choose the words that worked for today, too, rather than, you know, having the reader trip up over those things which have changed. Like, in Jane Austen novels, they’re always saying things like, “He made love to me on the couch,” and people jerk, and then realize, “Oh, she just means he courted me verbally on the couch.” You know, so with historical fiction, you know, you try and choose a word which still means the same thing then as now.

Rebecca
Actually, I kind of did a deep dive into your plays. There were a bunch of plays set in the past. They were gripping me in a way that I felt I was reading something of today.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. So does this quotation resonate? We were thinking because you’re in the midst of preparation for your newest play which is a musical of traditional Irish songs, is that right? Actually, interestingly, one of my friends is the dialect coach, I think.

Emma
Oh, I’m so glad to hear because, yeah, the first two days their Northern Irish accents were a bit dodgy. But they kept saying to me, “We’ve got a really good dialect coach coming.”

Rebecca
Ok, yes, she is really good. We teach together.

Emma
Fantastic.

Rebecca
Yeah. We went to theatre school together too. Well, so was there a risk or experiment involved in this play for you?

Emma
Yeah, because what do I know about music? You know, the musical element of this forthcoming play at Blyth, which is called The Wind Coming Over the Sea, it’s entirely the fault of my daughter, Una Roulston. Because I’m just a word person, but Una is a musical theatre performer and she’s starting at Sheridan — the BFA in musical theatre in September. Because of her, I’ve gone to more and more musicals over the years, rather than just plays. And I suppose I just have got more and more charmed by the way they can… there’s one particular thing about musicals I love. The song somehow enables you to leap over time and space. So you can have a song in a musical which starts with characters, you know, on the quay in Belfast, and it might end up with them in Montreal two years later. And it can just make that leap because the song sort of carries you. The song is a vessel.

Whereas sometimes in straight plays, there you are stuck in the words of the conversation and it’s a bit harder to make those leaps over naturalism and the sort of conventions of, you know, how long the scene is lasting. But music just, you know, allows you to pull away from the naturalistic while still keeping things very emotionally real. So yeah, I’ve basically been watching more and more musicals over the years. And then the play of Room that I did with the wonderful Scottish director, Cora Bissett, she asked to put songs in and I was a bit like, “What?” And then she said, “I promise no jazz hands, ok? These will be songs that will be just the captive woman’s sort of internal monologue, all the secrets that she can’t tell her son because she’s shielding him, you know?” And I found that in the play of Room which Marvish and the Grand put on here in Canada, I found it was the songs I loved best because they just get you into a more extreme state, you know?

So then when Blyth Festival asked me to write about Irish immigrants, I thought, “Well, I know that what they carried with them in terms of heritage, music was a crucial part of that.” So I decided that the play should have songs in it. But to decide that, and even to come up with a list of the songs that I thought would suit the story, that’s not the same as really weaving the songs in. So yes, Una gave me a lot of advice about, you know, things like, “You’re not giving the actor enough to do there,” or, “There’s too little transition time for the next.” I have several of them playing many characters, for instance. And she’d point out that there’s not enough time for somebody to even change the wig for one character for the next.

So yeah, it’s great when your children get old enough that you can actually start to draw on them for handy skills. Like I understand several progeny of both of you are staffing this event tonight.

Rebecca
Yes. Serving spring rolls.

Emma
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca
Although I was wondering if the reinvention of, like, jazz hands in your next piece…?

Emma
Could be. I honestly like to try new genres because I think with writing, especially if you’ve never had a real job and you’ve been doing nothing but this since your early twenties, I think trying new things is actually crucial because you can so easily settle into a pattern. And, you know, if you’re Lee Child and everybody loves your Jack Reacher novels, of course they would want one a year. But if you’re writing literary fiction, I think when you’re not offering, you know, the pure satisfaction of a certain murder mystery once a year, I think it would be fatal to start quoting yourself or echoing yourself. So by setting things in new times and places and trying new styles, I kind of force myself to feel like a beginner every time, which is, I think, extremely good for the writing. Yeah.

Natalie
We were just in Cannes, and two of the four films we saw were musicals.

Rebecca
Had songs, yeah. Yeah.

Natalie
Yeah yeah yeah. So that was kind of interesting to see.

Emma
Well, the short story that the Daveys have fixed up, they’re adapting so well, Writ Or, it’s about a writer-in-residence at a university and I should say it’s one of the more autobiographical things I have ever written. Because when I first came to Canada I took on a writer-in-residence job just to sort of, you know, get to know my new place and I found it quite a shock to the system, really. So I thought, “Well, if I make the writer-in-residence a man, nobody will guess it’s me.” So…

Rebecca
All the needy writers.

Natalie
Yeah, all the community writers who want to come and…

Emma
And we’re all needy writers, you know? Whether professional or not, they’re still…

Natalie
That’s exactly it.

Emma
Yeah.

Natalie
But the idea of celebrating shared commonalities, in that that’s how that panel has been put together.

Emma
Yeah.

Natalie
Is there a sort of a flipping of the script in terms of difference that can beautifully emerge in conversations where people are brought together around assumed similarities?

Emma
That’s interesting, because I can see, like, if you’re the one — you know, like, you know, writers of color talked about being, like, “The one on the panel.” And so they get asked the race question — you know, as if all the white people sitting there don’t have a race. Or even sometimes if you’re, you know, a writer on the panel who’s either a person of colour or a lesbian, you’ll be sort of asked about your work being political. And I’m thinking, “Everybody’s work is political.” We all choose what to write about. We all choose, you know, what issues to highlight as important. But only minorities tend to be asked about the political side of things. So yes, sometimes when you do a grouping like that, you can all sort of relax into it because there’s no burden of representation on any one of you. Yeah.

You know, when organizers say to you, “Are there any questions you don’t want to talk about?” I can never think of any because I’m really very happy to talk about any of my people as it were — whether, like, you know, Irish writers or Canadian writers or women or lesbians, I’m pretty comfortable with them all. But I do remember back in Ireland, you know, that pressure of representation felt like a bit of a heavy cake to wear because at the point where I was, you know, starting my career in early 90s, I was really one of the only Irish lesbians around. And so, you know, I would be asked, you know, “What do Irish lesbians think about this?” And I’d be like, “I don’t know, I’m only one of them. I live in England, I’m out of touch.” So that was a bit of a burden.

But then I remember moving to Canada, and I did my first interview on CBC radio and they asked me about, you know, my use of the past tense or the present tense in something I’d written and I suddenly thought, like, “We’re talking about the art!” You know? So I felt at last I was in a culture that was diverse enough that nobody was too worried about, you know, whatever minority I was representing. We could actually talk about the art as well as talk about the identity stuff, yeah. So Canada has basically been a great place for me to end up. I have not found the burden of representation to be too heavy here.

Natalie
Right.

Rebecca
So do you mind the question of, like, “What issues are you working through through your writing?” Or, like, “Are you working through issues, like your relationship with your father?” Like, is that…? How do you feel about those kinds of questions?

Emma
I feel sometimes I let people down because they think I’m going to be really messed up because of the situations of confinement in my work — especially since Room, I think. I remember some old lady saying to me, like, “Did you live it or just write about it?” I was like, “I’m sorry, I just wrote about it.” So I felt I was a sort of a parasitical author there — like, “No, I was not kidnapped myself, ma’am. Just researched somebody else’s story.”

Yeah, I think sometimes when people have read a few of my books, situations that are very dark (like, say in The Wonder, that girl tried to live without food), and then they meet me and I’m all cheerful. So I feel I’m sometimes a bit of a let down to them because my answer is not sufficiently psychoanalytical.

Rebecca
Yeah.

Emma
And sometimes I have to say to them, “To be honest, situations where characters are limited in their freedom of movement, they’re just easier to handle.” Like the locked room murder mystery, it’s a bit easier to work out who was where at eight o’clock if you can gather them all in the parlour, you know? So it’s really not that I’m trying to, you know, be cruel to my characters.

Though when I was researching Room in particular, there was a moment when I was trying to choose the furniture for the locked room that their captor would have chosen them. So I was on the Ikea website, choosing everything that was, like, the second cheapest. Not the very cheapest, because things had to last seven years, but certainly no higher than second cheapest. And I suddenly realized I was being the monster. And then I thought the writer always, in a sense, is the monster in that we do set up these situations for our characters to endure and they’re rarely situations of, like, long happy marriage or peaceful friendship or unadulterated sisterhood, are they? Because that doesn’t mean for good stories, you know — like, if you two were in the story I was writing, one of you would say something tonight or somebody would drop some clanger which would cause deep painful rift between you. I’m sorry, it’s just needed for the story.

Rebecca
Yeah — like, we’d have to run off with each other’s husbands or something.

Natalie
Yeah. It’s awkward because they’re over there.

Emma
Well, in the story then the husbands would run off together.

Natalie
I just cheersed you for that one.

Emma
Ok, what’s that great series I was just watching? The shiksa who pairs up with the rabbi, but she and her sister do a podcast together.

Rebecca
Oh, yes.

Emma
And there’s enormous friction. What’s it called? Nobody Wants This?

Rebecca
Nobody Wants This.

Emma
Nobody Wants This is a hilarious series. And the sisters, it’s constant tension between them over the podcast because one of them is constantly undermining the love choices of the other. Yeah, so just that makes for better TV.

Rebecca
Yeah, it’s true. I was thinking how when we first started this podcast, we were trying to, like, create a bit more drama, so Nat was going to help me reframe all the hard things that had been happening for me. That’s what we were going to do — and Nat was going to sort of solve me. And that lasted like an episode, and I was like, “I don’t think I want to say anymore. I think that’s it.”

So you have said, “I try to use memory and invention together,” and that does sound like what you were just saying — like, two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past. So would you say that is still your process?

Emma
When I read about the past, I’m typically writing about the people who didn’t have biographies written about. You know, they’re often the underdogs or the socially marginal, the poor, people who only leave a trace on the record when they are, you know, jailed or end up at the poor house or get into trouble with the law in some way. So often I’m trying to evoke lives from really very paltry records. And this is completely opposite of the kind of challenge that was posed to say, Henry Mantel writing about Henry VIII, and there she must have been wading through multiple biographies of court figures every year, whereas I’m often dealing with people who only exist through a small handful of facts.

But those facts can be so evocative, out of all proportion to the number of them. So, for instance, the driver of the train in The Paris Express, I know his name and I know the fact that his father and his son both had exactly the same first and last name and all three of them were train drivers and they’re buried all together in the same grave in Montparnasse cemetery. And, you know, that’s just a small little cluster of facts but it’s so evocative of a family for whom train driver was the job — it was like, you know, being married to the mob. It was just what you did.

And so the commitment of a man like that to his job, and to maintain the highest standards and getting the train to Paris on time — you know, there’d be no second option for him, no other job. This was just what you did, what you were. So yeah, I love the putting on of my historian’s hat and doing as much research as I can. And nowadays with the wonders of the online resources available to you — you know, the databases, the newspaper archives, there’s so much more you can find without ever leaving home even.

But then it comes time when the facts run out, especially when you’re writing about the sort of nobodies of the past, and then I have to sort of swap hats to my writer’s hat and make things up — but make them up in a mindset that has been informed and enriched by everything I have read. Yeah, so I love that. I love both equally. I love chasing the facts, and then I like that moment of like, “Ok, can’t find anything more about her, so now I just make it up.”

Rebecca
But, like, would it be boring to you to write… like, I found there’s an interesting crime that happened at a ski chalet in Ontario in the last two or three years. I was like, “That would be a cool story.” Like, would that be boring, because there would be enough research?

Emma
No, it could be a very interesting story, but I agree that, you know, in terms of evoking the atmosphere of a modern ski chalet… I don’t know, right now it doesn’t sound that interesting to me, but it could be that if I went into enough detail and really learned what it’s like in ski resorts. I find, for instance, if you talk to people at a party, if you ask someone enough questions, anything becomes interesting.

Rebecca
Yes.

Emma
You know, but you have to go in deep. You can’t be just like, “Seen anything good on Netflix recently?” You have to be like, “What kind of eczema? How bad is it? Show me.” So I often act like an investigative journalist at parties. I sometimes think people have thought me quite rude, but most people are grateful to be asked questions.

Rebecca
Yes.

Emma
Even if afterwards they were like, “That was an unhealthy level of interest she showed to me.”

Rebecca
But yet they go, “I feel so seen now.”

Natalie
Oh, that’s funny. Rebecca and I do feel like we are really great party attenders — people like it when we come because we do, we ask lots of questions. We don’t always come away feeling like anybody’s asked us anything.

Rebecca
Yeah, how do you deal with that, Emma?

Natalie
But there could be something about not leaving people room. We might be asking all the questions, but yeah, how do you deal with them?

Emma
But, you know, then I get interviewed over the course of my work.

Rebecca
Ok, yeah.

Emma
So yeah, I feel at a party, I don’t need that ego kick of somebody asking me questions. In fact, people are sometimes slightly in awe — like, if you’ve been interviewed on the radio recently or something, they’re a bit in awe, so they don’t ask you anything. So then, you know, your role at the party is to ask them instead.

Natalie
Yeah, you’re going to have to do all the work. It’s true. Ok, well, we’re going to ask a little bit of work of you right now because in that we’re heading to Dublin at the beginning of July, and we haven’t been (I was 15 the last time we went, Rebecca was, like, a baby, she was 13), is there something that we should know that you would say that…

Rebecca
Some hot tips, really.

Natalie
Yeah, that we could just sort of drop in a bar. Some sort of turn of phrase. I mean, I’m being a bit flippant, but not really. Like, is there something that, sort of as people returning to a sense of home now, that you could send us in equipped?

Emma
I think all of us emigrants or second-gen emigrants tend to have a slightly fossilized sense of what it’s like. So what strikes me every time I’m home is how much Ireland has changed, you know? Right now I’m reading a lot of Irish fiction. I’m reading one YA novel by a Bangladeshi-Irish writer. And in it, the main character’s parents, you know, are from Bangladesh, and they’re freaking out. Here is the daughter growing up in a world where, like, the prime minister can be gay. And I thought, “Wow, to have Ireland stand in as, like, you know, the epitome of the modern world, the corrupt, you know, diverse, multicultural, pro-gay modern world, when the Ireland I grew up in felt like, you know, it would never get out of the 19th century.” So I think, yeah, realizing how much things have changed in Ireland is probably key. And will you be just visiting Dublin, or countryside as well?

Natalie
Galway.

Emma
Oh, Galway’s lovely. And one thing I love to do in Dublin is they have various good pub crawls. So there’s a traditional Irish pub crawl where they lead you from pub to pub and they play music in an upstairs room. And then there’s a literary pub crawl as well, where unemployed actors, (you know, bless actors, there are so many of them who are unemployed) — so it’s very good for the tourist industry because the actors will lead you around from pub to pub and declaim scenes from Sing and Casey and so on.

Natalie
That helps. So when we send pictures back, if we can all roll our eyes as we are channeling our fossilized…

Rebecca
Are there any writers in the room?

Natalie
Oh, there are definitely some writers in the room, yeah.

Rebecca
Yeah, writers? Some of my favorite questions are always to hear about writer’s process, which… do you always get one, about process?

Emma
Oh, I’m happy to talk process. I think what we all dread are really generic questions like, “Where do you get your ideas?” Nitty gritties are always a pleasure to share.

Rebecca
So, this one’s a little bit generic. In a writer’s workshop that I just taught. We needed to talk about outlining versus… do you go with the flow? Or do you outline?

Emma
No, I’m a big outliner.

Rebecca
You’re a big outliner.

Emma
I think the people who can go with the flow are those who have been blessed with an innate sense of crafting a storyline. They can do it all in the back of their minds while they are unaware of what’s happening consciously. I can’t do that, no. If I just went with the flow, the result would be a sort of eddying brook that would, you know, seep across a floodplain. To get any momentum, I absolutely need to plan.

Because when I outline… and by which I mean I will literally list what’s going to happen in each chapter and then I’ll try and break it down and say what’s going to happen in each scene and what revelations are being seen. Like, what does the reader think is happening at each point? And in the case of The Paris Express, of course, because it’s a train journey and it’s in a number of train carriages, and as we know there are no corridors between them, so I’d have to work out, like, who’s sitting where when things are said or things are mentioned. And if I didn’t do this it would be such a mess, because when I do the outlining, I can then spot, you know, all sorts of repetitions — like, “You know, that conversation in chapter three is really fairly identical to the one in chapter five,” or, “Wouldn’t it be better if he didn’t know that until then?” So the outline gives me that kind of bird’s eye perspective, which allows me to do things like just cut out a whole chapter, for instance, if it seems like it’ll be too much repetition of the one before.

Rebecca
And that would outline start to end.

Emma
Yeah, but luckily, unlike being, say, an architect, you’re not wedded to your plans — you haven’t promised anything. And so you can change things, you know, in a way which would be much harder to do in some real world. And so I have changed endings, I’ve changed my mind about things, or I’ve changed the order in which I show you scenes. So one of my novels, Frog Music, is about murder. So I had it written in chronological order from early in the summer to the autumn. And I found it was just taking too long to get to the murder. Because I knew that it was going to be a savage murder, but nobody else did. So it just seemed like a lot of French people getting drunk in the streets of San Francisco.

So I decided ok, we’ll start with the murder, and then I’ll keep coming back between the lead up to the murder and the events after the murder. And so I just rearranged all the scenes. So yeah, you can change your mind about that kind of thing at any point. But having a plan makes it much easier not to feel panicky, because a novel is a hugely long thing. It’s not like writing a poem, which you can do in an evening.

Also, I find it helps you snap the little bits of time you can find — again, if you have a detailed plan. Because I suppose, you know, parents all get very good at sort of using their time. But in particular, if I’ve got a detailed plan, I can say to myself, “Ok, I’ve got an hour, you know what, I don’t know what to do with chapter four, but there’s that one little scene in chapter five I know I need. So I’ll work on that now.” Whereas I feel without a plan, I’d have to be like, “I need there to be three weeks of uninterrupted time so I can get in the zone.”

Rebecca
Yeah. The question which I always find so interesting is how do you decide whose voice to tell it in, and how did you decide for Room? I was reading another writer interview, and she was like, “Choosing whose perspective, that’s kind of the magical moment.” And I don’t know how you view it, because in Room, obviously, it’s told from the perspective of the child.

Emma
No, that is the key decision to make about any novel, I would say — is choosing not just who will be the point of view character or characters (The Paris Express has dozens of them), but it’s also choosing from what kind of vantage point they’ll tell it. So for instance, I used to love the murder novels of Barbara Vine, which was the more literary pen name used by Ruth Rendell for some of her books. And she often told things in kind of painful retrospect. She’d start with something like, you know, “The summer I was 16, I didn’t know I was going to kill my mother.” And you know, you have to sense, like, “Oh, she’s 40 now, and she’s looking back on when she was 16.” But it’s quite different if you’re, you know, right there in the moment telling it. So yeah, working out, you know, how much time has passed — and also how much of the story to show, that’s another thing.

Rebecca
Yeah.

Emma
Instead of having to trawl back through somebody’s life, can you come to it late and get out early? You know, using another rule they often talk about in film — is coming to the scene late and getting out early. And with The Paris Express, for instance, I decided it would be much tighter if I made the novel the same kind of length in time as the train journey. So I thought, “Well, I’ll start it when they’re boarding in the morning. And anything I need to know about their pasts can be mentioned, but I’m not going to actually trawl back and give scenes set in the past.” And I’ll end it a couple of minutes after the crash, at the point where the famous iconic photograph on which the novel is based was taken. That makes it a narrower frame than one of those big long historical novels, so I thought that should help with the tension. So yeah — who tells us and when, and for how long?

Rebecca
Yeah. Just on the subject of Room, I invited some of my book club to this event. And one of the women said, “Sorry, I’m too traumatized by Room, I can’t come.”

Emma
Fair enough, fair enough.

Rebecca
So I wanted to say: what would you say to her?

Emma
I know, I know. It’s a very upsetting story, but what’s lovely about writing a novel that sells very well, it’s not just the quality cheques, it’s the fact that it connects with people in so many different ways, and it makes you feel almost like… you know, I just came up with the basic story, but everybody then finds in the novel what they need. So I’ve had people write to me and say, “I’m 11 and I just read your book and it feels like my childhood.” Or, you know, people write to me and say, “I’m a grandfather, and when I look at my grandson, I feel so much of what the mother in Room felt.”

So people connect with it so differently. I’ve had letters from China and Iran saying, “Thank you for your book, which is obviously a political allegory of life under tyrannical rule.” You know — which nobody in the West ever sees it as an allegory. So it’s just fascinating how many different ways people can read a book. And it makes you feel just so grateful if you happen to hit on an idea that connects with so many people, you know? But yes, I totally understand your book club.

Rebecca
But do you see, like, her saying, “I’m traumatized,” — does that also make you go, “Yes, well if you felt that deeply then you connected”? Would you say that?

Emma
No, it’s a win either way.

Rebecca
Ok.

Emma
In a rather sheepish way, it’s a win. People will come up and say, like, “I cried so much.” And I’m like, “Yes!” Because you know, we want to make you feel, you know? It’s all about getting into the heads of strangers. It’s such a thrilling job, writer, because of that ability to get inside the mind of somebody you’ve never even met, you know? And in the more social forms, like if you’re sitting in a cinema when your film comes on, or if you’re at a play, you get to see it happening. But even with fiction, it’s kind of thrilling how it happens at a long distance, you know?

But it may also be the film of Room traumatized her, because everything is even more moving and upsetting when it’s on film, I find. And Brie Larson’s performance, there are two moments in particular where I cry every time I see it. It was lovely making that film as an Irish-Canadian film, you know, with the best of the indie industry on both sides of the Atlantic and using amazing actors like Tom McCamus and so on. And we were so lucky we found Jake Tremblay to play the kid because, you know, the film script absolutely depended on finding this preternaturally talented young child. He was seven or eight when we cast him, and we used to joke that if his adult teeth came in, we’d have to take them out. Luckily his teeth stayed small.

Rebecca
And you said that to him.

Emma
It would have been worth it to him because it motivated him — you can see by the fact that he’s thriving now. I’m so relieved that Jake Tremblay is still clearly thriving now because there’s a bad history with child actors — you know, being cokeheads or, you know, exploited like Judy Garland and so on. So I’m glad we treat them more gently nowadays.

Natalie
I’m really struck by you saying that you received those letters. I don’t think I ever sent a letter, but I definitely sent emails to some various writers who have impacted me — and getting responses back quite quickly, because folks just want to be told that their words mean something. So for all of us, a quick little takeaway tonight would be: send your person a note, because there is something to it. It does mean something.

But on the flip side of that, I think we would be remiss if we didn’t ask you something about the other side of feeling, which is AI. And just… do you have an opinion on it in terms of your own sort of reality as an artist, as a maker, writer of words?

Emma
Yeah, yeah — I’m deeply, deeply disturbed and troubled by AI, yeah. Like most authors, I’ve, you know, looked myself up in that list of all the books they used as a data set and there were 75 different titles of mine. I haven’t written 75 books, so that means that multiple editions and translations of all my books have gone in there. It gives me some comfort that, you know, Jack’s sloppy five-year-old grammar in Room may have slightly muddied the waters.

No, no, I’m really shaken by it. My partner’s a prof and I know that AI is causing such a crisis in the universities because they just… you know, it may well be that these students will go out there and in their jobs they will use AI for various useful purposes, but at university it makes it impossible to assess whether they’re learning, you know? And especially since COVID, you know, there was a big move towards take-home exams and so on and doing things — you know, asynchronous classes and so on. So all these kinds of technologies which allow things to be more accessible, but they make it all the easier to cheat if you’re using AI. So to combat AI, they may have to move back to things like sort of face-to-face in-person oral assessment, which is much harder to do in the case of large classes and so on.

So yeah, it’s causing an absolute crisis in education. It’s freaking out a lot of authors. The film industry, one of the issues of the Hollywood writer’s strike was, you know, do not make us write with AIs or do not have an AI cobble together a script and then have a writer, you know, without copyright protection have to improve it. Yes, I’m very nervous about it.

Natalie
Wearing my educator hat, I have feelings about it. Wearing my artist hat, I have feelings about it. But I’m glad we’re talking about it because I feel like that’s the danger. Because if we don’t talk about it, then there’s no way to have our voices be a part of the conversation going forward. Because then things just start happening to us, right? So thank you.

Rebecca
Sometimes people ask us if we make money doing this podcast. The answer is we don’t. In fact, every hour we spend on Reframeables is time not spent at a paying gig. And the steps to making a podcast are actually many. Finding the guests, booking the guests, reading the books, planning the questions, editing the interview, uploading it into the podcast world, making the artwork. So if you value this podcast, please consider supporting it with a financial contribution. Memberships start at $6 a month on Patreon and include a monthly extra where we record our five things in a week. In this world we have to support what we love, and with that support an energy comes back to us — so thanks for going to patreon.com/reframeables and becoming a supporter. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to be making a podcast, but here we are, three years later, still doing it with your help. So go to patreon.com/reframeables — now, on to the show.

Ok: accolades. Are they important to you, still? Have they become less so — like, as you get older? Do you care less? Are you still driven?

Emma
You know, it sort of depends who the accolades are coming from. Like if I ever win anything in Ireland, I find my kind of child self is going like, “Oh, they like me there in my home place,” you know? “They haven’t forgotten me.” But on the other hand, many accolades from Canada, especially soon after I moved here in the late 90s, accolades from Canada made me think, like, “I’m a proper Canadian author. I’m accepted here.” So yeah, they work not just as kind of abstract expressions of winning, but as acknowledgement from particular communities. Yeah, they are very touching.

And, you know, one thing I always remind people is that if you get shortlisted for something, you’re not likely to win it, right? Because the shortlist is usually five or six. So at the moment where they’re announcing a winner, you know, the way not to get tense is just picture dice rolling through the air. Of course it’s not likely to land on the six. You know, what are the odds? One in six. You know? So always remind yourself that just getting shortlisted was the real victory because then you’ve been part of the conversation and people have been hearing about your book and so on. But no, they are undeniably, you know, useful just for drawing your story to the attention of audiences or readers who might like it. But yeah, I certainly don’t sweat it.

Rebecca
And what would you say to your 26-year-old self? Or it could be 24. I’m always interested to hear what wisdom… I would be interested in any wisdom from anyone in this room, actually, what you’d say to your younger self, but particularly from you. What would you say?

Emma
Yeah, I’d probably say, you know, “Don’t worry about moving to Canada, it’s not going to do your career any harm and you will never regret having moved here.”

Rebecca
Because you were fearful?

Emma
I was just a little fearful, because I was living in England, doing my PhD from, like, 20 to 28 and I was, you know, writing quite a bit for the BBC radio, and so at the point where I moved to London, Ontario, I did feel a bit like, “Ok, I’m moving to the London nobody’s ever heard of. Will this damage my career?” Not that I’d ever really been a sort of go to literary cocktail parties kind of person, but still, I was nervous. And I remember my agent saying to me, “Oh, because of this new email thing, Ennam nobody minds where in the world you are.” And that has proved to be absolutely true.

Rebecca
And with AI, we don’t even need you at all.

Natalie
What is something that is bringing you creative joy right now?

Emma
Something that is bringing me creative joy… I think probably it’s been the rehearsing of this show live, because the actors are all playing instruments as well. It’s a cast of just six actor musicians. And just the kind of naturalness with which they’ll say, “Pull out my accordion,” or, “I’ll try with my cello,” you know, it’s just giving a kind of fluidity to the creation of this theater piece. Instead of each person just playing their own role, it’s more like we’re all making the magic together, you know? And so it probably would be that.

I’ve often found that writing novels gives me maximum feeling of, you know, control of creation of this world, but it’s a lonely business. And making films that are absolutely loved, but sometimes the writer can feel like, you know, the least necessary element in the whole process. But theatre is at that sweet spot of being collaborative and communal, but also not quite so... it’s not as expensive to make as film, so the writer gets to feel a bit more central to it, I suppose. So yeah, I would say a rehearsal room for a play is probably where I’m getting most of my joy from.

Rebecca
Sometimes we end our podcast with a speed round. Want to try?

Emma
Oh yeah.

Rebecca
But our questions tend to be a little bit… not very speedy, but we’ll try. And then maybe if there’s any questions from the audience.

Emma
Sure.

Rebecca
If there are any, feel free. Ok, so this is our speed round. If I just say it fast…

Natalie
It feels fast, that’s true.

Rebecca
Ok, what’s the last new skill you learned?

Emma
During COVID (see this dates it already, clearly I haven’t learned any skills since COVID), but I did finally learn to make proper Irish soda bread because I couldn’t access it in any other way.

Natalie
Ok, and just to say Emma did make us some. We had lunch with Emma, she made delicious soup with the soda bread. And we were just… anyways, that was a win. You won us.

Rebecca
You did good, yeah.

Emma
I think when you’re making art with people, it helps to bake bread… to break bread with them first.

Natalie
I think so. Well, it certainly did for us. Ok, you actually have… you are one of eight, yes?

Emma
The youngest.

Natalie
There you go. So how would one of your siblings describe you? You can pick whoever you want.

Rebecca
Or maybe three. Three of them.

Natalie
It’s a speed round.

Rebecca
Ok, sorry. I want to hear from all eight.

Emma
One of them would definitely say, “The annoying show-off one,” because she would see my career as intrinsically about showing off. As you know, my brother Dave, the ex-diplomat, he’d be very diplomatic about it and say, “Oh, my sister Emma, the distinguished writer.” And let’s see, my eldest sister would probably say, “Emma, who never bothers to do the washing up.” I’m almost sitting here chatting and while magically other people are clearing away the dishes.

Rebecca
What do you need to be creative?

Emma
I think I probably need to have had enough sleep. You know, I remember my plans to write as a new mother — quite unrealistic. I thought I could write books while the children were cooing, you know? And they didn’t do much cooing. And I certainly found in the early days where you weren’t getting enough sleep, it was hard to even get through the day, let alone write anything. So yes, I’d start with sleep.

Natalie
What’s a common myth, or something that people just generally misunderstand about your profession?

Emma
I think the line “write what you know” has been misunderstood to mean that you should only write about what you know. And maybe you’ve lived a life full of interesting jobs, you can stick to that, but, you know, I’ve pretty much done nothing but write. So I would run out of material very quickly if I only wrote what I knew. So yeah, I would encourage people to write anything that they can imagine.

Rebecca
Ok, and lastly, what’s your next big risk?

Emma
A novel set in the near future — so wish me luck with that one.

Natalie
Well, I tried that tonight when I asked you about the panel you hadn’t yet done. I’m going to email them and say that was false advertising. But anyway…

Rebecca
Well, I think that just about does it, Nat.

Natalie
And is there anyone out there with a question? Yes?

Audience member 1
So kind of double-barrelled, Emma. Thanks for being here, first of all. Do you read for pleasure yourself, or do you find it a chore? And it’s leading into the real question I have, is: do you ever either write about fictional characters or read about a fictional character and then wonder next year — going, “Oh, I wonder where they are? Like, what are they doing today?” Do they stay with you?

Emma
Yeah, I read all the time. Before kids, I used to keep notes on what I read, and I know I read about two and a half books a week — those days. It’s probably not quite so much now, but yes, I read all the time. And I even find reading very helpful in those new slots of life — you know, like when you’re inexplicably awake in the middle of the night. You know, instead of calling it, you know, “menopausal insomnia,” I try and say to myself, “Reading time!” So yeah, I read all the time. Right now I’m reading loads and loads of Irish fiction in particular, and God, it’s thriving, it absolutely is.

So I do find fictional characters lingering in my mind and I wonder how they would be reacting to situations or I’m reminded of them — like friends I once knew, you know? I mean, that ability of a novel to invent a reality that the reader and the writer combine in pretending is true, it’s amazing. I’ve even had fans sometimes come up and say something about, “You know, don’t think she would have done that.” And there I am arguing back and we’re all talking about a figment of the imagination — but it’s a joint figment. So yeah, I love that.

Audience member 2
After writing The Pull of the Stars, did you find, like, COVID, like, extra super weird? Because as you said, you wrote in the context of the early 20th century influenza pandemic. You must have found that like, really weirded out. I would have been weirded out…

Emma
It was a year we were all weirded out.

Audience member 2
We were all weirded out.

Emma
But yeah, I completely misunderstood the situation, because I’d written this novel about, yes, the flu pandemic of 1918 and I sold the novel in 2019, it must have been, and then it was meant to come out the following autumn, I think. And then when COVID happened, I thought, “Oh, well nobody’s going to buy my novel now, because the last thing people want is to read about, you know, previous illnesses.” But strangely enough, my publisher said, “No, no, they’ll want it, let’s bring it out fast.” And I felt rather indecent to be trying to sell something on the back of COVID. But they kept saying, like, “Oh, it will be a testimony to the importance of healthcare workers.” And I was like, “Ok…”

So we got it out very fast, and it was copy edited by an emergency room doctor and copy editor. She does those two jobs — she was actually in COVID wards and then hurrying home to polish up The Pull of the Stars and to catch some of my medical errors. I also had a midwife who was quarantined at the time to check through it for some midwifery stuff. So it all felt very urgent and fast, and then when it was published, it did get a huge readership — I think because, to answer your bigger question, I think history can really help us make sense of what we’re living through. And it is oddly comforting to think that people have been through awful pandemics before, when the world’s turned upside down, and situations of not knowing what the protocols are. You know, at the point where people were, you know, antiseptic spraying their groceries or, you know, buying special little copper handles to press lift buttons with, you know? We didn’t know. And similarly in 1918, there was so much they didn’t know. So I ultimately did find it…

Audience member 2
It must have looked like an inspiration — like, “Oh, I’m going to write about the pandemic.” 

Emma
I think the 100 year centenary of the 1918 pandemic, a few books came out about it and The Economist magazine did a sort of round up essay about these books. And I was on a train from London, Ontario to Toronto and I’d accidentally left my computer at home charging. So there I was with no computer and no book on a train and all I had was a copy of The Economist. So I thought, “Oh, I’m bored,” you know? I’m a bit… you know, I can’t just spend time looking out the window. I have to read or write. So I read The Economist cover to cover and there was this article about the flu, and by the time I got to my Toronto hotel, I was making notes on my phone, and I was like, “This is my next novel.” I think I’m very lucky as a writer that I get these very strong instincts when I smell a story.

Audience member 3
The first time I saw The Paris Express, I thought, “Wow, look at that.” You know, a train coming out of the back end of a railway station. And I wondered, was that in any way inspired by Harcourt Street railway station — the 14th of February 1900? Now, that was a freight train that went through the railway.

Emma
Yeah, there was an Irish Harcourt Street crash, very similar — sort of bursting through. Derailment not by coming off the side but by bursting through. And in the case of the Irish one, I think the driver lost his arm.

Audience member 3
Yeah.

Emma
Yeah — but, no I hadn’t heard of the Irish one at the point where I came across the French one. The Paris…

Audience member 3
What was your inspiration for The Paris Express?

Emma
The Paris Express was because we were going to France for the year and my partner is a professor of French, so we were going to spend our sabbatical there. And I found us somewhere to live, which happened to be in Montparnasse. It’s not an area of Paris I knew, and so I just googled, like, “Montparnasse history,” and suddenly multiple copies of this photograph — this surreal train dangling out a window. And it was just one of those moments where you know your next book, you know?

Audience member 3
Very good, thank you.

Natalie
This has just been such a lovely time of thinking together, and working through some really great questions — and Emma, you’re so funny. I’m so grateful that you’re so funny.

Rebecca
Did we reframe something?

Natalie
Yeah, did we reframe anything for you? Because you certainly reframed some thoughts for us on risk and reinvention. You know what? It was an interesting reinvention to come and do this work with my sister, and I’m really glad you’d not written a story about us, because I’m happy that we still want to hang out. But…

Rebecca
You can write something twisted. I encourage it.

Natalie
Thank you everyone so much for being here tonight with us. We are grateful that there’s just such a community of thinkers and readers who want to spend time together. And thank you again to Emma. Thank you to those in the room who helped to make this event come together — just the whole crew that were a part of bringing this Reframeables Canada Ireland Foundation combo together. And we still have, I think, like 15–20 minutes for you to go back there and get your Great Lakes stout, or a little bit of wine.