Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Karen Sbrockey

Wildlife by Richard Ford ... was one of the best books I've read. It inspired Paddy Clarke, to a degree. And A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing inspired The Snapper, and tile shape of the new book was inspired, to an extent, by Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates. There's a lot of repetition in that short book.

In the case of Wildlife, some months, some years after reading Wildlife, the emotional click came. And I decided I'm going to write a book about a boy looking at his parent's marriage breaking up. I read Black Water about five years before [The Woman Who Walked Into Doors], and my reaction to reading Black Water the first time was just 'that's a wonderful book,' that was all. Suddenly, when I was thinking about how to shape the book, Black Water came into my head, and the repetition. I read it again last month, but I didn't read it again while I was doing the work. Very different subjects; but I just remembered the repetition of the car going over into the water and it always ended 'and then she drowned.' Kept on going, 'and then she drowned.' And I wanted that repetition in my own book, and that's--I'm very grateful then to Joyce Carol Oates.

Were you encouraged by your parents to write?

Not actively encouraged, but the house was always full of books. I was encouraged to go to university, for example, if I wanted to go. They were terrific when I came to publish my first book, the novel The Commitments, myself. I needed a loan from a bank. I wasn't a home owner. I had no property of my own and my parents went guarantor on the loan, so I suppose the short answer is yeah, I was encouraged.

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.

You self-published The Commitments. Did you try to get that published?

No. I had written a novel earlier [Your Granny Was a Hunger Striker] and now I know, with hindsight, it was absolutely dreadful, but I sent it off to a lot of publishers and what struck me was--not that it wasn't accepted--but that it wasn't opened. Myself and a friend of mine, John Sutton, to whom The Van is dedicated, did a bit of investigating and found out the prices [to self-publish]. It wasn't extraordinarily expensive. I didn't have an agent. Agents didn't want to know one unless one was published. Publishers didn't want to know one unless one had an agent.

What was Your Granny Was a Hunger Striker about? Why do you say it was dreadful?

Oh, I think it's often called undergraduate humor. It was a smart-arsed piece--satirical. I haven't read it now since I finished it, but I've looked at snatches of it and it's actually quite bad. I would see it now as some sort of a rehearsal, a practice, of writing. Even the mere fact that I finished it gave me the confidence to go on and do something else.