The award-winning author’s book recommendations …
Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. She is the editor of the award-winning anthologies The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore, as well as The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. Her debut novel Hagstone was published in 2024 by 4th Estate.
One of my favourite authors is French writer Annie Ernaux, whose work blurs the lines between her own life and fiction, dealing with affairs, desire, writing and her parents. It’s incredible the way she writes about personhood. The Use of Photography is co-written with a lover, told through the discarded images of their clothes after sex. Also try The Years, Simple Passion or Happening.
Another writer who borrows from their own life is Maggie Nelson, author of the Argonauts and The Red Parts, about the murder of her aunt. I’ve just finished Pathemata, where she catalogues her attempts to find the cause of ongoing facial pain, written against the backdrop of the pandemic, parenthood and her socially distant relationship. I’ve written about pain in the past, and it’s so difficult to articulate accurately, not least because it’s so individual, but Nelson does it with both lyricism and humour here, and she’s always had a way with sentences: ‘Each morning it is as if my mouth has survived a war’.
On a similar subject, I’ve just re-read Lucy Grealy’s astonishing Autobiography of a Face, as I’m writing a foreword to a reissue of it this year. It’s harrowing and intense but remains the best writing on being a patient you’ll ever read.
I’ve recently finished two very different but equally brilliant Irish novels: The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine focuses on the mothers of three teenage boys accused of sexual assault. There are multiple voices, and it’s a really daring and experimental way to tell such a dark story.
Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way about picking at the old wounds of relationships and families. Part of the story moves back to the War of Independence and is so evocative. Highly recommend both.
