THE WRITE STUFF
Novelist Emma Donoghue talks the power of story and Pugh
When you were researching the phenomenon of fasting girls could you see the correlation to 21st-century issues?
Oh, yeah. I don’t write historical fiction as some kind of escape from the pressures of today. You always bring with you the questions of your era. You always see, in the past, stuff that’s relevant to your moment. There’s a reason I ended up telling stories about women smashing the patriarchy. A little girl in 1862 Ireland, she’s not influenced by the magazine covers of today. But she’s trying to be pure. She’s trying to be good. She’s trying to be all that stuff that women have been told to be for millennia. So it was a way of telling a hugely political story, but subtly and indirectly.
You adapted the book yourself. How do you ensure you’re faithful to what you originally wrote, but also make it fresh for the screen?
I really don’t think of words like “faithful”. Those are words borrowed from religion. For me, it’s more like: can I retell the story using a totally different media? I didn’t want it to be wordy in the way the novel has to be. I wanted to tell the story a lot through looks and actions and landscapes. You see Florence walking across those bumpy hills, and you see Florence eating. Moments like that, as storytelling units, are so much more cinematic than long conversations about theology. I’m really happy, despite being the novelist, that we’ve managed to cut away so many of the words [laughs].
Were you pleased to get Florence for Lib – a women who is a feminist off-screen as much as on?
Yeah. The power that she has on Instagram when she talks about how we shouldn’t be frightened of nipples, or when she shares food she’s cooking. She has such a power over girls. They used to queue up in this village where we were filming. They’d just wait all day, hoping for a glimpse of her. She’d come out at the end of the day, and hug them all. So for her to be representing the force of appetite and earthiness and “I’m choosing life” – her sheer strength and energy can communicate just as powerfully as any words we’ve given her to speak.
Do you hope the film promotes a conversation when people watch it?
Absolutely. Sometimes telling a story set in a different time and place lets you sneak into people’s minds, more than if you say, “I’m going to tell a story about the right to choose today.”