Written stars in the
It’s taken Sinéad Gleeson a while to write her first book. Not that it hasn’t been on her mind for quite some time. That said, she’s been rather busy. As a broadcaster and journalist, Gleeson is best known as the former presenter of RTÉ Radio 1’s popular literary showcase, The Book Show; as editor and archivist, she oversaw a pair of significant, awardwinning anthologies of Irish female short fiction, The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore. Now she’s publishing a debut collection of essays, entitled Constellations. It’s a wonder. And a book that wilfully defies description. But we’ll give it a go.
In essence, Constellations offers a literary journey through the female body, anchored in a series of personal snapshots from the author’s life, from childhood illness, eventually diagnosed as monoarticular arthritis, to a later encounter with leukemia, by way of love, loss, motherhood, the whole damn thing. She’s poured her heart and soul and blood and guts into these pages. It’s a highwire act, but Gleeson pulls it off with considerable aplomb.
“I really wasn’t interested in writing a memoir,” she says, “because I’m interested in lots of things; so if I was going to write about myself on crutches as a child, I was going to write about the church, and if I was going to write about leukemia, I was going to write about the history of transfusion, or artists who use blood in their work. It would be really uninteresting to write a book that was just completely about me, because I know that story, whereas when you’re writing about other subjects, you go out and research them. You discover things and you find connections, often ones that are entirely unexpected, that you never expected to find.”
Thusly, Constellations traverses a dazzling array of topics, from the moving tale of how Gleeson met her husband (we’ll spare you any spoilers) to a cycle of 20 poetic “stories” inspired by the McGill Pain Index, a scale used by physicians to gauge a patient’s level of discomfort, by way of extended riffs on everything from the life of Frida Kahlo to the language of ghosts to her kids’ musical tastes (as a one-time music journalist, it’s fair to say she’s had a positive influence).
A longtime supporter of literary greats, interviewing and writing about other authors and compiling their works, Sinéad Gleeson is finally getting ready for the release of her own first collection of essays. She explains to DEREK O’CONNOR
why now is the right time.
You feel the considerable craft that went into every single word, but what truly lingers and resonates is the sense of a life in progress, as lived by a restless, inquisitive soul negotiating life’s tribulations, and transforming them into art.
For the author, the road to Constellations has been a roundabout one. “A combination of things got in the way,” she says, “fear being the big one. I had messed around with some short stories in my twenties, a little bit more so in my thirties, and never finished anything. I’m wonderful at starting things, terrible at finishing things. That’s the one thing I say to people who want to write: ‘Would you please finish things?’ Also, I had a job, and young kids, and that’s really hard and tiring. They say you should write in the evenings, but I can’t do that – I can barely have a conversation after 8 o’clock at night. So, that was never going to be an option.”
The day job, in this case, also happened to involve grilling some of the finest literary talents in the world today for The Book Show, including any number of her own literary heroes. “You’re in a world where you’re interviewing people all the time who’ve published five, ten, 15 books, getting a masterclass in writing from people who know what they’re doing, which is invaluable – but then you become associated with being this book person on radio and telly, and what if you write a book yourself and it isn’t any good?”
A long-postponed trip to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the famed writers retreat at Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, finally got the ball rolling. “I talked to my husband (musician and producer Stephen Shannon) about it a lot; he’s always been encouraging me, so I applied to Annaghmakerrig, to go away for a few days. In your application, they say, ‘submit your writing’ – and I had no writing. So, I said, ‘I’ve got two small kids, loads of freelance jobs and I’m actually shattered all the time. I wrote this piece for a paper about my son – that’s the closest I’ve got to writing, please let me in...’ And they did. I had the letter for another two-and-ahalf years, just sitting in front of my desk, before finally I got there.”
A series of well-regarded essays followed, notably “Blue Hills and Chalk Bones”, which featured in the online edition of UK literary journal Granta in 2016, attracting the attentions of several agents and publishers, and ultimately resulting in the offer of a book deal. Bluff duly called, Gleeson finally got to work properly, while still juggling the freelance life and family matters – reading the results of those efforts, that urgency very much informs the finished work. Constellations arrives at a time when the essay form is enjoying a golden age, and feels very much of the moment – perhaps most vividly illustrated by a passage penned during the recent abortion referendum.
“I think Ireland has changed so much in the last ten years alone,” she says, “and a lot of the things that I touch on in the book, they’ve changed since I was younger. It’s better now. I can write about mother and baby homes, and Magdalene laundries, and all the terrible, awful things that happened, and the silencing of women. Because the generations that my grandmother, my godmother, my great-grandmother (all of whom feature in Constellations) came from wouldn’t have been able to talk about anything, because the priest would have been right over, or your husband would have given you a slap. All because of the coercion and control over what women could do, how they could act, what they could say, was really problematic. And troubling, and stifling, for years and years. And I can say what they wanted to say.”
In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that this writer has known Sinéad Gleeson in various capacities over the years, primarily because Ireland is small, and her extended circle of friends and acquaintances is large. She’s a true champion of the literary medium, new Irish writing in particular, and an infectious enthusiast by nature. As we speak, she’s resident in the netherworld that is pre-publication, waiting for the project that has dominated the last few years of her life to finally drop; the advance praise for Constellations has been glowing, and the US rights have already been snapped up. And as is her wont, she’s busier than ever, which is saying something – last year, she was named a Writing Fellow in her old alma mater, University College Dublin (UCD), a role that involves her mentoring a new generation of nascent literary talent, while giving her space to evolve her own practice. At least, that’s the plan.
“Part of your job, apart from teaching, is you’re meant to be writing something,” she says, “so I’m meant to be writing a novel, which I am doing, but I’ve left it for months because I was still doing edits on Constellations and loads of freelancing and various other things. And the longer you stay away from something, the more you don’t go back to it. It’s like the gym – you get the fear. You think it’s terrible, and you’re not engaged with it.” She’s also editing a collection featuring 100 new Irish short stories, entitled The Art of the Glimpse, for UK publisher Head of Zeus, to be published in 2020.
Gleeson will readily admit that the ailments detailed (and deconstructed, beautifully) in Constellations have left her with an enhanced sense of mortality, one that informs her relentlessly productive nature. Having taken the long road to publication – life does tend to get in the way – this literary late bloomer is officially off and running. “I was walking to the library in UCD the other day,” she says, “and what went through my head was, ‘Imagine if me at 20 had known the next time I’d be back here would be as someone who had a book that was about to be coming out.’ My mind would have been blown. And the next thing I thought was my 20-year-old self would probably think, ‘My God, what’s going to happen to you between then and now?’ You don’t have that much to say in your twenties. Thinking back, if I had published something then, I’d probably be mortified about it by now.”
“You become this book person on radio and telly, and what if you write a book yourself and
it isn’t any good?”