MY LIFE IN BOOKS: NIAMH MULVEY
Niamh Mulvey was born in Kilkenny and has recently returned there having worked in publishing in London. Her first book of stories, Hearts & Bones, was published to great acclaim in 2022. Her debut novel, The Amendments, explores the lives of three generations of Irish women bookended by the constitutional amendments of 1983 and 2015 and is published next Thursday by Picador.
The books on your bedside table?
My bedside table is a pile of books so there are a lot.
But the tops ones are Peter Pomerantsev’s How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler (please, BBC, option this), Sinéad Gleeson’s Hagstone and the new standalone thriller by Mick Herron, The Secret Hours. It’s a bit slower than his Slow Horses books [the Slough House series] but full of his trademark London-weariness and petty workplace inertia. It’s great.
Your book of the year (so far)? Rough Beast by Máiría Cahill. Everything you never wanted to learn about power, tribalism and courage.
Your favourite literary character?
Grandmamma from Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Re-reading this book with my children was probably my reading highlight of last year. Dahl’s use of adult characters is unusual – most children’s writers get them out of the way, but in his work they are central, and often terrifying. Not Grandmamma, though; her presence anchors the child in wisdom and goodness in the face of terrifying evil.
The first book you remember? I remember vividly the miracle of letters turning into words for the first time in my primary school reader. The word was féach! It’s a good word, a good motto for a writer.
A book that changed your life? Books continually change my life but Chekhov has been a recent discovery (for me) who has brought a lot of joy and peace. He is good at just letting things be as they are, there’s no sense of him trying to impose control or force the reader towards a conclusion. And yet these beautiful shapes and structures still emerge in his stories.
The book you couldn’t finish? I give up on books all the time. It’s a consequence of having worked in publishing for years – you start to read books to find out what they are rather than what they do. When I realise this before the end of a book, I usually give up. It’s a bad habit, but life is short.
Your comfort read?
When I feel stressed, I read comic essays. A recent discovery for me is Tim Kreider. His collection I Wrote this Book Because I Love You is very enjoyable.
The book you give as a present?
The Giant Jam Sandwich ,a classic picture book by Janet Burroway and John Vernon Lord. I give it to kids, obviously, but parents often like it too.
The writer who shaped you? I’m not sure that’s for me to say. But I always wanted to write a big, juicy family drama along the lines of Jonathan Franzen or Pat Conroy (remember him? I devoured his books as a teenager). But I never thought I could do it – I thought all I could pull off would be a pallid little moue of a book, desiccated and restrained. But when I was at my most unselfconscious as a reader, books about families were what I was drawn to and when I finally found my way into the story of The Amendments, I think I was drawing on the muscle memory of those books. LM Montgomery too, her books trace families over generations and I was an obsessive fan as a child.
The book you would most like to be remembered for?
What a question! I just hope they let me write another one.