Writers don’t tend to discuss money. For the most part, there’s not much to discuss. But Sligo writer Elaine Garvey is in the unusual position of being a recipient of the basic income for artists payment, which was introduced by the Government as a pilot scheme in 2022.
“When I was choosing an arts degree, it was not high-status,” she says, over coffee in the Museum of Country Life in Castlebar, Co Mayo. “It still isn’t, because people think, Well, you’re not going to earn money for what you do. I see teenagers now filling out their CAO forms and they’re not choosing arts for the same reasons. I just hope that will change for the next generation because it excludes so many people.”
Garvey’s debut novel, The Wardrobe Department, has already been earmarked as one to watch in 2025. The book is set in 2002 and tells the story of a young Irish woman, Mairéad, working in the costume department of a London theatre. Mairéad is a thwarted artist, desperate to express her creativity but also unsure of how to move forward with her dreams. It’s something Garvey can relate to.
“I’m still trying to figure out why, when I was seven, eight, nine, and knew I wanted to be a writer, why did it take me so long to send out work? When you don’t do what’s in you, you are not a good person to be around.”
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Garvey is bright-eyed and interested as we talk, laughing often. “I always wanted to be a writer,” she says. “I don’t remember wanting to be anything else. My sister and I used to put on stories and plays to entertain ourselves. Mary would be the director and the leading actor, and she fired me for eating all the snacks before the shows began. We had great fun, and used to make up stories before bedtime. She would put me to sleep with a story. I remember that more than any particular book.”
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Garvey was on a path destined for writing from the time she left school, studying English and Irish in Galway, followed by a creative-writing MPhil in Trinity College Dublin. “I graduated in 2000 and then I took so much time. The plan was to find a job that would allow me to write ... I spent about 20 years looking for that job,” she says, laughing. “I tried a lot of jobs and careers – graphic design, advertising, eventually I ended up working in theatre full-time.”
Although she had published several short stories in the Dublin Review, it took a long time before she could give writing the serious attention she had always intended to. “There’s a lovely phrase where you align your intentions with your behaviour, and I had intended this for so long. I had to decide: what am I doing with my time and is it bringing me any closer to being a writer?”
After leaving a job and turning 40, she signed up for a Stinging Fly fiction-writing course. When Covid hit, she moved from Dublin back to her family home in Sligo. By early 2022 she had secured an agent and signed a two-book deal with Canongate publishers.
“It takes your whole life to write your first book, doesn’t it? I started it around 2002 and tried so many different ways. It was nearly the end of the [Stinging Fly] workshop when I wrote a scene that’s in the novel, and that scene came out in one go and it hasn’t changed a lot from that. Suddenly I realised: I can do this, I have a story.”
Later that year the stars aligned further when she was offered the basic income payment for artists. What difference has it made to her life as a writer? “The most immediate thing was I could look after my health. And the recognition – one of the reasons for setting up the scheme is to give recognition to the value of time spent on a creative practice in our society – that was huge. And I was able to write full time.
“Artists work so hard and we all think we’re not working enough. We’re doing too many things. And once you clear the space so you have more time to work on what you want to work on, the unexpected roads that’s taken me have been wonderful. I have these new friendships, a better sense of myself and who I am, and what I want to do.”
Much of The Wardrobe Department describes the experience of being a young woman who is unsure of her place in a world where everyone else seems to know what they’re doing. At one point, Mairéad describes the experience of being female as a “riddle”.
“I still feel that,” says Garvey emphatically. “It’s impossible. When I was a teenager it was so difficult, because you could see why certain girls were popular and then how the boys talked about them behind their backs. So you couldn’t be – the terms are so horrible – you couldn’t be ‘easy’, you couldn’t be ‘loose’ but at the same time you couldn’t be ‘frigid’. Whatever you did was the wrong thing.”
Getting older helps, she says. “For some people ageing is not a happy process but the confidence you get is really good. You’re becoming more aware of what makes you happy and what doesn’t, what’s acceptable and what isn’t, what you can say no to, just becoming more yourself, and people respond to that too. Try to please everyone and you’ll please no one.”
Garvey was also interested in investigating the romantic templates that women are fed from childhood. “The book has many subtle references to fairy tales and how those have imprinted on us and our expectations of what a happy ending is – it’s almost always marriage. I wanted to kick back against that. After I wrote this story I realised that nearly everybody in it wants a wife, but nobody wants to be a wife. Why is that?”
The book was influenced by Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray, his translation of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne, and Garvey gave Mairéad the surname Sweeney, as a nod to the work. “I read that poem when I was a teenager and I always loved it. There was something in it that I always connected with. I carried it with me through every house move, this little volume of Seamus Heaney’s translation. There’s that beautiful line when he says there are worse things in life than hunger, imagine living without a cloak, to be completely naked, because Sweeney is completely naked in the poem. I thought his mindset at the beginning of the poem is Mairéad’s in the novel. She’s a little bird being hunted.”
if I have to go back to work, I have to go back to work. I’ve done it before, I can do it again
— Garvey on the possibility of losing her artist's basic income
The book also deals with the power dynamics of a small London theatre and its morally corrupt producer in a time before the #MeToo movement and all of the enlightenment that came in its wake. Bullying, sexual exploitation, groping in the hallways, manipulation and plain rudeness and cruelty are all part of an ordinary day at the office and she was careful not to “retrospectively empower” her characters. It was a different time. “In 2002 we didn’t know how big the problem was. Bectu [the Broadcasting Entertainment Communications and Theatre Union in the UK] did a survey about bullying and harassment and 92 per cent of the people they interviewed had experienced bullying and harassment. Sexual harassment gets the headlines – and it should – but bullying is so pervasive and puts so many people off.”
When it comes to her creative process she keeps it simple. “It might sound trite and cliched, but that phrase ‘Trust the process’, I feel much more balanced when I repeat that mantra. Other people’s expectations are a lot. I just go back to the process, every day, even if I don’t have a full story, I go back every day. I stay calm. The thing is, it works.’ She cites research into how children play as informing her own approach to her creativity. “There’s no censorship or deadlines; they don’t have fixed attachments to ideas, it’s fluid. If something doesn’t work, you go around it. Once you want certainty and a fixed outcome, that will shut down your artistic process.”
Does she worry about having to go back to work if the basic income for artists scheme is not renewed? “I have planned for both [situations]. I’m in a different place now thanks to the scheme and it’s brought so much to so many people’s lives that if I have to go back to work, I have to go back to work. I’ve done it before, I can do it again.
“In my head, in order to be a healthy person you have to eat and move, and that is the structure for everything else. Now I think of writing in that way as well – if I don’t do that, everything else breaks down. I don’t know what I think until I write. I often use pen on paper and it goes through my right arm and when it comes out that’s the only way I can clarify my thoughts. Writing and language are such human functions. There’s a narrative around everything we do, even when we dream there’s a narrative. So I think it’s to do with being human. I’m a happier person when I’m writing.”
The Wardrobe Department by Elaine Garvey is published by Canongate
