I was named after Jane Austen’s Emma. My dad Denis [the late academic and literary critic] wanted to call me Emily because he had been working on Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte, but my mother Frances didn’t like the idea of Emily. She said, “You’ve also worked on the novel Emma, let’s go for that.”
People – especially in the United States – often ask me questions that I can tell assume I had some kind of very traditional Irish upbringing, that we were storytelling around the turf fire. To be fair, we did have a turf fire, but it was in Mount Merrion in Dublin. It was suburban.
It is hilarious to me, but my red hair also means people assume I am the most authentic of wild Irish women. If I am directly asked, I tell them that it’s all fake, I’m brown-haired.
Living in New York for a year when I was nine was mind-blowing. In 1979, Ireland was a very different place, and nine is such a formative age. It had a lasting effect on me. It made me loud and confident, and I became a little bit Americanised with a can-do attitude. I think if I had always been at school with Irish nuns, it might have kept me a bit more low-key.
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I loved being one of eight children. I’m an extrovert and I’m very interested in people and all the different thoughts going on in their heads. I remember those dinner tables as just so stimulating – it was like listening to many radio stations at once. And my parents were so encouraging of each of us to go our own way.
In 1990, I felt that gulf between Irish culture and the rest of the world, and it was a great liberation, at 20, to get away from it. Once I had moved to England and was in Cambridge doing a PhD, for instance, I could completely come out to the world as a lesbian. But then Ireland started to catch up and it became a much more modern place, a much more pluralist place.
I didn’t stay away from Ireland because of any feeling that I couldn’t be me. What happened was I fell for Chris [Roulston] in 1994 and then I followed her to Canada. My second emigration in 1998 was really just for love.
It’s good for a writer to feel like they are an observer, a wanderer, someone who is noticing the little unwritten rules of society. I have repeatedly put myself in the situation of being the eejit who doesn’t quite know how things work, but who is fascinated and taking notes.
It was partly because I was going to Paris for a year with [university professor] Chris that I felt destined to write my new novel The Paris Express, which is inspired by a photograph of the Montparnasse train derailment of 1895. We were living near Montparnasse station, but what really appealed to me about it was that it was such an amazing image of high-tech gone wrong.
A steam train was such an impressive piece of machinery then, but this one was falling vertically out of a window. It’s like a visual parable of progress and speed and modernity gone wrong. Even the fact that it was photographed, that’s a very modern moment and it’s why we remember this accident when far worse disasters are long forgotten.
Paris of the 1890s was such a hub and a hotbed. Everyone who was interesting, whether they were a political radical or an inventor or an artist, was drawn to it. It was the sort of New York City of its day. I thought, “I’m spoiled for choice, I’m going to put real people in my carriages”, and then it was a delightful exercise, like planning a very complicated party.
Mado, the idealistic anarchist, is the closest thing to a main protagonist in The Paris Express. When I read articles from French magazines and newspapers, I found several locals independently saying that when they heard the news about the crash, they thought it was an anarchist bomb. This really struck me – my god, were city dwellers already so blase about acts of mass terrorism in the 1890s? And they were.
My next novel is set in the near future, but I can’t talk about it any further as I haven’t sold it yet – it would be tempting fate. My next film is H is for Hawk, an adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s amazing memoir about grief and falconry. When you get to adapt someone else’s book, it’s like climbing inside a giant machine and figuring out how it works.
I’m doing my first musical, The Wind Coming Over the Sea, this summer in Canada. It’s about emigrants during the Famine who settled close to where I live in London, Ontario, and I’m using traditional Irish songs to tell the story. It is good to be in that beginners’ mindset, and that was also the way I felt adapting my novel Room into my first film screenplay under the tutelage of Lenny Abrahamson. You don’t want to be getting smug or repetitious.
When The Wonder was being shot in Ireland in 2021, I got to be an extra, but in that classic extra way, my scene was then completely cut from the film. I was a particularly bad extra, I would say. I acted hammily – I was quite ashamed of myself.
I still take part in Ireland as much as I can and in as many ways as I can. I don’t just go there on holiday because then I would feel I was only passively visiting it.
A crucial part of Irish culture for me is that we can slag each other. I feel instantly comfortable if I am working with people who I can make fun of, and vice versa. In Canada people need to be my friends and know me before we can slag each other, whereas in Ireland I feel that we start with the slagging. That is something I really treasure.
During the long years that my mother had Alzheimer’s, my trips to Ireland were tinged with sadness because visiting her would make me aware of what she was enduring. Since my parents have died, in a way Ireland feels less fraught to me. I still have lots of family and lots of friends there, so the link hasn’t weakened.
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I have both Canadian and Irish citizenship, and I love that our kids [Finn and Una] have both identities too. They have grown up well-used to the taste of Tayto, and it makes me feel less lonely as an emigrant that they know what I’m talking about when I talk about Ireland. Even though it was only the first 20 years of my life that I lived there, it has marked me so much that nowhere else will ever feel quite as much like home.
In conversation with Laura Slattery. This interview was edited for clarity and length. Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Paris Express, published by Picador, is out now.
