LIVE at Hay Festival with Jack Edwards

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1:20Hi, everyone. As you might be able to tell from the sound of birdsong and the vague hum of a chainsaw in the distance. I'm actually on holidays this week so please enjoy instead of our regular episode a live episode that I recorded at the Hay Festival last month with Jack Edwards. You've probably heard of Jack Edwards before. He is the internet's librarian. He is honestly one of the best kind of book influencers out there and I was so so delighted to be interviewed by him on stage about the Rachel incident and Skip Shock and just a bunch of other stuff about writing and how I feel about the kind of writing side of my life in general.

1:58I loved having this conversation. I hope you love listening to it. We'll be back with our regularly scheduled program programming next week.

2:13Caroline O'Donoghue is a New York Times bestselling author and podcaster. Her podcast sentimental garbage has been streamed 12 million times and i'm seeing some faces in the crowd too who are here for our live recording last night so thank you for coming back that's always a relief that people want to see us again the rachel incident is uh adult novel which sold 250 000 copies today we're here to talk about her young adult fiction specifically this new wonderful book which you can see a shiny new copy right in front of me skip shock so please welcome to the stage, Caroline O'Donoghue.

2:52Hello, thank you. Hey, how is Hay treating you? Oh my god, fabulously. I'm staying in the weirdest house. It's so good. I love about Hay, they just put you in people's houses because there's no real hotels around here. So I'm staying in the most amazing gaff full of like Victorian oddities and special fabrics. It's like, it's the best fun ever. and I love being here with you as well it's really fun what a treat yeah well I since we're now best friends on on the hay festival stage two events means best friends I mean it's set in stone yeah I wanted to talk to you about the Rachel incident to start with actually a lot of people in the room maybe by kind of a cheer who in the room has read the Rachel incident oh lovely thank you which was my introduction to your work and I love that we center two best friends who are writers um what is it that draws you to storytellers but also to the craft of storytelling?

3:43It's interesting no one's ever asked me that question before because you're right they are um so uh Rachel who's our protagonist of the story she is a journalist and an editor of a London an English newspaper centering on the Irish immigrant experience and so so basically kind of a trade paper or a small community paper meanwhile her best friend James lives in New York and he's a very fancy writer of a um of a He's a comedy writer, basically, who sometimes writes movies as well. And I always kind of imagined him to have a sort of like Bowen Yang kind of vibe to him or something. Like somebody who's like, you know, a writer and a performer and also kind of has this sort of social media credibility.

4:24You know, that's always what I sort of imagined in my head. And so it's like a very, you know, a very famous writer and a very workaday writer. and they you know they focus on this time in their lives where they were sort of first introduced to that like artistic way of life and the two people they met which is um dr byrne and his wife deanie and how they got introduced to that sort of like life of the mind that way and i guess i never really it's i think authors are often accused of self-involvement when they write about other writers yeah you know and it's interesting because writing about writers gives you a lot of narrative freedom because you're naturally centering somebody who's asking a lot of questions.

5:04And it also gives you the main character who has a lot of free time and a lot of excuses to be in random places. So for example, when we first meet Rachel, she's covering for her newspaper this kind of Irish expat event called the Late Late Toy Show. Do we have any Irish people in the house that know what the Late Late Toy Show is? Yes, we do. So on a practical level, doing stories about writers is really fun that way. But in terms of the Rachel incident specifically, it's very much a story about how we contextualize our past to ourselves and how we define ourselves by kind of writing our own stories.

5:44I mean, I know you're a huge Joan Didion fan. I am. And we all know that quote, and it's always blazed across tote bags. You know, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. and I think we sometimes we who work in the book industry we take a sentence like that we tell ourselves stories in order to live and we think it kind of means so everyone go buy a book do you know what I mean books are essential but really it's kind of a glib way of saying we're all lying to ourselves all the time in order to compartmentalize the horrors of life you know which is the less interpreted sort of like meaning of that phrase I think you know.

6:23And when you're a writer writing about a writer do you find that people naturally want to be like oh so that character is you you know and do you find that biographical kind of observation irritating or are there parts of you that are in that character is there a perfect balance of how much of yourself to put into any given character? You know what for this book specifically I really felt a strong sense of mischief of wanting intentionally to troll the reader. Because we talk all the time about how books are competing with screens all the time now. And we can rally against that. There's no use pretending that people aren't picking up their phone every five or six pages, even if it's just to take a picture of the page or take a picture of the closed book in front of their coffee.

7:14to upload it right you know and it's like well why not work with that so like when i am you know when i did this book it was like the no matter whether or not you've heard of me whether or not you've listened to the podcast or whether you've just picked up this book randomly in a in a bookshop anywhere in the world what you're gonna do because this is what i do when i read fiction is i read the first few pages i'm like this is pretty good you look at the back page and you go, Carole O'Donoghue is a writer of six novels from Cork, Ireland, blah, blah, blah. And then you'll go, well, this character is a writer from Cork.

7:47And the way this character is physically describing herself looks a bit like this picture on the back. Is this a memoir? Is this a play about us? Do you know what I mean? And I really wanted to play with that because you could, if you were reading the first few chapters, you could be like, well, as soon as I said, this could probably be about her. As soon as I said, this could probably be about her and her friend. And then once the drama really kicks off, I really wanted people to be like, is this about her? And I love playing with that because no, it isn't. It's really what this book is, is kind of a soap opera in many ways.

8:22I feel like it's very honestly and truthfully written, but the events in it are pretty dramatic. And yeah, I'm in love with kind of messing people around that way. It's like, why not as authors make that work for us? The fact that people are reading with a phone next to them, you know? I wanted to ask you about the way that you write love as well. Because I think in the Rachel Instant, there's almost three kinds of love with the three different men. There's the relationship with Carrie. There's sort of lust towards Dr. Byrne and the fantasy of that relationship. But then also there's platonic love between her and James.

8:59and I loved that you gave their platonic friendship and that relationship as much respect as the romantic relationships in the book as well yeah so I wanted to ask you about that sort of transformative relationship and those years that they have that bubble of two friends who live together what made you want to write about friendship as well as love do you know what it wasn't a specific it wasn't a specific thing of like I think we've been banging the drum for quite a few years now about like, you know, friendship, you know, friendship mattering as much as or more than romantic relationships. And I think we've all read My Brilliant Friend, you know, we all understand that.

9:36But what I really wanted to get into was love of men. So this book is dedicated, The Rachel Instance was dedicated specifically to the men in my life because I had realized that I was five novels into my career and that I hadn't really written about my relationship with men at all. And I think part of that had to do with the fact that I came of age as a novelist, very specifically in a post-Me Too era. And it's so interesting because we don't think of books as being things that exist within a trend microscope. We think of fashion that way. We think of TV that way. But I do think there was a real flurry of books after that time where so many female novelists were so hurt and angry at this, you know, the thing about Me Too being like this realization that we had all been screwed over in similar ways by similar people.

10:31And there was this real anger and this sense of retribution. And I definitely wrote to that anger for my first couple of novels. And then, you know, as all feelings and all, you know, cycles of thought have to do, they fade and they churn and then I sort of got into this feeling of you know it became very normal for women my age to be like oh you know kind of like I'm straight but I don't want to be or something or like I live with a man in spite of myself it became like very normal yeah this is my burden to bear and and uh it became really important to me to be like well who do we mean do we mean our dads do we mean our gay friends do we mean the boys we're besotted with and the boys we marry like and it sort of like actually meant a lot to me to really think about the men I love the most in my life and sort of um deconstruct the love I have for them and show that on the page you know yeah I wanted to ask you about being an Irish writer right when I was looking at a few reviews I noticed that a lot of publications kept saying like Sally Rooney-esque you know writers love to do um and stick that on the cover in order to sell some copies and I was wondering do you find that as an Irish writer as an Irish female writer do you find that reductive that it draws a false comparison it's kind of a marketing gimmick that sets you up for something that you're not actually trying to be it's so interesting my journey with that specific question because I remember when I first started writing like my first book came out the same year as conversations with friends and you know love the book love love her like she's I think she is one of the great minds of our generation and like I've received a few dms back when she used to use social media and I think oh wow I think she's probably just a lovely gal as well and has it's I think it's a it's a real shame that social media has made her have to retreat because people are just have become too obsessed with her but there was this real feeling of like it doesn't feel great to be 27 years old with your first book on a panel full like say you're with six other debut writers and everyone gets two questions each.

12:37And one of your questions is why do you think Sally Rooney is so successful? And I bet like, and I remember sitting there thinking like, well, I bet she's not in a Waterstones in Leeds asking, answering questions about me, you know? And I remember feeling like a real sense of like, this is tough, you know? And, but like then the more I matured in this profession and I've been in it a long time now, I've realized that, and I've both realized and been on the receiving end of, the rising tide lifts all boats. I feel like Sally has created in herself this whole kind of industry within an industry.

13:14And so many Irish female novelists have been uplifted by this. And like 10 years ago, if someone asked you about an Irish novelist, name one or whatever, they would say James Joyce or something first. or maybe Maeve Binshey, who's one of my favorite novelists. But now when we think of the phrase Irish novelist, we think of like some sassy girl from Dublin with a great outfit. And I kind of love that, you know? Yeah. But it's really interesting to be on the receiving end of a trend because I think the only thing that ever really annoys me is that when people pretend as if like, okay, so one author broke through and then we just scooped up all the scraps.

13:57And then we just blasted them out of a cannon kind of thing. But when in reality, there is a reason that there are so many Irish novelists. There's a reason so many Irish playwrights and artists. We're a tiny, tiny country. We've created an enormous amount of great artists and thinkers. And that is because we are a country that invests very heavily in the arts. In the last couple of years, we've also started a universal basic income for artists, which is still based on a lottery system. But I think out of the people who applied, something like half of them were awarded it. We have a grand system like and that has completely, you know, changed people's attitude to art in Ireland.

14:34And it's actually like magnificent to be around because I really I'm born in Ireland. But like I moved to London when I was 21. And because of that, I sort of see myself as almost like a London writer. And I always think that the kind of writer that you are is very much shaped by the sort of people that you have to impress in order to get published. Right. And so if you're a London writer, you might be at a cocktail party and see David Nichols there, or indeed Dolly Alderton, or whatever. And you see that, oh wow, people are making a serious living off these books. And you think, well, God, you go into a publisher, you're like, David Nichols wrote one day, I'll give you two days.

15:16I'll give you three days, I'll give you a set of days, I'll give you a week. And it makes you kind of a shark. It makes you a commercially minded author. whereas I speak to my friends in Ireland who are working off a grant system many of the times and they are thinking about the art but they're also thinking about how they can present the art that will get it funding which means they have to think of it in a term they have to back themselves and they have to feel like their work is important and so there's this artistic confidence behind it that makes me really envious sometimes you know I almost feel like I have to have a gimmick and a joke but I I really envy some of my sort of Irish counterparts who will just sit there and be like my book is about a difficult subject and if you don't want to buy it I don't fucking care um so yeah it's a fascinating subject yeah a lot of your characters do come from Cork in Ireland and I wondered is there's kind of like a CODCU like the Carolina O'Donoghue cinematic universe in which like a lot of the characters are from Cork I'm like I wonder if they have met oh I love that do you find it easier to write about Ireland now that you are no longer there I sometimes wonder if it's easier to write about a place and you can kind of calcify it into something yeah easier to put on the page once you are no longer there seeing it the way it moves day by day it's so interesting that you say that because I don't I I sort of almost see Cork as a vector for youth because all of my youth lives there like I said I moved to this country when I I was 21 and therefore everything in Cork has a sort of an amber glow around it and the shades around that like I can adjust the dimmer on that all the time and sometimes depending on the day or the year I'm having I feel like Cork was this idealistic place to grow up and sometimes I feel like it's this kind of dark net of secrets and and of course like all you know small Irish places is both, you know?

17:12But yeah, I wonder to myself a lot whether I'll be able to write a book about Irish people in Ireland who are older than the age of 21 because that's where all the Irish books stop for me. Where it cuts off. Yeah, yeah. If anyone's over 21 in one of my books, they're living in England. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay, I have one final question for you about the Rachel incident specifically and I think a lot of people in the room will be thinking this too but we're all desperate to have an update on the screen adaptation of the Rachel incident. Can you give us any updates? Well, is there a gun to your head that you can't say anything?

17:45I don't know. Yeah, because the thing is, you think they make you sign an NDA, but they haven't. And that is very much their mistake. And you know what? That's on them. No, but so, yeah, no one's like sat me down and said, here's what you can say. Here's what you can say. So I'll just have to use my own discretion. So let's just go crazy. Let's just go mental. Here's who we're not casting. But the, so I'm writing the bulk of it. It's going to be an eight episode show and I'm writing six for channel four. And I think all going well, it will be on TV by Christmas 26. So it seems like a long way away, but actually in sort of filmic terms, it's tomorrow because it means we need to start shooting in Ireland in January of 20, of 26.

18:33and um which is that will be the first time i'll be living in ireland again since i was 21 so maybe i'll finally be able to write a novel about irish adults after that okay so it's an investment into that it is yeah exactly two birds one stone i'm very much a use every part of the buffalo sort of author well i wanted to talk to you about your young adult endeavors yes how do you feel about the term young adult in general because i was reading skip shock and it didn't feel to me like something that adults wouldn't enjoy as well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it felt so exciting to go on this adventure with the characters.

19:09So I wanted to ask you about the, that framing of this book as a young adult book. And do you think there is an age limit to books or can anyone enjoy it? It's a really curious thing, isn't it? Because I kind of go back and forth. I fully think if you enjoy like fourth wing or Sarah J Maas or any of the kind of adult commercial fantasy that you see that this is absolutely a book for you. I think this is, you know, yeah, I don't think, and there's, you know, there's some heavy stuff in this. Like there's, you know, there's sex work, there's murder, there's death, you know, there's stuff. They're going through it.

19:37They're going through it. But the older I get, actually, I've been working in this genre kind of simultaneously for my whole career. You know, half of my books are white and half of them are adults. And the older I get, the more I think that young adult is actually not a descriptor of the audience. It is more a descriptor of the genre. So I think when you get older fantasy, like for example, someone who I would think would be firmly fantasy would be someone like Samantha Shannon, right? Who it's like deeply complex lore and incredibly complicated political systems and all that kind of stuff. And I think those books are huge and they're like a huge investment of your time as well.

20:23And the investment is so worth it. She's so gifted. but I think of YA fantasy as being a little bit lighter on its feet kind of thing. I think that there's like, you know, the young adult of young adults describes the characters far more than it describes the tone of the book. You're sort of seeing something with kind of seeing the book to the lens of almost the innocence of a young person but because you're this book is set in a completely different world you are that naive person as well so there's a slight sense of naivety to it where these characters are discovering themes of like segregation or racism or whatever for the first time and and i hope that it you know that that when you first see something really unfair when you're young and it cuts you like you see somebody who's homeless or something and you just can't believe why why that would happen and then as you get older you mature and become calloused that kind of thing.

21:18I think when you read young adults, which is so often about political terms, it sort of reopens your heart and your mind to how unfair things can be and how scary the world can be, you know? And your trilogy, All Our Hidden Guests, was, am I right in saying it was inspired by tarot cards? Yes, it was. I, yeah, I was a big tarot card gal. I collected them for a long time. And then I remember I had this moment short, weirdly, shortly after like the first Trump presidency. And I remember having this moment of being like, I can't do this anymore. I can't like tell, collect tarot and tell tarot to myself because like this great force for evil has won and they're laughing at us.

21:59I thought of all the kind of right-wing men who would be laughing at me like this kind of crying liberal with my tarot cards. And I became like briefly disgusted by myself. And I was like, no, no more. And then I remember, I, do you know that, um, yeah, um, FreeCycle, I put all the tarot, it was like 40 tarot decks into a box and I put on FreeCycle free tarot cards, free box of tarot cards. And then I looked at the photo I had attached and it looked so weird. And I just added brackets, not haunted, but then weirdly I've like come back and, but like, you know, I was such a huge, huge tarot fan i loved you know i'm a huge fan of like um philip pullman as well and like um i think so much of the alethiometer that lyra balacqua has is about sort of reading into the timelessness of symbols and archetypes and like for example you know of a symbol for hope in your tarot deck is represented by the star but you might get a chinese tarot deck and it's represented by a certain flower or a mexican deck represented by a certain um other kind of you know bird or something and then you you develop a kind of international inner dictionary of what different symbols mean and i loved that and um yeah i loved playing that with that for all our hidden gifts weirdly now of the last sort of like five or six weeks i've come back around to tarot again oh really and i started buying it again i'm like oh no friends fear she's reading tarot again so when it comes to planning out a trilogy because um skip shock is going to be a duology right yes yeah so how do you decide how many books an idea should have you know like how do you decide oh this is this series is going to be a trilogy this one's a duology this is a standalone you know or does it kind of develop as you write you think I've got more to say on this topic yeah no do you know what this was supposed to be a standalone okay and then it just kept getting longer and longer and longer there was just more in it for me I suppose I and then I said to my publishers um listen this will eat this can either be a kind of 400 page or 600 page kind of big tomb and it will take me another year or we can cut it in half okay um and they went with the cutting in half so this is this is yeah it's very much a part one and part two yeah okay and is there a chance that there could end up being three and four are you like no i think i'm finishing the story at two it's going to be neat as an ending i don't know the thing is is that i always think to myself because you know what being a YA author is not easy yeah everyone wants to give all the kind of the claps and the medals for the contemporary literary fiction everyone's ready to respect that but you're at a dinner party and you tell people you write YA and they act like you know you just said you know I make small mice from soap and it can get a bit knackering you know and every so often I think um oh god maybe I'll just wind it up but I love writing it so much it gives me again I the phrase I keep coming back to I feel light on my feet when I when I write it and then I did a YA event yesterday morning with 800 kids and I felt like I was Taylor Swift of the Eros tour man it was so good and we all we did this kind of world building class together where they were all kind of like screaming out their different suggestions for what this world we were making together should be and I was I could never give this up it's better than crack man it's so good I love teenagers I love I just think they're the most and you know what I have to say Welsh teenagers are my favorite sliver of the teenager there's something about Welsh teenagers I find so endearing because they're they're they're kind of um they're not precocious but they are kind of old before their time.

25:44They're like, hello, how are you? Kind of thing. And they kind of shake your hand very strongly. And then they're like, I've brought you my book I've been working on. Yeah, I got a few sort of work in progresses yesterday. There's a kind of an old world seafaring confidence to Welsh teenagers that I am obsessed with. That's why I love coming to Hay. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the difference between writing YA and writing contemporary fiction. Yeah. You know, do you have two things on the go at the same time and then you dip in and out or are you like no I'm focusing on one project and which do you find more relaxing to do you said you feel more light on your feet with with yeah well the thing is with this book specifically I mean I don't know if any of you have tried world building before but it is extremely difficult because you know you might have some fun being like oh I'm gonna think about their feasting traditions and in what way they eat and whatever but you can't just come up with the bits that you like you have to like come up with currency, religion, burial practices, superstitions, kind of that kind of, you have to come up with everything.

26:45And it's so easy as well to slip back into boring cliches that we've picked up from world building. Like, for example, I remember I was writing a sentence and I was like, oh, and then everyone went to the tavern for some mead. And I was like, why am I saying tavern? Why am I saying mead? Is it because I've just inherited this kind of fantasy lingo way of speaking that I haven't really earned, you know, or that doesn't really make sense here. And so you have to kind of police yourself all the time. So it's not relaxing, but it feels like a greater accomplishment in some ways, this book anyway. For All Our Hidden Gifts, that was a real laugh because it was so much of that book is just kids hanging out, being really silly.

27:26And I love writing teen dialogue. I just think, yeah, they're endlessly fun to write. Well, we will have time at the end for some questions, by the way. So this is just your heads up to get thinking of what you would like to ask Caroline at the end. But I do have some questions for you specifically about Skip Shock. Obviously, the book, I think, is available in the bookstore. So I will be really impressed if someone has managed to read it already. I assume that most people in the room are excited about it, but have not yet. Yes, it's out on June 5th, by the way. But we have some special kind of advanced copies in the book's tent.

27:58So you're the only people in the country who have access to the special edition book. So I wondered if you could give everyone a bit of an insight into what the book is about. Sure. How long do you have? So, okay. So Skip Shock is a time travel novel. And it's not time travel in the sense that you're going backwards and forwards in time. It's time travel in the sense that it's time distortion. So it's sort of a string of related parallel worlds that are connected by a train line. And in those worlds, all the time kind of moves differently. So if you think of like a normal train map that goes north, south, east, west, the further north you go, the faster time gets.

28:37So you might have 12 hours in a day, 10 hours in a day, six hours in a day, eight, two. And then the further south you go, the more hours in a day. So we can have days that go on for 40 hours, 60 hours, 80 hours. And you can sort of tell from yourself where's all the power and money and influence and stuff going to be. obviously in the South because people are living longer. They're holding onto wealth for longer, as opposed to the North where things are far harder. People are living and dying far quicker. And I was really obsessed with this because I'm sure you guys have all had this conversation before, but like post COVID, we were all saying the exact same thing, right?

29:19Which is that our relationship to time had completely changed. We're still talking about it. We're still talking about the years sort of 2020 to 2023 as they just sort of went by like that. And we joke about it in conversation all the time, but I think it has a real existential sort of real fear for it. I don't think we, we, we all sort of talk about how we don't like seeing COVID in art and there's no COVID in this, don't worry. But I think because we don't like being confronted with lost time, I think it's the existential panic of lost time is, is very confronting for us. And one of the character is Margot.

29:51She's from our world. She's from a 24 hour world. And she kind of slips into this system. Uh, you know, and she ends up in a six hour world first. And she has this kind of sensation that comes over her where she kind of panics and vomits and blacks out. And it's kind of like, like an advanced form of jet lag, which is what skip shock actually is. It's like, and it's this kind of really, it kind of kind of kills you or whatever. So we, we've got this character Margot, who's kind of slipped from Ireland on a train from Cork to Dublin, uh, into these worlds. And on that train, she meets this traveling salesman, because the only way you're allowed to travel around these worlds is if you have business, which some of you might remember from COVID as well, where I remember when there was that weird thing where all these random rules, like you had to, um, if you wanted to go to the pub, you had to have a significant meal.

30:40Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, if you wanted to travel, it had to be for business that you could prove. And so he's someone who's traveling around and, you know, he's inflicted with this disease, Skip Shock. He meets Margot. He's never met anybody from a 24-hour world before. And then adventures ensue. There's a lot to this book and that's just the tiniest iceberg of it. But, yeah, a lot of it is about our relationship to time and how also we'll never... It's the most subjective thing in the world. I will never know how quickly this event has gone for you. But according to the thing, there's 20 minutes left.

31:13So for me, it's gone very quickly indeed. You know, it's like so, it's so subjective. I find that fascinating. Yeah, we were even saying on stage, they were like, okay, this video is two minutes long. We were like, this is the longest two minutes of our lives. I know, I know. Yeah, it is weird how time sort of shifts like that. Am I right in saying that some of the discussion around travel and borders and areas that different people are allowed into and others aren't and visas was partly inspired by Brexit? Yeah, it really was. Like, you know, some books, they kind of come upon you suddenly, like the Rachel incident I wrote, you know, in a couple of months.

31:46And it was just sort of, it kind of came out whole. I didn't really have to think about it. Sometimes you get really lucky that way. And this book is kind of the equivalent of like a piece of chewing gum underneath a cinema seat for 30 years. You know, just rolling around in popcorn and hair and used condoms and just, you know. and uh i the first kind of germ of the idea came to me when uh you just after brexit was announced i had you know it's so strange now because obviously brexit i'm assuming we all we'd all rather it didn't happen in this room but it was the after kind of the obama years and after the kind of time i was living in london which was such a hopeful time it felt like the first really bad thing to happen to my generation.

32:34Like, obviously we had lived through the recession. We'd all started our careers in the recession. But then when that happened, it was like, oh, what? Like we didn't, we'd been on the winning end of things. It felt like for a long time, because I had, you know, uh, taken part in kind of the abortion referendum in Ireland and, and, you know, marriage equality in Ireland. I had been used to easy wins for left-wing policies and to have this sudden thing where suddenly all of my friends were saying to me, all my sort of British friends were saying, well, you've got the good passport. You know, I've got the Irish passport and nothing for me changes.

33:07And I found that fascinating, that kind of thing. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, everyone was saying like, well, hurry up and get married. You want to get that passport kind of thing. I was like, we've been together for eight years. Stop like treating me like a GI bride. It's so strange. And I was so fascinated by how like, and you know, we were kind of a fairly, you know, media, London media crowd, most of us, you know, white, most of us born, you know, in England, or whatever, or most of them were. And it was the first time anyone of that cohort was faced with this idea that people all around the world face all the time, which is, I don't have the right piece of paper to be where I want to be.

33:48And the randomness of that really struck me. And I really felt like, I really feel like the best fantasy, whether it's like The Handmaid's Tale or The Hunger Games or whatever it is, is based on something that an author has noticed about the real world that feels perverse to them and they just have to blow it up. Like Suzanne Collins, famously for The Hunger Games, she was watching Survivor and flicking between channels and she saw the Iraq war also and the collision of those two images inspired those books. And famously in The Handmaid's Tale, all of those injustices that happen to women happen somewhere in the world.

34:23And I think what happens is, as a fantasy writer, you take something that you think is perverse and you put it under the microscope and then you sort of project it on the ceiling of your own brain. And you make it big so you can see all the details. And that's kind of what I hope this book does, is kind of how perplexing it is that we do that at all, you know. And another facet of that kind of divide is also that Moon, who is our male main character, is part of the Lunati. yeah um which is basically kind of like a religious group yeah they sort of worship the moon in a way and he has a very visible uh sign because he has a moon tattooed on his face yeah and i think that that symbol of his religion made me at least think of other um very obvious visual signs of someone's religion like a turban or a burpee or something was that kind of in your mind that that idea of visible religion um being being seen in society as well that's so interesting i actually hadn't even made that connection but you're so right because like yeah people wear visible signs of their religion all the time and even though it opens them up and it makes them vulnerable to anybody who wants to say something hateful or or indeed do something hateful but like i think what really inspired me about about all that was was like the how we feel about kind of nomadic religions in general or nomadic people in general so it's something what i really enjoyed about creating that religion that this character is a part of which is called the lunati they you know if they follow the full moon so therefore travel is intrinsic to what they do um and so and what they kind of with what they get from this nomadic religion is that they sort of have a kind of a monthly ceremony where they are given sort of flecks of silver silver seeds it's called and that is their payment from their religion for following their religion because you can't really have a job if you follow this religion.

36:18And what this translates into for the people around them is they get money for free. And I think it's fascinating how we talk about people who get money for free, even if it's part of a taxpaying system that they've been paying into their whole lives, even if they're, you know, for any kind of reason, you know, an asylum seeker or refugee or whatever, I find it fascinating how quickly empathy sours when someone thinks somebody else is getting something for free, even if it's like the tiniest amount of money that is really hard to live on. And I also was really inspired with that. I mean, Irish travelers was like a touch point for me as well, because, you know, as I've just been talking about being from Ireland and what a wonderful liberal society we are in many ways, but you'll still get in Ireland this enormous gulf of empathy about Irish travellers.

37:16And I'm not here to sort of weigh that up or anything, but I just think it's really interesting when you get a population of people like the Irish who are so careful to not overly categorise and not overly judge and to remain liberal, and then you will hear very liberal Irish people just being like, oh, well, the travellers all got plasma screen TVs in their caravans. That kind of really generalised, broad stuff. And that to me was a fascinating sort of thing to explore in fiction. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about, and a lot of people will notice this as soon as they start reading, that we have two different perspectives, but Margot's perspective is told in the third person, whereas Moon's perspective is told in the first person.

37:58I wondered why you chose to share their perspectives in a different stylistic way. Yeah, it was like cracking a safe. You know what I mean? The longer I get into this profession, the more I realize that so much of the stuff we learn in school is just bollocks. I just don't think about grammar construction or whatever, or ending a sentence on a preposition. All these rules that we learn, I think, are basically kind of useless, really. But then the one writing thing that does vividly change how a novel is perceived, how a character is perceived, is perspective and tense. so um because we have margot so margot as i said earlier is this 16 year old girl who has very much in the in the grand tradition of fantasy like alice in wonderland or dorothy in wizard of oz or sort of um chihiro in spirited away is a girl from our world who has fallen into another world and that is actually even though it's such a common trope it's a really hard narrative to write because you're just writing this character who's amazed by everything all the time and like that really slows up the action to be like, and wow, and they're eating a different way, and oh my God, this is a God, and they've got all these pictures, and they're all backwards.

39:14It's really boring to write about a character who's constantly amazed by things. The best writing advice I ever got in my entire life was from my secondary school English teacher, who I'm sure secondary school English teachers have their own place in heaven. Because they're the one everyone comes out to, and they're the one everyone quotes in books events. but I remember we had this kind of essay creative writing task to take home for the weekend and you know the thing where they give you four or five options to choose from of what prompt you want to go with and one of the prompts was the time machine and she said to us and by the way if any of you choose this time machine I don't want half a page on how amazed you are to find a time machine I want you to just go back in time and I think about that every single time I write it's like amazement is the most boring emotion It's the least contagious emotion.

40:05And so then with Moon, I wanted him to be in first person because he's a character who's been living in these connected worlds for a long time. And it's very boring to him. He's very cynical. And so I wanted the reader to exist in the gulf between his cynicism and her complete naivety. Well, given that my mic has literally stopped working, it's like, shut up, Jack. It's time for other people to ask some questions. so I'm going to ask one more of mine while you guys formulate your question then I'll come to um the audience for questions my last uh nerdy question about the craft of writing this for you was I noticed that names were such an integral part of this book obviously yes Moon and Margo are such distinctive names but throughout the whole book you can sort of um start to see patterns in different communities based on how you named the characters I wonder if you could give us an insight into how you came up with that naming process and system I love that because I love that question because it was one of the hardest things to come up with this book so another thing that's really difficult about world building like like is is character names because if you've got to build a world there's going to be a lot of people and you might come up with a few sort of like interesting sexy names for the main characters but then after that you're kind of mashing the keyboard you're like carlola i know it's the y and a h at the end you know and that to me feels like just very unoriginal.

41:25And so I really racked my brain of like, I need an easy system with which I can name people. And I eventually landed on, I'm going to name every character in this book based on a unit, a way that people measure time all over the world. So I created this enormous table, right? And across this side, it was just languages of the world. I think I had about 20 languages. And down here I had, um, uh, ways in which we measure time. And I, I said, you know, hours, minutes, seconds, days, months, days of the year, days of the week. Um, uh, even like words like, um, like, uh, for example, one of the characters is called Tayo and Tayo is Japanese for shadow and a shadow is a way in which we measure time.

42:08The moon is which way, which we, um, uh, uh, measure time. There's a character called Ani, but like it's, it's spelled like the French for année, like the French for year. And there's a character called like Sam Donnerstag. It's like literally German for Thursday, you know, and there's a character called Domingo, which is obviously Sunday. And like once I kind of hacked that little thing, I was like, oh, this is good fun. It's a bit of good fun stuff. Okay. So there's a little Easter egg to look out for while you're reading as well.

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44:40um okay i would love to come to some audience questions i see one right at the back hi marvelous nourishing conversation i love this idea of like time being a privilege right yeah like privilege being the idea that in a social sense that there are certain obstacles other people face that you don't right you might not and that offers you extra access and power right yeah opportunity and this is a topic that comes up time and time again in discourse i remember like molly may saying that you have 24 hours in a day and everyone's like no boo um no we don't shut up exactly right and even during covid you mentioned you know that being a time where time was relative and yeah i'm a content creator and loads of my friends who are also content creators started in lockdown right yeah and they talk about how it was so great for so much time and i'm like but that in itself is a privilege other people were really struggling to make ends meet and that sort of thing right so my question really is that I think this is a great opportunity for um a younger audience maybe to get encounter this idea that time is a privilege um and maybe think about okay I actually maybe have more time than other people in the world right yeah in my society and what would you want them to do with that time ideally oh god oh god the thing is as you were talking, I was formulating my answer and then you could throw me a curve ball.

46:04I think I know the question is, no, I don't. But like, I thank you so much for the time and privilege question. Cause that was actually a huge part of what motivated this book because I feel like questions around privilege, they, they almost fall down before they get anywhere interesting because like, um, someone will talk or, you know, someone, the, the, the phrase that I now think has sort of fallen out of common use is that, you know, check your privilege or whatever. Um, God, when's the last time you heard someone say that, check your privilege. Um, and those conversations, I think ended up alienating more people than they embraced because it always like got into the splinter cell of kind of, well, yes, I know I'm white, but my parents were working class or yes, I know I'm rich, but you know, one of my parents is an immigrant or whatever.

46:52And it would just kind of really dismantle into like people arguing they didn't have privilege or the ways in which the the privilege that you're observing didn't really exist or was negated by something else. And of course, obviously everyone's working with a different batch of sort of problems, but it really meant that I always felt like we never got anywhere constructive because everyone was just showing their own sticker book of like why there is specific case. It's like that wasn't helpful. And so the thing, what I loved about writing this book was that every single person who reads this book, to quote Molly May, does have 24 hours in the day and they have to think about like how would my life be different if like I was aging at the same rate like a day like that's I think it's like every the average human life is 20 ,000 days or something and um like if every day was passing the same but they were two hours long um how would that change your attitude to food and relationships and love and sex and religion and and all how would it change your attitude to absolutely everything would it make you kinder or would it make you sort of like Like, you know, how some people are kind of, what's that phrase that they use for people from Boston?

48:01What is it? They're kind, but they're not nice kind of thing. Or like you get that from a lot of cold countries because people kind of, they can't slow down for small talk because it's cold. And so they're just like, okay, here's what you got to do. I'll help you change your tire, but I'm not going to talk to you, you know? And so in terms of like how people should be spending their time better, I would never hope to say. By reading this book. By reading this book. And going to the bookshop afterwards to get it signed. Excellent. Do we have any other audience questions? Yeah, number two. Oh, yeah.

48:33Hi. Hi. So I was just in the talk from Tim Berners-Lee, basically quite sobering, you know, the world is in crisis, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And I'm wondering how, and exactly that, like how do you talk about writing fiction and encouraging people to read it and encouraging them to take space to sort of dream at the same time as going, the world is in crisis and we need to do something meaningful. Like, how do you match that? Oh my God. Yeah, they're real tough questions here. How do I fix the world? I don't know. How do we just, how do we just, well, do you know what? A lot of fiction like this can sometimes have kind of like a grim view of humanity because there's a lot of people terrorizing other people kind of thing and everything.

49:19And there's a conversation that happens when this book that I was, I took a lot of time over because every time you write for teenagers, you, even if you're not, even if you're mostly thinking of the story, even if you're mostly thinking about your themes, you want them to be able to take something away from it that they can use. and there were a couple of things in this book I really wanted to get across to the average 16 year old one of which is that you will be asked to hate people who have less than you and here's our toolkit for not doing that and also is that things change but they change again and you know this character you know the main character in this book Moon he's 19 and he's incredibly cynical because he's seen a lot of the world and he's been treated very badly within it and he doesn't want to join any kind of revolution or any kind of political action because things have always been this way and then he speaks to another older character and like they're not they had to change to get this bad which means they'll have to change again and like you know we're constantly living within cycles and trends and yeah we we owe it to ourselves to believe that it can change again because it had to change to get this bad and i'm afraid like that's the that's the biggest solution i have i'm just an author you know i just write fiction i think we have time for maybe a couple more questions there's a hand just say oh there's one in the front row and then there's one at the back here has been yeah thank you hi if you could play the role of my english teacher for like a hot minute are you gonna come out today yeah if you could like your biggest advice for going on the theme of time how would you balance the time especially when you were starting out between when like what you were doing in your normal life and when you kind of started writing how would you balance like when would you decide to write would you write when you like had ideas come to you like you'd be in the middle of the night just like oh I gotta write this down yeah or would you write when you kind of sat down you were like I want to write this I want to get a chapter I want to get a short story out how did you manage your time like that that's what yeah Yeah, what an interesting and relevant question.

51:25Yeah, you know what? I've always written and I've always done it. But yeah, when I was like a teenager, I always, I get asked a lot by very young people about advice to be a writer. And I always feel really bad for them because it's like I barely wrote when I was a teenager. I wrote for creative writing and I would try and start journals and then I would abandon them or my brother would read them and broadcast them to the family. And that's my trauma. That's my sticker book. And I'm always going to say to very young people who are still in school, because they have all these social activities, they have homework, they have all that kind of thing.

52:03Like, don't pressure yourself too much to get words on the page right now. To me, the most important thing before, when you're still living your very young life, is to find friends who nurture creativity because like you see people like kind of lose that knack for making stuff up or just having a bit of fun like it's always like I'm always like please join a band like even if you can't you can't play an instrument like to me just like having a friend I met up with every week to write songs with was is so integral to my creative practice because the the people who will get published I'm sure there's many wannabe novelists in this room the people who will get published are the people who are sharing many drafts along the way.

52:47And in order to do that, you have to have friends who you trust with your creative process and friends who it doesn't feel silly to be like, I wrote a few thousand words, will you please read it? But in terms of carving out time to physically write, I moved to London. I desperately wanted to be employed at a magazine. Nobody was hiring. So I just started blogging, which is now more or less a dead art form, but Substack is bringing it back. And that was always just like whenever I came up with a funny idea or whenever I read someone else's funny thing that sparked an idea and it was just sort of like crowded around, but I wanted to be noticed, you know, so I was trying to build regularity.

53:25And then eventually I got some journalism work, things built from there. But then it was really, it was my agent coming to me, my agent, Briony Woods, saying, I think you could write fiction. From that point on, I gave up drinking for six months. I used to get up at 6 a.m. before work and write for an hour. And I just did that every day for six months. And then I had a first draft and it was bad. And then I spent another year editing it and it got to a publishable state. But to me, it really took somebody believing in me that I could write a whole novel. That made me be very disciplined about it.

54:00So I do think, yes, be disciplined, but have a playfulness and be open. I think much more than discipline, it's such a long and lonely road to being published. You need to have a creative community who are excited to read your drafts and you're excited to read theirs as well. Thank you so much. Thank you. And we'll be coming to your talk at Hay in a couple years' time. We did promise this young man. Yeah, we have one last question, if you can make it as speedy as possible. Yeah, because it's doing the red thing now. So you spoke earlier about the North-South divide in your book, the South being more wealthy and the North being more impublished.

54:35Is that like a deliberate parallel between the UK and the way things are now? Or was there another reason behind that? That's a corker of a question. That's a really good question. Do you know what? Actually, it was a flip of London is what I really wanted to do because I live in London. I live in South East London. I've always lived in South East London. When I first moved, I don't know how many of you guys know London that well, um i moved to elephant and castle and i was sort of like living on a mattress next to my friend's dryer for six months and uh and you know i'd never i'd come cork i never lived in in elephant castle is a bit more gentrified now but you know it was like a pretty rough and ready neighborhood back in 2010 and um and and i would you know get on the bakerloo line or get on the northern line and i i would go all the way up and then see just how people's days were just different like you You go to Evan and Castle and people are managing their childcare and their jobs and they're getting on the bus and they have two full shopping bags and they're getting a bus down to Oval so they can unload it and whatever.

55:36And it's like, the pace of life is different, right? And they're eating on the go because they don't have time. And then you go up to Highgate on the Northern Line 45 minutes later, people are just like, let go freelance. You know, and I was really amazed by how much like a 45 minutes on one train could do that. And because I sort of identify as a Southeast Londoner now after 12 years, I wanted to flip it and just make the South rich. That's so interesting. And now you're equipped to go into reading this book with all of these little Easter eggs and nuggets of wisdom. So enjoy the book. Thank you, Chad.

56:11A round of applause for Caroline O'Donoghue. Thank you.

56:49Thank you.