Sligo writer Elaine Garvey discusses her debut novel, The Wardrobe Department, her journey to becoming a published author and the impact of the basic income for artists payment on her creative practice.
Author Elaine Garvey: When I was a teenager, you couldn’t be ‘easy’ but you couldn’t be ‘frigid’ either. Whatever you did was wrong
“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.” 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.
“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 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.”
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.
WRITING DEBUT NOVEL BASIC INCOME ARTIST IRELAND
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