The author reflects on returning to Paula Spencer for his 13th novel, intergenerational trauma, and anti-immigration sentiment in Ireland
. Even more surprisingly, for one of Ireland’s most prolific writers, he has only been upstairs in the actual museum once before. “I’m not dead,” he smiles, by way of explanation.
Family, Roddy Doyle’s 1993 TV series starring Sean McGinley as violent abuser Charlo Spencer and Ger Ryan as his wife, Paula Doyle has been described as “the undisputed laureate of ordinary lives” and nowhere is that illustrated more in his work than with Paula Spencer. He shares this ability to elevate the ordinary with writers such as. Is he a fan? “Very much so, yes.” With this new book, he’s examining Paula’s life in the aftermath of all she’s been through. “Despite all the circumstances of her life, is her life worth living? Yeah.
“I think I always had a grip on the psychology, and the thing about psychology is that our inner workings always reveal something new, and they always make nonsense of our previous conclusions,” says Doyle. We talk about the word “inappropriate”, the word Paula uses, carefully, to describe the way Charlo was looking at her daughter. “These days, four- or five-year-olds know the word ‘inappropriate’, but nobody used the word back then ...
The novel is dripping with guilt and intergenerational trauma. “The real damage,” says Paula, “is that she can’t face her children, not even in her imagination. They’re like a jury and she’s always guilty – she knows she’s guilty. Nothing will ever make her know or feel any different.” And elsewhere she says: “Guilt that’s what Charlo had left her. The family jewellery. A necklace, pearls of jet-black guilt. Choking her.
As an observer of Dublin and Irish life through his fiction, how does he feel about the state of the country now, in particular with the rise of right-wing, anti-immigration activity? “Generally I feel quite good about living in Ireland,” he says. “I think we were probably a bit smug for a while, thinking we were untouched by these things but that was stupid.”
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