Niamh Campbell’s Shelf Life
Niamh Campbell is the author of This Happy (2020) and We Were Young (2022). She has won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Writing. She lives and works between Dublin and Clare.
How and where are you?
I’m in the front room of my house in County Clare, on a weekday morning, temporarily banished from the kitchen table because there’s a roofer in there, fixing a leak. The house is old and eccentric but sadly, despite my probing, does not seem to have a ghost.
I feel a little tense and spare, which is typical of a working weekday, because I am in the early stages of a new novel and lacking in context and confidence. My baby got hold of some flash cards earlier and these are now scattered all over the floor.
What are you reading right now?
The Child in Time, by Ian McEwan. I was made breathless by the opening sections, in which a child is snatched from a supermarket, and which I read in the Gatwick airport at the end of a weekend away, childfree. Now that I’m home I read slower and the shocking start has evened out into something that seems conceptual and high-minded and less visceral, which is both a relief and maybe a disappointment.
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
I’ve finally given in to Grand Designs and am doing a kind of tour of the ‘top’ episodes, big folk marquees and Blairite co-op colonies and so on, with my husband, who processes life through dwelling intensely on DIY.
Music-wise, I leave a classical and jazz radio station – RTÉs Lyric FM – on for my baby at night, and often end up listening to opera or original compositions or Lonnie Holley in the small hours. It’s not a single thing, but a feeling tone, and I feel at home there now.
The last thing I watched and loved was Past Lives. I'm susceptible to being enchanted by certain kinds of actors, and Greta Lee is apparently one of them. In that film at least, she conjures an entire personality through really subtle physical movements and tendencies - it's so tenderly done. Trying to capture physical personality in writing is something I try to challenge myself with these days.
What did you read as a child?
Anything I could get my hands on, including my mother’s Secret Seven collection and a few Threads-esque 1980s pro-nuclear disarmament stories I inherited, and which have stayed with me in associative form. In the 1990s, in Ireland, children’s books which focused on Irish history – the Great Famine, the 1916 Rising – were popular, and they probably influenced me as a writer; I have always been interested in place and resonance. My friends and I would read magazines like Shout and Mizz, which our parents tried to confiscate. There was no guidance on my reading, and little of it sounds chic now: I loved pony adventure stories and Sweet Valley High and Flowers in the Attic and so on.
Looking back, I really thought of the written world as a built, existing world - a discourse, to use the adult term - and my intention was not to make value judgements but orient myself within it. I teach creative writing now and the idea that books are consumer products, especially YA books which are tailored to market demographics and parental controls, is having an insidious effect on reading habits, in my opinion.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
I was transfixed by John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun when I was about twenty-one – it led me to do a PhD on McGahern, or rather on ‘sacred weather’, on the emotional tonality of climate, in his writing. I think now that Amongst Women, this spare, beautiful, cold, totally perfect little novel, is one of the best I have read, and certainly the biggest influence on me. From McGahern I learned dialogue – his clipped, naturalistic, often banal use of speech and speech patterns is a technique I have adapted to my ends – and also the power of respecting or fearing your own characters so much you don’t feel you need to know absolutely everything about them. His work is a wonder.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
There is a whole genre of hate for my debut novel, This Happy, on Goodreads; it’s like opening the seventh seal.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I used to sit down, poke a few painful spots in my soul, and let the memories and associations flow. It was an unconscious process, and related a lot to catharsis, with no planning or sketching in advance. Then, when I was in labour with my daughter, I had a reaction to drugs which caused me to hallucinate great waves of the past in a way that felt ghoulish and unwanted and unhealthy: I kept thinking – and I mean while in labour – that I needed to protect myself, psychologically, from this, because I was going to be a mother now. I ended up staging a kind of psycho-dramatic battle against my own worst impulses and decided to completely cleanse my mind. It was extremely trippy.
In the aftermath – when I’m also trying to work around childcare and teaching – the process has become simpler: decide on a Big Theme, write a synopsis before beginning, break this up into flash cards, proscribe set times to write and work to a deadline. I still have to draw on the personal well of weirdness, but less recklessly. Writing, at least in the way I have always done it, brings you close to the abyss in yourself.
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
Low key. I was signed and sold within a year of committing to writing, so I didn’t feel angst about it. I first became known through winning the Sunday Times short story competition, and while this was wonderful (I was grateful and proud, don’t get me wrong, and the judges were wonderful), suddenly I had people following my lame little Instagram account and a certain amount of attention, not all of it friendly. Since then I’ve cultivated a mostly low profile; I’ll go to a festival and geek out about style or something, and not get asked back. I don’t hustle. I was also thirty when it all kicked off, so common sense had set in. It would have been a disaster at twenty.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Don’t take things personally. Very, very little in life is personal. Probably nothing is personal.
What are you working on right now?
I am working on my third novel, which is about the death of the self and the transmigration of the soul, but in a mumblecore millennial kind of way.