12 Questions for Rob Doyle

The Irish novelist on moralists, serenity, slow reading, being very tall, his partner Roisin Kiberd, and more.

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12/25/2023 Lower East Side, NYC

It’s torturous writing these, can be at least. Cathartic afterward, though, of course. That’s the name of this game. Writing in general: racking up a combination of experience, perspective, and some bizarrely found tidbits of the subconscious, adding a touch of voice called disposition to this weird alchemy of feelings, emotions, thoughts, instinct, intuition, and lyricism, perhaps a bit of help from the gnostic and spooky, a force never to be understood. It’s a quite painful and uneasy process, an act which could lead to said catharsis, and hopefully, when it’s all over, a sense of inner-peace, serenity… if we’re lucky. 

I find this act particularly torturous all the more now, though, because I have such reverence for all the authors I’m interviewing in this series. There’s no motivation to this whole thing other than that it’s an excellent privilege to be able to chat with some of the writers I’ve spent weeks, months, if not years of my life reading, authors who’ve come to delight, amuse, and emotionally decapitate me over and over again. They all mean a lot, these formative figures. And so I’m supposed to intro them here, which is to write a little piece of prose, showing off what I’ve got, ‘popping my shit,’ before giving the stage to the real masters of ceremony. And how awful would it be to waste this with… Rob Doyle is a novelist, critic, and essayist from Dublin, author of X blah blah blah, shortlisted for the Y award in his 30s, having Z adapted to a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, and it would go on… before a paragraph, like — I got the chance to speak with Rob on a chilly Berlin afternoon, one of those autumnal days where the wind oddly — you get the point. Is there anything in the world more boring or monotonous than the obligatory introduction, preface, and prologue? It all amounts to the non-literary act of context, the abolition of mystery and mysticism, artistry; the glorified and condensed Wikipedia page. (This is why books with mere epigraphs have so much more value, it’s another enigma to be worked with and interpreted, a spiked aperitif before the train dutifully departs). Funnily, I do suspect a lot of writers would just prefer the normative intro. When they agree to an interview, I don’t think they’re also asking for, or consenting to, an opening act. Apologies for my presence. 

Something else I’d like to quickly touch upon: fuck critical distance. While I can be quite a curmudgeonly, critical person, I’m not a critic. I’ve been told by an editor that, with this series, I should maintain the distance between me and my ‘subjects.’ I don’t care about that at all, and just as Martin Amis wouldn’t be afraid to write thousands of words in praise of Saul Bellow, or like Bret Easton Ellis on Joan Didion, Didion to Hemingway and Bronte, Hemingway on Twain and Lawrence, I have no problem writing that I think Rob Doyle is, unequivocally, one of the most interesting writers alive right now; a concise humorist and an expert of inner-tension, the tension that exists within us all, between the spiritual and the physical, our needs and desires, hopes and realities, curiosities and answers. I recommend reading Threshold, it’s a fantastic book.  

There’s a different piece I’d like to write about Rob, and it concerns the three times I met him this past summer, when he was subletting my flat in Berlin while I was, off in Montreal, in the process of splitting up with my fiancé. Amidst a very gloomy and distressing emotional state, there were these thought-provoking yet short lived conversations with this highly regarded novelist. The story of meeting this writer, which would actually be the story of the intervals of time between meeting this writer, when my life unfurled and unfolded, could work as a story of parallels: one world, which to me was absolutely everything, was dissipating, becoming ungraspable, while another, though abstract, began to germinate, and very subtly make sense. These short yet meaningful conversations with the sage-like Rob Doyle could start each section of the short story, or perhaps novel, a lovely three part structure with an opaque yet subtly relevant overture to each act… the dialogues that took place in the doorway of my apartment in Schoneberg between two writers, one established and one unestablished, the influencer and the influenced, talking about Michel Houellebecq, Annie Ernaux, how to close the window and turn off the washing machine. If approached correctly, these scenes could work quite well in raising the curtain to the story of me and my ex-partner’s separation, a great upheaval, the end of a period of my life which, inevitably and by corollary, turned into a beginning. I’ll write and publish it another time, though, more appropriate for when I’m headlining. 

My interview with Rob Doyle, the forty-one year old Irish writer of two novels (one adapted into a film), a collection of short stories, a book of nonfiction, and a multitude of reviews and essays, can be found below. Enjoy. 

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GG: You read more than fifty books per year, sometimes more, yet you’ve said you’re a slow reader. How would you say this benefits a writer? If you were a ‘faster reader’ would everything in your life—and career—be different?

RD: I used to wish I could read more quickly but now I’m perfectly comfortable with my slower rate of reading. It’s just how I am, how my mind works. If a passage or a sentence stimulates me, inspires thought or fantasy or daydreams, then I let that happen before going back to the book. When I read, I’m not really in it for the plot so much as for the language, the ideas, the writer’s personality as it emanates from the prose. And so there’s more pleasure and profit to be gained from reading slowly, savouring a book like good wine or food. However, if I was a faster reader, I could probably review a book every week and make a living from that while also writing my own books. But I’m not, and so everything takes me ages.

What’s serenity to you?

When I was very young, I had no serenity at all, no inner peace. Everything was frantic, stressful. So these days it’s important to me to cherish serenity wherever I can find it, to be at ease as much of the time as possible. In practice, this means making lots of room in my days for doing absolutely nothing. Playing with the cat. Walking around, looking at the sea, the sky, buildings. Being useless. I’m industrious enough with my writing, but I do my best to live by André Breton’s maxim: don’t do anything for money that you wouldn’t do for free.

When I read your work, especially your fiction, I sense themes of the importance and rarity of personal dignity. Could you say a word or two on your perspective on dignity, and its place in our current culture and society? 

The first thing that comes to mind is a phrase I once saw on a Bob Dylan T-shirt: Dignity ain’t never been photographed. I don’t know if that’s true — I’m not much of a photographer, but I could probably photograph dignity if I put my mind to it. I’m glad to hear you discern that theme in my work, but I don’t know if I have anything to add on the matter — I suppose my vision of dignity emerges from my books, even if within those books I’m often describing the various indignities that I and everyone must slog through on this cursed earth.

Do you think it's the writer's place to tell their readers how to live?

I really don’t. I’m allergic to the moralism that infests so much contemporary culture. I’m energised instead by a desire to explore the imagination, to wander through portals of dream and consciousness in search of the sublime, the terrifying, the forbidden. If some notion of how to live well on the earth emerges from that, so be it, but it’s secondary to my intentions. I detest moralists and as soon as I feel a writer is preaching at me or trying to make me a better person, I add their book to the pyre. By now that pyre is very high, so high I can no longer see the sky or feel the warmth of the sun.

What was the lowest point for you as a writer, and how’d you come out of it? 

There have been so many low points that it’s hard to single out any one for special attention. But perhaps the toughest phase was in writing my first novel and trying to get it published. There’s so much rejection you have to go through, so much self-questioning and self-doubt, because nobody has given you permission to be a writer. If you’re like me, there’s nothing whatsoever in your family background to make it seem natural or plausible that you might, as it were, create yourself as a writer. But you do it anyway, because you’re driven by an irrepressible lust for glory, power, self-expression, vengeance. And when it finally starts to work out, the relief is immense.

You’re strikingly tall in person. I don’t know how tall specifically, and I won’t bother to Google it, but it appears to me something like six foot eight. What’s that been like, and how has it defined you? 

This is a very big question — so big that I don’t think I could possibly answer it here but might have to write an essay on the subject one of these days. Being tall certainly has its pros, but it also has its cons, especially when you want to blend inconspicuously into a scene, as I so often do. It’s awful when you’re at concerts, for example. You’re standing there painfully aware that you’re spoiling someone else’s night, and that they’re standing behind you hating you. You try not to obtrude, but you do, you do. I’ve started to have fantasies about when I’m an old man, if I make it to old age: I’ll be this long, spindly, skeletal figure, wintry and otherworldly. I’ll frighten and intrigue children, who’ll see me as some kind of wraith from the land of the dead. I’ll live alone in a cabin by the sea and all kinds of dark rumours will attach to me. It’s something to look forward to.

You and Roisin Kiberd, in terms of both looks and talent, are quite the couple. How is it being in a relationship with another influential writer? Competitive? Jarring? At times annoying? I think of course about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, how they’d edit each other’s manuscripts, the last and final eyes before publication, one another’s most trusted literary confidants… is it like this? Moreover, and sorry if this is rude, but what do you think Roisin’s ‘Year of Magical Thinking’ would look like? 

This may be hard to believe, but there has been little or no competition between me and Roisin since we got together several years ago — at least, not on my side. I’m painfully competitive in general, but with Roisin, we’re so very different in terms of our writing styles, our sensibilities, our concerns, and even in where we are in our writing lives (I’m seven years older and I already had a few books to my name when we first got together, whereas she had yet to publish her first). And so competition just doesn’t come into it, or it hasn’t yet at any rate. I’m always helplessly rooting for her, and I can feel that she’s rooting for me. As for her version of My Year of Magical Thinking, it’s been a running joke of hers that someday she’s going to write a memoir of our life together titled Loom Over Me (she’s short, 5’2, whereas I’m alarmingly tall, 6’6). Such a book would probably be utterly damning, so the challenge is to denounce myself so radically in my own books that there’s no harm left to inflict when she finally gets around to writing hers. Seriously though, Roisin is one of my favourite writers — that’s one of the reasons I’m with her.

Joan Didion or Eve Babitz? Philip Larkin or James Fenton? Michel Houellebecq or Emmanuel Carrere? 

I like Didion at her best but I don’t like all of her, and I really like some of Babitz but often her whimsy and airiness annoys me. So if it’s a desert island deal, I’d have to go with Didion. I’ve never read Fenton, so it’ll have to be Larkin there. And… please don’t make me choose between Houellebecq and Carrere! I love both! On the page, neither is ever uninteresting. If you can say that about a writer, then that writer has succeeded.

Can you tell me a bit about your thoughts, and your approach, to writing about sex? 

My approach has always been to write about it explicitly, graphically, and just get as much meaning and insight from a sex scene as possible. My writing on sex has been described as pornographic — including by my own father — but I think I’m very prudish in certain ways. There are things I don’t like talking about, don’t like hearing about. I have all sorts of shady fixations, neurotic hangups, weird compulsions. But the most vivid writing often wells up from that which we can’t talk about. As E.M. Cioran put it: only write books if you’re going to say in them the things you’d never dare confide to anyone.

You’ve mentioned having a lovely friendship with the great Geoff Dyer. How’d this come about, how’d it progress, and what influence has this sort of relationship had on your life? 

It came about because I’d been a huge admirer of his work since I first read his book Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It in Rishikesh, India, when I was twenty-four. His work demonstrated to me the true extent of the freedom writers had, but which many writers didn’t seem to me to be taking advantage of. It wasn’t just his writing — it’s that Geoff provided an example of how a writer could be in the world, staying inspired and living for art, beauty, and transcendental experience. When I began to establish myself as a writer a few years later, I wrote some pieces about him and interviewed him a couple of times, and a friendship developed. When I moved to Berlin he started coming over in the summer to hang out with me and my mates. All of that has been wonderful. However, the best of a writer is in their books. That’s where the profound encounter happens: in the reading. Getting to know the writer in real life is just a bonus.

How do you navigate decision making? Are you a “trust the gut” kind of fella, or more adherent to empirical logic? 

I generally trust the gut, but I’m also very reliant on the people around me. In fact, I wish I’d been more reliant in years gone by. I wish I’d sought the counsel of friends and family instead of just blundering through life the way I did when I was younger. I’m lucky in that I have some good friends in my corner, as well as Roisin, whose emotional support and advice is crucial. When there’s a big decision to be made I tend to open it up to the room, so to speak.

Can you tell me a bit about your new novel, and, if you will, what drove, or this is a word I always trip over—inspired you to begin work on it?

I don’t want to say too much about it just yet. I began writing it a little over two years ago, and in that period it’s evolved and mutated in ways that have variously excited and alarmed me. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and at the same time it’s a very me sort of book. Okay, okay, I’ll say this much: it’s an autobiographical fiction that takes place on multiple planes of reality and varying degrees of fictionality. It’s made up of books within books, dreams within dreams, selves within selves, worlds within worlds.

Why do you write? Is this something a writer should know about themselves? 

I write so that I don’t kill myself. Writing is my way of being in the world with a measure of sanity, purpose, and — to loop back around to a word you used earlier — serenity. 

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Photo Credit to Katie Freeney