Influence is a funny thing. Ira Glass once spoke quite eloquently about the taste-talent gap – that is, the space between the things an artist likes and the things she has the capacity to create. And so she creates, because an artist can’t help herself from creating, but finds that she doesn’t like what she’s made. The hard work comes if she chooses to create regardless, slowly chipping away at that distance between what she likes to consume and what she has the ability to create. But the hope, I think, is that the gap will always remain, that as the artist’s skill grows her tastes refine so that she’s always inching forward towards something she will never reach. What I love about this idea is that a writer can only become truer to herself by reading others and seeking to emulate the aspects of those works that most resonate with her.
Today I am publishing my debut novel. It’s about a relationship between two people who are pretty lost in life. Aaron hasn’t spoken to his parents since the death of his brother. Róisín hasn’t been back home to Ireland since moving to Boston and overstaying her visa. They meet on an otherwise routine night out, one that changes both of their lives. It’s about homesickness and grief and the distance we tend to put between ourselves and the people we need in our lives.
There is so much of myself in this novel. It is fiction informed by personal experience. I moved from Boston to Dublin at 25 years old. I have experienced homesickness like I never thought possible. I have watched my old life move on before I had a new one to take its place. I know what it is to return home to find that everything once familiar has changed, to realize that I myself had changed, too. This book is an encapsulation of so much of my life, filtered through prose. And yet, this book would not exist without the works that inspired it.
It feels like fate that two days before my debut novel is published, Sally Rooney has published her fourth novel. I am among her many fans who cannot wait to read it. Reading Normal People challenged my understanding of what a romance could be, how perspective distance can be used to create intimacy. Without Rooney’s works, I know that Placeholders would not exist, so it’s only right for it to share its publication week with Intermezzo (which I cannot wait to read).
There is a reason that I and so many others love Rooney’s books. Her work taps into a paradoxical nature of intimacy that though the desire to be seen is universal, it feels crushingly individual. We love her works because we see ourselves in her characters. Literature at its best has the capacity to make a reader feel less alone in their experience.
So here I am today, publishing a novel that I’m deeply proud of, that is at once something only I could have created and also could not exist without the works of others. If I hope anything for this novel, it is that someone reads it and recognizes something of themselves inside, and that they feel less alone for it.
For more information about Placeholders click here