We were lucky enough to have Noelle McCarthy answer a few questions for us around her new memoir Stakes. She gives an in-sight into her writing process, the story behind the cover image and hints at another potential book in the future!
Was your writing process for Stakes similar to Grand or was it a totally different experience for you?
It was a different experience, insofar as I had more of an idea what was involved this time, which made it a bit more intimidating- with Grand I was a first-time writer so, blissfully ignorant as to the time a book takes to write and edit. This time around, I was aware of all that so I was more consciously pacing myself and counselling patience during the hard parts!
Were there any moments during the writing process where you nearly pulled back from including something personal or were you just all in?
I think I was pretty all-in. One of favourite things about Dracula, the novel that inspired Stakes, is the degree of emotional honesty in that story: all of the various characters are constantly disclosing deeply personal secrets and making themselves vulnerable to a reader. I think that was the aspect of the novel that had the greatest effect on me as a young person reading it, and I think I felt that it was incumbent on me, when I started writing in response to Dracula, to at least try to do the same. Once I’d made that decision, I didn’t really question it.
In your writing you often balance heavy material with humour. How important is humour to you when telling difficult stories?
So important! Not only in terms of balance between light and shade, but also I think, in terms of recreating an authentic human experience- when I think of the heaviest times in my life, or the hardest, there’s never not a seam of, if not, laugh-out-loud humour, then at the very least, a discernable sense of the absurd running alongside them and that was important to me to have.
For the cover of your memoir Grand the photo is one of yourself. Can you share a bit about the photo on the cover of Stakes? Did you get to choose the image?
The cover photo is of me, it’s by my Dad I believe, on the morning of my First Holy Communion. I never really noticed the side-eye, but my mother in law pointed it out one day, and said how mischievous she thought I was looking. When it came time to work on the cover of this book, I thought my expression here does a lot to capture that mix of light and dark/ black humour that’s a big part of the story and luckily, Grace, my brilliant publisher agreed!
You recently wrote in defense of Charlotte Glennie’s memoir in the face of a review she received, what’s your relationship to reviews of your own memoirs? Do you read them?
I wrote about Charlotte’s book because I felt the reviewer did her a disservice in writing about an imaginary book he would like to read, at the expense of considering the book she actually wrote, which is, I think, a reasonable expectation for an author.
I recently read some reviews of Stakes and I was so moved and energised by them- they’re all by women so far, and I love that- my ideal reader in my head was always a young woman. I’m grateful to the reviewers and editors commissioning them, it’s such a sustaining thing for a writer, to get a sense of a reader connecting with the text- those glimpses of their points of view, aesthetic sensibilities, shared love of Madonna etc were a shot in the arm for me after the solitary business of writing it. That said, I don’t go near Goodreads- my husband had a look at it with the first book and he said I’m better off staying clear. I am not very good at taking direction, but in this case, when it comes to finding ways of inflicting emotional violence on myself, I’m learning to look elsewhere!
Do you have any other plans for another book in the future?
Sadly, yes. I have a friend who says, the definition of being a writer is someone who can’t help themselves, and that rings true.
Shirl's Review of Stakes
I just love Noelle’s writing, I don’t really know how to describe it, it’s just so unmistakably hers. She writes with such raw honesty and doesn’t hold back as she lays everything out there from her addictions to her desires. It surprised me to learn that she had actually started writing Stakes before Grand.
Her curiosity with Bram Stoker’s Dracula brought back memories for me as a teen in the 1990s, also obsessed with Dracula, mainly due to Coppola's star-studded film. It was interesting to read how Stoker's book was a part of her life and how she would keep coming back to it at different stages in her life.
Her memoir addresses the #MeToo movement and also has her coming back to the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. As I have recently read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, the laundries are still very fresh in my mind and I found myself reflecting again on this troubling part of Ireland’s history that I knew little about until recently. If you were a fan of Grand, memoirs like Mother Mary Comes to Me or also drawn to Bram Stoker’s Dracula then I highly recommend Stakes as your next read.