Friday, April 30, 2010

Guest author Nuala Ní Chonchúir: The Voice

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet, living in Galway county, Ireland. She has published two collections of short fiction and two poetry collections, and has worked as an arts administrator in theatre and in a writers' centre, as a translator, as a bookseller and also in a university library. Nuala teaches creative writing on a part-time basis, and blogs at Women Rule Writer.


My debut novel You, which has just been published by New Island, is told from the POV of a ten-year-old girl. It is 30 years since I was a ten-year-old but, writing in my character’s voice, I was immersed once again in the rough magic of childhood. The novel shows how seriously children can take the world and the way adults often fail to take their feelings into consideration when big things happen. There are freedoms in childhood that make it – from adulthood – seem appealing, but it can also be a time of confusion and fear for some children, and so it is for my main character.

The book is, essentially, a monologue that charts the summer of 1980 in the un-named narrator’s life in Dublin, Ireland. I wrote the novel in the second person – hence the novel’s title You. It’s a voice which comes very comfortably to me when I write. Some of my most successful short stories are also written in the second person and it’s a POV that worked well for Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City and also Edna O’Brien in A Pagan Place. Though, in their screamingly funny book How Not to Write a Novel, Howard Mittlemark and Sandra Newman say: “Certain late twentieth-century novelists used the second person singular successfully, notably Italo Calvino in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City. But there it ended...In fact it was named the ‘second person’ when McInerney became the second person to get away with it and it became clear he would also be the last.” Ouch.

Second person is perhaps not as intimate a POV as first person – it deflects away from the narrator a little – but, as both writer and reader, I find it seductive. To my mind it is also a very natural way for an Irish person to tell a story: the narrator is at a small distance but uses the cajoling, close voice of a confidante – a storyteller in the reader’s ear.

There’s no big ‘why?’ in my story; You is a novel about friendship and loyalty and changing your mind about other people. It also explores the way children suffer when the people who love them let them down. The narrator is disdainful of adults; she notes their (many) faults and exposes them when they are wrong, but she is also willing to change her mind about them when she feels supported. The girl is mistrustful because she has been let down continuously: by her Da (he left); her Ma (attempted suicide); and in various ways by her mother’s new boyfriend and her father’s new girlfriend. The narrator is a dreamy, analytical, inward looking child – very internal in her approach to life – but sharp in her own way. She’s sensitive and spiky and craves normality; she just wants to be a little girl, but out of necessity she’s developing beyond her years. The child is more capable than the adults in her life so, when things go drastically wrong, she takes matters into her own hands because, she feels, at least she can trust herself.



If all that sounds a little grim I must quickly add that the book is told with humour as the narrator’s naivety often gets in the way of the truth of the situation.

Like most writers over the year-long period it took to write the novel, I developed a great affection for my main character. She became an extension of my life because I carried her and her voice around in my thoughts always. And even though I know she is not real, I can still think of her as if she is, as if she exists in some parallel place and time. And I suppose she does – each time a reader takes a book into her hands, she warps time and dives into the reality of another place. That the place and events sprung from someone else’s imagination matters little. I just hope that my readers get lost in the ‘you’ and that they are convinced enough by the voice of my novel’s girl-narrator to keep on reading.

One free copy of You is available to readers of Novel Spaces. Just leave a comment in the box and mention that you would like to be entered in the draw for the book.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

12 comments:

Liane Spicer said...

Welcome to Novel Spaces, Nuala. I don't think I've read a 2nd person POV novel, so I'm looking forward to reading yours!

Group 8 said...

Thanks for having me here, Liane. I hope you enjoy the read!

Anonymous said...

I'd love a copy. I was dubious about second person until I read Bright Lights, Big City, but now I quite like it. It's true what you say - it's like a more restrained first person. I'm sure you pull it off with aplomb, Nuala!

Liane Spicer said...

I've got to get my hands on Bright Lights, Big City too. Actually heard about it when I read an article about another book which plays on the title: Bright Lights, Big Ass. o_O

Talli Roland said...

Love the cover, and the book sounds brilliant. Thanks for your post, Nuala!

Aoife.Troxel said...

I'd love to win.I read a very good novel written partly in second person POV once; it would be interesting to read your take on that POV. I think the second person is sometimes more personal and intimate, because it gives you more insight into the relationship between the narrator and the other characters in my opinion; what they would say to them, what they only think about them. And it also lets the narrator confide more easily, without the very personal one-on-one first person POV, instead a roundabout story that I think is better (but takes skill to pull off).

KeVin K. said...

Thanks for joining us, Naula.
Very interesting reading.

I have never mastered second person storytelling.
Though truth to tell, I only tried second person once, in an unsuccessful attempt at a juvenile choose-your-own-adventure for a series of books the IP wisely chose not to produce.

You know:
At the end of the tunnel you find two doors. One is shiny gold and the other is black as onyx. What do you do?
If try the golden door, go to page 47.
If you try the black door, go to page 92.
If you go back the way you came, go to page 13.
If you're really bored with this, go outside and play.


Can't imagine writing for adults this way. Can't imagine a second-person novel working at all, in fact.
Which means I have no choice but to track down and read a copy of You.

(Oh, and I will be stealing portions of your name for at least one character, btw.)

Kaz Augustin said...

Nuala, I spent a wonderful month driving around Ireland but my favouritest place of all was Galway, particularly the Connemara region. Absolutely breathtaking! I also attended a hurling final. Also breathtaking, but in a different way. LOL

And second-person, huh? Yep, chalk me up as someone else who's never mastered it. But I'm willing to be swayed. Please enter me in the draw. ;)

Group 8 said...

Wow, what great comments. Thanks so much for all of them. Those who want to be are in the draw. I will do it Monday week as I am flying to New York tomorrow for a week. Hope that's OK. It gives more people time to enter the draw anyway, right?

Kevin - steal aways on the name - hope it's not the unpronouncable surname!! ;)

Kaz - Connemara is indeed beautiful. We live the other side of the county but that region also takes my breath away each time I go. I saw it under snow recently - MAGICAL!

Liane Spicer said...

Don't think I mentioned that I'd like to be entered in the draw too.

Unknown said...

That's a very erudite and witty discourse on the concept of the 2nd person POV - love the reamrks about 'being the second person to do it.'


I've read N's 'you' characters in 'Nude' so can imagine how well formed this one is - wouldn't mind being entered in the draw, but I'm getting me mitts on this book, one way or the other!

Group 8 said...

Thanks to all for commenting and entering the draw.
I've done the draw with the very helpful helpfulness of my baby daughter Juno and the winner, as picked by her, is Eimear Ryan. Congrats Eimear!
Send me your address & I will post it on to you.
Nuala x