‘I love language:' Susannah Dickey on her debut
The road to adulthood doesn’t run smooth in Susannah Dickey's fierce debut novel, Tennis Lessons. The book follows a young woman’s internal monologue from her earliest childhood memories to her mid-twenties, charting everything from minor everyday experiences to life-altering encounters in vivid, graceful detail. The distinctive narrative voice and format of the novel are just a few examples of what makes the book a new and exciting addition to Irish fiction, writes Joanne O’Sullivan.
When I speak to Susannah in June, we chat a little about the benefits of having more time during the last few months of lockdown, and I tell her how much I appreciated the extra free time to tear through her utterly absorbing novel in the space of a weekend. I comment on how different it is to anything I’ve read in a long time, and the works I’d compare it to - the hit tv show Fleabag, and the recent American novels My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The New Me.
When I ask if there were any particular works or she had in mind when she started writing the book, she mentions being influenced by Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and how this inspired her narrator’s distinctive voice.
“In its earliest permutations I was thinking along the lines of that slightly off-kilter approach to narratives. It probably became less experimental as I edited it, because I think initially it was probably fairly unreadable!”, says Susannah.
It’s hard to imagine that anything written by Susannah could be unreadable. She writes beautifully and poetically, which is sometimes surprising given the harsh nature of some of the topics in the book. Even when exploring some of the most difficult subjects, be it sexual assault or bodily discomfort, there’s a lyricism to her writing that make disturbing scenes easier to read. Did her work writing poetry inform her style of writing?
“It is something I thought about. I think the reason I started writing poetry is because I love language. I love playing with language and having the opportunity to try and capture the most affecting, but also eloquent version of a thought. I’m someone who is never entirely happy with what I’ve said the first time. I’m always editing in my head: how could I have said that better?
From the very beginning I wanted this kind of leap-frogging from events to encounter. I knew that I wanted to do this charting of different moments, but I wanted them to be not moments of triumph or accomplishment - but more the less successful or traumatic events that come to shape a person’s life in not necessarily dramatic ways. I was never really interested in writing some kind of grand narrative arc of triumph or self-discovery, I just wanted to write about a very normal person but who has these thoughts and ways of seeing herself, and how she comes to learn to live with herself”, Susannah says.
I ask if she had any nerves or concerns about how the book would be received, it seems like most books written by a young Irish woman these days are evaluated on whether or not they fit the bill of being the new Sally Rooney.
“This avid search for the new Sally Rooney is funny, because Sally Rooney is still the new Sally Rooney! I get why people might want to make those comparisons, because Sally Rooney is obviously hugely talented. We’re both doing intense character studies, but our approach to that character intimacy is very different.
I worried a little, because it’s a novel that doesn’t do anything very dramatic in terms of character development. I didn’t want this to be a story of learning to love herself or achieving her dreams. I wondered if people would find it too hopeless, if people wanted something a bit more triumphant. But the books I love reading are the ones where you get to know a character really intimately, and I love visceral writing. I wrote the kind of book I like reading,” says Susannah.
I mention the ending of the novel, that it seemed like a very hopeful conclusion after the more difficult or challenging periods in her narrator’s life.
“I really love that you use the word hopeful, because I know that it’s the kind of book that might not be perceived as that much fun, but for me there is joy to be found in her friendships and in her later relationships with her parents.
That seemed like such a natural moment in the book to end, because she’s finally reconciled herself to who she is and she’s coming to accept herself. She’s finally found something akin to contentment, so I was hoping that readers would assume from that ending that there’s a kind of springboard off of which she can jump and find happiness.”
Tennis Lessons by Susannah Dickey (Doubleday) is available now
PICTURE CREDIT: JAMES DICKEY