Catherine Prasifka's debut and its inevitable comparisons to her sister-in-law Sally Rooney
Catherine Prasifka, author of None of This Is Serious. Picture: Joanna O Malley
In Catherine Prasifka’s debut novel, the main character Sophie is at a party one night when a vast purple crack opens up in the sky. She and her friends reach for their smartphones, taking pictures and scrolling through their social media feeds to figure out what is happening. The apocalypse may be looming but life goes on.
This urge to find answers in our smartphone while simultaneously feeling completely powerless will echo with many people at the moment as the relentlessly grim news cycle moves from pandemic to war, with Covid still hovering in the background and the ever-present threat of climate change. It is a theme that was also tackled recently by the movie Don’t Look Up — how we stare at our screens while the world burns.
“It was quite funny when that came out," says Prasifka. "When I was watching it, I was like, ‘shit’. But I do think we approach the issues in a different way. In that film, people with the knowledge are trying to communicate it to others, whereas in my book, it is very much like, you are an individual as the apocalypse is happening around you and you know nothing.”
The 26-year-old Dubliner says she wanted to attempt to capture the often overwhelming nature of life online, especially for younger people who have never known a world without the internet or social media.
“There is a lot going on in the book, but that is just life. Often, when you are representing things in fiction, you go, okay, I don’t want to overwhelm the reader, I am going to take a very narrow look at something but that is not my experience of being a young person on the internet, where you are just constantly scrolling through… it’s like dog meme, dog meme, wildfires, war.”
In the book, 22-year-old Sophie has just graduated from college and is flailing somewhat as her friends find partners and plan their careers. Like her main character, Prasifka had just finished college — she did English at Trinity College, Dublin, and a masters at the University of Glasgow — when she began writing None Of This Is Serious. Her future was uncertain to begin with, then the pandemic happened.
“I have always wanted to write, and then I graduated into a big nothingness. I decided ‘I’ll start this’, then along came the pandemic and more nothingness. I started writing the book when I was 23, and I thought, ‘I’m a realist, I’m not going to write the best book of all time at 23, maybe Mary Shelley could but not me’."
But she had noticed that a lot of works of fiction, and also TV shows and movies, were struggling to integrate social media in a way she felt was authentic to her own experience. "I often find that people ignore it, or it functions as just regular conversations, or it is the entire plot of a show like the Tinder Swindler — it is all about things go wrong on social media.”
While her book explores the irresistible lure of doomscrolling through social media, it can be a big help in promoting a debut novel, as Prasifka knows. When influencer Jack Edwards recently featured None Of This Is Serious on his YouTube channel, the impact was immediate, she says.
“I was sent the clip by a stranger on Instagram telling me they had just seen my book on Jack Edwards’ channel. That video has had over 100,000 views or something.”
However, she worries about how such publicity can encroach on one’s personal life. “Having that community and someone like that promote my book is amazing. But I am kind of staring down the jaws of a great beast, going, ‘well, how much of myself do I want to put out there?’ It helps me market myself if it’s my face and if I’m talking about my life but does that mean someone is going to find out where I live and show up to my house?”
This brings us to the topic of her publicity-shy sister-in-law, the author Sally Rooney, who is married to Prasifka’s brother John. She is prepared for the comparisons, for as well as the family connection, both she and Rooney attended Trinity and were also champion debaters.
“It is an interesting question and one I felt strongly about even before I wrote a book. Sally and I have ended up writing books that on the surface have similar concerns because we are both young Irish women who went to Trinity and experienced similar things. But I think the way we approach literature and our themes are very very different. I am hoping people will realise that.”
Other young female writers who have graduated from or written about Trinity — Naoise Dolan, Louise Nealon, Megan Nolan — tend to be bundled into the same category with Rooney, and Prasifka knows she is no different. She struggles with both the advantages and drawbacks of such comparisons.
“I definitely have benefited from whatever marketable term exists and I am happy that people, because of Sally and her work, are saying we should listen to more stories from young women. Then I think we are a relatively privileged group of people… there are probably a lot of really good stories from people that we are not hearing because they are not viewed as a marketable demographic and that’s bad. I am hoping I can use whatever platform from this to uplift other people who don’t benefit from it.”
Prasifka says she did not even show her book to Rooney until she had secured an agent and sold it. “My mum was like ‘Would you not send it to Sally?’ and I was like ‘No, I would be absolutely mortified’. She is lovely and amazing but I thought, if this ends up going anywhere, I will be asked this question a million times and I want to be able to put my hand on my heart and be like, no, she had nothing to do with it. It was only after I had sold the book to Canongate that she actually read it. She has been great with all the post-book stuff like publicity and contracts.”
One thing that Prasifka is more than happy to reveal about herself is her love for the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. When she was writing None of This Is Serious, she was inspired by Swift’s work ethic and creative output during the pandemic, when she recorded and released two acclaimed albums, Folklore and Evermore.
“When I was writing this book, I was listening to those albums, thinking, well, Taylor Swift has done this, during the pandemic. I also find her very inspiring because she has said, ‘I want to have a thin skin and a sharper pen’ — she wants to feel things and she wants to produce art from them.
"That is a pretty good goal and is what I tried to do in the book — when you speak openly and honestly about things that maybe aren’t discussed, people if they can’t relate to your exact experience, they relate to that feeling and they go, ‘yeah, that reminds me of the time I felt that, I didn’t know other people felt like that’.”
- None of This Is Serious, by Catherine Prasifka, published by Canongate, is out now
