Colette Sheridan talks to Molly Twomey whose debut poetry collection deals with her eating disorder

Using literature as a means to deal with inner conflicts

Sat, 09 Jul, 2022 - 14:30

Colette Sheridan

Award-winning young poet, Molly Twomey, whose debut collection Raised Among Vultures chronicles a history of eating disorders and inner conflicts, says she has “an all or nothing personality”. It’s something the Cork-based Lismore native is trying to work on.

When Twomey (26) was a student at NUI Galway, she became unwell with an eating disorder and had to give up her studies. During her time in the City of Tribes, she went through a phase of “drinking to the point of being absolutely drunk because I was just so lost. None of it was fun really, bar the poetry. I suppose I wasn’t eating. I do feel that part of my life was really just a blur.”

Twomey later resumed studying, this time at University College Cork (UCC) where she gained a first-class honours degree in English, followed by another first in her master’s in creative writing. She was given the title of “College Scholar” at UCC in 2019.

“When I was at UCC, I was a perfectionist. I didn’t engage with friends or anyone that could have been a friend. I was very much there to get the best results I could. It was a huge distraction. I felt I could give up everything to this. I was down at the front of the lecture hall and I wasn’t really talking to anyone. I was lucky that my dad had a friend who had a house in Cork. I wasn’t ready to move in with housemates or deal with a kitchen. I was able to live on my own for a little bit. It was what I needed. I was ready to go back to academe but I wasn’t ready to go back to a social life. As much as I was really glad to be there, college wasn’t fun.”

It took Twomey a long time to find a therapist she really clicked with. “There’s different therapists you need at different stages of your life. Sometimes you need a therapist that is soft on you. Other times, you need a therapist who’s tough and hard on you.”

What did she learn about herself from therapy that she didn’t already know? “The all-or-nothing mindset that I have. And I sometimes wonder about my eating disorder being a sign that I didn’t really want to grow up or face the world. Also, simply put, boredom is hard to deal with. You look for things that will take up your mind and your life.”

While social media and the obsession with body image is “one element” that led to Twomey’s eating disorder, she says that people “put a lot of blame on it. But social media is something we can control. You can limit what you see. There is an awful side to the internet that I grew up with. When I was younger, I was on Tumblr which promoted eating disorders.”

Twomey’s poem, Tumblr includes the following stanza: “Our messages fluttered onto each other’s screens;/we confessed skinned apples, Diet Cokes,/prescribed black coffee, three thousand sit-ups.”

She says, however, that social media “is nothing different to what the tabloids have been doing although it’s more extreme.”

Twomey spent hours looking at content “that was really damaging. But I think I would have had an eating disorder without social media. I know it’s a huge problematic issue but I don’t know if it’s the root cause of eating disorders and body image issues. I think eating disorders are often a symptom of something else. There are core general issues that everyone has to deal with like loneliness and just feeling lost and afraid and bored and anxious.”

Twomey says that while her debut collection is, in part, drawn from her own life experience, “I would never say that poetry is autobiographical. I do think there’s a tendency for people to assume it is, which is fine.

“Poetry can draw from a truth. In the act of writing, you’re really diving into feelings. The details mightn’t be exact, but the feelings are true.”

Like poets Leanne O’Sullivan and Victoria Kennefick whose debut collections deal with eating disorders, Twomey is laying herself bare to a certain extent. Does she find writing about issues around food and body image therapeutic? “Sometimes, but you’re locking yourself in a room and going back, which is difficult. It feels really good now, a bit like it’s done.”

It is empowering, she agrees. “I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll move on now. There’s other things to write about.”

Twomey admits to having been obsessed with Leanne O’Sullivan, who lectures on the master’s in creative writing at UCC. For her English degree, she wrote a dissertation on O’Sullivan’s first two collections. When she was moving to Galway, Twomey’s mother slipped a copy of O’Sullivan’s first collection Waiting for my Clothes into her bag.

“At that time, I would have been in complete denial. I didn’t think I had an eating disorder. My mother said nothing. It’s such a delicate subject. Putting the book in my bag was her way of making me aware. I got to read Leanne’s poetry and later I saw how amazing she was doing.

“During my dissertation, I started to move away from her first collection and looked at her collection on the hag of Beara. I started to see how her mindset had changed from writing about eating disorders to different things that were happening in her life. It was really inspiring and made me think it could happen for me.”

What interests Twomey is the female experience in modern Ireland is “the different things that women come up against. It’s not just women, but different systems, patriarchal systems, capitalism, even the housing crisis, things that I and my friends have come up against.”

Twomey, whose day job was working in the library at UCC, is moving to the Graffiti Theatre Company where she has been appointed marketing and development officer. She seems to be at ease with herself. While her poetry is quite dark, Twomey comes across as confident and can be light hearted in conversation.

She found it “inspiring” to hear novelist, Louise O’Neill say she now considers herself recovered from an eating disorder. “You often hear that recovery never happens, that you’ll always be somewhat sick with that voice in your head. It kind of gives me hope to hear that Louise has reached that point. I still have bad days and fear of different foods and different experiences. Or finding myself losing a bit of control.”

Twomey spent 16 weeks in an eating disorder treatment centre in Dublin. “While I was there, I was writing a poem every day. They were terrible and were never published. When I was writing, I was thinking of where I was and was letting off steam. I was so angry while I was in there. It was really hard. I felt I was being forced to do things.

“Obviously everything that happened there came out of care but in a place like that, the eating disorder is screaming at you. It wants to be acted on. Poetry allowed me a release. The poems were awful.”

But clearly, they had some therapeutic role for Twomey. She is interested in writing a memoir. And even in one so young, there is plenty of material there.