Naoise Dolan: Debuting my novel in a pandemic has taught me a few things

I was excited to immerse myself in a literary scene that bore thankfully little resemblance to the pretentious coterie I’d had in my head. 2020 had other plans...

Naoise Dolan

Before coronavirus I’d never had a literary community, and vaguely envisaged them as consisting of four black polo necks, three mandolins, and one poet in a beaded hat. The literati of my imagination convened in the dark, filled someone’s grandma’s antique chalices with liquor brewed in her equally antique bath, and felt more antique than any of that themselves with the head on them the next day.  I still don’t have a literary community unless you count typed interactions with anxious people on Twitter. Which, as it happens, I do.

I’d had two physical interactions with the Irish literary scene before my debut novel came out in 2020. The first was my publisher’s dinner in the winter of 2019, where everyone was kind but I was too frazzled to take much in. Then in February 2020, when the virus still hadn’t hit Europe, I was unexpectedly but delightfully offered a place on an artists’ residency in Cill Rialaig, Kerry, at the edge of a cliff. My dad drove me since I still can’t drive myself. I slept under the rafters of a pre-Famine cottage, read my work aloud for the first time to a circle who either were engaged or made good engaged faces, and met lovely writers I’m still in touch with — not least Danielle McLaughlin, who spared my father another trek by dispatching me back at the train station. I invited everyone to the launch of my book in April, and was excited to see them all again, to meet more people, to immerse myself in a literary scene that bore thankfully little resemblance to the pretentious coterie I’d had in my head.