The Brooklyn Rail

Maggie Armstrong has never felt that life comes naturally to her. What she has been blessed with instead, she seemed to suggest to me when we spoke recently over Zoom, was a propensity for calamity, hilarity, and drama. For a writer of literary fiction, I’d argue that there are few better gifts you could be blessed with than the capacity to make light of one’s suffering and the chops to make art out of it.

Armstrong’s debut, Old Romantics, a collection of interlinked short stories, was published originally by Tramp Press in Ireland in 2024, and is published this month by Biblioasis in North America. The twelve stories follow Margaret, an aspiring writer with a penchant for what might generously be described as heedless men (though sociopathic might be more accurate), from early adulthood through her ever-complicating thirties. Reading it left me vacillating between almost spitting out my coffee to laugh and feeling sunken and eviscerated at the recognition of Margaret’s many personal, professional, and romantic disappointments and the scalpel-like precision with which Armstrong renders them page after page.

Before she published Old Romantics, Armstrong, who lives in Dublin, was a journalist and critic who had also published a number of short stories in Ireland’s foremost literary journals. We spoke about her journey as a writer, dealing with imposter syndrome, and the value in finding a small, supportive community. She was self-deprecating, serious about the work, funny, and bracingly honest about her struggle (and determination) to get Old Romantics over the finish line.

Tadhg Hoey (Rail): I know you sent some stories to Tramp Press back in 2018, but it would be 2024 before they published your first collection. Can you tell me a little about writing during those intervening years?

Armstrong: Those stories I sent Tramp in 2018—none of them have been published. They’ll never see the light of day. They were very immature, and, I suppose—what do we call it? Juvenilia. I’m so pleased that nobody took me up on them. I was really keen at the time to be read, to be published, but my work wasn’t ready. I think things have to get a little bit difficult in life before you can really discover your material sometimes.

I hadn’t yet encountered—I was going to use the word “hardship,” but I’m not going to, actually, because that sounds ridiculous when you have actual problems in the world—but the sort of trials and tribulations that soon became the mainstay of my existence, they hadn’t really yet got going at that time. I think there’s no harm in a little bit of suffering to get to the hard places.

Rail: In terms of the resilience to get a draft of the book done, or to have gained an insight into the emotions and situations your protagonist finds herself in?

Armstrong: Absolutely, both those things. Oh dear, I’ve really made a very grand claim to suffering.

I guess the kind of stories that I was experimenting with when I was a much younger person were sort of irreverent and frothy. I made light of difficult experiences and I think what writing a book has taught me to do, and what working with editors has taught me, is not to degrade serious material with an oversupply of humor, to take it seriously and to take oneself seriously.

I didn’t take myself seriously as a person for a long time. I didn’t think my work deserved the scrutiny of an editor. Even once I was being edited, it was very odd. I felt like I was pretending to be a writer and my fraudulence was only a discovery away. This book has done well. But still I’ve seen my name and people saying nice things about my work and I’m like, “That must be another Maggie Armstrong they’re talking about.”

Rail: You just reminded me of a moment in “Trouble” where Margaret goes to see an esteemed Irish writer to show him her manuscript and she tells him, “I have about sixty stories here. None of them are finished and they’re all the same story.” Hearing you talk about your early stories reminds me of that.

Armstrong: Yeah, and certainly I have met an esteemed writer and a conversation similar to that would’ve taken place in similar pubs. An esteemed writer did say to me once, “I feel so, so sorry for you—I know that there’s absolutely nothing else that you’re ever going to be able to do except write and you’ll never be happy until you do.”

Rail: Wow. How did you feel about that at the time?

Armstrong: Well, I felt he understood the kind of self-torture.

Rail: That’s like a life sentence being handed down by a judge.

Armstrong: Yeah, kind of lofty. I really love Samuel Beckett. Hamm in Endgame: “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” The self-seriousness of writing—I’m really down with all of that. I am quite tortured as a writer and a person. I’m perennially in some drama, caught up in some flurry of my own making. I’m a parody of self-parody. Pity my sisters, we talk to each other every day about the latest goings-on.

Rail: Margaret has quite a bit of drama in this book as well. She’s a fascinating character. Sometimes she’s very present on the page, other times she almost disappears. She has this kind of naïve way about her, even though her fantasies are constantly meeting failure. Not at every turn, but usually, romantically speaking, there’s some fresh hell in every story.

Armstrong: She’s very resistant to the arrows that want to pierce her bubble. She’s very set on her own convictions and they’re incredibly watertight.

Rail: One of the things I saw as a lifeline for Margaret—something she hangs onto in a very subtle way throughout the collection—is the act of writing. She’s got this manuscript she’s working on in the background of several stories. It doesn’t come out as a major plot point, but she mentions wanting to get a draft finished before she has her child. Did you always see writing as crucial to Margaret’s story?

Armstrong: I just think there’s something immensely emancipating about putting pen to paper and being able to tell your version of what happened. I think the moment you begin to write something, you’re somehow freed from it. It becomes a story which belongs to others. I do really relate to the idea of writing oneself out of a crisis. I know that Edna O’Brien wrote her way out of a very unhappy, abusive marriage. Every writer has had to do that to improve their circumstances—particularly women writers, when it was such a male preserve for so long. So, to step into that was highly intrepid for the first women who gave themselves men’s names—George Eliot, the Brönte sisters, even the wonderfully humorous Irish writer Molly Keane, who wrote as M.J. Farrell after the name of a pub.

Rail: Or writers who, like Edna O’Brien, had their books burned.

Armstrong: We’re not sure if Edna may have embellished that myth. It did come from Edna, but it was a rumour that Edna heard through someone from her village in County Clare—it was along the grapevine. Let’s just accept that it happened. There’s absolutely no evidence of any priest having created a bonfire behind the church. It’s cool if it happened.

Rail: A beautiful image—great for a career.

Armstrong: Yeah, I mean other far more disturbing things happened to her, like her knickers being discussed in Hibernia while she was having a custody battle with her husband. During that, male publishers and writers were printing articles where they tried hard to mock her and to smear her reputation. She was hated, vilified, and had a very sad life. She’s an icon, but I mean…

Rail: She paid the ultimate price for it. She had to fucking leave the country. This was with Ernest Gébler?

Armstrong: Yeah, her resentful writer husband. I got a real sense from watching Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story (2024) of a life that was never happy. A life of work and of punishment within the establishment. She suffered for the women who came after her, and we get to benefit. What Edna O’Brien; Kate O’Brien, another writer banned by the censor; and just a whole stable of Irish writers who had to be trampled on by the patriarchy for carving out just very determined working lives knows is what any woman knows: what it’s like to be the one woman in the room. You can’t get a word in. That’s what it must have been like for those women. They found their voices on a page.

Rail: It’s funny you mentioned writing yourself out of something—such as a bad marriage. Usually, I hear writers talk about writing themselves into being, in the sense of a bildungsroman or whatever, but you’re saying, “I’m writing to extricate myself from something. I wrote myself out of this situation.”

Armstrong: I never had any vision or idea of the future, any vision to do or be anything. I just wanted to be adored and taken care of in the same way that I’d seen my father do for my mother. It was a bit of a shock when that didn’t occur immediately and when I was in circumstances that were—how do I put it?—an extreme adjustment of my expectation. Growing up with lovely, middle-class parents, I thought life was going to be one big dinner party, with candelabra and boozy anecdotes. When I left home it wasn’t that. When you’re living in a household with small children and overworked parents, I didn’t know what to do other than write, to make sense of it.

But then I had a feeling that there was a milieu of writers, a club of people who were happy and who had realised their dreams—who were full human beings. Artists at the top table, basically. And that I was just, like, irrelevant. I was so unhappy because I wasn’t writing and publishing and I had deep and highly corrosive jealousy issues of anyone who’d been published. I felt that they had realised their dreams, and that those dreams were inaccessible to me. It was like I just couldn’t bear success and I really resented it. I had terrible schadenfreude.

That stuff used to eat me alive. I was also writing criticism and I thought that you had to be savage in how you approached work. That’s how I expected my book to be approached.

Honestly, it was so transformative to have written a book—then to have readers who liked it. I spent a lot of years on my own or with my children or just feeling unfulfilled, like I was not living the life that I wanted to be living and never would. It really has been immensely transformative. Not only did I have it published, people did like it. That came as a surprise.

Rail: So before your book was published you felt like life was elsewhere—that there was some party you weren’t invited to?

Armstrong: I’m still not at the party. But, what I’ve realised is that there is no party. Or, there’s loads of tiny parties and, actually, the real community—the real sort of place you belong—is scattered, diffuse, changing all the time. It’s you and it’s other writers and readers who support each other and who encourage each other. Stories are then written from a place of goodness and of trust.

Rail: You were on guard for a tougher response.

Armstrong: Yeah, and then there was nothing like that. In fact, it was incredibly welcoming. No one was fed to any lions. No men sat around and rubbished my work, I don’t think!

You know, if there were a literary scene here, it would be a disaster. It would be Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Myles na Gopaleen [Flann O’Brien] getting hammered in The Bailey [a pub in central Dublin City].

Rail: You don’t think there’s one in Dublin?

Armstrong: There shouldn’t be one because alcohol would ruin it, like it does everything. I think the moment you have a literary milieu, that’s the moment you lose the environment for creating lasting work with a diversity of voices. People used to talk about Grogan’s being a colourful bohemian pub. I think these kinds of literary monuments can become graveyards of ambition.

Rail: An excuse not to write, essentially.

Armstrong: Yeah, writers are solitary figures. We are best at work. We are happiest on our own. Of course it’s wonderful to meet at festivals. I have friends who are writers, some are published, some not yet. My oldest friends are visual artists. That’s my community. It’s wholesome. We talk all the time, and see each other in small doses. It’s meaningful.

Look at Sally Rooney, she absolutely can’t bear being known. She just wants to write her books, wants everyone to leave her alone and stop comparing books to hers.

Rail: Apologies—I thought you were saying there’s no literary scene in Dublin. You’re saying there’s no moment of arrival, where you feel suddenly a part of it.

Armstrong: There is a literary scene, and of course it’s shifting all the time. It’s probably more alive than ever, but I’d hate for anyone who hasn’t been published, or seen their work in print, to think that there’s a fortress that they can’t break into.

Rail: It’s illusory. The grass is always greener.

Armstrong: Yeah, exactly. Exclusion is actually not such a bad thing for writers. Where the best work begins is alone with ourselves and on the margins of society. We just have to listen to ourselves and to our own voices and keep going back to what we’re writing. Then when it’s ready, get it out there and trust that you deserve to write work that’s read.

Rail: This might sound like a very obvious thing to state—because I imagine every writer has a lot staked on their writing—but it really sounds like you had a lot riding on finishing your book and getting it published. That must have been a huge weight lifted for you.

Armstrong: So, what happened: I wrote novels before—they’ll probably never be published—but they were kind of practice novels. I thought I would start with a novel. I was writing a novel, and I didn’t realise I was living inside a novel—that being the events that became the central story in Old Romantics, which I felt were quite significant, quite unusual. People talk about having had a “good pandemic,” mine was utterly gruelling. The pandemic for me was like prison with shoelaces. And there I was at my desk, trying to write a novel of manners set in a magazine office during the Irish recession and life got in the way and eclipsed that novel. It was like a total lunar eclipse of life over art to the point where I had to abandon the novel and just tune into what was happening around me in my own life.

I never believed this was going to be a collection of short stories. As I said, I didn’t feel that these were real stories. I didn’t feel that they were literary exemplars. I thought you had to write a masterpiece. I had not studied the masters. I had certainly got lost in Alice Munro, and dipped a lot into James Joyce and Anton Chekhov, Frank O’Connor, John Cheever, John Updike, but I’d never figured out how to write a short story. I felt that my [stories] were rambling exploits. Only now do I feel that they don’t need to be masterly. They just need to exist in the first place.

You asked if there was a lot riding on it. Well, I met for lunch with Sarah (Davis-Goff, of Tramp Press) in June 2023, and she commissioned the book and said they would like to publish it the following April. That gave me six months to have the whole thing done. So it was rather quick. Having messed around for 10 years, it was expedited in the end.

Rail: It must have been almost ready to go?

Armstrong: No, I had six stories written and I wrote six more quite quickly. I had a baby and a six-year old, and we moved house during the deadline. There were many late nights.

Rail: Wow. The book feels coherent and consistent to me.

Armstrong: Thank you so much.

Rail: I couldn’t call Old Romantics a happy book, though it can be funny. There’s a lot of black humor streaking through the thwarted hopes, romantic mishaps, betrayals, and the domestic strife. I’m thinking of the woman in “The Dublin Marriage” and Margaret’s potentially imagined romantic relationship with her male housemate—you write of “the fast arriving drudgery, the claustrophobia within a love sustained by friendship and respect.” In “Trouble,” Margaret reflects that the “simplest mistakes and breaches can cause the most lasting damage.” You very deftly situate us in the unease within each fresh hell Margaret finds herself in.

Armstrong: I’ve always been very comfortable in despair, and I’ve grappled a lot with what Joan Didion called “the question of self-pity.” I can revel in comic failure. My mum’s favourite two axioms were ‘Accidents happen nearest the home” and “Pride comes before a fall.” I fell often, metaphysically and not, and was accident-prone. I’ve always found life hard. It’s never come naturally. I’ve always got into situations—I would come off my bike, break my arm, be on crutches for some reason or another. Something was always going wrong. My mother was often despairing about it. I just began to feel that the only recourse was self-parody. If you can put it on paper, at least you get a bit of copy out of it, right?

I mean, where would you be without humour? Certainly, I would never forgive a writer or even a person that didn’t have a sense of humour.

Rail: You mentioned Beckett earlier on. There’s this great part in Waiting For Godot where Estragon suggests they hang themselves and when he takes his belt off his pants fall down. The seriousness is undercut by ridiculousness.

Armstrong: And he loves the idea of hanging himself so he can get a hard-on.

Rail: I forgot about that.

Armstrong: Yeah, I often think as well about Louisa May Alcott at the beginning of Little Women—which Greta Gerwig quoted in her film adaptation—something like, “I’ve had a lot of troubles, so I write jolly tales.” I really love P.G. Wodehouse. He wrote many brilliant, comic novels during the Great War when his countrymen were in the trenches. I read those books. My dad brought me some P.G. Wodehouse when he came to rescue me in Paris when I was suffering from crippling panic attacks.

Rail: That helped?

Armstrong: Yeah. Blandings Castle was my valium. My father had a very, very dry sense of humour. My mother loved absurd and zany comedy. Even after she became ill, she was always set on finding something funny to read or watch. I remember her wandering around at eleven o’clock at night asking me whether I had any D’Unbelievables videos. In my family we all escaped through laughter, however amoral the cause of it. I think hilarity is one of those vices—it’s kind of like coffee, it’s not that bad for you.