Recent things! In which I have a love of glam rock and YA, and no one is surprised.
Not intentionally, but I’ve written about music biopics (both fictional and fictionalised) and nostalgia more than once lately: it was the 20th anniversary of Velvet Goldmine, which was one of the movies I was obsessed with as a teenager (because glam rock! And naked Ewan McGregor!). It features heavily in a YA novel I wrote at the time, Good Girls Don’t (2004; ebook edition 2016), and even though I’ve rewatched it many a time over the years (it also has Christian Bale before he went all weird and super-muscley!), revisiting it for this anniversary piece was the first time I’d watched since Mr Bowie left us (feelings!).
Anyway, I thought, well, that’s it, that’s all my music knowledge used up…
Then I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody. And I had to write about it.
The piece I’ve linked to there is about the movie, and the band, but it’s also about being a teenager and having an obsession, and about how we shape stories to try to make some sense out of life and death. (It is unapologetically sentimental, also.) I didn’t know I had quite so much to say about this, but I’m glad I wrote it, and very glad that the lads at HeadStuff published it.
(And if you haven’t watched Live Aid, particularly the UK side of things, go for it.)
On to books! I’ve a longstanding love of the campus novel, and with so much buzz around Sally Rooney’s second novel, which is set mainly at Trinity, it seemed like the time (okay, fine, any excuse!) to pull together a few recommendations for other Irish campus novels. Our tradition (insofar as we have one, and it’s still a bit shaky, really) is a bit different to the Anglo-American tradition (in part because our oldest university is in the city centre and not in a bubble of its own), but no bad thing.
And I also talked to a few writers about their ‘day jobs’, which is a subject I’m more than a little fascinated by. What struck me when putting this together was how many writers were so eager to discuss this stuff – to acknowledge that they had day jobs, that it was hard, that there’s a weird attitude both in and out of literary circles about ‘needing’ one (or even ‘wanting’ one for the stability), etc.
Finally, a while back I was asked to give a HeadStuff Lecture, which are these nifty ten-minute talks people give about stuff they know about (informative but not academic) and after dithering a great deal I came to the shocking conclusion that I needed to talk about YA fiction (I know – sometimes I am not the sharpest crayon). There’s a thing people say sometimes on panels which is ‘there was no YA when I was growing up!‘ and – although we can argue about categorisation in bookshops and libraries, and access to things, and public perception versus librarians and experts – they are either wrong or else have very good anti-ageing cream.
I think my favourite bit of this piece is my claim that the Irish invented YA fiction, which is both nonsense but also actually a little bit true.
