The Emma Donoghue Interview

Ronan O'Driscoll of Nova Sociable Interviews the Best-Selling author

Editor’s note: this interview by Ronan O’Driscoll originally appeared on his “Nova Sociable” Substack, and is reproduced here by his kind permission.

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Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, playright, and historian. She lives in Canada with her family and is appearing soon in Halifax as part of the 2025 Spring ForeWord Literary Festival.

Ronan: Thanks for meeting with me. I saw you last year at the Afterwards Literary Festival where you read from the wonderful Learned by Heart. I’m a big fan of your work and really enjoyed your latest, The Paris Express. I’m looking forward to discussing it in detail with you. I should say that this interview will be published in the Charitable Irish Society of Halifax’s newsletter and on Substack. I have questions from some of your fans I’d like to save for the end.

Emma: That sounds lovely.

Ronan: OK, on to The Paris Express!

The story is fast and cleverly paced. I happened to be listening to the audiobook as well as reading the paperback and when the train was an hour and a half from the station, there was actually about an hour and a half left. Did you intentionally time the narrative to the journey?

Emma: Is that right? (Laughs) I didn’t really know how long it would take to read aloud but that is a nice coincidence. The story is all about “making time” and racing to a destination, so it kind of makes sense.

Ronan: How do you feel about audiobooks? Personally, I think they’re great. They can really add an extra dimension to a story.

Emma: It’s like the old radio dramas, isn’t it? I get to contribute to choosing the voice actors. I can choose a voice and an accent I'm really comfortable with.

Ronan: Yes, that narrator was great, jumping into different accents very subtly. As with all of your novels, there is a lot of deep research lightly worn. Many of the characters on the train were really on it. There are also a few "stowaways" from the history books who might have been on the ill-fated train, such as Irish playwright JM Synge and one of the painter Gauguin's models. How do you navigate bringing these fascinating extra characters in at the risk of breaking the historical accuracy of the events?

Emma: Yeah, it's great fun taking people sometimes at a time when, either we don't know what they were up to then or they weren’t famous yet: like Gauguin’s model. We don't know what she was up to after she sold all his stuff and took off. It’s fun to imagine her life after that. And Synge, he didn’t know he was going to be famous, he was just this drifter without any purpose.

Ronan: People who are interested in history would be interested in these, these big names, right? And it's really fun to bring those in. But were you worried at all about breaking the strict historical accuracy?

Emma: No, I made sure to look for where there's a gap in sources. We don't know all of the passengers who were on the train, right? They could, absolutely, possibly have been on the train.

Ronan: That's true!

Emma: Synge was around. For me, the rules of the game were if someone was around and if I didn't know that they were with anybody else, anywhere else that day, then they could have been on my train!

Ronan: That’s the difference from creative nonfiction, right? Where they will very rigidly stick to the facts. But yours is fiction with a historical basis. So it makes a lot of sense.

Emma: There’s a double pleasure of writing something like this, in some sense, factually. But also vividly brought to life in fiction. Those two things together ring my bell!

Ronan: That's a really fun kind of creative thing to balance, isn't it? As I was reading, I was wondering whether the Russian was real. What was her name?

Emma: Blonska.

Ronan: And she was real, right?

Emma: She was an actual person, a real person, who died at a charity event in Paris a year or two later. So I know that she was around, and I know what kind of things she was doing. I even know about her orthopedic corset! She was identified by her orthopedic corset when she died in the fire. So, you know, sometimes you just need a tiny handful of facts about someone to just bring them into life.

Ronan: That’s wonderful. In The Paris Express, the cast of characters is much bigger than any of your previous books I've read yet I felt invested in each one.

Emma: I think that’s because it's about a train. As you know, a train is a form of mass transit. So it would be a waste to write a book about just one person on a train. Then you have a wide range of people, but all their destiny is tied together on this particular day. So you would have to have an ensemble story, you know, a big group, and they would have to sort of stand for all of society in a way.

Ronan: Yes, I enjoyed how all of human life was represented there.

Emma: Yeah, you get all kinds, and that's the fun of it. And, you know, even personally, like when you take an airplane or something, you get that feeling as you're looking around, wondering, what's that person like? And how would we all behave if suddenly there was a catastrophe? Would I be a hero? I often suspect I'd be completely paralyzed and powerless!

Ronan: (Laughs) You would hope, but it is hard to know. Because the train has all these people, the narrative jumps around and you get a taste of what each of them are feeling. Although it's not first person. One thing editors hammer into writers is you're not supposed to have “head hopping”, right? You're supposed to, you know, pick one character and base everything from their perspective. However, I feel like you turn that on its head. And we flow seamlessly between the different perspectives.

Emma: I agree with the rules that say, within any one paragraph, you don't suddenly jump into somebody else’s mind. But, in sections, I think it's absolutely fine to have any one page be from the point of view of one person, then leave a little line, a little break, before the next. I've done novels that are first person, single point of view, but I love the third person where it’s close to the current person’s specific point of view.

Ronan: Oh, yes! What do they call that? “Third Person Near” or something like that.

Emma: Right. You really try to absolutely stick to their perspective. And even the kind of vocabulary they would tend to use. It's not actually first person. So when I'm writing the child Maurice, for instance, I don't do it the way he would speak it, but I try to do it the way he would think it.

Ronan: Indicating how he’s bursting to go for a pee and stuff like that.

Emma: Yeah! And he's not, you know, pontificating about the state of society and whatever. I knew I wanted a child’s perspective when he caught that first view of the Eiffel Tower. His astonishment at this enormous thing which made him forget how he missed his stop.

Ronan: Yes, you get that sense of what it must have been like for people looking up at it, you know, coming from a rural background. That rule of head-hopping is beautifully broken by other writers, too. Jane Austen, for example, she did that too, right? And she’s another influence of yours I believe. Speaking of Austen, there’s an “Emma” character in the book, a representative of the privileged class.

Emma: I really wanted to show the whole range of society, and how differently they lived. Even the different kinds of food they were eating on the train, the different fish and so on.

Ronan: Oh yeah, the food descriptions were excellent. It’s France, so you feel like you’re sitting down at a fancy restaurant in the upper class carriages. Synge makes an appearance but it was his contemporary, James Joyce, I felt most while reading The Paris Express. There’s the Wandering Rocks chapter in Ulysses where many streams of consciousness are encountered. There’s also a lot of wonderful Joycean celebrations of the everyday: the “rollers” in the engine room eating an egg off a shovel they pulled from the furnace, for example.

Emma: Oh, he’s influenced us all, hasn’t he? That moment was like Bloom eating the kidneys in the morning.

Ronan: Yes, I loved that scene. There are many Joyce-like characters too: exiles, painters and Bohemians. He’s somebody every successful Irish writer is compared with. Can you talk about that influence?

Emma: Well, Ulysses was set over one day, a bit like my book. So I'd be very aware of that as an origin for a novel. I thought a lot about, you know, novels on trains, but also novels that take place over a single day. I like the intensity of it.

Ronan: There's something appealing about that pacing, having that one event at the start. I’m thinking of how it opens with that one character Mado being reluctant to even get on the train. We wonder why. And that tension is building throughout. I don't want to give away the ending, though! But to finish off on this, I know every successful Irish writer gets compared to Joyce. There are plenty of others, especially women, Irish writers. And I just wanted to ask how you feel about that?

Emma: Oh, you know, I’ve actually found people compare my work to Samuel Beckett just as often! I think one review of the Paris Express said it was like Agatha Christie meets Samuel Beckett.

Ronan: That's really cool. Yeah, I like that. That makes a lot of sense.

Emma: And, you know, another, another ancestor I'd be very aware of is Edna O'Brien? I saw that wonderful documentary about her this year. (See Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story)

Ronan: Oh, I don't know about that, I’ll have to check that out.

Emma: Oh, it's fantastic. It's based on her reading aloud from her diary. In any case, I'm honored to be compared with any Irish writer. I'm definitely writing in that tradition. Actually, this summer, I will have my first musical on, using Irish traditional songs. It's the story of an immigrant couple from Antrim who settled in Ontario in the 1840s. It’s called The Wind Coming Over the Sea and it’s part of the Blyth theatre festival.

Ronan: I’d love to check that out. I’ll have to put a link to it in the interview notes. (See The Wind Coming Over the Sea - Blyth Festival Theatre)

Emma: I’ve used real traditional Irish songs as part of the story. It was a real delight to work with them. And the letters are real, from this couple who were separated by immigration. Jane has to stay back in Ireland with their children while he writes back to her. It’s very relevant to our present day and the treatment of migrants.

Ronan: Yes, people tend to forget how horribly the Irish were treated back then.

Emma: It’s an awful irony, isn’t it?

Ronan: To finish up on The Paris Express, I’d like to ask about the ending. No spoilers but it is built up from the first page and propels the narrative right to the end. A lot of novels and movies include the aftermath of an event but The Paris Express is all about the lives and events right before. The ending is unexpected but shows an alternative to the driving force of modernity. I think of the poor woman giving birth in the carriage and this rude male soldier (who has been spitting throughout) exits the carriage cursing, leaving the door banging in the wind. After his exit, the remaining women gather to help deliver the baby, including that crucial character Mado (again, no spoilers!). Would you like to expand on what you were thinking about here?

Emma: Mado—Madeleine Pelletier—was also a real person with a fascinating life. I wanted to show her making a choice, weighing up the forces of life and death and choosing one of them in the end. She went on to be a feminist who studied psychiatry, becoming a doctor in Paris. She founded a suffragette journal and smashed windows in protest. At sixty-five, she was arrested for giving an abortion to a thirteen-year old incest victim. They sent her to an asylum where she died a few months later.

Ronan: What a tragedy. I would love to know more about her. Sounds like another novel there!

Emma: (Laughs) We’ll see.

Ronan: I’d like to get to the questions from the others. The first is from Linda:

My question for Emma is about all the time periods she has set novels in. 1850s, 1895, 1920s. (probably more but the recent ones). Does it get easier to do the research? Or is it the same amount of work every time?

Ronan: I very much enjoyed Haven, which is set in Medieval Ireland. 600 AD, I believe.

Emma: That was fun. It’s so different from now, it’s almost like science fiction. Like, I couldn’t have the priests look at a rock on the island and think “that looks like a spire”, because churches didn’t even have spires back then. To answer Linda’s question, research gets easier now thanks to the internet. Newspapers of the period, all kinds of archives, online forums are all freely available. That helps a lot. It’s also much easier to search for specialist books and other resources. For example, all the Guamont Company films are available online.

Ronan: Oh yes, I liked that character. She had this officious boss and was trying to convince him to use their cameras to make films.

Emma: Yes, he pooh-poohed the notion. Who would ever want to watch moving pictures? She went on to write and direct hundreds of them, the first movie company. You can view them online.

Ronan: OK, next question is from Pat:

Are there moments, perhaps fleeting, where you think you'd like to move back to Ireland, and if so what is the main draw or memory?

Emma: All the time! I do go back sometimes and straight away, when I’m chatting to people, it’s like I’ve never left. And then there are Taytos and other peculiarly Irish things that I miss terribly!

Ronan: Me too. Although, I don’t think those are so good for my high cholesterol… Last question is from Helena:

The one thing I often wonder about writers I love to read is, what do they read? Does Emma even have time to read fiction given the amount of research her novels require?

Emma: That’s a good question. I consider it just as important to read fiction as the historical stuff. I actually read far more widely than I write. I enjoy all kinds of genres, science fiction, popular science, you name it! In the end, all those ideas turn up in the fiction, distilled as it were, into the story.

Ronan: What a great way to describe the creative process. I’d love to dig in more but I don’t want to monopolize your time which you have been far too generous with! Thank you so much Emma, for sharing your insights on writing, especially around The Paris Express. We are all looking forward to your upcoming appearances in Halifax as part of this year’s Spring Foreword festival.

Emma: Thank you! I’m looking forward to it too.

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