An interview with Rob Doyle

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, April 2022

Rob Doyle’s latest book, Autobibliography (2021), originated from an Irish Times book column, where he was asked to write once a week throughout 2019 about a pre-twenty-first-century work of literature, at no more than 340 words per book. He describes it as ‘the book chat equivalent of haiku condensation’. The other half of Autobibliography is a mirror text of sorts, written during lockdown in 2020, and are reflections upon these reflections on books, spanning many different kinds of writing, including memoir, anecdotes, travelogue and other, less categorisable forms. Doyle is the author of the short-story collection This Is the Ritual (2016), as well as the novels Threshold (2020) and Here are the Young Men (2014), which has recently been made into a film.

Liam Harrison (LH): What was the experience of writing the shadowy half of Autobibliography, which came after writing your Irish Times columns, and what was it like writing during such a shadowy time? Given that the first half of Autobibliography was written in a pre-pandemic time of travel, flux and action, while the second half was written in a time of lockdown and limbo, what was it like merging these two different texts?

Rob Doyle (RD): Writing the ‘shadowy’ half of the book, as you call it, was exhilarating. The book is a split-screen concept – there are the fifty-two columns that I wrote in 2019, and then you’ve got these mirror texts accompanying each one: italicised self-reflections or digressions, usually about books or writing, or just about life. The book wouldn’t work without either of these two elements: neither of them would stand up alone.

What’s so exciting about writing a book, including the one I’m working on now, is the sense of freedom it brings. It’s as if you can see this landscape ahead of you and a great feeling of ease sets in, because you can see there’s new territory to be explored. I had space for fifty-two essays about books or writing or about my life – which incorporates pretty much everything. There’s no life separate from reading, and when you’re talking about yourself, you’re also in some sense talking about the whole universe.

I was living on my own, on the coast in Rosslare, County Wexford, which meant that the pandemic restrictions didn’t affect me too harshly, as I was already cut off from everybody. I had this project and there’s no happier state than when you have a book to write and work that you want to do. Conditions were perfect to get on with it. Despite the isolation of the lockdown, I didn’t feel static or stuck. Arguably, the pre-pandemic year of 2019, which I spent writing the Irish Times columns in Berlin, was a far more difficult year in my own life. I felt a more pressing loneliness in that period than I did during the pandemic. I think that’s reflected in the book.

My writing has always gone into difficult, even ugly terrain. I’ve always been trying to get to grips with the thorniest aspects of my nature, as well as expressing the more benign side. Nonetheless, as I flick through Autobibliography I see a lightness in these ‘shadow texts’. Oddly enough, when I think back to spring of 2020, when the whole world was going into this terrible shock of an unprecedented upheaval, I think of sunshine and a newfound happiness, of hope and optimism. That was the experience I had in the early weeks and months of lockdown.

But Autobibliography is a Trojan horse kind of book. It’s got a friendly cover with a jazzy font and a punning title. It’s a ‘book about books’, which could be the gateway to sentimentality, a non-critical mawkishness and a celebration of reading for its own sake. Towards the beginning it has lots of light, humour and love. Then, as you get into it, the darker and more troubled elements begin to bleed in and eventually you realise that the book you’re reading is the expression of a fairly twisted up and problematic mind. It goes into some uncomfortable places about sexuality, gender relations, masculinity, madness, stress and trauma, but only after lulling the reader into a certain sense of security.

LH: I want to come back to that optimism in Autobibliography. First, I want to ask about the conditions of reading and writing which are often discussed across the individual essays. One epigraph in Autobibliography comes from Roberto Bolaño: ‘I remember the colour of the Mexican sky during the two days it took me to read the novel’. Autobibliography asks us to think about how our experiences of reading books are coloured and inflected by the places and environments in which we read them.

You write in Autobibliography about an unpublished novel set in a Bolivian town, which you’ve never shown to anyone. And you also write about Japan: ‘Each of us holds the idea of a place we long to see more than anywhere else – and for this reason we should avoid ever going there.’ What are your thoughts on the relationship between where and what we read?

RD: As you mentioned, one of the mirror essays in the book is about this Bolivian town called Tupiza, which I passed through for a few strange weeks when I was twenty-four. It completely enchanted me, and in the essay I mention a novel I wanted to write, or rather a novel I did write, which was set there, but which I never showed to anybody.

In terms of my internal, emotional economy the micro-essays in Autobibliography occasionally stand in for books I once wanted to write. It was somehow the same with Threshold – I like to think that each chapter of that book is an entire novel, condensed. I’ve now sent the echo of a novel about Tupiza out into the world in place of the actual novel. Writing in this miniature, formally liberated way where you can go in any direction allows you to revisit and, in some sense, immortalise the places you’ve passed through that have stayed with you.

I regard Autobibliography as an accompanying volume to Threshold. Both books have a concern with recreating places, and in the books the experience of reading is always bound up with the experience of place. I also tend to associate music, as everybody does, with the period of life and the place I lived when I first heard it, and as you go on through life that becomes a kind of Proustian device for unlocking whole eras and epochs of memory. Reading has always been the same: it’s not something that happens separately from life, it’s something that happens very much to this body, this me, this consciousness that’s drifting around the world and is always in a particular place, and maybe has the sun on its toes, or is in a cold room or whatever the case may be. I wanted to gently filter that into Autobibliography and let it become a part of its inquiry into reading.

LH: Revisiting different eras of your life through passages of music or snatches of novels is such a beautiful image. I want to go back to your recent Dublin Review essay, ‘Tastes Good with the Money’. Could you tell us how it came about?

RD: I briefly considered using that essay as an afterword or closing chapter in Autobibliography, but it didn’t quite fit. The essay was one of the few things I wrote in the second half of 2020. Myself and my girlfriend moved back to Berlin in the second half of the year and we started hanging out with the band Fat White Family. I had struck up a friendship online with their singer, Lias Saoudi. He came over to Berlin for a few months and we were hanging out, and things got fairly hedonistic.

One of the upshots of that strange, beautiful and delirious time was that I ended up doing the voiceover for a globally distributed advertising campaign for Hyundai cars, in a commercial in which Lias was the actor, even though he’s never acted in his life. It was a confluence of rather bizarre circumstances.

While both of us are hopefully known for having a certain integrity in our art, a certain lack of compromise, we ended up working together as corporate shills. The whole story was so laden with manifold ironies that I realised I really needed to write it down. I pitched it to Brendan Barrington at the Dublin Review and then sent him a raging, caustic and genuinely unhinged first draft of the essay, which made him question whether it was a bit too confrontational, as well as questioning my psychological well-being at the time.

When I look back on that plague winter in Berlin in 2020, while I was writing the essay amid total lockdown, everybody was drinking way too much and had addiction issues. Things got quite dark psychologically. Nonetheless I wrote what eventually became one of my more light-hearted and funnier pieces, which was not only about the author Rob Doyle becoming a shill for Korean car manufacturing, but also about friendship, my interest in Lias’s band, and how the route I’ve taken as a writer is starting to bear unanticipated fruits.

LH: The friendship with Lias is one of the great things about the essay, and his character emerges so vividly in the writing. It captures the bonds of friendship in a really wonderful and perhaps unexpected way. I did want to ask about Lias’s ‘obsessive philosophical grudge’ against the band Idles. As a Bristolian, I’ve heard a lot about that debate . . .

Also, and I don’t expect you to answer this, but given there’s a kind of Bernhardian spleen running through Autobibliography: how much do you hold ‘obsessive philosophical grudges’ against fellow writers? Do you channel that energy, which Bernhard displays in My Prizes, towards the rest of the writing world?

RD: Oh, there’s no limit to my wrath, my pettiness, my vengefulness, my sense of pique, my sense of spleen. If I didn’t have my have my trove of resentments, petty grievances and obscure slights remembered from the past I would barely have the energy to get out of bed in the morning. I feel that stuff is great, it keeps me going and it fuels me.

I remember speaking to a novelist who is very big in France and not so much in his own country. I said: ‘Why don’t you move to France? You’d be royalty there’, and he said, ‘Ah, but where would I get the resentment, the feeling of being neglected?’ I think that stuff can be very useful.

LH: What kind of usefulness, collaboration and freedom can literary journals, like the Dublin Review, offer you as a writer? You mentioned the process of emailing Brendan Barrington and working on the essay together. Your work has often appeared in journals like the Stinging Fly and gorse – what role have literary journals played in your writing life?

RD: They’ve impacted my writing in a very positive way. People become established and recognised for their writing through different means and routes, and a large part of mine was prior publication in literary journals.

I couldn’t have named a literary journal when I started writing my first book, and probably not even when I was into the second draft of it. That book had gotten turned down by various publishers in the UK. At a certain point, I moved back to Ireland after living in England for several years and I began to look into this scene of literary journals. It was a bit mercenary because I wasn’t naturally inclined to buy and read them myself. At first, I jumped on them to get my work seen. And then I started to differentiate between them and see which ones actually appealed to me. I discovered the likes of the Dublin Review, which I’ve worked with a lot over the years because of Brendan’s editorial rigour, which is a tradition that, from what I’ve seen of Tolka, you guys are very much carrying on.

There were many others, and publishing in them was my way to cause a bit of noise, for people to say ‘God, who’s this guy?’ You write one really good story or one essay that startles people and they’ll remember your name henceforth. It just opens doors and, before I knew it, the publishers were soliciting me.

It’s also a continuing symbiosis. For example, when I first heard about what you were doing at Tolka and the idea of an Irish journal of purely non-fiction, I was immediately enthralled and interested. I was very happy to write an essay for the first issue about video games, which I’ve since thought of as the final nail in my intellectual coffin.

LH: There’s a lot of similar themes to your other books in Autobibliography, but there’s also a shift in terms of the vitriol and despair that typified Here Are the Young Men and This Is the Ritual, although I don’t mean to generalise these books as only vitriolic and despairing.

In Autobibliography you say that you’re ‘facing a future that is strange and turbulent but not entirely hopeless’, and you reflect on how reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is now a source of nostalgia and comfort, which it might not have been in your twenties. Do you think there’s been a shift from, to borrow a phrase from DH Lawrence via Geoff Dyer, the ‘sheer rage’ of your early work? Are the same philosophical concerns still there, but confronted in a different way?

RD: I’m in my late thirties now, and if I was still thinking and living in the same way that I was when I first read a lot of these books in my early twenties then something wouldn’t be right. That would be a kind of arrested development, because of course you do change, and it’s crucial that my work reflects that.

In Autobibliography I could reflect directly on these processes by asking questions like: ‘What did Nietzsche mean to me then?’ and ‘What does he mean to me now?’ Back then, I was younger than he was when he wrote his wunderkind books like The Birth of Tragedy, but now I’m about the age he was when he was starting to write his real masterworks, and soon I’ll be older than he was when he wrote those. It inevitably changes how we read them.

As you get older you just can’t afford to be as nihilistic because you’re in the midst of life now, and it’s harsh, it’s brutal, and it’s not going to get any easier from here on in. In fact, it’s only going in one direction. It becomes more urgent than ever to find out what comes after you go to the utter depths of doubt, destruction and rejection, to find out what is left. To ask: what are the sources of sustenance? My relationship towards the perverse, disruptive, irresponsible, dangerous writers and thinkers who I was drawn to when I was younger is somehow attenuated and altered and complicated. You start to look around for sources of real nourishment and sustenance.

LH: In Autobibliography there’s an essay which is a one-star review of a Rob Doyle novel. ‘I suggest that you grow up and face the real world and leave your adolescent angst behind. I’d be ashamed to put my name to this thing. I give your book my first one star.’ Did you write that? (I presume you did!) Was it based on any true reviews?

RD: That micro essay comprises a single paragraph rant in the second person, which you gradually realise is a voice of brutal, relentless critique of me as a man, as a writer, and as a human being. It’s quite nasty and cruel, but funny too. I made that chapter by cutting, pasting and splicing together damning online reviews I’d found on various websites and transcribing them into the second person so that the effect is like this vitriolic sadist is shrieking at me. I put it in there with no heading or explanation, so the reader coming upon it for the first time is going to wonder: is this his inner monologue of vicious self-loathing and self damnation?

It was cathartic but troubling. I remember the morning I read all of the reviews. I needed to compile all the worst things that had been said about me, so I took a Valium and just went through it all in a numbed state, which was easy, but when I was editing the essay, it made me feel quite down. I was like, ‘God, this is pretty vicious’, but I’m glad I included it. I don’t want to give any sons of bitches out there any ideas though. I very rarely read online reviews, so if anyone’s thinking ‘I’m going to get into his next book by writing a really awful review’, think again.

LH: I did follow this up by going on Waterstones.com and finding a two-star review for Autobibliography, which mostly just lists the things I really liked about it. It describes it as ‘a confused mess of different genres which skimmed the surface of all of them’ and loftily complains that ‘the works chosen to examine are particularly obscure to the extent that few . . . would have ever heard of these let alone read them if I as a highly intelligent extremely prolific and extensive reader had not’.

RD: There is a strange masochistic fun to be had in reading that kind of stuff about yourself. And the funny thing is, sometimes they can write really well. Their sheer loathing inspires them to great flights of lingual finesse and force. That chapter was a shout out to my detractors and assassins.

LH: The essay you wrote for us at Tolka, ‘Childish Things’, discusses a rediscovered aesthetic pleasure and immersion in video games, having abandoned them and ‘put them away’ in favour of philosophy, travel and general adulthood for many years. You write:

As I made my way in the twenty-first century, I listened with interest to rumours that games were becoming more artful, abstract, feminised, innovative, and I wondered if they were on the cusp of a revolution akin to the modernist overhaul in art and literature a century earlier. But there was too much to do – too many books to read, films to watch, girls to pursue, parties to be had, countries to explore, pages to write. I don’t regret this long withdrawal from games – I really wouldn’t have got much done if I’d kept spending several hours a day in virtual worlds, on top of my other vices and time-sucking habits (which would come to include the gamified ego-contest of social media).

I love the idea of a modernist overhaul in video games, and especially as they’re often treated with cultural derision. The essay also reminded me of Roisin Kiberd’s The Disconnect, as she describes how relationships and other forms of communication and media are being increasingly gamified. It is a strange irony that games themselves seem to be a kind of escape from the gamification of real life. Which is a long way of asking: have you played any good games recently?

RD: God, I haven’t, no! It’s been the busiest two months of my life, and I’ve been writing one thousand words a day, so the gaming has taken a backseat. I had a relapse into a game called Broforce recently. Roisin put me on to it. It’s a funny shoot-em-up in the 1980s, two-dimensional platformer mode but it’s very knowing and ironic about American imperialist action movies.

I downloaded an iconic cult indie game called Papers, Please. It’s a bizarre workplace game where you’re this guy in some fictional Eastern European, Soviet-era state, who must either accept or reject the visas for people coming in, decide whether to let them in or turn them away. Your actions have serious moral consequences. It looked really interesting, but I didn’t quite have the patience for it.

LH: That sounds morally wild and uneasy. I’m not sure I’d be able to handle that. I feel like that last sentence is how I encounter most games: I’d love to have the patience.

What are you writing at the moment?

RD: I’m a bit disinclined to say but I’ll tell you it’s a book unlike any I’ve written before. Things are getting weird out here, and that’s what I’m very excited about.

LH: To wrap things up, seven years ago the advice you gave to aspiring authors in the Irish Times was ‘Alienate everyone and die in a hail of gunfire’. Have you got any new advice for writers?

RD: Arm yourself to the teeth. To quote Cameron Diaz’s character in The Counsellor, the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.

Rob Doyle’s essay ‘Childish Things’ first appeared in Issue One of Tolka (May 2021). Issue One is now sold out on our website, but may still be available from certain stockists. Issue Three of Tolka publishes 25 May 2022.

Rob Doyle is the author of Autobibliography, Threshold, This is the Ritual, and Here Are the Young Men, which has been adapted for film. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and many other publications.

Author photograph by Katie Freeney.