Emma Donoghue – Favourite Things
Emma Donoghue is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Her novel Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes and has sold over two million copies. Donoghue adapted Room into her first feature film (by the same name), which was nominated for four Academy Awards. She has recently adapted her 2016 novel, The Wonder, into a feature film that is currently filming in Ireland and stars Florence Pugh. Her latest novel, The Pull of the Stars, is out in paperback now.
These are a few of her favourite things...
Treadmill desk
I am bone-idle, and so I hate exercise. I like long, chatty walks when I don’t have to think I am exercising, but I hate focussing on exercise. In all my decades of being a writer, a treadmill desk for walking on whilst I type is the only thing I have found that can include exercise in my day. It is a lifesaver. If I want 100 per cent of my concentration I still sit down with a coffee, but for things like emails, research and reading, it is no problem at all. It keeps your circulation going and means you won’t get sleepy. In the past, I have walked for up to six hours; the time just rolls away.
Graveyards
My mother used to bring us to graveyards. If we were driving through the countryside and she saw an interesting graveyard, she would stop, and we would leap out. The rest of the family would be like, “oh no”, but I love history; she and I loved nothing more than poking around reading gravestones. I love finding the crumbling ones or the really poignant ones. Nowadays, they often have photographs too. I find it very stimulating to my imagination to see these little traces of former lives.
Cheese and onion Tato crisps
These are very unhealthy Irish “bargain-basement” crisps. I believe the European Union tried to ban them once because they have so many additives, but there were protests. I am not going to claim they are great gourmet food, but they are the food of my childhood.
Ever since I left Ireland at the age of 20, they have been virtually impossible to get hold of; they are very delicate, so if you post them, they get squashed, and I have not managed to buy them abroad. They are the perfect nostalgia food for an emigrant because you can’t get hold of them abroad, so when you think of eating them, it is your childhood you are trying to get back to, and you can never quite reach it. So every time I am back in Dublin, I immediately buy a pack, it goes in my bag, and I know I am home. It is my Proustian madeleine moment, these trashy crisps.
My mother’s diaries
They are really just her day-planners; tiny little notebooks with “get a haircut” written in, but she would also include tiny jottings about how her day went. There were eight of us growing up, so she had a very busy house, and yet she was so energetic. She started them in the 1940s and wrote right through to the 2000s. They have little notations like “baby very bad”, and you try and work out who the baby was and what they might have done.
They are really evocative even as tiny notations and make me feel very close to her (and in sheer admiration at the energy level of my parents in their ten-person household). You see each of the new technologies appearing one by one, so they will watch television in a hotel one day, and then they get their own television later on and then you’re waiting for the internet to arrive. It is a lovely way of being in touch with my dead mother.
The islands of Skellig Michael
The pair of pointy islands are just off the coast of Kerry in Ireland. Many people would know it from the Star Wars films – it is Luke Skywalker’s hideout. It is extraordinary. I have never actually landed on it; I have been on boat rides around it, and I have once booked to land on it, but Covid hit, and the trip had to be cancelled. My next book is set on Skellig Michael in the year 600, so I know every inch of it from my research, but I have never actually been. It doesn’t look like anyone could have ever lived there, and yet monks did for centuries – the place fascinates me. U have never seen a landscape like it.