On the Growth of an Essayist

As a fifteen-year-old, my eye was not on contemporary Irish literature. I was thinking about music and I was thinking about music writing, and it was through writing about contemporary pop and rock music – British writing – that I started to get led towards, first of all, American writers, really obvious names for that period like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, and, to a much, much lesser extent, female writers of a similar era. So it was much later that I came to Sontag, say, or Didion.

And there was something very exciting to me, even as an adolescent, about the idea that there was a kind of writing that could bring together journalism and something more experimental, something more literary. And weirdly enough it was in the pages of British music magazines, like the New Musical Express and the Melody Maker in the 1980s, that I first discovered Roland Barthes, that I first saw Barthes’s name and the names of Foucault and Derrida. And I started reading Barthes at age sixteen. It wasn’t really a continuum between that kind of adolescent enthusiasm for various kinds of nonfiction and theory and journalism, and what I then went on to study as a literature and philosophy student in Dublin in the early 1990s. I threw myself into theory – we in Ireland fought the theory wars a decade or two later than everybody else – and it seemed at that point – ’91, ’92, when I was an undergraduate – an immensely exciting place to be thinking and writing. And strangely I never connected it – or only connected it very partially – back to that enthusiasm I’d had as a teenager for certain kinds of much more mainstream and much more popular and populist writing.

In my twenties, while working on a PhD that was entirely in the field of literary theory – I did research on ideas about time in Barthes, Agamben, Paul de Man, Lyotard, a couple of other figures – I started to get quite frustrated with academia, frustrated with English as an academic discipline, and the kind of writing that it might make possible.