Why is a Nice Irish Girl Like You Writing About That?

Yesterday, I read “Irish Women Writing Fiction Were Dismissed as ‘Quiet’. Ireland Wasn’t Listening” by author Kathleen MacMahon. It reminded me of when my seventy-five-year-old Irish Aunt Peg asked me why a nice girl like me had written a book about persuasion. I was in my twenties. Persuasion In Practice was my first book as a professor of communication. She considered it unseemly for a young woman from our family to write about influencing people. I merely smiled and explained that she was using persuasion at that very moment – that everyone does and we’re all best served to know how it works. I waxed poetic for a few moments about Aristotle’s work on influence. She shrugged and left the room.

I’ve never forgotten that moment. Perhaps on some level I’d inherited a bit of Aunt Peg’s admonition. Over the years since, I heard it again and again in various forms. The Harvard Business Review, for example, pressed me to tone down the “women’s angst” before publishing what would become a reprint bestseller, “The Memo Every Woman Keeps In Her Desk.”

According to MacMahon, until recently women’s writing in Ireland was dismissed as quiet. Quality of writing alone was never enough to guarantee a female writer a hearing. Edna O’Brien’s 1960 The Country Girls is a case in point. Despite O’Brien’s extraordinary writing skill, MacMahon posits “It was the novel’s scandalous theme – sex – that made all the noise.” 

Things have changed. Irish women living in Ireland and elsewhere are regularly tackling weighty subjects in fiction. MacMahon provides an impressive list. I wonder how many of them had an Aunt Peg wondering aloud if they might want to tone down their writing a bit. But they persevered.

My latest crime mystery, Damned If She Does, deals with rape and the shame and secrecy that often follow. I probably lost half my audience just now in that sentence. After all, even today, if fiction focuses on rape, even as a subplot, it has to be a woman’s book. Right? The constricting albatross of “women’s commercial fiction” is still about our necks and there is little doubt that discomfort lingers with women writing about subjects that cut too close to the bone.

So “well done” to Irish female fiction writers delving unapologetically into the indelicate realities of life – not doing so for shock value but because life isn’t always pretty. And to women writers in cultures far less encouraging — I’m delighted to be in your company.