The Person You Wanted To Be
Rachel Connolly on her new book Lazy City, sincerity, cynicism, and if you can ever go home again.
We interviewed writer Rachel Connolly a little while back before her debut novel Lazy City was out or available in the U.S.
It is out now and today we’re happy to share a new interview with her about some of the themes of Lazy City.
This interview was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
Morning.
Morning.
Okay. Well…we wanna talk about your book, Lazy City.
Thank you <laugh>.
Congratulations. How has the response been in the UK? Are you anticipating anything different from the US?
Yeah. I was really pleased with the UK response. The reviews were mostly really good. I did get one bad one <laugh> but the reviews were mostly really good. And actually the first review was by a critic who I don't personally know, but a critic from Belfast I respect quite a lot. He's also usually not very positive about books, so I saw his name at the first review, I was like, oh God, <laugh>. And then actually he was really positive. It was a really nice review 'cause he really got – so much of the book is about its style, and he got the distinctiveness of the book, which I was really, really happy with. People seem to be saying that it feels kind of fresh, which is really nice. That's kind of the most you can hope for.
Belfast is so a part of the book, do you worry American audiences won’t pick up on the subtleties? The Irish bits.
I feel like the humor of the book is, or I think is, very funny, but it's kind of dry humor — that either really lands with people or it doesn't. I think sometimes if a book is funny it undermines the seriousness of the book, which is something that you kind of have to watch out for. But yeah, I'm hopeful that the tone sort of feels fresh.
You're in England now – the book’s main character, Erin, begins in England and returns home to Belfast. Have you thought a lot about what it means to go home? How can you revisit where you come from? I wonder how those feelings influenced you and your writing.
In a lot of interviews I've done so far they are like, which bits are based on you? And I’m like, it's not my diary. It's a novel with a character who is actually very different from me. But, I think the question about drawing on emotional resonances in terms of a sense of place or moving away and coming back, that's such a thing.
I feel such a strong kind of connection to Belfast and I love being there, but, at the same time, when I'm there, because I grew up there and because I know a lot of people there, there is a slightly a claustrophobic sense sometimes of people wanting to know too much of your business. I think that kind of tension was something that comes through in the book a lot. The main character feels such a big connection to a place, but there are these exhausting elements of it. And that's definitely something that is true to my life. Definitely.
I think it's interesting to think about the duality of recognizing that a place made you, but also finding it invasive and wanting separation. I always think of that quote, “you can’t make new old friends”. There are certain dynamics you can’t replicate. But you can only have any clarity on that if you leave to begin with.
The idea of being able to change creeps in at the sides. When I was growing up, the environment in Belfast was very conformist. It wasn't that much of a thing to be gay. Even the way people dressed was very rigid and uniform. Preppiness was the thing – and in such a narrow way. Like, they wanted a Hollister hoodie and they wanted really bad hair extensions. I remember reading fashion magazines about New York and watching things with Chloe Sevigny and thinking that preppiness was really lame and uncool and feeling so restricted by the fact that that was the definition of cool where I lived.
There's a really nice bit in Milkman, which is obviously such a brilliant Belfast book, where it talks about how low the barrier was to be a weirdo. And that's definitely something that you forget about. In the film Brooklyn, based on the Colm Tóibín book, she goes away and then she comes back and she has forgotten the nosiness and surveillance aspect. You forget the limits that have been placed on you and that you left, partly, because of those limits. When you go back you’ve kind of half forgotten all about that, because you've just become the person that you wanted to be.
The attitude on the receiving end of coming back is also interesting. The people who note that you left and might be different now. Especially in the UK where everything is so regional. The humor, accent, dialect, way of being, all of it.
Totally. The north of Ireland and the south are actually quite distinct. The south of Ireland is functionally a different country. It has a different currency; if you go with your cell phone, you have to pay to text down there. I didn't go to the south very often when I was growing up. It just felt very different, very distant. I've been interested in southerners' perceptions of the book. I participated in a panel, and the person moderating it was a woman from the south, and she said, 'So, your book is really negative about Belfast.' I replied, 'No, it's not <laugh>.'
I've had similar experiences with a couple of English people who asked, 'Why didn't you talk about The Troubles in your book?' One of them mentioned that certain communities didn't experience The Troubles, and so, probably, that was just not my background. But that's not true at all. My mum grew up in the Bogside in Derry, which is where Bloody Sunday happened. The Troubles are a significant part of my story, but my experience is that people who have been through The Troubles don't always go around talking about it all the time.
I really, really didn't want to write a book that explained aspects of our history to a foreigner. I had no desire to do that in any way, shape, or form. There's room for books like that, but it's not what I intended. I strongly believe that Wikipedia exists for this reason.
I didn't want to write a book where characters talked to each other and explained The Troubles, because that's not how we conduct our daily lives. I wanted the realism of how people actually interact and discuss these topics. It's interesting as well because trauma and The Troubles play a significant role in my book; there's a looming sense of fracturedness over people and things. Many relationships are very strained due to PTSD and those experiences being passed from one generation to the next.
Yeah, it is there in this lingering grief. I did feel like grief showed up in a lot of ways. Between characters, between Erin and Belfast, but also even in nostalgia there’s grief.
I know all the facts and statistics, but an essay is the place for that. To me, a novel is at its best when trying to capture the sense of how it feels — and there's a profound sense of loss. Much of what The Troubles were about was an alternative way for people to govern themselves. It was an anti-colonial resistance, but it was also a socialist project. It began as a fight for Catholics in impoverished areas to gain the right to vote, access to housing, and some form of human rights. However, it was closely linked to a much larger liberation struggle at that time. There were many parallels and collaborative efforts with the civil rights movement in the US. They recognized a synergy in terms of the rights denied to both communities. But the sympathy for white Irish people, particularly Catholics, was much higher in the US than the sympathy for black people. So, they organized together, hoping that the reporting would highlight the similarities between the two communities and change the perception of people with varying levels of sympathy.
But there is a profound sense of loss now because what they were fighting for was essentially a socialist state, and they didn't achieve that. The peace process resulted in decommissioning and disarmament, and the British Army no longer patrolling the streets. However, the actual goal was a socialist state, which they never attained. I believe this sense of fighting for something much bigger contributed to the overwhelming grief even though it is now, in essence, a functioning society. When I say 'basically functional,' I mean that there hasn't been a government in the north for years – it's still quite messy and chaotic. But that wasn't the intended outcome, just to be basically functional.
I aimed to convey this on a broader scale. When I talk to my mum, who grew up in the Bogside, a part of Derry, all of her family were heavily involved in resistance movements and organizing. There's a lot of sadness about the fact that it never materialized. None of it actually came to fruition. They had a clear goal and were deeply motivated and enthusiastic about it. And it didn't happen.
I recall a conversation I had with her, which I found very touching. She was discussing a man she knew from her youth who ended up working as a lawyer. He was involved in a case related to someone whose relative had been killed by the British Army. It was a long-standing historical matter, seeking some acknowledgment of what happened during that time. She ran into him after the case – which they won. She said, 'Congratulations.' But I remember her saying, 'Oh, and he's still a socialist, he still believes in all of that.' She does too. That struck me. Such things are touching to me because it's like what they got, what we got, what ended up happening is the basics, and that's not what anyone truly wanted. The broader argument can easily be forgotten. This is the feeling I aimed to convey in the book—the sense of sadness that what was never going to happen, didn't happen, and it's just like, but –
But it might have happened.
Yeah, exactly. There was a time when it was very chaotic, but there was a sense that there was an alternative. They were really arguing about how to organize ourselves. I think that can get lost. It's usually framed as just a religious conflict. But, it was more about the denial of access to a group of people based on religion, but that prompted a bigger discussion about what a society should look like. Should anyone be denied access to stuff? Why is it? It's like any colonial struggle when you actually look at it. Colonial struggles are really arguments about what a society should look like. Should it be capitalist and organized around money, or should it be organized around something else?
I loved how you dealt with religion in Lazy City. Erin goes to church, more than once, but it never feels overtly religious. More habitual. How did you decide to bring in the church in this way?
It was so interesting, actually. There was a draft of the book that had none of that stuff. The book is written in the present tense and follows the stream of consciousness tradition, although it's easier to read <laugh>. You get all of this person's thoughts and their journey through the days and whatever. However, the problem with that approach is that it's quite hard to introduce memories in an authentic way. When I was revisiting memories of her friend and her own background, I didn't want to rely on phrases like "six months ago this happened," or having her pick up a letter and suddenly be reminded of something — that was my worst nightmare.
I found myself stuck on how to incorporate those memories naturally. Then, a friend of mine passed away, and I went to church to light a candle for her, which is a mark of respect I follow. Considering it's part of how I cope with this kind of stuff, and it's a common practice for most people I know from Belfast, it made me wonder why it wasn’t in the book and why I'd been avoiding this uncomfortable aspect of the story. I became more intrigued by the discomfort — that’s where I tend to gravitate <laugh>.
In the book, she would go there to sit, have memories, and reflect; it's that kind of space. It became a space in the book where things could be in the past tense, and the timeline could shift as her memories and perspective shifted without needing unnatural transitions. I genuinely appreciate the dimension it adds to the book. It does bring discomfort, in a way, but I hope it also makes the book feel more genuine.
Do you feel less awkward about it now?
Yeah. I think that's one reason why I love to kind of sit in discomfort. <laugh> I've spent a lot of time thinking about religion in terms of what it means to grow up in a religious environment. Even if you don't agree with the teachings, the symbolism and imagery of it are still a significant part of your life.
It says so much about Belfast, again, in this subtle way of how it raised you. It’s less out of obligation or shame that you would go to church, more like you find yourself there because it’s muscle memory. That’s what you do here when this sort of thing happens.
There's actually a lot of atheism in England where people have no connection to any religion whatsoever. I have many friends who have never been to church, and I understand where that comes from, but they face the issue that when someone dies, there is no meaningful way to mark it, really.
Death, birth, and even marriage are subjects that are really quite awkward. We don’t like to think about these things too much, avoiding the intensity of these experiences. We tend to downplay them significantly in our everyday lives. There has been a lot of good in the mass turn away from religion, but we never replaced it with an alternative. We have yet to devise a collective means of paying respect to this thing of death. And it's really hard to think about death because it's just so incomprehensible, so often we don’t think about it. Having no rituals and no communal gatherings in that sense is, I think, very lonely.
Something else I loved in the book – that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about right now, is how often Erin contemplates having a glass of water. Truly I thought it said so much about her and her thought process.
I have a lot of sympathy for her as a character because I think she's very aware of the things she should enact towards her betterment, <laugh>. But those things go awry very often.
Yes. I wondered how she felt towards the American man who was really sort of sincere and earnest. I felt like there was some push back towards him.
You mean like irony and sincerity?
Yeah.
I actually love the American man in it, but I know he's not a lot of people's favorite character. There's something about his energy, which is so hopeful, that I love. The rest of the characters are all quite dry and brittle. He is more hopeful, and he's more upbeat; he's sometimes a bit pompous. He has a soft presence. What I like about him as well is that he is actually pushing for closeness. He does make quite a big effort to reach out. I think she recoils so much from him because she's semi-disgusted by him all the time. I don't think she really knows what to do with someone who is so openly warm. He's very much like, "What are you doing next Tuesday?"
I like him as a hopeful presence in the book. It's interesting what you kind of said about irony and sincerity. I wasn't thinking about it when I was writing the book, but it probably does come through in terms of the tone of different groups of people and the way they're actually like.
I’ve been thinking recently about it whether the dominant mode is sincerity or cynicism. The cynicism of the current time is so prevalent to me. Even just in the sense of when people talk about social justice online or even when they're being anti-woke or whatever, so often I'm like, "Are you actually serious with this? Like, is this actually sincere? Is this cynical? I'm just like, I don't know if this is the true thing that you're doing, and not because you're being ironic, but because you're kind of being a careerist or very personally schemy, trying to figure out how best to position yourself. Sincerity versus cynicism, I would say, is the dominant. I would even group irony in with sincerity.
Even if you read someone like David Foster Wallace, what really sticks out, I think, now reading him is that he doesn't seem fake or saying things because that's what you're supposed to say or saying things because it will get a rise. Overriding the fakeness of stuff is definitely something that I've been thinking about a lot.
So many relationships feel cynical, even platonic ones. There’s no room for romance, which is, you know, a bummer.
I believe people are often suspicious of each other. This was something I aimed to explore in the book as well. Erin, the main character, is very guarded around people, and in the end, you can see that this keeps a distance between her and others. That is, guardedness is an impassable thing. Maybe, in a different book, at the end, that barrier would break down, and she would be like, 'Now I can have closeness,' but she never does. Her speech is guarded and cynical toward others, and she tends to suspect the worst in them. It doesn't really serve her well, and I hope this is something that the reader sits and thinks about.
Without giving too much away, the ending…how did you arrive at the cause of death of her friend? I liked the feeling of randomness, meaninglessness – it sort of reinforced some of her cynicism to me.
It's basically a small-scale natural event, which I don't think gives too much away. It's funny; when we were selling the book, there were those who felt the death wasn't realistic. But, that was during Covid, and I was like, this literally just happened – this kind of thing does happen now. I think the randomness of it and the fact that it's unexpected were trying to poke at the fact that the world is changing and it has changed, and that this kind of thing does happen. The natural world is becoming something that we understand less and less because we've pushed it to its limits.
It's quite challenging to write about that because it is so big, so I wanted to try and make that feel personal. The world is changing, and everybody has to adjust their expectations of the future. Everybody has to change what they had planned for themselves and what they imagined their life to be like. Everybody has to rethink that in all kinds of different ways. This was my way of trying to make it feel personal, where it's like this is the kind of future she had in her head, which has changed and is different now. Taking stock and rethinking.
That is really true and really sad. It did feel personal. I felt like her internal monologue about missing her friend was so accurate – wanting to tell your dead friend about a boy and wondering if that’s disrespectful. Friendship is the small stuff though.
That's the stuff that's important to you in your life as well. You know, it's the kind of stuff that you truly value. I received a fortune cookie last night, and it said, “Celebrate the small things because you'll look back one day and realize they were the big things.” It was so corny, but I thought, that's true. The reason you connect with certain people is for small reasons. You share a common way of thinking about things. Things often feel like they should be big and momentous, but in reality, there's a detailed side of life, which is what truly defines our humanity.
Yeah, you remember the most random moments in enormous detail I think.
One of my really good friends who I was at university with, we used to make pastry with beetroot, I haven't made it since. But she texted me the other day and she was like, “Do you remember that thing that we used to make?” She was like, “I'm really craving it.” That brought back loads of memories because that's such a specific thing to our friendship, this random dish that was a kind of comfort food.