Caragh Maxwell Sugartown Reading at Books Upstairs

On October 1, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a reading and conversation for Caragh Maxwell's debut novel, Sugartown. I absolutely love attending events at Books Upstairs, and this was made even more interesting by the fact that Maxwell is a graduate of the M.Phil program at Trinity that I'm currently attending. Thusly, many of my professors were in attendance as well, including Eoin McNamee, who was the conversation partner for the evening. 

The event began customarily with free wine before McNamee introduced Maxwell to the audience, sharing his story of first hearing Maxwell read a piece in class, knowing she was special. They discussed her extremely successful essay in the Irish Times where she wrote about having cancer in her late teens. This led to heaps of interest in her work, but Maxwell stuck with her degree. That was where Sugartown began to form as her culminating course project. The book received over forty rejections after completion, but just when Maxwell was starting to accept the reality she needed a new plan, a new project, she learned the book would be published by Oneworld. "I do well with a deadline," she said on the virtues of the M.Phil program and using it as a launchpad for drafting the novel. It offered her the structure she needed as well as the opportunity to figure out who she was and where she wanted to head in life. Now, she has her sights set on becoming a full time writer. When speaking about balancing her day job and writing, she noted, "This isn't my forever but writing is my forever." 

Discussing her process, she cited writing as a very personal act. Because of that, she admitted to disliking both running and participating in workshops. This makes sense when working through deeply personal material. "It just comes out of your pores," she mentioned at one point after reading a passage set at the character's grandmother's house. She came to realize that losing multiple grandparents in the course of writing the book spilled over into the work. She described the focus of always trying to catch the feeling of being in your late teens or early twenties and render it on the page. Another particular concern of Maxwell's is family. She fascinatingly observed that families are "tiny microcosms of society." McNamee offered her the title of "Laurette of lost girls," and pointed out her gift for writing about the body. Maxwell pointed out that this attunedness to physical sensory details likely stems from her cancer diagnosis at eighteen leading to a hyperawareness of her own body and what every feeling might mean. 

After Maxwell read a second passage from early in the book describing an acid trip, McNamee opened the floor to questions which brought up conversations about Maxwell setting her novel in the midlands, in a small town rather than the often used urban or particularly Dublin setting for novels in this particular vein. She shied away from the idea of being pigeonholed as a certain kind of writer that writes about a certain kind of place while also being deeply proud of putting these experiences on the page. She summed this up simply saying, "I wrote about people like me and the people that I love."

As a part of McNamee's praise that Maxwell is also a deeply literary writer, they got into a lighthearted argument about the virtues of the semi-colon, many of which he suggested she remove during her time as a student. She mentioned she'd been reading his recent novel on the train and noted not a single semi-colon. "You leave the semi-colon alone!" 

More on Reading, Writing, and Me:

On the Clock review

September Wrap Up

The Wardrobe Department review

My Post-Grad Back to School Supplies