Geraldine Quigley is a writer from Derry. She began writing in her forties and had been working on her first novel, “Music Love Drugs War”, for four years, while working in a call centre. When she applied for the Penguin Random House WriteNow scheme, the hope was that someone at Penguin would read a piece of her work and, possibly, invite her to one of their events. Two years later, that novel has been published by Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin, and will be published as a Penguin paperback in February 2020. Music Love Drugs War is a tale of growing up, going out and getting into trouble. The young characters do all of that, and more, against a background of a bitter upsurge of violence and the tragedy of the 1981 hunger strike. 

Gregory McCartney: Hi Geraldine, Thanks for being in the HU. Let’s go back to the very beginning. Were you brought up in a family that liked to read? That had a lot of books about?

Geraldine Quigley: There were always books at home, though it’s not like we had a library. My parents made sure that we were bought classic hard backs for Christmas, Little Women and The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island and so on. 

There were magazines too. When I was small, I remember us all in bed at the same time, sharing the beds, and each of us having a volume of an encyclopaedia each that we read. So, I suppose the answer is, yes – there were books and we were encouraged to read.

GMCC: Being a writer or artist isn’t traditionally a working-class occupation. Mainly because we’re too busy trying to make a living and don’t necessarily have the networks around us that others might have. How did you get into it?

GQ: There aren’t many working class writers who are published, but there and have always been working class writers. They just don’t get published.

I think there has to be a huge motivation to begin writing in the first instance and those seeds have to be set early, in school, where children should be encouraged to be creative, for the sake of being creative, and told that writing can be a choice.

At the minute, it is very hard to write as legitimate work when making a living is precarious. If a writer hasn’t the financial security to spend money on writing competitions and submissions, if paying for editorial advice or mentor-ship isn’t possible, getting yourself seen is incredibly hard. My own experience was very much this, finding it hard to justify investing money on submissions when every penny was counted. 

The Penguin Random House WriteNow mentoring opportunity was were I got my break; it’s a free scheme for underrepresented writers. I applied, not expecting to get anywhere, but was chosen to be mentored. If I hadn’t been writing, often thinking why I was, I wouldn’t have had a manuscript to show them. 

GMCC: You started writing comparatively late. Was there always a need to tell a story within you? I think you worked in a call-centre which I imagine would either kill the creative spark or force people into creativity to kill the boredom. 

There was certainly always a notion in me but not necessarily a story. And yes, I did work in a call centre, for four years. It wasn’t boredom that kept me writing, though, more than a need not to believe this was all I was worth.

My mother died in 2008. That was a catalyst for me to write, an urge that I successfully ignored for years. I asked my family if I could keep the diaries we used as day books. They seemed to me a wonderful record of a very human, stressed family coping with a terrible, gradual loss from dementia. So. I began, very slowly and with a certain amount of caution, to write a memoir of those days and of my relationship with my mother. It was called The Good Mother: The Death and Life of May Harris. When I self-published it online, I realised that it wasn’t lack of imagination that stalled my writing, but needing the right subject. 

It would also be fair to say that I was afraid of my mother’s disapproval; I wanted to write about life in all it’s rough and real forms. I believed that she wouldn’t approve and so I never started. I wonder what she would think now? 

I’d been a retail manager for years until I was made redundant. I took another position very soon after, in the panic of having a mortgage to pay and no salary coming in. Big mistake - one that led to anti-depressants and a feeling of complete failure when they laid me off.

I entered the call centre thinking it would do for six months and then struggled to believe I was capable of anything else. I had already begun Music Love Drugs War before that, but the act of writing, each day that I had off, held me together, gave me an identity and something to grasp onto. Call centres are full of people who are wasted in those places – engineers and artists, musicians – all trying to survive and pay the bills, holding onto their sanity.

I still work in a call centre – just a much better one, where people are valued. 

GMCC: The book is set in the post-punk era, the early 1980's. Why did you decide to base the novel in that period? 

GQ: It wasn’t a choice. This was the only story I had to tell.

When I decided to write fiction, the desire to record what being a teenager at that time, in that place was the obvious choice.

I wanted it on record that this group of friends existed and that we were political and non-sectarian, and brilliant. I was saying that not every story about Derry, or the north, generally, had to be about orange and green, psychopaths and brutality, Kevin and Sadie, or filled with that cringing sentimentality that Irish fiction sometimes falls victim to. 

I would avoid the clichés and write it exactly as I experienced those times. Every word, each scene was filtered through that determination. Writing it within the context of the hunger strike of 1981 was perfect; I was seventeen and remembered the conflict within myself, trying to get a sense of the drama on the street, the starkness of loss, and, at the same time, the thrill of listening to music, falling for a boy, doing exams, all of that normal teenage stuff.

GMCC: The 1980's culture generally seems to appeal even to kids these days in a way that the 1970's (apart from maybe the punk years) or the 1990's don’t. Was it easy to go back to then? I was hanging about Derry then also. I have trouble remembering quite a bit of it though! 

GQ: So easy, I think because I was the right age in 1981, in the middle of that very formative period where things seem to stick to you.

And that was a particularly relevant year – the hunger strike, of course, gave me a clear timeline and I have very strong memories, (we all have, those of us who are of a certain age), of the news and the counting down of days to another, seemingly inevitable, death. It was also the year my father died, the year I got together with my husband. And, I found that I could mine my subconscious for the little details of homes, snatches of conversations in bars or bedrooms; that, just the act of writing, the hours spent, seemed to pull more and more of this to the surface – the Royal Wedding, Charles and Diana – brilliant images to write about.

GMCC: I recognised a few people in the newspaper photos accompanying interviews. How much did you base the characters on your actual friends?

GQ: Not as much as you would think. At the very beginning I suppose I pulled from everywhere, but the characters soon took over and became their own selves. I have described them not as my friends but as the people who sat next to us, in the Cave. 

It is part of the magic of writing that the story suddenly writes itself and characters take turns that surprise you – each of those characters, Kevin and Liz, Christy, Paddy, Orla, Sinead and Noel, exist in some other universe, my new friends. Even now, I have a sense of where they are and what they are doing – the one’s still with us, that is.

And I’m glad that I didn’t fall into the trap of trying to reproduce individuals – it would never have worked, to get so far bogged down in real life.

GMCC: The kids depicted in the book are all very ordinary which makes how they are shaped by events and actions all the sadder. You’ve said it’s a book about radicalisation. Could you expand on that a bit?

GQ: Radicalisation, yes. It didn’t start out that way; at least, that word wasn’t in my head, not until I was deep into the first draft of the novel.

Stupidity is how I would have described it, until, through many discussions about the how and the what of becoming active in the Provos, I began to look at the reasons why someone would be pulled in that direction, what motivation there was. And, again, the reality of it – not going down the ‘sociopath’ route.

These boys were poor, with few life choices. They were also ambitious and curious and wanted a life beyond Derry. Poverty and lack of choice wouldn’t be enough to drive them towards the paramilitaries, although I firmly believe it is a driver for others, even now. 

There was a need in the character of Christy Meehan, a need to be admired and also for a role model – and a need to lead and excel. That accompanied by anger, and grief, pushed him to action. There is a push element, as well as a pull, to radicalisation – sometimes the indoctrination follows, rather than leads. 

Someone, a young woman in a room in the office of Penguin Random House, said to me that Music Love Drugs War was the best book about radicalisation she had read. It’s certainly anti-war and anti-army, whether state military or paramilitary.

GMCC: The Cave and Casbah were legendary bars in Derry for a certain generation. It was a little before my time (the Gweedore and Dungloe were my formative hang-outs) Music was the basis of a lot of friendships, some that genuinely were ‘cross-community’.  Was it important to articulate its importance?

GQ: So important, since the music we listened to, also drew us to one another and held us together. The jukebox in the Cave, right at the back of the bar, was an education in a variety of genres, sixties, seventies and eighties. At an age when what you wore marked out in the street, sometimes dangerously, to dress differently was a political decision. That was very much tied into the music, the bands we followed, how we cut our hair, what we read, what we smoked. 

Those bars were genuinely ‘cross community’. No one asked about religion; they may have guessed but it wasn’t brought up as it wasn’t important – or perhaps because it was important to ignore it.

In the context of the novel, that sense of the war outside invading that safe place where the friends hung out was crucial – once the boys had crossed the line, made their choice to fight, they no longer felt they could continue to drink in the Cave. The scene where Paddy returns to the Cave, having decided the war wasn’t for him, is so important – it’s coming home.

GMCC: How has the response to the book and the reactions of local readers differed from though further afield?

GQ: It hasn’t, I’m glad to say. Any opinions I have heard, have been positive. The one thing I would say is that I was and still am taken aback by the enthusiasm of readers across the water. There is a genuine lack of knowledge there about the so-called Troubles. I was told by my editor that the book took her somewhere she had never been and I believe that, twenty years on from the Good Friday Agreement, people have forgotten the trauma of what happened in Ireland through those decades. 

I was more concerned about the reaction of local readers, since we are our worst critics and god forbid that I should have got it wrong. That it has been well received means that I got the tone right – there is nowhere like Derry, we are very specific. I worked very hard at keeping it real.

GMCC: I was at a literary gathering in London recently and everyone was asking me about Derry Girls. It seems to have put us on the map in a good way. Were you surprised that an English publisher was so enthusiastic and supportive of the book rather than perhaps an Irish one? 

GQ: I asked my editor what it was that she saw in the story, what made her want to publish it. She told me it took her somewhere she had never been before. This is a woman with nearly thirty years of publishing experience. What was common experience for us has a universal appeal that she recognised. And this is reflected in what has been described by some as a cultural upsurge coming from Northern Ireland. 

I think it not the subject matter but the writers that have made the difference; so many women telling the story of our past from our perspective. The stories that have caused a stir aren’t laden with cliché. There is a freshness to them. That’s what the publishing world is seeing and relishing.

I was told that one Irish publisher was asked about the novel and they told my editor they wouldn’t have touched it – I call that censorship and it was a common opinion until recently. I’m glad things have changed and I hope that blinkered view of our stories doesn’t return.

GMCC: Do you have a routine for writing? You still work full-time I think so maybe in the evenings or at the weekend? 

GQ: Ha ha, yes, you’re right. I’ve recently taken a break, having finished the first draft of my next novel, and will be plunging into the second draft imminently! There go the weekends. I’m definitely not an evening writer and tend to keep them for editing. 

GMCC: Your next book is situated in 1940's Derry. Can you tell us a little about that?

GQ: A myth busting tale of post war Derry. And that’s about as much as I can say!

Details of how and where to purchase Music Love Drugs War can be found  here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/135443/geraldine-quigley.html