Sarah Moss: Is it possible for me, an immigrant writer, to produce ‘Irish fiction’?

Whenever I give a straightforward answer to the question “where are you from?”, I feel as if I’m lying.

In Ireland, I say “northern England” – it’s important to insist, not London, not the south – though I’ve now spent far more of my life in other places and neither of my parents is from the city where they raised me. They themselves moved away years ago. When I’m actually there, I don’t claim to be from Manchester. I say “I grew up here”, and people look doubtful because I don’t sound that way.

Elsewhere in Europe, I say “I live in Dublin”, which is true and has been for six years. But you’re not from the place where you moved in your 40s.

My delight at being awarded a prize for Scottish writers last year was partly because recognition is heart-warming, and also because I’d rarely dared to call myself Scottish. Accepting the prize, painfully conscious of my English accent, I told the story of my great-grandparents finding a place of safety in Glasgow after fleeing Russia and Latvia 100 years ago, though what qualified me officially was that my American father and English mother were living in Scotland when I was born.

I like being Scottish. I have beloved Scottish friends and relatives. I’ve spent time in and set novels there. Often I’d also like to be in some hyphenated or qualified way Irish. But I’m patently neither, though my British passport names Glasgow as my place of birth and as I write I’m awaiting my certificate of Irish naturalisation.

Writers’ national identity sometimes seems to matter as much as sports players’, and for similar reasons. Whose team are you on, which country are you playing for, which prizes can you win? Like many writers and artists, I have never been a team player. I dislike clubs and competitions, distrust cliques and gangs. Writers are, often, to generalise, outsiders, observers, given to the long view, odd if not downright awkward. We see patterns uninteresting to other people and question what seems self-evident. How do these propensities relate to the construction of literature as an international sport?

The definition of an Irish, English or Scottish writer is not obvious to me. (I’m sure Welshness is at least as complex, with a distinctive language politics, but I have no claim at all there.) Following a long and honourable tradition, many “Irish” writers don’t live in Ireland, and some of those regarded as Irish here have more fluid identities elsewhere; sometimes this fluidity is at least as much the product of transnational lives and careers as of the international tendency to confuse Ireland and Britain. Some writers, artists and musicians who live and work in Ireland are not habitually included among “Irish artists”. I do not know if it is possible for an immigrant writer to produce “Irish fiction”; there are, after all, no official rules, and probably customs vary. (I wonder as I write, is this another example of the loud-mouthed immigrant saying what should not be said? Or is it my immigrant writer’s job to do just that?)

The first novel I published after moving here was written feverishly in the locked-down autumn of 2020, and set on the Derbyshire moors for which I longed as I worked, like many others that year, on a makeshift desk in the corner of a small bedroom. I wrote myself back into a place I missed, among people whose voices I knew from childhood. I was still getting to know my allotted 5km and none of us was fully present.

[ Sarah Moss: One phrase has always annoyed me: ‘Remember there’s always someone worse off than you’Opens in new window ]

After that, I set a novel between Italy and north Clare, partly because I had fallen in love with the Burren and also because I wanted to explore the idea of belonging to a place through love and knowledge rather than birthright. My central character had lived in Ireland much longer than I have and married into an Irish family, but she was English. By then I’d been here long enough and made enough friends that she could have an Irish best friend in whose speech patterns and ways of thinking I had reasonable confidence, but I asked my own Irish friends to read drafts. I constructed the novel so there was no scene without an outsider to Ireland; as Austen is reported to have said of conversations between men, I don’t know what they sound like when I’m not there.

By this point, three years in, I found myself interestingly constrained as a novelist. I had been away from Britain too long to set a contemporary novel there. I return several times a year for work and to see friends, but I’m not breathing that air or hearing those conversations. I still vote in England, but when I hear myself describing life there to friends here I’m increasingly aware that I’m describing a different time as well as a different place. I live here. I work here and socialise here, vote and pay tax and have opinions and generally, I hope, participate. Ireland is where I listen to people on buses and in cafes and where I chat to friends and strangers and where I teach and go to meetings and bike in traffic and run in weather, and also where I read and where I write.

Hiberno-English trickles through my prose and speech. My accent hasn’t changed much, but my syntax and vocabulary have. Increasingly I find myself editing Irish dialogue out of English characters as I write.

So in some ways it’s natural, inevitable, that I would find or invent my stories here, except that I’m still an outsider and I expect the observer effect still shapes my experience. However hard I work on integration, I am and will always be English in Ireland and that does and will always mean that some elements of Irish life are understandably and probably rightly closed to me. Which means I can’t set a novel among Irish people in Ireland, and also, now, I can’t quite set a novel among British people in contemporary Britain.

It’s fine. I’ve been writing about the English abroad in the postwar decades, a rich seam that could perfectly well see a novelist through a respectable career and invites me to think about emigration and exile and war and belonging. Creativity thrives on constraint, and – being trained as an academic – I’ve always enjoyed the research required for historical fiction. But I do also like to write to the moment, have sometimes been accused of making news into art faster than is tasteful. It would be good to be able to keep doing that too.

Earlier this year my editor asked me if I’d consider writing a little Christmas book. I’d just finished a first draft of an English-abroad novel and was trying to leave it in peace for a while but restless without a project under way. I am not fond of Christmas, disliking organised fun, crowds, parties, over-heated rooms and disrupted routines. As sometime readers of my column will know, I don’t forget that domestic violence, suicide and divorce initiation peak at Christmas, because trapping families behind closed doors with too much drink, too much expenditure and hysterically high expectations is destructive. But from the novelist’s point of view, that trap is interesting. I like a closed-room story, and Christmas can be as much of a closed room as a bank heist or hijack or hostage-taking.

[ Sarah Moss: Christmas - and the perfect family life it represents - is an oppressive fantasyOpens in new window ]

I thought of outsiders, people closed out of the traditional family gathering. I thought of the allure of a hotel at Christmas, the dream of someone else doing the hard work in exchange for money rather than the queasy blend of love, obligation and resentment current in domestic settings. I thought how much fun it might be, to write about candlelight and flowers and discreet, all-seeing service, and I thought about how Christmas can focus yearning and regret more or less repressed by work and routine all year. Everyone wants to go home at Christmas, even or especially if “home” is in the past as well as far away, and the Irish tradition of the emigrant’s return was irresistible to the immigrant novelist.

So I set my Christmas book in Ireland, in a hotel I greatly enjoyed inventing on a clifftop in the west, it doesn’t matter exactly where. I started with an English woman, older than me and with a different life experience, and an Irish man, a little younger than me and with a past that has no overlap with my own. It’s a novelist’s job to inhabit other lives and I do it with commitment and appetite, but in the first draft I shied from the Irish man’s point of view. How dare I, English or maybe Scottish immigrant, imagine that I could see through Irish eyes? In the second draft, it seemed to me that I could, that much of my work of integration is to see Britishness through Irish eyes.

I had caught myself, at a dinner in a mixed group of English and Irish people, half-thinking that often the English, however pleasant and kind as individuals, simply don’t know how to behave, say what should not be said and fail to hear what others are not saying. It’s not that hard, I thought irritably, if they’d just listen. They? We. I. How often had I been that oblivious person? I could recall a few times. How often am I still that person? (See above?) It’s a life’s work, immigration.

[ Paul Gillespie: Monocultural Ireland was always a fantasyOpens in new window ]

I found, as I revised and rewrote The Winter Guest, that I was developing confidence in the Irish characters, that all the work I do in daily life observing and learning and listening, paying attention the way immigrants do, was useful to me as a writer. There are elements of the novella that will be invisible to many English readers, though whether that makes it an Irish book is for you to say.

The Winter Guest is published by Picador