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Young Irish Writer Finds
Room at The Top Emma Donoghue is one of the younger Irish writers who found international success in 2010 when her novel Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
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fter years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 Emma Donoghue settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with Chris Roulston and their son Finn (7) and daughter Una (3). Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, Donoghue is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic, Henry James Professor at New York University). Prior to Room (2010), she was mainly known for her historical fiction and her collection of short stories Touchy Subjects (2006). Kara Rota met her at a reading at the Irish Arts Center in New York. I began reading Emma Donoghue’s critically lauded novel Room in the auditorium of the Irish Arts Center, while waiting for the her reading to begin. I’d just been handed a press copy, and upon turning to the beginning of the story, I found that I couldn’t stop. Room, shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, is narrated by 5-year-old Jack, who lives with his Ma in an 11’x11’ room and has never experienced the world outside of it. His Ma, however, retains vivid memories of the last time she set foot in the world: seven years earlier as a 19-year-old student, before she was kidnapped and imprisoned by “Old Nick,” who is also Jack’s biological father. Like any 5-year-old, Jack’s days are filled with lessons and play, savored candy and rationed TV time, where the evening news holds no more relevance to his experience of the world than Dora the Explorer. When Ma’s fear for their lives and Jack’s multiplying questions about the abstract reality of the world outside Room force them to risk everything to escape, the novel cracks open wide into a universe that brings both Jack and Ma inexplicable joy and wonder and overwhelming challenges. I later had a chance to talk with Donoghue about her novel. KR: To me, Room is an allegory for all parent-child relationships. For a small child, his mother can often feel like his entire world, while her child’s love both traps her and gives her very existence meaning. The
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inevitable opening up of the rest of the world is differently wondrous and traumatic for both of them. Which came first – the idea of writing a book about the closed-circuit intimacy of the mother-child connection, or the setting of a tiny room to emphasize the claustrophobia and incredible creativity and love therein?