Escape on the Word Train

EMER MARIN

Author of More Bread or I'll Appear

The Harvard Crimson (THC): Tell me about the title of your book.

Emer Martin (EM): When I was growing up my mother always told a story. She came from a small town in Ireland...and there were people that lived opposite that had a mad daughter, and they always kept her locked upstairs to they only ever saw this face in the window. Rumor had it if you went to the family and were in their living room, that she would appear at the top of the stairs and shout "More bread or I'll appear," and they'd run up and feed her rather than have her come down and embarrass them. So this is a story we were always told and we loved it as kids. When my parents had guests we would stand at the top of the stairs and shout "More bread or we'll appear!"

I heard other people from other parts of Ireland tell it and I realized that it was a sort of a folk myth about madness and the attitudes to madness and since More Bread Or I'll Appear is a book about genetic madness and how a family copes with it, I thought that she [the girl in the story] was an appropriate figure. She doesn't appear in the book, [except as] a ghostly figure that haunts them...an image that the children all have of this madness that they know is their lot in life, too.

THC: The first indication in the book of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is in the father. It later manifests itself in different ways in the other characters. Did you study OCD before writing the novel?

EM: Yes, I went to the library on 42nd Street in New York, this beautiful library. I used to go there and sitting in that reading room I just felt intelligent--"Here I am, I must be intelligent. Look at that ceiling, isn’t it wonderful." I was always intrigued by OCD because it's not a psychosis, It's a neurosis. So the person who has it, they know what they're doing is irrational, but they can't stop it. It's not like where you actually believe something, like a schizophrenic actually believes they're hearing things. They know they shouldn't be doing this, they know it's ridiculous, but they can't stop themselves. I think it's that idea of a rational person compelled to perform irrational acts, the struggle that came because of that really fascinated me.

THC: You recently graduated from Hunter College as valedictorian. What were you studying? What was your major?

EM: It was English and Studio art--painting and sculpture. In my painting and sculpture, I would always do themes from the book as well, you know, so I'd get completely obsessed. Obsessed! There's that word again. Maybe writing is an obsession. [Laughs]...I kept taking classes that would help me with the book. So when I had them down in Mexico I signed up for Spanish 101 so I could put in a few Spanish phrases, which I did, for the four Spanish sentences. I wanted Fatima to be African because I wanted to include a lot of the continents. So I took [a course on] 19th and 20th Century African history. I was also taking Anthropology 101 which was my forced science--nothing to do with the book--but it became almost the most important class in the book...Aisling is fascinated with evolving into something--what humans will become next. If we've come this far from fish, if we don't destroy the planet, blow it up in the meantime, we might end up as something as strange as fish is to humans as humans is to what?

THC: Will you talk a bit about Aisling's role in the book?

EM: The book is a kind of odyssey, a moving around between five continents. And it's Keelin's journey. Aisling disappears from the family. So at first you think it is about Aisling and about finding Aisling, but in the end the book is about Keelin's journey. Aisling is a figure that really scares people. My editor hated her, really hated her. And I was thinking, "I loved Aisling." I thought she was very strong and wild. And okay, she did disappear and not contact her family, but in a way that was her prerogative. And in a way, Keelin is the presumptuous one, going out looking for someone who doesn't want to be found. Aisling...is a person who escapes. She doesn't have a set gender, she doesn't cling to her past--she just blows off her past. She doesn't have any country or nationality. She doesn't stick with one lover. She is really someone who is escaping the boundaries of our bourgeois existence. I think she's an adventurer, a mad prophet.

THC: What about Keelin?

EM: When I was growing up there was a certain type of figure, a daughter, who stayed with the mother. In Ireland so many people emigrated, but there was always one daughter who stayed at home with the mother, lived with the mother, took care of the mother, didn't get married. And she was always the one that the mother loved least. [Laughs] It's horrible, I know. I used to go to the funerals of great aunts, and people would all be muttering, going, "there's such and such, she gave her whole life to her mother, but the mother, she always preferred the boys. Keelin at the beginning of the book is very comfortable. She's leading a sort of asexual existence just having her odd joint sitting on the windowsill. She's solitary, and she's set to sit there and teach in the school she went to as a kid and just take care of her mother. And the mother loves Aisling far more. I don’t want to give away the book's ending, but Keelin is liberated at the end, in a way. She gets to go out and take on a new persona and have lots of weird sex. [Laughs]. She would have never done that sitting at home with her mother.

THC: So why did you become a writer? How did you become a writer?

EM: It all started when I was nine years old. And I wrote a poem about a horse who played golf. It all rhymed and I thought it was great...I walked around in the schoolyard reading it, and people liked it. I was the most popular person in the class that day, and I thought "this is a racket." So since then I've been searching for that one moment of greatness I had when I was nine. [laughs]

After that I sort of just wrote every night. I kept notebooks and I'd write a poem every night and draw a picture at the end from when I was nine. For years and years and years. And it was lot of bad poetry when I was a teenager, of course. Thank God my mother threw it all away she's very neat person. When I left Ireland I was 17--I led a sort of wild existence--I traveled to all these different places. I always say I've cleaned bathrooms in every European capital in the world. I lived in Amsterdam, London, Paris and went to Israel, Egypt, and just kept traveling continuously. And all the time I would write, I had notebooks, and I'd never keep them because I was traveling. I think it was just the act of writing that I really enjoyed. I would write constantly. And I never really kept anything until my first book, Breakfast in Babylon when I decided that I needed to keep some of it. But I was ready then. I was preparing the ground. It didn't matter that what I was writing wasn't any good. I was writing for my pleasure.