When I brought Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine to the women at the Ahmanson Senior Citizen Center’s writing class, many of them working on their own short stories about motherhood and family, they couldn’t stop talking about Lexie—the ambitious, young, single mother who refuses the provincial life laid out for her and escapes to 1950s London. What struck everyone in our upstairs computer room was how O’Farrell conjured a woman hungry for more, unwilling to apologize for taking up space in the world. O’Farrell writes about lives and places that history wants to minimize: ambitious midcentury women like Lexie; the steadfast resilience of Elizabethan women like Agnes Hathaway in Hamnet; and the trauma buried in Ireland’s soil during the Famine in her latest novel, Land. She gives voice to those who are footnotes in other people’s stories, and that act of attention makes them luminous.
So, beaming with excitement at the opportunity to sit down on Zoom ahead of Land’s publication, I was curious about what illuminates the life of an author whose stories make countless others, including the senior citizens I see almost daily, inspired to share their own. I discovered the urgency O’Farrell has carried—a refusal to sleep, a compulsion to craft a world different from the one she’d been taught—since she was in her early twenties. A need to make something true of her own runs through everything O’Farrell does, coursing through her words, her pages, and even the granolas in her breakfast.
— Shandela Contreras
Editorial Intern
1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.
Maggie O’Farrell: It is very hectic, but fun.
2. What book should everyone read growing up?
MO: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
3. How do you start from scratch?
MO: Don’t worry about the beginning. Beginnings are really hard and it’s really hard to know what you’re doing when you start, so I would say just plunge in anywhere because you can always make bad writing better, but a blank page is always just a blank page.
4. Map your novel point A to B, or pivot as you go?
MO: I map it out as I go. I don’t necessarily have a strict plan. I tend to start out and just kind of explore what’s there and then I draw maps and flow charts and plans while I’m in the middle of it.
5. Three presses you’ll read anything from?
MO: Oh, wow. Well, I don’t tend to choose books by publisher. Sometimes I will read authors that I know and trust and love, and sometimes I’ll just go by a really interesting blurb or if my eye is caught by a cover that beckons to me. I don’t limit myself to publishers. I’m more interested in themes and people.
6. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?
MO: I don’t really use e-readers. I don’t really have to. I can see that if I was on a long commute like I used to be in my 30s then I probably would, but I always go for paperback
- I love a paperback book, not too heavy. It’s perfect to carry around.
- MO: Yes, but hardbacks feel so sumptuous don’t they? You can treat yourself to a lovely hardback sometimes
7. Describe your ideal writing day.
MO: I tend to ring-fence my mornings for just writing and thinking, so I don’t answer any emails, I don’t pick up my phone, I go down to my studio, which is at the bottom of our garden, and it doesn’t have any connectivity. And sometimes it happens, I end up writing something, and sometimes there are those days when nothing is really coming, but you can just daydream and read and think about what might come next.
8. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?
MO: Write what you know. I think you should write what you don’t know. For me, the best start is writing something you don’t understand, something that baffles and confounds you.
9. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?
MO: Just to keep going. Keep going—that’s the main thing. And remember that writing is in some part inspiration but a lot of it is just graft.
10. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:
MO: Oh, that seems really mean. I think there was a brilliant adaptation of Edward St. Oban’s Patrick Melrose novel called Patrick Melrose. I can’t remember which channel it was on, but it was written by David Nicholls. I thought that was brilliant, and was really, really close to the book. I have to say, there have been some really quite painful Jane Austen adaptations, some of which I cannot watch because I love Jane Austen. Some of the adaptations set my teeth on edge.
11. What’s your favorite comfort snack?
MO: Dark chocolate, preferably with orange or lime in it. It’s very good if you feel like you’re flagging slightly, when you’re writing, and you just don’t quite have the time to make a meal. You can have a few squares and it keeps you going for a little bit longer.
12. How did you meet your agent?
MO: Well, actually, my agent and I almost met at university. We were at the same university on the same course, same year, and we never met. We met a bit later in an office, which is quite boring, but I love my agent. She’s one of my favorite people in the whole world and when I went to the Oscars I took her with me.
13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?
MO: You have to know that those times when your confidence falls are part of the process. When you have a surge of optimism, that’s when you get words down on paper and then you have a crash in confidence, but the crash in confidence is when you look at it with a critical eye, so that’s to do with editing and finding the right path. Don’t think of it as writer’s block, think of it as a necessary part of a process.
14. What’s your relationship to being edited?
MO: I really welcome being edited. I have had the same editor, amazingly, the whole time. I’ve never written a book without her and I really rely on her feedback and her eagle eye and her intuition. Sometimes she says things to me which I don’t entirely want to do, but I look at my work and I think: Well okay if I want to keep this bit then I have to make sure it works. I have to do the work, I have to do the buttressing, and I’ve got to redesign the architecture of the book if I want to keep it. But sometimes she says something and I think, oh, my God, she’s so right. I have to rush home and get rid of that page! What was I thinking?
15. Write every day or write when inspired?
MO: I don’t tend to write every day, just because I have a very busy domestic life. And I think you can’t always wait till you’re inspired, because then it might not happen.
Daydreaming is a very important and very underrated part of writing. Your work isn’t always writing on the page. Sometimes it’s just thinking and the book will fix itself in your head sometimes.
16. The writer who made you want to write?
MO: I’ve always wanted to write, but I think when I read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, that was when I really thought I wanted to do this. I read it in Hong Kong. I was living in Hong Kong for a while when I was about 21, 22. I remember reading it, and I closed the book and I tried to go to sleep and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I got up, and I remember writing something. Getting up in the middle of the night and writing something thinking, I really want to do this.
17. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?
MO: I find it really hard to know when I reach the end and I usually rely on either my husband or my editor to basically wrestle the manuscript out of my hand and say, “Okay, that’s enough.” It’s really hard because you can just go on and on, you know, finessing it and fiddling with your adjectives and crossing things out. There is a point at which I think you do need to ask someone and they have to say, yes, it’s finished.
- Is your husband one of your first readers?
- MO: He is, he always reads, I mean, not my first draft, because no one reads that, but I’d say he probably reads my earliest draft that I’m happy to show someone. And then he also reads my penultimate draft.
18. Writing with music or in silence?
MO: The actual writing itself I have to write in silence, but I usually have a playlist for every novel which kind of gets me in the mental space for the book. When I’m opening my laptop and laying out my notebooks, getting my pens (I write with old fountain pens). I fill my fountain pens and while I’m doing that I’ll have my playlist on and then when I start to write I turn it off. I find that it kind of helps me. Music is very useful for making the bridge between your quotidian life and your writing life.
19. Describe your writing space.
MO: I’m really lucky that in the last five years, we have built a studio in the garden, which is glass, it was an old greenhouse which fell down. So it’s glass and it’s like sitting inside the rib cage of a sea monster. It’s lovely.
20. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?
MO: Re-reading is something that’s really important to me, there are certain books that I re-read every year, five years, 10 years, and you always see something really different in them. Sometimes you need to let your well refill. So if you’re feeling that you can’t write any more, if you are having one of those moments where you hit a brick wall, just go back to something that really sustains you. And even if it’s nothing to do with the book you’re writing or the piece you’re writing, it will somehow refill you.
21. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?
MO: I think that with every book it’s really good to set yourself a new task or a new hurdle to clear. With every book you write, there’s a learning curve, you learn so much and then with your next book you want to put it into practice and try something new.
22. Book club or writing group?
MO: You know, I’ve never been in a book club. No one has ever invited me. And I don’t do writing groups so much now, but I found them incredibly useful and supportive when I was starting out. I think it’s a great thing to have, especially when you’re starting. They can give you lots of encouragement and feedback when you haven’t necessarily got a professional editor yet. Also, writing groups can get you into a kind of regular habit of writing which is really good, so maybe every month or every week you have to produce something. That’s a really good discipline.
23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?
MO: I love cooking. I love cooking a lot. I love cooking lots of soups and bread. I make my own sourdough. My own cereal. And I love growing things. I grow lots of herbs and lots of flowers, and my children—I’m very obsessed with my children, and my cats. And I go swimming.
- You make your own cereals!?
- MO: I make my own granola cereal!
