Lavender Menace volunteer Katie Marson interviews Ordinary Saints author Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin. Thanks to Bonnier Books UK for the review copy and arranging the interview!

Transcriber’s note: this interview was transcribed verbatim without the use of AI. It has been edited for clarity and readability.  

I want to start by saying I absolutely loved the book. In particular I really enjoyed your writing style and found the book to be full of really wonderful, quite punchy and quotable lines and moments. I’m wondering how you think your background in journalism writing influenced your style and translated into novel form. 

I’ve done some journalism, and I also work in what I call social justice communications. So, at the moment I give freelance support to [places like] unions, campaign groups, and charities with their communications. And I think across both of those other professional areas where I do lots of writing, it absolutely requires clarity. When the impact you’re trying to have is to convince someone to do something or to just straightforwardly impart some information, you can still have your sort of rhetorical flourishes, but they have to serve a greater purpose. And I think that the discipline of doing that over a long period was incredibly useful when I sat down to write the novel, in that I had this really baked in awareness that the most important thing is to reach the reader and to bring the reader with you. And once you’ve done that you can have a lot of fun and you can put in your jokes and you can put in your metaphors and you can do whatever you need to, but there’s an underlining requirement for clarity that I think is important for novelists to hold on to.  

Quite a lot of Part One of the novel follows Jay’s life in London. I’m wondering if you could speak to your decision to set the novel in London specifically; the significance of this city rather than having your character end up in another major city in Ireland, or elsewhere in UK such as Edinburgh like yourself? 

I guess part of that relates to my own kind of movements. I grew up in West Dublin, and I moved to London when I was about 22 or 23. Then I spent a long stretch of time in London, nearly ten years, and then moved to Edinburgh in 2020. And then shortly after that I began the book. So, on one level it’s a question of familiarity—that was at a point when I really knew London, when it still felt very present to me, and I didn’t know Edinburgh particularly well. Especially because I moved during lockdown, I didn’t know normal Edinburgh very well at all. So on that level it was kind of writing what I knew—and I think across both London and Dublin, starting in lockdown, I was writing about places that I felt sort of nostalgic for, and I think that can be quite a powerful engine.  

But I think there’s also a larger function that London plays in the novel, and I think that’s that Jay has grown up in what’s been this quite claustrophobic, quite stifling environment—certainly to her—where she feels like everyone is always watching people, or always unhappy with her. She doesn’t have a lot of freedom or space to be herself, and I think that [there is significance to] just the size of London—the fact that you can kind of disappear so completely and become anonymous in a way that you can’t in even a city the size of Edinburgh or Glasgow (where you can’t leave your house without thinking “maybe I’m going to run into like five people I know today”) like you can in London. I also think that probably the size of the queer scene in London is significant to the novel; that gave her the space to grow into her queer self a bit more. So yeah, I think [the fact that] it’s sort of the furthest possible place from the context that she grew up in is what’s significant about it. 

I also wanted to talk a bit about mental health and how the book handles mental health, both with Jay’s mother and a little bit with Ferdia as well. There’s a section that really stood out to me where Ferdia is a child waking up in fits of panic because he hasn’t received his first communion yet, and instead of consulting a psychiatrist the family calls the parish priest. Reading that in that moment I felt quite a lot of empathy for Ferdia, who I think a more secular person might recognise as a child with heightened anxiety. And I’m wondering how you imagine his life may have been different if the first intervention had been from a mental health professional rather than the church. 

To provide some background context to this, I think that one of the fundamental things that I felt I needed to achieve for the novel to succeed was that Ferdia had to be quite unknowable, and I’ve tried to [make it so that] almost every time he appears there’s something like that question, where we could read this in any one of two, three, four, five different ways, and because of the nature of his life and his death, we’re never going to know. Then so much of the novel is over this kind of tug-of-war over his memory and who gets to own and hold it. So I guess that’s a bit of preamble to say that I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to be too deterministic about it because I think that is the core mystery of the novel. But I think specifically with regard to this question of him as a child, I think that obviously with the family I think it is a reasonable reading that he did have heightened anxiety. I saw someone at one point say that they were reading him autistic, and his faith and the intensity of his faith and interest in the saints and prayer as a kind of hyper fixation, which I loved as a reading; I thought that was really, really fascinating. But I think it speaks as well to the kind of tension that exists between secular and religious people, and that to a lot of secular people a lot of his behaviour is kind of deeply troubling, whereas to the church they’re like ‘no, this couldn’t be better; this is evidence that’s he’s an incredible gift to the world and an amazing person’. And so I think to answer your question of if he had been in context where that [behaviour] was pathologized it would’ve really fundamentally transported his life, and that may have been in a way that he moved away from the faith and opened up other possibilities, but also, if we accept that his faith was the animating force of his life, that also could have been pathologized and suppressed in a way that wouldn’t necessarily have been positive for him. But I definitely think that Jay expresses as an adult looking back that she felt under-supported, that she didn’t feel seen, that it was a very difficult and anxious environment to grow up in, and I probably think that Ferdia, whether consciously or not, would have felt the same, and would have never gotten support with that.  

What you said reminds me of something you said previously when you spoke about the book at Argonauts, about the difference between people who are practicing religious and those who aren’t: you said something along the lines of “it’s not just necessarily a difference in opinion but a very, very fundamental difference in belief, and how you see the world, and how everything you think and do is influenced by that”. So I think it makes a lot of sense that in a different household, in a different context, things for Ferdia would have looked completely different, but in this family was read in a very specific way that was influenced by their belief. 

And we can’t know if that’s good or back—I think that because a person without belief can’t fully inhabit the other perspective, there’s always going to be uncertainty about it. And neither is right, ultimately, but I think we can often assert that a secular approach is always the best and that’s not necessarily true. 

Another thing you said is that you were trying to very intentionally make Ferdia quite unknowable, and I think that was very true to at least my experience of reading the book. And you can feel that Jay experiences this almost anxiety around not being to understand him, and I think as a reader I was in ways feeling that as well. At one point Jay says she’s sort of filling in the blanks of “oh maybe he was in the closet, or maybe he was secretly thinking or feeling this way,” just to find a sort of last puzzle piece that fits everything together—and I think that was true to my experience of reading it as well. And so, in Part Two when these memories of Ferdia are no longer present, you do really feel that. I’m wondering if you could talk about your decision to not include him in flashbacks or memories in Part Two like you had up to that point in the story. 

I think that’s something that arose—like I can’t quite remember how the novel developed that way—but I do really remember writing Part Two, and just naturally the flashbacks fell out a bit because it’s got a really consistent narrative flow over the course of this one weekend; we really just follow the characters very exactly whereas in Part One we’ve been kind of jumping around a bit. And I can’t remember if I said this at Argonauts, but I felt the same when I was writing that section, I found it really hard at first. I was thinking it felt like such a slog, it felt emotionally difficult in a way that Part One hadn’t because, like, Part One was really fun in lots of ways and getting to do some of the just mad flashback stuff was great. And then I had this realisation that oh, [Ferdia’s] absence is why this is hard and having to spend time with these three characters—Jay and her parents—really in the unspoken presence of their grief, that was emotionally difficult. And I think that when I tapped into the fact that I was feeling that, I was like ‘okay, if I lean into this, I think I can make the reader feel it as well’. And it felt constructive; it felt kind of meaningful to do it that way. Because when the three of them are together Ferdia’s absence is so present, right? In a way that when Jay is in her own life—there’s no empty space in her life that is Ferdia shaped, because she’s built something completely different, whereas if you return back to the system that that person existed in, than the presence makes itself felt again. And I think that pulling out the flashbacks for that section and just leaving emptiness felt like the way to do that. 

I have one more question sort of regarding Ferdia, particularly about the name that you chose for him. You mentioned that Ferdia was born during a cultural shift in Ireland away from Christian or Catholic baby names and towards names from Irish and Pagan mythology. And then Jay (Jacinta) is obviously given a very Catholic name after Ferdia has sort of restored the family’s devotion to the faith. I’m wondering if you could speak to how you landed on these names and their significance, especially for Ferdia, whose name comes from the Irish founding myth which you called, very powerfully, “a war of greed fought with the bodies of children, the nation’s founding saga”. 

So I had an initial version where they had different names—and actually, I mean, a lot things were different but they had much more typical names; they were called Michael and Grace. But then, actually that whole version I ended up chucking away, 20,000 words, because that version wasn’t working in the way I wanted it to. And then when I started again, I just gave myself a huge amount of space and freedom to really just search out paths that felt exciting and that felt fun and that felt interesting. And so I think—and I can’t say this for certain—but I think that the names were almost reverse engineered, because both their names are kind of followed by a story. So with Jay; she’s named after Jacinta, one of the visionaries of Fatima, but her grandmother is telling this story to Ferdia and Ferdia asks for [his sister] to be named Jacinta because he loves this story so much. And then similarly, the story of Ferdia’s name is told. And I think that I sketched the stories and was like, ‘oh, hang on…’. Like I think that I wrote the scene where the grandmother tells the story first, and then I was like, ‘oh, this is cool, this is an interesting back story to Jacinta’s name’. And then it quite quickly it became clear to me that the name Jacinta does not fit her—and that actually unlocked a huge amount about her character. She’s repeatedly, throughout the whole novel, battling for people to call her Jay, which is obviously a very common queer experience. And while it’s not actively traumatic for her to be called Jacinta—it’s not a deadname—she is like ‘I do not want to be called that, that is not who I feel like’. And she keeps having to fight that. And I think that tension for me came to symbolise the much bigger struggle that she has to just have them acknowledge who she is. Then with Ferdia, I wanted him to have a name that felt different to everyone else. I absolutely love that name, and that’s part of the story; and in one translation it does mean ‘man of God’, so that also kind of fit in quite nicely. But yeah, I think that his name is very different to the rest of the family’s—it’s Irish whereas everyone else has English names—so it’s another way to kind of set him apart and make him a little bit different. 

And I do think it’s a really interesting question in the queer community, in particular for trans people, but I think across the queer community, people wrestling with your name, wrestling with the fact that it’s an identity that’s been opposed on you by other people who wouldn’t have predicted the life that you lead. It’s like a way that we’re all kind of tethered to the names that we were given and the gender and whatever else that we were given as babies. I think that it’s interesting, in any novel, to have people kind of shaped by or wrestling with their names. I think there’s lots of people who have done interesting stuff with that.  

And I think with Jay in particular, when I was reading the book one of the biggest themes I noticed is this struggle where there seems to be two versions of herself that exist. And I think the fact that she decided to change her name speaks to this idea that she’s creating a completely different version of herself and a version of what her life can look like when she moves to London. So to then have people sort of refuse or struggle to acknowledge this new name it also feels like a refusal to acknowledge the person who she’s become and the life that she’s built—which I do think speaks to many queer people’s experiences of having to repeatedly say to people that ‘you know that’s not my name, you know that’s not what I go by, or who I am’. 

And ‘you know that this just isn’t comfortable for me, and you’re not willing to prioritise that’. But then I think that Jay’s also been kind of participating in this splitting of her life. And again, I think that that’s something I was trying to [address] with Part Two, because I think a lot of us think that if we just run away and separate ourselves then we can design exactly the people we want to be. But I think that ultimately, you run into the past again. And I think that trying to isolate and trying to split yourselves in two isn’t really a sustainable path to growth most of the time. So I thought that actually chucking her back into the weeds of having to deal with her family, having to try and reconcile these two selves in some way, feels to me like one of the core narrative arcs of the novel.  

Yeah absolutely. And even before Part Two when she’s still in London there’s a discussion where we learn that she hasn’t told the woman she’s seeing or any of her close friends anything about her life up to that point. She says that she feels this very clear divide between the version of herself that exists in Maynooth and in London, before Ferdia’s death and after, and it’s such a clear divide. And a divide that’s so strong that even with this woman who she’s sort of falling in love with, she can’t even get the words out—that’s how strongly these two versions of herself are separated. So then to have her sort of thrown back into the deep end of everything in Part Two is a bit of trial by fire I suppose. 

Yeah, and she says even that things used to be like, sliced down the middle and now these two halves are pressing on top of each other in this crazy way. And she’s really anxious and really panicking about how to manage that. 

As I was reading this book I was really struck by—so, I’m not someone who underlines books, I don’t like to write in them—but I was struck by how many times there were moments where I really wanted to. There’s a lot of just really strong quotable passages of text. There’s one moment in particular that I want to ask you about—it happens when Jay is in the memorial service for Ferdia and she has a memory of when she was in Barcelona visiting the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia after a night out with a woman she had just met. 

“I’d learning the day before that by the time he’d began the Basilica, Gaudi had been working for years to break the restraints of the church architecture, pushing against all that was tight and fixed in the Gothic, encouraging it, tweak by tweak, to soften and splay. And in that morning, listening to the voices of the choir floating high and light through the overstory of branching stone, I felt that he had done it. That there was something about the lines of his achievement, the muscle and bones of the place, that meant I could stretch out in the cool, blue-stained light and think, against the rumbles of the psalms, about the hours I had spent fucking the night before.” 

I just loved that moment so much. And for me it immediately put me back into the headspace of being in church and feeling fearful and ashamed that God could sense that my mind was wandering, especially if it was every wandering to something gay or sexual in nature. And I thought it was so cool how you completely sorted twisted that and you’ve presented the church as a space that encourages the mind to wander. I’m just wondering how you came up with that idea and why you wanted to include it here at this point in Jay’s story. 

Again, I think this kind of connects back somewhat to the question about the names. I think I tried to let myself pursue desire paths in my own thinking when I was working on this story, and I was in Barcelona shortly before writing that passage. And I am obsessed with the Sagrada Familia; it’s one of my favourite pieces of art in the world, and I think it’s so spectacular. And I think something it represents to me—and this is something that really emerged for me a lot through writing the novel—is that faith and belief and Christianity, and even Catholicism, are more contested than we often think. And very often the hierarchy of the Catholic church wants us to think that there’s one set of rules and everyone is following those rules and if you step outside of that, you’re deviant and you’re wrong. And that was my experience of it growing up, I think. Whereas when I was working on this novel and I came back to digging into Catholicism in a deeper way than I had in a long time, I found that actually there have always been people who are doing different things and who are challenging things. And someone like Gaudi was a deeply religious man—he actually felt kind of converted by his own work on the Sagrada Familia—he was non-practicing and it kind of brought him back to the faith. But he’s clearly doing something quite revolutionary; he’s clearly exploring and expressing faith in a really profound way through the work in that case. So, I had just done a lot of reading and just got really interested in the Cathedral and it kind of emerged that way. And I think that putting it at that moment in the novel where she’s in this church space that’s associated with her childhood that she’s always found stifling, and then her mind goes somewhere else where she felt more free and where she felt like something else was possible, what happens is they mirror each other. Ultimately she is then in this other church thinking about this woman that she slept with in Barcelona. I think it’s an example of where she’s finding ways to escape that strict binary version other life and that she’s like “actually, parts of these things can coexist, and I can inhabit these spaces as myself, I don’t have to revert to being this child version of me.” 

At the Argonauts event you said something that really stuck with me. You were talking about how young people are sort of potentially realising that with this collective move away from the church and from organised religion, maybe we’ve thrown out a bit too much. And now young people are seeking things like ritual, community, collectivity, moral guidance, in other areas where previously people were getting these things from the church. Is this an idea you had in mind for Jay? Do you think there was a sense of Jay feeling like she’s lost a bit too much and seeking some of these things in this new version of her life? 

Yeah, absolutely, that was definitely something I was thinking about. And I think you can see in her journey that she’s grappling with something that I don’t think is uncommon for people who grew up in religious contexts and then are no longer religious, which is that life just feels a bit flat to her. She’s grown up in this context where everything is so infused with this profound meaning, and particularly having Ferdia’s presence and having that force of his belief in her life, kind of makes everything glow. It makes it mean that every decision you make day-to-day is directed towards this greater purpose. And then she’s like, completely rejected that, but she’s still kind of in what’s left. And I think part of that is that she kind of feels like a bit of a failure. She feels like, “his life’s been so geared towards this greater purpose and that’s now being celebrated and what do I have?” But I think she also feels it as a lack in herself. And I think one of the ways I really tried to draw that out is by showing scenes of her at work where she’s just doing this, you know, this bullshit job that she doesn’t care about, that she doesn’t feel has any real social value, that she’s just doing to pay the bills, and that’s something that she’s kind of grappling with. And I don’t want to be overly prescriptive about what I was intending to do, but I also think queerness itself is what, to me, provides her with this sense of meaning. And particularly sex is something I’ve tried to show as a part of how she’s reconnecting with a deeper sense of meaning in her life.  

And I think we’re seeing this quite a lot; you see things in the queer community like people being really into tarot or people exploring certain ideas of witchcraft, or engaging with nature. But I also just think that the vision that lots of people have for our community—ideas of queer utopia and being able to transcend the current lived realities of our lives and envision something dramatically better and more free—I think there is something almost religious about that, or certainly it mirror religion. That was something I was trying to play with a bit as I was writing. 

I just have one last question, which is maybe a bit silly. When Jay attends a book talk in London she says,  

“The people are so well dressed and intentioned, differential to the speakers, yearning for answers. It’s like mass”. 

And then I would maybe go so far as to say that all of us lining up to get our books signed afterwards feels very much like communion, or least looks very much like communion. I was wondering how that connection came to mind for you, and if it’s a sentiment that you share.  

Wow, that’s fun. I think, again, this actually flows kind of naturally from what we were just talking about. I think that for so many people I know, and for me, one of the ways that I connect with a deeper sense of meaning in my life is through reading, and through engagement with all sorts of art, but particularly for me through reading. And then I do think that when you go to a book event you’re trying to tap into that meaning in a deeper way, or to pursue that feeling of connection further. And for me, I have really loved getting to talk about the book to people. It’s such an extraordinary way to get to connect with people—knowing that something I have written has hopefully connected with or has illuminated something that they’ve experienced, and then getting to hold that even in a minute in the signing queue as a shared experience is so special. I think that it’s such a communal experience; like even in this conversation, I feel I have learned things about the book from this conversation. It feels like such a privilege to get to get to keep growing and developing with people in this way.