You're Invited to the Dublin Launch of Some Of Our Parts on September 24th!
Come along to a conversation with writer and journalist Róisín Ingle (and say hi!)
My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By, will be published on September 19th, which is next week! If you’d like to order the hardback, audio or Kindle editions, they’re linked below. Thank you to every subscriber whose support has enabled me to write the book!
TLDR: Come along to the launch of Some Of Our Parts at Dubray Books Grafton Street in Dublin on Tuesday September 24th at 6:30pm! It would make my year to see you there. I’m just delighted to finally have a chance to meet some of the lovely Ireland-based subscribers who support Peak Notions and keep it going. Don’t be shy - all are welcome. Come along and say hello!
Writing a book is a profoundly solitary process. There’s a lot of sitting about in various levels of pathetic and unkempt deconstruction, writing away in elephant pyjamas or while wearing swimming goggles because someone is chopping an onion in an adjacent room and you’re at a ‘crucial stage’. There’s a lot of drinking cold tea from mugs and swallowing it while coughing in shocked disgust, realising that you’ve just drunk deeply from an ‘old’ cup and not the fresh one you made ten minutes ago. Was it a cup you made earlier or one mouldering since yesterday that you neglected to put in the dishwasher? Who knows.
This is what being a writer is like. You’re mostly sitting about by yourself wearing frayed novelty socks, nauseated within a spiral of self-doubt, wondering whether it’s narcissistic to think you’re the stupidest person who has ever lived. (It definitely is). It is not a gregarious, sociable or even dignified career path. It makes you lonely (sometimes), weird (most of the time), and a bit feral all of the time. Then, once every couple of years, you write a book or do some form of work that pulls you out into the world. Reminds you that you have responsibilities toward the people who read your work, and that there are in fact some of those people in existence (at least you hope there are).
Writers linger on the edge of things, like freaks or perverts. They float in some liminal place between in and out, like a person at a party pretending to look at their phone because they don’t know how to talk to strangers. They prefer to observe rather than to do. Establishing patterns and making judgements, considering what things mean rather than actively engaging in them. It’s a bit creepy. A bit parasitic, a bit ‘heavy-breathing creep at the back of the bus’. There are writers who ‘do’, of course, but the value of writing comes from observation. We live quietly on the edge, digesting all we bear witness to like it’s been plated for us. At best, one would hope that at the end of the writing process we’d have put together something decent. An offering that helps compensate for the fact that we are, when it comes down to it, ultimately cannibals.
Some Of Our Parts is the outcome of around a decade of trying to make sense of a world that is constantly baffling to me. It is the culmination of my writing on culture and identity and it’s where I have been able to explore the tricky questions on identity that most interest me in the careful and in-depth way they need and deserve. ‘What does the word ‘feminism’ actually mean and how useful is it to women in the current moment?’ ‘How does a diagnosis of neurodivergence in adulthood actually work, and should it radically change how you think about the story of your life?’ ‘Can you ever escape the legacy of your upbringing when your past determines your present?’ ‘Is an elite university education really the best route out for disadvantaged young people? ‘Who gets to decide your national identity, and how?’ ‘How did Ireland come to value conformity so highly, and what does that tell us about culture after colonialism?’ ‘Why do we keep trying to locate our unique, nuanced individual identity through unquestioning loyalty to groups?’
She’s alive!
The book is also a memoir. I’ll take you with me through an epiphany I had while sitting in a cupboard waiting on a call from one of the most famous women in the world, through an exploration of the philosophical questions prompted by an autism diagnosis in my 30s, through a mental health crisis that left me unable to read for a year in my early twenties. You’ll attend an elite university with me and watch me flounder there because I had no idea how to do anything else. You’ll come with me on an adventure through a brief history of Irishness and take a hard, sometimes uncomfortable look at national identity. You’ll come along as I consider what sanity is and whether any of us have it, as well as what it means to love someone who looks nothing like you in a world that really seems to care about that stuff. You’ll be there with me when I ditch a successful career to save my sanity, and as I consider how we might allow ourselves the grace of a rich and constantly changing identity in a world with very fixed ideas on who we are allowed to be.
This conversation at Dubray Books on September 24th will, I hope, be a special one. The journalist and author Róisín Ingle is my great friend and former editor — the first person who ever put my name in print. One of the first to give me a chance and see value in my writing all those years ago. The book is her fault as much as mine. She is and has long been an inspiring and scrupulously honest voice in Irish media. It will be an incredibly special experience to talk about Some Of Our Parts with Róisín. I’m confident that it will be the kind of intimate, frank conversation that friends have when it feels like nobody is watching. So I’d love to see you there — we’ll all be friends together.
I won't make it to Dublin Laura, but really looking forward to reading this!
Hi Laura. I'm in Melbourne, OZ, so have to decline your tempting invitation. I have done the next best thing and ordered your book. I value your posts and hopefully someday you will do something down here when you are back.