Doireann Ní Ghríofa: "I wrote the book in a car out of necessity"

This is a female text.

The Irish poet

(Galway, Ireland, 1981) warns at the beginning and at the end of what is her literary debut in prose:

(Sixth Floor).

A book that could well be an endless prose poem.

Or a liquid text that spreads like mother's milk that floods the days of its narrator.

Or the echo of a lament that has not stopped ringing since the 18th century, through the mouth of the poet

.

She sings of her dead loved one, as our narrator sings to women from the solitude of a mother's life.

This is all female text that doesn't support many more tags otherwise.

"What is a female text is precisely the question I asked myself while writing the book"

, confesses its author.

"And I don't think I've found the answer yet, apart from the fact that it's a text that grew out of my life and what it means to be a woman every day of my life," Ghríofa insists in an interview via Zoom.

«I had four children in six years, so all that time was marked by what it is to be in a woman's body, with her pregnancies, her recoveries... It was impossible to ignore those circumstances when writing».

What came out of her womb then was a text written from the perspective of "a

, who had acquired the habit of immersing herself in suckling love."

A mother who questions her own identity: «Without milk, how will I see?

Without milk, who will I be?

A 21st century woman who inquires into Eibhlín's past and who, between diapers, vomiting and kisses, reconstructs the story of her dirge or

to find herself: «I have been absent from my own days to investigate the days from someone else."

Ghríofa does not hide the precariousness of modern upbringing.

Not surprisingly, it conditions even the very gestation of this work, chosen

and a finalist for the National Critics Award in the United States.

The author wrote it locked in her car while she waited every day for her son to get out of school.

«I wrote the book in a car out of necessity, because I felt that I had no other choice.

I was taking care of four small children and any window of opportunity had to be seized.

He came from writing poetry in the moments when the children fell asleep, so when I saw that he was going to have three free hours each day, it seemed like a world to me.

I told myself that, with so much time, I could write a book," Ghríofa jokes today.

"I took it so seriously that when school started I didn't want to waste the 15 minute drive home, so I would

" .

She was so absorbed that she set an alarm on her mobile so she wouldn't forget to pick up the child after school.

It is difficult not to wonder then how much distance there is between the voice of the narrator and that of Ghríofa, between their two lives.

The book is pure autofiction: «There are parts of the book that are very, very close to my experience, but others are imagined.

Even the most paranoid is very close to my life, ”acknowledges the author.

For example,

.

Ghríofa laughs: "People ask me and, unfortunately, it was like that."

A ghost in the throat

is not just a vindication of motherhood, with all its sleepless nights, its dark circles and exhausting love.

She is in addition to all those

.

Like the voice of Eibhlín and her lament that now tries to invoke Ghríofa.

"It is frustrating to look at the past and not see women," laments the author who, however, draws attention to the new movement that is sweeping the world: "Women are rebelling against the literary canon that we have inherited."

Her work to recover the caoineadh of Eibhlín Dubh cannot be explained otherwise.

Or yes, because deep down, "invoking the voice of Eibhlín helped me not feel alone when I was a mother, because that way there was another woman with me."

That is why this is a female text.

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