Page Turners: ‘The Wardrobe Department’ author Elaine Garvey

Sligo author Elaine Garvey’s short stories have been published in The Dublin Review and Winter Papers, and her debut novel, The Wardrobe Department has just been published with Canongate.

Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show’s producer. But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there.

In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new – why, then, does she feel so stuck? Between the bustling side streets of Soho, and the wet grass of Leitrim and Donegal, Mairéad is caught, running from the girl she was but unable to reveal the woman she’d hoped to become. Told with rare honesty and equal measures of warmth and bite, The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present — and asking what comes next.

Did you always want to be a writer?

I can’t remember wanting to be anything else. I must have learned early on not to say it aloud, however, possibly because the person you said it to would immediately ask for proof. Or try to talk you out of it. Becoming a published author came from a lot of failure. Most of what I have written has been rejected, and I still expect that to happen. What made the difference this time was listening to feedback from other writers who are also excellent readers and could see what was working and what wasn’t. Arts funding helped. I was able to finish The Wardrobe Department and prepare it for publication because of arts funding. One aspect of this was the ability to participate in a mentorship programme, where I was very lucky to be paired with the writer Danielle McLaughlin.

What inspired you to start writing?

My sister and I made up our own stories and plays to entertain each other when we were children. I used my school notebooks for the stories; I think that was the start of it. My mum joined a writing group when I was in secondary school and they would meet in our front room sometimes. They were, and still are, a very encouraging group. My mum is a poet and is working on her second collection. Finding the confidence to keep writing as an adult was difficult, fear began to creep in and take over, but I know that if I don’t write, I become unwell.

Tell us about your new book, The Wardrobe Department. Where did the idea come from?

The Wardrobe Department is set in London in 2002, and the main character, Mairéad Sweeney, works in a costume department in a theatre. She is Irish and is conflicted about working in the West End — she adores the theatre and is in awe of her colleagues, but she also knows there is a lot of bullying and harassment in her workplace. And she experiences homesickness so intensely, it’s like grief.

I had a short story I was working on for maybe sixteen years and couldn’t finish. A combination of things led me to apply for a Stinging Fly fiction-writing workshop with the writer Sean O’Reilly, and a group of nine other writers. Over the course of those Monday evenings, this story started to form. We took it in turns to submit draft work for review, which can be excruciating for the writer, but, if you find a group and mentor you can trust, it can bring the work to a place you might not have reached on your own.

It took me months to find the right name and the right job for my character. I did not want to go to London or inside a theatre, those places were far beyond my comfort zone, and I resisted that for a long time. What helped was the support of other writers and the moments when the characters surprised me. There is a scene towards the beginning of the book where Mairéad is caught skiving off work by her boss and the theatre’s caretaker. It took me six months of failed attempts to write that scene, and then it came out almost in one go. From that point onwards, I had a place to begin.

What do you hope this book instils in the reader?

What I’m hoping is the story will go out into the world and start living its real life. If readers connect to it, that will mean a lot to me.

What did you learn when writing this book?

The story you want to write is not necessarily the right story. I was listening to a visual artist talking about being surprised by her work, and she said that “the drawing knows what I don’t allow myself to know.” This is also how I feel about stories. I re-structured my life several times over in order to write this book and I’m glad I travelled in unexpected ways. Denise Gough is reading the audiobook of The Wardrobe Department. If someone had told me that while I was writing it, I would have dismissed it as impossible and I would have been wrong.

One practical thing I learned, from the research I carried out on dressing actors, was how to tie shoelaces properly. Turns out, I’d been using the wrong knot and that’s why mine kept re-opening. This is not intended to sound flippant, it’s something I use every day now: cross the same lace over the top for the knot and the bow, don’t switch laces. The bow should sit straight across, on an east-west axis. If it’s asymmetrical, the bow will loosen and eventually re-open.

Tell us about your writing process?

Slow and steady, like the tortoise in the fable. Staying in an uncomfortable emptiness for a long time is my process, learning to watch the weather in a new country, living with it, gradually linking form and idea. This is at odds with the pace of what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. It takes a lot of energy to withstand the pressure to produce and not be derailed by other people’s expectations. When I read the poem Sweeney Astray as a teenager, there was something in it I recognised but couldn’t articulate. Twenty years later, Sweeney led me to the main character in The Wardrobe Department.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

Where? That’s an interesting question. Where are we when an idea comes? In the middle of something else. Idling. Washing the dishes. Waiting for the lights to change. Staring out of the window. A word overheard, a random connection in your thoughts before you fall asleep. The writer Una Mannion told me about ‘hot places’; an imaginative place which is especially generative for fiction. Ballybeg or Hy-Brasil. I only know it when I get there, and I don’t know how to get there.