Nicole Flattery on her new book: ‘I’m curious to see how people feel about it’

Interview by Clodagh McGlynn, TY, Loreto College, Mullingar

Local author Nicole Flattery was listed on The Irish Times ‘50 people to look out for in 2023’. She has written a book of short stories ‘Show Them a Good Time’, which featured her story ‘Track’ that won the 2017 White Review Short Story Award.

Her novel ‘Nothing Special’ is coming out in March.

The Westmeath Examiner spoke to the Mullingar native as she prepares to release her new book.

Q. What made you want to become a writer?

I studied theatre and film in college. I read a lot of plays. I was always working on plays. I did a playwriting module in third year and another in fourth year and I wrote a play at the end of that.

I really enjoyed the process of spending time on my own writing and I decided that I wanted to try to write short stories, and I did creative writing in Trinity for a year. On another level, I’ve always been a big reader. I think my desire to write came from that but it was only really in my fourth year of college that I thought about it as something more serious that I wanted to do, but I wasn’t published until many years later, until I was 25 or 26.

Q. Where do you get your inspiration from?

I read a lot. It’s funny because with the first book, the story is kinda surreal and otherworldly and extremely odd things happen, but I think all of them came from real life inspiration – things that I’ve been thinking about or things I’ve been frustrated by. Nearly everything arrives from my own life in some shape or form.

There’s a story in my collection set in a petrol station. My sister worked in a petrol station and I thought that was really cool.

I always read about that setting. I have an ebook coming out next month and it’s set in the 1960s. I feel like there’s a lot of myself in the book. A lot of things that I’ve been thinking about in my own life. I think inspiration comes from pretty much everything, all over really – probably my own life the most.

Q. What is your writing process?

It varies. At the moment I’m doing a lot of promotion for this book, or I will be doing a lot of promotion for this book. I’m answering a lot of questionnaires and writing articles and things like that. So I haven’t had much time in the last few weeks to work on my own stuff – but I’m writing a novel. I’m pretty dedicated and I’m lucky because I’m doing it full time at the moment. I write quite a bit in the morning and then revise in the afternoon. I can be a slow writer, it takes me a while to write anything, but I can be pretty focused when I get to a certain point.

Q. Would you say that Mullingar has influenced your writing?

Yes, in the sense that I grew up there, I went to school there and a lot of my friends are from there. I went to Loreto, I had a lot of great teachers in Loreto. I think that you’re always influenced by the place you grow up. I came home for the fleadh in August! So yeah of course it has.

Q. Do you have a favourite book and favourite author?

My favourite book changes. My favourite author changes too. There’s some that I’ve always read and re-read. One of my favourites is ‘Who Will Run the Frog Hospital’ by Lorrie Moore. I really love that book. I really like Edith Wharton, who wrote ‘The Age of Innocence’. I feel like I’m always encountering new books.

When I’m in a frustrated mood I’m like, ‘Ugh I wish I did that’. Those two writers particularly and another called Mary Gaitskill. I feel like I will always be re-reading them. Even years and years from now, I’ll still be reading them.

Q. You mentioned that your new book is about a girl working for Andy Warhol in the ‘60s. What made you want to write about that?

I think I got the idea years ago, when I was 26 or 27, maybe even younger. I kind of always had the idea in the back of my mind. I just thought it would be a bit of a challenge. It felt like when I finished my short story collection that I had exhausted Ireland a little bit. I haven’t, obviously, there’s thousands of books from Ireland, no one’s exhausted Ireland.

I really wanted to try to do something different and I thought this would be the opportunity to. I had never done a lot of research on something either so I thought this would be the opportunity to try something just a little different. Then, it’s kind of funny because it seems so removed from my own work, but I’ve been thinking over it recently and all the same ideas are there from the first book. It’s all about work and women. So it’s not actually that different – but it sounds different.

Q. Do you have any other upcoming work?

I have the book coming out in a month. I’m getting nervous now. Then there’s a few articles coming out accompanying the book. This will be it for the year now. I’ll be going around talking about the book in different places. I feel like because I was writing it during Covid times and I started even before then in 2019, that I’ve been working for a long time. I’m curious to see how people feel about it.