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I know for how long: One stinking, miserable, gooed lump of days. I washed the blood off my face. I put on the kettle. About her alcoholism Paula is wry and somewhat less detailed.
After she throws Charlo out, she tries to control herself by vowing not to drink until her youngest child is in bed. She locks up the vodka and throws the key over the garden wall, and then, after she has read Jack his bedtime story, she goes looking in the dark for the key. She always finds it, and the rapidity of her descent into drunkenness is breath-taking. Or perhaps they are impatient with her failure to rescue herself. Readers may find The Woman Who Walked Into Doors a difficult journey both for the relentless darkness of the abuse and alcoholism and for the street language of North Dublin, peppered with obscenities.
One member of our group was so offended by the language that he found it difficult to go on reading. Discussion of this book makes it clear, however, that the questions still rankle: It's such nonsense really.
I once used the word 'comfortable' in an interview and suddenly I get 'he comes from a middle-class background'. But what we were was comfortable: My parents owned their own house but the land around it was owned by the city corporation so it was the type of area that I was writing about. I always felt happy with one foot in either camp. I could write if I wanted to about a more middle-class setting. I may well do.
But I'm not a politician, I'm not going to go around in a wreck of a car and live in a council house under some pretext that I'm close to my people. Doyle admits to existing in that most boring of all worlds ' bliss ' but he resists the suggestion that there is in this a danger of complacency: I live in a happiness and contentment I once wouldn't have thought possible.
But all I have to do is look at people to see that my contentment isn't shared: Family and Paula grew out of that. I wouldn't want to just build a wall around myself and say, 'Well I've got this so fuck the rest of you'.
I find I think in the opposite way, like: In his twenties he was involved in the short-lived Socialist Labour Party in Ireland and, though he has ceased to be interested in party politics, he lent his support to the pro-divorce campaign in the recent referendum, even threatening to emigrate from Ireland if the vote was lost. Was there a link between this involvement and the trials of Paula, who, for 17 years, stands resolutely by her man?
It was a question of whether certain elements of the Catholic church were going to impose their definition of Irishness on us. In the past Doyle has spoken about his writing 'celebrating the ability to keep on dreaming'; here it is more a question of retaining the will to wake from a nightmare. True, Paula has escaped Charlo's fists in this book she has found the strength to kick him out, and seen him dead, shot by the Gardai during an armed robbery but her marriage remains with her: Doyle has always written karaoke novels - his characters perform to a defining soundtrack. In a chilling passage here, however, Paula comes to realise that she doesn't 'know any songs from the 80s; they mean nothing ' and the radio was on all the time.
What did I do in the 80s?
I walked into doors. I got up off the floor. I became an alcoholic. I discovered that I was poor, that I'd no right to the hope I'd started out with.
Does he anticipate the hostility for this book that he received for Family? Doyle grins, 'I hope so. When Family came out I'd won the Booker Prize about six months before and had attained an - unwanted - latter-day sainthood.
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors () is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle , adapted from the RTÉ/BBC miniseries Family. The Woman Who Walked into Doors: A Novel (A Paula Spencer Novel) [Roddy Doyle] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. From the Booker.