Losing the Plot

This is the text of the 2025 Stinging Fly lecture, which was delivered by Sarah Moss at Pearse Street Library in Dublin on September 25th 2025.

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Though I do not seem to myself as old as my children and, increasingly, my students, imagine, there is a sense in which I grew up in the nineteenth century. Just before I started school, my family moved from a Victorian house outside Glasgow to a Victorian house in Manchester, in a suburb which is now the byword for Northern English bourgeois metropolitanism but had then fallen on hard times. I went to the school at the end of the road, built for the children of the poor by a Victorian industrialist. I learnt to swim in a pool once part of a bathhouse in the 1890s, intended to improve the health and hygiene of Manchester’s factory workers (and thereby save their managers from communicable disease). At weekends, sometimes we went into the city centre to visit the University Museum, built in the 1870s to house Manchester’s share of colonial loot and the dinosaur bones that became exciting after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and occasionally to the theatre in the Royal Exchange building, which was Manchester’s stock exchange in the days when the city was affectionately known as Cottonopolis. (Pantomimes and ballet went to the Palace Theatre, a shabby extravaganza of gilded plasterwork, purple velvet and chandeliers opened in 1891.) Some of our trains went from Victoria Station, which still has spectacular Victorian tiled murals under an iron and glass roof that shows off the glory of nineteenth-century engineering and architecture. Later, I went to a girls’ school founded in the 1880s by the Manchester Liberals, who also founded the Guardian newspaper, so that their daughters could be as well educated as their sons and have equal access to the universities that were beginning to accept women. Manchester has a strong leftist radical and feminist tradition; I have no deep sense of belonging anywhere, but to the extent that I come from somewhere, it’s not a bad place to claim.

Manchester was, as you’d expect, bombed hard in the Blitz, and in the 1980s when my memories coalesce, the craters and ruins, even in the once-grand parts of the city centre, were unrepaired. I thought nothing of it. My Yorkshire grandparents were born in World War I, which they called ‘the Great War’, as if their own was just a squabble, and World War II shaped their adult lives, facilitating social mobility in a way that would have been unthinkable to their parents. (On the other side, I come from the European Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora, defined by that war in the obvious but not the worst ways.) My parents, in different ways, grew up and lived their lives in the lengthening shadow of the war in whose aftermath they were born. Everyone talked about it daily, casually. The boys in the playground at school played Huns and Allies, ran around with outspread arms making engine noises and strafing the palaces I was inventing for the girls. But it was, apparently, the Victorian city that had been bombed. In terms of architecture and infrastructure, there was little between the death of Queen Victoria and the Blitz and not much after.

I was a bookish child. That is an understatement. I learnt to read late, at six, and went overnight from illiteracy to constant reading. I couldn’t carry home from the (Victorian) library (past the war memorial) enough books to keep me going over the weekend. I took a book with me when I went to pee, because any sedentary time not spent reading was wasted. I read in the back of the car, which made me sick, and after my parents had stopped so I could throw up and they could tell me off I picked up my book and went on where I’d left off. I explained to my mother that I preferred to read and be sick than not read. After my bedtime, my father typed and my mother ran the sewing machine so as long as I could hear both machines it was safe to have the light on, and once they’d gone to bed the night was mine; I have always slept relatively little. I took books to school, where reading gave me a place to which the bullies couldn’t follow me, and read under the desk and through breaks. 

In retrospect, someone should perhaps have intervened, but when I wasn’t reading I was fearful and tearful so my absorption was probably a relief to all concerned. There was just a practical problem, which was that I was always running out of books. I re-read everything, repeatedly, until I could visualise a paragraph at a time and knew the shape of every page, but that wasn’t enough. The 1980s and 1990s were a golden age of children’s literature, with Penguin’s Puffin imprint publishing and reprinting all the glories of twentieth-century British and American children’s fiction. Jumble sales had books for a few pence and I could walk to the library on my own. I read the Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables and Little Women series and the works of Edith Nesbitt and the three Heidi books (all, we might note, set in the late nineteenth century); Arthur Ransome, Noel Streatfeild, never liked the particular Englishness of Enid Blyton. There was plenty but it wasn’t enough, and, there being no YA then, it was natural that I would turn to the adults’ bookshelves.

Neither of my parents read much for pleasure, but my mother, an art historian by training though at that point immured in domestic life, taught an Open University course on nineteenth-century arts and culture. We had battered copies of the Brontë sisters, George Eliot and Dickens, delightfully big books that promised me whole days of security from the fear of running out. And they were in some ways delightfully accessible to a determined ten-year-old, almost all beginning with the hero or more usually heroine at about my age, striving through adversity into adulthood. Jane Eyre is nine at the beginning, Maggie Tulliver not much older. Most of Austen’s teenaged heroines have younger sisters for the child-reader to tag along. The first few times I read Jane Eyre, it was a thrilling school story with a tedious romance in the middle (revisiting now, I’m not sure I was wrong). Middlemarch was about childhood and adolescence in different social classes in provincial England, with self-absorbed grownups ruining things for everyone (not a terrible reading, really). David Copperfield and Great Expectations were about little boys having a hard time growing up. I found Walter Scott and Wilkie Collins harder going, less interested in women and children, but they had a lot of pages so I read them anyway.

Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parents worried about the effects of reading fiction on their children. There was moral panic about young people, particularly girls, reading too many novels, especially in the compulsive, secretive way that I read. Romance would addle girls’ minds, leading them to expect or even require romantic love and passion where real, enduring marriage in real life was founded on social and economic compatibility, bearing and raising children and managing a household. (I ask myself again, were those parents so wrong?) Early nineteenth-century novels of passion and Gothic fantasy—rarely reprinted, so I didn’t discover them until my post-doctoral research fellowship—risked enflaming girls’ sexuality, making them wild and greedy and promiscuous, full of unrealistic longing and unfit for good and useful adult lives. As a teenager, I was too focused on anorexia and exam results for anything so fun, but I still think that what I read and the way I read it did some harm as well as getting me through bad times.

I absorbed some lessons about gender and sexuality and bodies and appetites that played badly with late-twentieth century diet culture. All the heroines of both the children’s books and the Victorian novels were thin, physically fragile, without the appetite that marked moral failure or at best the blunt sensibility of the fat best friend, already alive and inelegantly well in Anne of Green Gables’ Diana and dim, plump Meg of Little Women.

I know now that the nineteenth-century fetishisation of feminine thinness and fragility was all about race and class and empire, demanding of middle-class white girls a performance of self-control and vulnerability that would mark them out from working-class women who had to be imagined as robust to justify their long hours of hard labour, and especially from Black women whose subjectivity was barely admissible at all, because if it had been acknowledged whole economic edifices would have tumbled. 

White supremacy hurts white people too, just far less and much more slowly than everyone else. But I didn’t know that when I was ten. I mistook realism for reality, and understood that the purest and best and cleverest girls came in thin bodies and didn’t like food and were prone to exhaustion and fainting, none of which was natural to me but most of which I could induce, to the approval and envy of the adults around me. There’s more to eating disorders than reading, but it didn’t help.

When we read, we learn, and I was learning literary as well as bodily forms. In the beginning is the omniscient narrator, who is not exactly the author but not a character in the novel. The narrator tells the story but has no power over or within it. My childhood was wholly secular, my religious education gleaned entirely from Victorian fiction, but I imagined a kind of recording angel hovering under the ceilings and following along like a drone on walks and rides. The omniscient narrator is the voice of the novel but voiceless within it, disembodied, all-seeing, at once omnipresent and without presence, omnipotent and without agency. I have become, in recent months, fascinated by this figure, but for years I took it for granted and for more years I dismissed it as weird and dated.

I learnt that novels begin in the protagonist’s childhood, with the conviction—articulated well before Freud by Rousseau—that childhood experience determines the course of later life. I learnt that houses are almost as important as, sometimes more important than, characters; that curiosity and ambition and hard work can prevail over all forms of structural disadvantage; that while sometimes bad things happen to good people, moral strength will win in the end; that the Byronic hero will eventually succumb to the quiet charm of the bookish girl and, even more questionably, that this is a happy outcome for all concerned; that love conquers everything. I would say it is a true if not complete summary of my passage to maturity that it took me decades to reach a deep understanding of how reality persistently refuses to conform to the traditions of realism, and that there is an extent to which various forms of structural privilege protected me from this realisation.

There are, I think, ways in which the novelist remains indentured to literary tradition. Form is form, there is nothing beyond or without it, and also I am a firm believer in constraint as the enabler of art. If you’re going to be a novelist, you write something that is recognisably a novel and that means accepting at least some and probably most of the rules of novels, which include some form of plot and setting because there is nothing without time and space, and some form of narrative because that’s how it is, that’s why readers and writers turn up. 

You can do a yellow polka dot sky if you think it’s worth the effort, and have disappearing dragons roosting on chimneys. You can play with whatever magic occurs to you, and I recognise the political and artistic power of fantasy for those whose real histories are dark. Within the world of the novel, magic, surrealism and the supernatural still have to be plausible and make sense on their own terms. 

I try not to be snobbish and old-fashioned about fantasy and sci-fi, but I find the forms of reality in my own experience quite rich and strange enough for my purposes and anyway I’m interested in the mundane, in the days in which we live, while also seeing that that ‘we’ is a dangerous little word. We white people, we middle-aged women, we Europeans, we mothers; I hope that what I mean is we on this earth at this time, in this place we are destroying under our feet through negligence, weakness but mostly our own deliberate fault; plagued by our particular wars and plagues which are similar to but different from all the other interesting times and, I truly believe, terminal. This thought makes me want to divert towards the purpose or justification for making art at the end of the world but I resist.

And so I remain approximately faithful to literary realism, at least, still in love with it, though as with most lifelong loves not blind to the flaws and weaknesses. Though I can now dissect the history and ideology underlying the tradition in which I write, I continue, more or less, give or take the odd talking raven, to write in that tradition, or at least from it and maybe to it. My novels are all founded in research, the kind of research for which you need a university library and it helps to have a PhD. I like to know exactly what happened to whom in real life before I start inventing what might have happened to someone imaginary had they been there and then. I care about the textures of daily life, the movements of hands and the feel of clothes. Days are where we live, and bodies are where we live; it seems increasingly odd to me that anyone has ever been able to imagine the mind as distinct from the body partly because as anyone who has survived an eating disorder or a diet or a famine knows, the mind runs on the fruit of the vine and work of human hands. Without food, no thought; with less food, less thought. Art as much as sport depends on dinner.

Writers who grow and cook food have always known this, that writing is an embodied practice, which is a stupid thing to say because breathing and circulating blood and thinking and feeling and being human at all are also embodied practices. The relationship between words and physicality never stops fascinating me; I have written about but remain drawn to prehistoric human experiences and dance, both of which are forms of expression that leave no verbal or narrative trace. It’s been said that I must have something against archaeologists since I keep writing about bad things happening to them, but it’s not the archaeologists but the prehistoric archaeology, the work of understanding people who leave their bodies and sacred places and clothes and waste and cooking pots and jewellery but not their words. 

And dance is wordless expression, narration, representation, an art form whose relationship to time is utterly different from that of literature, because dance exists only in the moment of performance while writing is a technology of memory, a way of making meaning of the past in the future. 

Now I am drawn to pottery and ceramics or at least drawn back because I was an enthusiastic teenaged potter, and I think about how firing and glazing clay arrests time, how, as Keats observed, pots can be almost unchanged for centuries and sometimes millennia but they are the foster children of silence as well as slow time. All of which is to say that I find the here and now endlessly fruitful and playful and generative, that I live with delight and despair in days, with joy and trouble in a body and so I feel no need to look beyond the real, by which I mean the daily being of these hands and eyes and tongue, this belly and these feet, in this place at this time.

And so, in fiction, I work and play between that daily accumulating knowledge of real life and the daily shifting understanding of the form and practice of the novel. Sometimes when reading a student’s work I will hear a duff note, a halting step, and I’ll recognise the intrusion of real life in fiction. I make a note—this section feels implausible—ask the student, and I’m invariably right. You can’t say it’s implausible, they often say, it really happened. Yes, I say, I know, but reality is very often implausible, haven’t you noticed, and depending on the age and life experience of the student they nod sadly or go on protesting, and often I feel a slight midlife envy of those who still think life has a plot, or worse yet, a ‘journey.’

You cannot write a novel in which shit just happens for no reason. I was going to say you can if you like, there’s no law against it, but it is my long experience as writer and teacher of writing that in fact you can’t. Writing creates plot, the linear nature of clauses and sentences and paragraphs concocts meaning, cause and effect, almost as a consequence of grammar. The plot may be slight and lack suspense—as the years pass I am less interested in the artifice of events in fiction—but it will make itself.

There are various qualities of real life that fiction cannot mimic, though the game of representing them is endlessly fruitful. Language cannot produce simultaneity. We write and read one word at a time, one after another. Some poetic forms make the order of words negotiable or variable, but that order still exists, and in prose, in sentences, especially in a loosely inflected language like English that relies on word-order to create meaning, the existence of a beginning, a middle and an end is a constraint of the form of the sentence. Students occasionally manage to construct arrangements of words that begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop but convey nothing sensible in between, and this is invariably a failure of grammar; what looks like a sentence lacks a subject or a verb or both, or has multiple subjects which not do match multiple verbs. It is possible to arrange words outside the passage of time, but not to tell stories. (Actually I am not sure about that; I was about to offer a shopping list as an arrangement of words without chronology but in fact I write my shopping lists in the approximate order of progress around a supermarket or down a high street, and in shopping as in writing we do one thing at a time. In a grocery shop, you can’t evaluate pears with one hand while selecting toothpaste with the other.)

One thing at a time, one sentence after another, and while correlation is not causation, in stories correlation is meaningful. Your reader will soon become frustrated and leave if random stuff just happens for no reason, which is in my experience often a reasonably accurate description of daily life. It is not possible to have two or more things happen at the same time, which is also a reasonably accurate description of daily life. In this lived moment of composing this sentence, there is a motorbike—now a car—now a bus—passing my window; the aftertaste of coffee in my mouth; my bracelet sounding against my keyboard; in my thoughts, brush teeth, book train tickets, why isn’t my son home yet, when can I read more of that book. I have ordered these happenings for the purpose of the sentence, but they are simultaneous, apart from the traffic which moves faster than I can type. In prose, even thoughts must happen one at a time, though I myself am incapable of such purity of mind.

So at the level of the clause, the sentence, the paragraph and the book, narrative prose makes sense and thereby departs from real life. This making of meaning seems to me one of the gifts that writers offer readers. Here is structure, linearity, not necessarily justice and a happy ending but at least a well-crafted tragic ending, offering the consolation of catharsis. I have been wondering, in my last few books, how far I can divert from this kind of fairy-tale structure before the form of the novel gives way; endings are a particular problem for the realist writer because they very rarely occur in reality. Things end all the time, inevitably or unexpectedly, often messily, but endings, meaningful and final conclusions, are few and far between and even when they happen in reality, not wholly realistic. And a novel must end, can’t just stop. The writer has a responsibility to the reader to conclude things in some way, provide some form of terminus that is neither falsely tidy nor annoyingly unresolved. Real life, you may have noticed, has no such obligation.

And so I have turned, from time to time, often when shocked or at least dismayed by unreasonable reality, to non-fiction. There is no satisfactory word for the form of prose to which I refer: memoir (but really, what do we remember, and is it still memoir when other people have incompatible recollections of the same events); life writing (can you write a life?); autobiography (seems to imply a claim to importance on the writer’s part; someone famous for something other than writing, I feel, might write or at least expect to sell an autobiography but if the writing is really the point this seems an egotistical claim, though arguably the whole unnameable business is an exercise in egotism anyway); ‘creative non-fiction’, a term I wish to handle only with tongs, because, as an ex-colleague used to say, all writing is creative, what do they think, we find it under the bushes?

Still, I prefer to avoid defining the border between fiction and the other thing in terms of truth, for the idea of truth in this context makes me want at once to make post-modernist proclamations about the ideological problem of reality (whose reality, who gets to say, how was it constructed), and to declare that some politicians are simply telling lies. And I’m not sure how far you can have it both ways, say at once that as a matter of verifiable, objective fact a certain number of people were killed in a certain place at a certain time and also that reality is a social construct. For literary purposes, I walk away and say instead that the forms of fiction are narrower and more reliable than the forms of non-fiction; that to call a thing a novel is to make a contract with the reader different from, more specific than, the contract of the narrative prose that is not a novel. A novel’s final allegiance is to literary form; the other thing will do whatever is necessary or desirable with form to represent reality. 

I write in both modes, but where I have stayed with the other thing—I’ll call it memoir as long we agree that by memoir I mean ‘what has stayed in my mind as truth’ rather than ‘what all witnesses consider accurate’—it has been to represent experiences that diverged from all rhyme and reason. The first of these was my first emigration, from England to Iceland in 2009, when my children were very young and the Icelandic economy crashed and the volcano erupted, and the second was a fairly thorough breakdown in the aftermath of my second emigration, from England to Ireland under lockdown. (There’s no excuse, I knew about both the financial crash and lockdown in time to change my mind and I chose not to, reasoning both times that it would be interesting, which it was.) There is something about foreignness, the outsider perspective, that I find both creatively stimulating and personally costly, and in this case I’m particularly interested in the immigrant writer’s changing relationship with language.

In moving to Iceland, I quickly learnt that global English, the language used by Icelanders for ease of communication with most other Europeans, was not the language in which I sang my grandmother’s Yorkshire nursery rhymes to my children and wrote my novels. Global English was transparent, without tradition, not lending itself to jokes or dreams or desire or grief. Many people spoke it fluently, with more orthodox grammar than some of my students in England, but apart from the passionate readers they did not hear its chords or feel its currents. It was a communication system without a history. I had no business complaining because my Icelandic never got beyond halting phrases, mostly concerning the life of the under-threes because my toddler son took a few weeks to become bilingual, but something about my alienation from home tangled with my alienation from language, which was not an unhappy but a curious situation; reality overtook realism.

In coming to Ireland, I emigrate within a language. I had enough Irish friends in England to know that English English and Irish English are not the same. The differences became immediately fascinating as I engaged with Irish social and professional life. I grew up in the north of England, where folk speak their minds and dissimulation is dishonesty. I had, of course, spent enough years in other places with other people to know how to moderate my plain speaking, to understand the power of what is not said and some of the ways of not saying it, which gave me a basis for listening here. I knew that both ‘dissimulation’ and ‘dishonesty’ are culturally specific terms. But immigration, I think, is a life’s work, and when I think of my immigrant father and his immigrant parents and their immigrant parents probably  the work of generations. On that side of my family, for at least 150 years no one has stayed anywhere long enough for anyone to be second-generation, including me, and so I am still listening, paying attention as immigrants must do. Perpetual outsider status has of course advantages and disadvantages, but—as perhaps Joyce and Beckett knew—it brings a skinless relationship to both reality and language, keeps you—us—me—permanently raw and exposed and attentive to the wild and painful glories of how people use words in real life. 

And so far, these are the tense twin deities, the magnetic poles, of my writing and teaching: minute attention to reality and enduring loyalty to realism.

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