Emer Martin

Life

1968- ; novelist, painter and film-maker; left Dublin as a teenager (‘done with Ireland, just done with it’) - miving to Paris (au pair-ing) and later to London (stacking shelves, iiving in squats, and hanging out with punks); moved to New York; ed. Hunter College, NY (BA) - class valetudinarian, Jan. 1998; m. an Iranian scientist in California and completed a film MA in San Francisco State U.; issued Breakfast in Babylon (1995), based on her Parisian experiences winner of Listowel Writers’ Week Book of the Year award, 1996 and hailed as an Irish female Trainspotting; issued Teeth Shall be Provided (1998), a short-story collection; issued More Bread or I’ll Appear (2000), winner of Audre Lorde Prize, and Miriam Wienberg Richter Award, 2000; received Guggenheim Fellowship, 2000 (€50,000); studied painting in New York and met her Iranian husband with whom a dg. (b.22.10.2000); awarded 2-year bursary by Irish Arts Council; taught creative writing on Trinity Access Programme over 9 years at TCD;

issued Baby Zero (April 2007), a tale of an Irish-raised Orapian woman’s fears during imprisonment in a fundamentalist [Taliban] regime, and the story she tells her unborn child about three “baby zeros”, partly inspired by the experiences of her husband’s family’s scattering; winner of Listowel Writers’ Week Book of the Year award, 2006; produced Nuts, Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut - a friend since sharing a judging panel in San Francisco book festival in the late 1990s; moved back to family home in Co. Meath, 2005, angered by the Bush regime’s foreign policy in the Middle East; issued The Cruelty Men (2018), a multi-generational novel about a Kerry-born Irish-speaking family in the Meath Gaeltacht whose children are placed in mother-and-baby and Magdalene institutions - launched at Hodges Figgis, 12 June 2018; scheduled interview with Darragh McInture at the Belfast Book Festival, 12 June 2018;

Fremont High School as shows at the Wild World (Palo Alto, California), 2017, becoming writer-in-residence at Wild World in 2018; settled in California as a High School (SF) and servces as advisor to the Gay-Straight Alliance at the school, speaking out again curriculum restrictions and anti-gay laws in America (saying: ‘Politicians shouldn’t tell teachers what to teach’); wrote The Cruelty Men (2019) in a rented studio in Co. Meath; founder of Rawmeash, a publishing co-op; passes time between Co. Meath and Silicon Valley, California where she settled in 2014 and teaches in a High School; she wrote a tribute, with other writers, at the death of Philip Casey (Irish Times, 5 Feb. 2018); her new novel, Thirsty Ghosts, is due to appear from Lilliput (Dublin) in Autum 2023; Martin has had first of two exhibitions of her paintings, Origin Gallery, Harcourt St. (Dublin), 2006 & 2009.

Emer Martin Webpage

Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, and the Middle East and in many places in the United States. She fled Ireland at age 17, finding it to be insular and oppressive, and began to wander through Europe. She was exhilarated and relieved to find herself alone in Paris drifting from cinema to cinema and finally discovering a tribe of wanderers, dreamers, refugees, and hustlers on the slopes of the Pompidou Centre. Her first novel, based on her travels was Breakfast in Babylon, described the life of a young Irishwoman in the Parisian underworld and won Book of the Year at the 1996 Listowel Writers' Week. When it was published in the U.S Emer became part of the 90s zeitgeist writers and connected with the Scottish writers and Rebel Inc. She did many tours of the U.S and Europe. They were dubbed The Repetitive Beat Generation in a book that featured many of the faces on the scene such as Irvine Welsh, and Alan Warner. Emer lived for ten years in Manhattan in the East Village and co-founded a group of Irish women artists and troublemakers known as the Banshees. [...]

Available online; accessed 27.12.2022.

[Emer Martin has a Twitter account [@emermartin] - which she is identified as a "writer/painter/teacher/socialist, founder of Rawmeash publishing, currently lost in the strange Valley of Silicon - she/her". She also writes regularly on Facebook with both personal and public news and responses. ]

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Works

Novels

Breakfast in Babylon (Dublin: Wolfhound 1995), 288pp.; Do. [another edn.] ([USA:] Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books 1997), 288pp.
More Bread or I’ll Appear (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [HMH] 1999), 288pp.; Do. [another edn.] (London: Allison & Busby 2000, rep. 2001), 320pp.
Baby Zero (Dingle, Kerry; Brandon Press 2007), 314pp.; Do. [another edn.] (Rawmeash Publishing 2014);
The Cruelty Men (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2018), vii, 440pp.
Thirsty Ghosts (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2023), 352pp. [see extract]

Short fiction

Teeth Shall be Provided (Canongate 1998), q.pp.;

Children’s fiction

with Suzana RTulac, Why is the Moon Following Me? (Rawmeash Publ. 2013), ill. by Magdalena Zuljevic.
The Pooka (Rawmeash Publ. 2016).
The Pig Who Danced (Rawmeash Publ. 2017).

Miscellaneous

‘America is not broken, it was built this way: A new generation is seeing the repercussions of white supremacy, violence and capitalism’, in The Irish Times [Sat.] (6 June 2020) [See copy - attached.]
‘In California, we’re watching Ron DeSantis’s assault on LGBTQ+ rights with horror’, in The Irish Times (23 May 2023) [see copy - attached.]

See also contrib. to Shenanigans (Sceptre) and Fortune Hotel (Penguin).

[ See The Art of Emer Martin [film] - at The Wild World Magazine - online; accessed 22.05.2108. ]

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Criticism

Lucile Redmond, review of Breakfast in Babylon, in Books Ireland (Dec. 1995), p.327; another edn. (Mariner Books
[Shirley Kelly,] ‘He Said Venice was Like Las Vegas’ interview-article in Books Ireland (Feb. 2007), p.6.
M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera, ‘Breaking Consensual Silence through Storytelling: Stories of Conscience and Social Justice in Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men’, in Miscelanea [62] (Jan. 2021), pp.167-185 [see notice]

Snippets
Lilliput Press, book-notice on The Cruelty Men (2018): Martin’s mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries are the Irish cousins of Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulags; her dispassionate depiction of the ordinary psychotic violence at the heart of families and society in rural Ireland is akin to that of Ferrante’s Naples. In this novel, two Ireland’s run in stark parallel. A gentle country of fairy rings, blackberry picking, and poker evenings with the local priest masks a system in which the Church and State incarcerate the vulnerable for profit. The intimacy of the first person accounts draws the reader into the world of each character. Their stoicism makes their suffering all the more moving and dignified. A delightful abundance of poetic and surreal phrases, quips and curses in this book give it a vitality and authenticity. Poignant and swift, The Cruelty Men tells an unsentimental yet emotional tale of survival in a country proclaimed as independent but subjugated by silence. (Available online; accessed 22.05.2018.)

M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera, ‘Breaking Consensual Silence through Storytelling: Stories of Conscience and Social Justice in Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men’, in Miscelanea [62] (Jan. 2021), pp.167-185 - ResearchGate synopsis: ‘In recent years Irish society has witnessed an upheaval in public opinion before the discovery of conspiracies of silence hiding stories of institutional abuse which had remained concealed from the public domain. These narratives of secrecy have been consistently identified and stripped away by writers like Emer Martin whose novel The Cruelty Men (2018) denounces the fact that forgetting and silence are woven into the fabric of society and politics in Ireland. Drawing on the notion of consensual silence, the article explores The Cruelty Men as a text that addresses institutional abuse and challenges official discourses by rescuing the unheard voices of the victims and inscribing their untold stories into the nation’s cultural narrative. As the article will discuss, ultimately the novel calls attention to the healing power of storytelling as a way of renegotiating Ireland’s relationship with the silences of the past. (Available online; accessed 25.05.2023.)

Quotations

Emer Martin addresses an audience in Palo Alto

[...]
The old California where you went to light up, hit the surf, and drop out is just a hazy nostalgic dream long gone. The summer of love is now the summer of code. You are reading this because of these people. As I drive down the sleepy suburban tree-lined avenues, the quietness and unruffled calm is deceptive. No one can afford anything because the rich have taken all. Everyone wants to be a billionaire. This is New York on steroids.
[...]
“What does Google do?” I paused. “They have invented the cow that shits money.” There was a silence. In an auditorium of squirming teenagers no one moved. “That is what Google does.” I said in the hush that had descended. My daughter looked up from her phone and around at her peers in surprise. I saw her forehead wrinkle in a questioning frown. She had not heard a word I said. “This cow wanders from building to building over by Shoreline. At night when most of the people have torn themselves away from their work and trudged off to their tiny, outrageously high rent apartments in Mountain View, to check out each others lives on Facebook, or sit in Starbucks in strip malls skimming Instagram and trying to keep their feed matching, you can sometimes strain and hear this cow lowing. She trudges heavily down the multi-colored corridors, past all the free vending machines, juice bars, yoga rooms, dry cleaners, day cares, everything designed so you never have to leave, and she keeps shitting. She shits and shits big piles of it. All they have to do is scoop it up and feed it to the bank. She is the cow that shits money. That’s what Google invented.”
[...]

Available at The Wild World - online; access 22.05.2018 [re-paragraphed].

Thirsty Ghosts (2023) - excerpt:—

I was born in Gestapo Ireland in the 1950s - where men weren’t allowed to think and women didn’t even exist. My name is Dympha. Patron Saint of the Mad. Yeah. I’ve heard all the jokes. I came to the Laundry at fourteen years old. The others all called me Little Poet on account of me writing me own poetry when I was little and walking barefoot by the River Dodder.
I used to put me feet in and let the river soak me and I’d suck the spirit of the water to give me strength.
Ma was told I was always sitting by the River Dodder with me eyes closed. And she found all me poems, scribbled on the backs of bits of paper. Sure, I can’t remember even one of them now. They had always been telling me than if I didn’t behave, I’d go to the Magdalenes and that’s what they done - and they never came looking for me after. All the blame went on them nuns but they didn’t have to come looking for us, it was our own famblies who shoved us in for the most part. Of course, the nuns were there to suit them, and the Guards to send us back if we ran. What a racket.

—Excerpt in Tom Tivnan, interview-article, The Bookseller (8 Sept. 2023) - available online; accessed 10.10.2023.

Tom Tivnan writes:

[...] Martin tells me that an inspiration was the American socialist historian Howard Zinn, then grabs a copy of his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States, from a nearby shelf. She says: “My brother gave me this book when I was about 19 and it changed my way of looking at things. I thought: ‘Oh, you can write about the people that were left out.’ So even in the historical bits of Thirsty Ghosts, you never get the nobles’ view, it’s the servants’. I think it is difficult to write history like that; “regular” people often get scrubbed from the record. But I think the responsibility of me in fiction is putting back those voices which have been disappeared from history.’

Martin was born in Dublin in 1972 to parents who had moved from the countryside, growing up in a suburban housing estate. She chafed at the sexist strictures of Ireland at the time: “It was very patriarchal, church dominated. In school, all we read were male authors; we were literally told girls weren’t good at maths and science. I thought ‘What are women good at then?’ I guess we were supposed to be the support act.’

Idem; available online; accessed 10.10.2023.

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Notes
Breakfast in Babylon (1995) called a novel of drifters, winos, petty crooks in Paris, Berlin, London in which the central characters Isolate and Christopher [called] the Hoodoo man, "streetwise" (Lucile Redmond, review of in Books Ireland, Dec. 1995; see also cover pic. in Books Ireland, Sept. 1995.)

Breakfast in Babylon (1995; USA 1997) - Publishers’ Weekly [quoting unnamed reviewer]: Winner of Ireland's prestigious 1996 Book of the Year award, this startling debut delivers a gritty, knowing transatlantic response to the current U.S. trend in “tough girl” writing. It traces the path of a young Irish woman, Isolt, as she wanders through London, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam and Israel. This journey takes her up and down the rotten underbelly of the New Europe. This journey takes her up and down the rotten underbelly of the New Europe, through a shadow-world populated by drifting bands of misfits: drug addicts, social welfare scammers and vagrants-by-choice who winter in Northern Europe's inner-city squats. Half anarchist, half waif, rebelling against the system but often tossed and bruised by the predominantly male world of the street, Isolt survives on her lust for life and thirst for adventure. She falls in love - and out - with Christopher, “The Hoodoo Man”, a charismatic but manipulative drug dealer and addict from Detroit (Martin handles the metamorphosis of this relationship from misguided love into nightmarish abuse with enaging insight). Isolt makes some friends - most notably Becky, a junkie who dies anonymously in a derelict cellar - and many acquaintances: victims of empire, small-time opportunists, refugees from political slaughter or miserable family lives. Despite the grimness of her subject, Martin enlivens her work with dark, often hilarious humor, and disarming compassion. Isolt’s personal confusion is affecting, but it is her articulate reflection on the plight of others that most touches the reader. Like the work of a latter-day, punk Breughel, Martin's large tableau encompasses a whirl of memorable characters in beauty, brutality and humor.’ (See full review - online; acessed 25.05.2023.)

More Bread or I’ll Appear (1999) - Publishers’ Weekly [quoting unnamed reviewer]: ‘Irish author Martin's meandering second novel (after Breakfast in Babylon) traces the erratic intersection of five siblings in a middle-class Irish family as they try (and usually fail) to leave home and make their way in the wider world. Molly, the mother of the clan and a piano teacher by profession, separates from her mentally unstable husband and moves the family from West Ireland to Dublin, where her oldest daughter and favorite, Aisling, can attend college. Yet the capable “tiger-spirited” Aisling disappears in her early 20s, leaving a void in her wake. Meanwhile, patterns develop at a belabored pace among the other siblings: teenaged Orla becomes pregnant and is shipped off to New York by the family's benefactor, Uncle Oscar, the priest; Patrick, the only son, exhibits pious, obsessive compulsive behavior that mirrors his father's; Siobhan bounces among jobs in London and New York, growing increasingly anorexic; and Keelin, the youngest and the principal narrator, resigns herself to staying at home to care for her ailing mother, finding work as a teacher. It is not until 15 years after Aisling's disappearance, when most of the siblings are in their early 30s, that Molly persuades Keelin to try to track down her sister, who has been sighted variously in Japan, Hawaii, Mexico and Honduras. Keelin and one or another sister take off around the world, following elusive clues, usually in bars, in pursuit of Aisling. They learn a little about her: she dresses as a man, and sells sex to Japanese businessmen but seems to prefer women. When Keelin finally encounters her in a dreamlike scene on the beach, the real Aisling cannot measure up to the expectations the reader and her family have of her. Martin's prose has a strong rhythmic lilt and her characterization is sound, though unfocused; the voice of Keelin barely emerges from the chatter of her siblings. Although Martin seems to be exploring whatever defines the essential Irish spirit, the narrative drive weakens and is almost lost against the global cacophony of Keelin's picaresque journey. (Feb. Issue - available online; accessed 25.05.2023.)’

Baby Zero (2007) - an Irish-raised Orapian, Marguerite, imprisoned by fundamentalist government and pregnant, tells her unborn child stories of three baby zeros, Leila, Marguerite and the child herself - all born to a family at times of upheaval and scattered about the globe - to an uncle in Los Angeles and an Irish refugee programme. (Brandon Press notice, 2006 Catalogue).

The Cruelty Men (2018) - a sweeping multi-generational view of an Irish-speaking family who moved from Kerry to the Meath Gaeltacht and the disasters that befall their children in Irish institutions. . Abandoned by her parents when they resettle in Co. Meath, Mary Ó Conaill is faced with the task of raising her younger siblings alone. Padraig has disappeared; Bridget escapes, and her brother Seamus inherits the farm. Maeve is sent to work as a servant to a family of shopkeepers in the local town. Later, pregnant and unwed, she is placed in a Magdalene Laundry where her twins are forcibly taken from her. [Cites Irvine Welsh - as infra.] (Lilliput Press notice, May 2018 - online.)

Thirsty Ghosts (2023) - Publisher’s notice: ‘Emer Martin’s is a radical, vital voice in Irish writing, as she challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland. Two families inhabit this immersive polyvocal work, an intergenerational saga announced with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continued here as punk rockers and Magdalene laundries spiral into a post-colonial Ireland still haunted by its tribal undertow. Scenes surface from Ireland’s mythological past, Tudor plantations, workhouses and industrial schools, the Troubles laid bare, the transformative pre-digital decades playing out in this propulsive narrative.

Further: Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope while intimate in focus. The Lyons, professionals in a newly independent state, are attacked by paramilitaries in their family home in Tyrone. The eccentric Ó Conaills of Kerry, traumatized by displacement, find themselves in leafy Dublin 4. We encounter a servant who meets Henry VIII, a Lithuanian Jewish family who become part of the fabric of Dublin, and a wild young girl who escapes the laundry only to stumble into a psycho pimp. / Related with dark humour, verve and high literary style, Thirsty Ghosts is a revelatory exploration of Ireland combining themes of power, class, fertility, violence and deep love, forces as universal as the old stories that permeate and illuminate each character’s life.’ (Lilliput Press - online; accessed 23.10.2023.)

Irvine Welsh writes: ‘The Cruelty Men is a tidal wave that drags you like a piece of debris through Irish history from the ice age to gangland Dublin. A bible of f**cked up Irishness.’ (Publisher’s notice; available online at Amazon et al.)

Namesake: A namesake Emer Martin is the CEO of St. John’s Hospital following 18 months in post as its Deputy CEO. (See online - accessed 25.05.2023.)

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