Roddy Doyle on who should write what: ‘The only thing that matters is – is it any good?’

Roddy Doyle isn’t concerned about whether someone is qualified to write something – for him, the issue is if it’s any good or not.

He’s often been asked whether he ‘should’ write from a woman’s perspective – as he did for 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, its follow-up in 2006, Paula Spencer, and now the third instalment in the trilogy, The Women Behind The Door.

“It’s not a competitive sport – if I write from the female perspective, I’m not shoving somebody aside,” says Dublin-based Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

“I know that the publishing world isn’t sentimental – if I’m not delivering what the publishers want, they’ll very nicely, very politely, give me the bum’s rush. It hasn’t happened yet.”

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For Doyle, it’s pretty much unavoidable to write from perspectives that aren’t your own. If he was to write a man walking into a room with a woman inside, should he make the man turn around and leave?

Of course not, with Doyle saying: “I have to think about the woman, I have to give her the right lines, I have to go behind her back and look at her, looking at him… It’s all very complicated.”

For the writer, who also penned The Barrytown Trilogy, beginning with The Commitments: “The only thing that matters is is it any good. That’s all that matters. It’s not a moral issue to my mind – it’s a creative issue.”

He then, somewhat surprisingly, mentions Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi movie, Alien – one of his “favourite films”.

“What right had that person to write Alien? They’ve never been up in space… I don’t want to dismiss, but any creative person has to go beyond their own experience. That’s a big chunk of creativity.”

That’s not to say Doyle is opposed to the growing trend for sensitivity readings. “I wouldn’t mind it, as long as it’s part of the editorial process, and I’m not told, ‘We have to change this, this and this’,” he notes, emphasising the importance of context, and how language in Dublin might be different to somewhere else.

Nearly two decades after he last wrote about Paula Spencer, Doyle was compelled to return to her story in spring 2021, when he was getting his first Covid vaccine at The Helix Theatre in Dublin.

The theatre was once home to a production of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and it got Doyle thinking: what would Paula make of the day he was having? The new book grew from there – and even opens with Paula getting her first vaccine in the very same location. The story sees Paula in a much better place in life – she’s sober, her abusive ex-husband, Charlo, is dead, she’s got a new job she enjoys, her children are grown up and she’s seeing a new man.

But her relative peace is shattered when her middle-aged daughter, Nicola, knocks on her door in a crisis – forcing the two to reflect on their relationship and things in the past that Paula might have preferred to leave buried.

While Doyle can’t imagine returning to some of his characters – you won’t, for example, see an update on Paddy Clarke’s life any time soon – Paula occupies a special place in his brain.

“I’m the same age, roughly [as her], and she’s been in my life creatively for over half my life… Since I was in my early 30s,” he explains. Doyle is 66, and he says the fact they’re similar ages is “important”.

“When I started the book [The Woman Who Walked Into Doors], I was the father of very young children. I’m now the father of children in their 30s and late 20s – it’s a different experience,” he says – and this is reflected in the way he writes.

“If I was 30, I could talk about mortality quite easily and totally accept that life comes to an end, but when you get to this stage of life, mortality isn’t an abstract, and you don’t want to be nearer to it.”

He also says “the camera angle changes” as you grow older. “Things become more significant. My diary is still full of things I’m looking forward to… But at the same time, you’re dragging along more and more life.

“There’s a certain looking backwards and forwards, and Paula does it all the time. I wouldn’t have done that in the first book.”

Thanks to what Doyle refers to as the “Sally Rooney moment”, there’s been a recent boom in younger Irish writers. “Agents and publishers are looking more closely at the work of Irish women than they would have done 10 years ago – and I think that’s brilliant. But I read an article [recently] that you would have sworn there hadn’t been any Irish literature before then.”

There’s plenty of younger Irish writers Doyle is excited about – naming Michelle Gallen and Colin Barrett – while still appreciating the work of the older guard, like Anne Enright, suggesting that a certain Irish sensibility unites all of these creatives.

“We’re all breathing the same air,” he says thoughtfully, particularly noting a shared “history of violence”, as well as the cultural impact of Catholicism.

“A big point in my life was turning my back on Catholicism – it wouldn’t be the case here [in England], I’d imagine, if you grew up in a Catholic house. But I didn’t grow up in a Catholic house – I grew up in a Catholic state.”

Even though he says the younger writers “grew up in a very different place than I grew up”, he adds: “That place is where their parents grew up” – and that legacy was passed on.

The Women Behind The Door by Roddy Doyle is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £20. Available now.