The Dublin author once caused outrage for writing about domestic abuse. As he publishes his third tale about his heroine Paula Spencer, he talks about optimism for his homeland, new Irish fiction – and the genius of Roy Keane
A couple of days before I’m due to meet Roddy Doyle in Dublin, I test positive for Covid which, although suboptimal, is at least in the spirit of his new book, The Women Behind the Door, the third in his series about Paula Spencer. The book opens with Paula putting on the kettle after enjoying “a great day” out with her pals in May 2021; a trip to the vaccination centre for the first jab of the pandemic, and a sense that, as Doyle puts it, we might be approaching “the beginning of the end”.
Doyle got his first shot at the same place, a repurposed conference centre on the Dublin City University campus in Glasnevin, on the same day. “Driving home, I began to wonder, is there a book here?” he tells me, as we chat, appropriately distanced, over Zoom. “I had been writing short stories, and I was thinking, Can I bring it further? Can I confidently say that we’re over a bit of a hump and we’re heading back to what would have been normality, or some version of normality, something new? So there and then I began to wonder, even before I got home, what would Paula be thinking?”
