“Generation Gaps” by Emma Donoghue

The women and men who people Emma Donoghue’s fiction come from a wide range of eras (medieval to near-future) and countries (France to California). What’s less often discussed is that they also cover a wide age span, from five-year-old Jack in ROOM to eighty-year-old Noah in her most recent novel, AKIN, about a retired professor on a quest to uncover his mother’s World-War-II experiences. Three of Donoghue’s books explore close relationships between children and grandparent or pseudograndparent figures (two generations apart): ROOM, AKIN, and her book for younger readers, THE LOTTERYS PLUS ONE. In this talk (with short readings), Donoghue will discuss challenges - technical, psychological, political and even ethical - raised by writing youth and age. She will offer insight into the struggle to get the language right, make the bodily sensations and rhythms real and unstereotyped, the behaviour and manners convincing, and the cultural references meaningful to readers of a wide range of ages. If writing a child demands a sort of deep excavation of one’s own memory of having been that young, creating a character who is ‘other’ by virtue of being considerably older than oneself calls for a different kind of work: a sort of empathetic extrapolation. A separate but inextricable issue is how to capture the flavour of each historical generation, formed by their distinct experiences, as well as how different generations do or don’t talk to each other.

With financial support from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ International Keynote Speakers Support Fund