Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue is perhaps best known for her novel “Room,” told from the perspective of a 5-year-old boy held captive with his mother. Most of Donoghue’s work, however, is rooted in historical fiction. She frequently writes about characters and perspectives that are often erased from history.
Her latest novel, “The Paris Express,” tells the story of a fateful disaster on a French train in 1895. Donoghue spoke to OPB’s Crystal Ligori in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Historical fiction is a unique genre because you might already know what happens in the end, or at least you might be broadly familiar with the plot. So authors are left to fill in the gaps around a reader’s knowledge. For Irish writer Emma Donoghue, that includes bringing to life isolated monks living on a remote island, the resilience of a child born to a kidnapping victim, and in her latest novel, a group of passengers headed for disaster on a French railway. Donoghue is the author of 16 novels, including the award-winning bestseller “Room,” which was adapted in the acclaimed film of the same name. She’s also written 10 stage plays and adapted two of her own books for the screen.
Donoghue spoke to OPB’s Crystal Ligori in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival about her latest novel. It’s called “The Paris Express.”
[Audience applause]
Crystal Ligori: First things first, “The Paris Express” is about a French railway disaster that happened in 1895. I understand the inspiration came from a photograph that you saw of the aftermath of the crash. Let’s start there.
Emma Donoghue: I feel I came very late to the party, because apparently the photo was a famous dorm room poster. But I stayed at home during my whole first degree, going home to my mammy for dinner every night, so I never had a dorm room poster.
It’s a cluster of photographs taken over a couple of days of a train in a position of extreme indignity, or an epic fail, I would say. This photo often shows up nowadays as a meme with some kind of funny slogan like “WTF” or “You think you’re having a bad day?” [Laughter] It’s a timeless image of high-tech gone horribly wrong. I only saw it a few years ago when I was going to France for the year and I had found our family somewhere to live in the area of Montparnasse. So I just googled “Montparnasse history,” thinking I always enjoy a bit of history, in my private life as well as in my writing life. So let’s see if anything interesting ever happened in Montparnasse. And there was this photograph, and I was like, “That’s my next novel.”
It also made me realize that this particular train disaster is one of many. Like all forms of really convenient transport, like the automobile, there is a death toll, and there has always been. But we carry on because we want to get where we’re going.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that this particular disaster would only have been remembered because of the photograph. If nobody had taken a picture of it, it would have been forgotten. So it’s two technologies embracing. And it made me think a lot about all the other technologies of speed. I’ve got a lot of people on my train who have portable typewriters, ride bicycles or sell cars, they’re all speed freaks in different ways. I didn’t want the novel to be like a jeremiad all about the dangers of technology. I wanted to capture the kind of sheer fun of it as well.
Ligori: In the realm of speed, the novel is pretty quick. It takes place just during a matter of hours, starting at like the 8:30 a.m. departure from the coastline, going to the derailment that happens right at 4 o’clock. Can you talk about the decision to write within that constraint of time? Did it feel freeing, or did it feel constraining?
Donoghue: Oh, I love my limits. I’m a playwright first, really. And what the ancient Greeks called the unities of time, space and action, it’s easier to write a good play with a limited number of people, maybe over one day in one place. And even though the novel can rather more easily cover centuries if you like, I still think the intensity of any situation in which people are sort of stuck together … and the fact that if something’s said over a number of hours, somebody in hour five can make a brief reference to something that somebody said in hour one, and they’ll still remember it and we’ll still remember it. It sort of all lingers in your head simultaneously like a play. Pure pleasure for me to limit them.
But also, I wanted to draw attention to time and urgency, because the disaster happened because of time and urgency. So it’s all about this modern commitment to punctuality. Which, may I say, in 1980s Ireland, none of us felt that. The buses could be half an hour late and nobody panicked. Obviously, in 1895 Paris, that was a culture very committed to the modern, the just in time, the high tech. And so it was unacceptable for the train to be 10 minutes late, hence the entire story.
Ligori: The book has dozens of different characters, including the train itself as a character. How did you work to keep the audience sort of invested in all the different characters and all the different storylines?
Donoghue: It’s a real challenge, for readers as well as for writers. I’ve written several books with three point-of-view characters. This is more of a challenge, but it was necessary because it’s a novel about a train. And the whole point of a train is that it’s not one little family in their car having epiphanies on a road movie. A train is mass transit. And it’s always been not just mass, but segregated mass transit. It’s always been the posh carriages and the horribly crowded third class carriages. So I knew it had to be a kind of a novel surveying all of society, so there had to be a lot of people.
I tried to introduce people at different times rather than everybody getting on in Normandy at the same time. And also, arranging people in sort of clusters so they would have interesting conversations with each other. I wouldn’t be just giving you a survey of the silent thoughts of all these people. I needed to make them start interacting immediately.
Ligori: Before we get too far, I’d love for you to read just a little excerpt from the book. I don’t think it needs much setup.
Donoghue: The point of view at this point is an Irishman called John.
[Reading excerpt from “The Paris Express”]
“The main reason John travels in third class is to stretch the meager remittances mamma sends him from their Dublin suburb. But it also lets him study characters, the more colorful, the better. The girl in the extravagantly feathered hat smoking opposite him, for instance. Her small, stern features could come from anywhere between Bombay and Manila, he reckons. By her clothes, she announces herself as a demimonde, the kind mamma would denounce as a denizen of Gomorrah. John has shaken off all those old Catholic pieties. He would never resort to hiring one of these women. But they do wake in him a private, tender sympathy.
“The smoker’s hat bears a taxidermied nest full of slightly crumpled black and orange oriolele birds. Her flame-colored dress is billowing over John’s knees, and God Almighty, is that a live monkey on her shoulder, grinning out from her huge chignon, the morning sun haloing it with red gold? Next, his eyes are drawn to the passenger beside the plumed girl, a woman with a cone-shaped head, her baby on her lap with its skull tightly bandaged to produce the same weirdly high forehead and flattened ears. Now, that’s the kind of thing you only see deep in the countryside.
“‘Excuse me!’ she snaps at the girl, making John jump. She’s addressing her neighbor. ‘Your feathers are in my face!’
“‘The girl blows a smoke ring before saying ‘You’re welcome.’ Her French is thickly accented, that’s about as much as this Irishman can tell.
“‘Take it off, why don’t you?’ the conehead demands. The man whose hat has the label Monsieur Dois points overhead helpfully and says ‘Hats go up in the ropes.’
“‘Not mine,’ says the outrageous girl in orange. ‘It don’t come off.’
“‘Why not?’ the conehead wants to know.
“‘It’s sewn into my hair,’ she says. And her poker face dares anyone to call her a liar. Several passengers grunt or mutter, but John finds it puzzling that none of them has raised any objection to the monkey.”
[Reading ends]
[Audience laughter and applause]
You know, I feel like a bit of a cheat talking about these people, because I meant to make them all up, right? I am capable of invention. I’ve written novels that are purely fictional. But the problem was that I was doing my background research to see what kind of people might have been around in Paris in 1895, and I found so many interesting people. It’s kind of a, dare I say it, Portland of its day. [Laughter] It’s a place people go to on purpose because they’re weird, and weird in many different ways. Paris was full of inventors and painters and radicals and queers and people from the farthest flung corners of the French Empire, which was enormous.
I came across Annah, the girl blowing the smoke rings, mostly in photographs and in paintings. She worked for Gauguin, or you could say that she was a trafficked Indonesian teenager who was unfortunate enough to end up as his studio assistant, mistress … none of the words quite fit. And she turns up in paintings, staring out, just called one word “Annah,” or sometimes “Annah the Javanese,” so we know nothing about her real background. She turns in a few photographs by his social circle as well. And she’s not smiling in any of them. And it was her unsmiling face that made me think, “She’s earning a place in my book.” And also, the fact that when Gauguin – they were on holiday in Brittany, by the way, where racist teenagers threw stones at her – sent her back to Paris to get the apartment ready for him. And she sold all his possessions and ran away. [Laughter]
Like many interesting people, she disappears from history. And so a few years later I’m thinking, “she could very easily be on my train.”
Ligori: I feel like I chose that reading specifically because it really captured how claustrophobic the train felt. Someone’s dress billowing over your knees …
Donoghue: And you were back-to-back, there were no backs on the benches. Shoulder blades to shoulder blades with strangers.
Ligori: How did you think about which characters were in proximity to one another in the train cars?
Donoghue: I suppose I wanted there to be sparks, right? John would go on to be the famous Irish playwright John Synge. But at this point, he has no idea. He just thinks he’s a loser student, hanging out in Paris, and pining for women and not daring to speak to any. So I wanted to give him some outrageous girl to not even dare flirt with, but to moon at.
Some people I put together because I thought they’d find each other interesting. There’s a car seller couple, and I stick them in a carriage with the one-armed engineer who would go on to invent the Paris Metro. And one thing I love about him … well, his name, Fulgence Bienvenüe, but also, he had lost an arm to the train system already in that he’d slipped and had it cut off. But this did not in any way dampen his enthusiasm for mass transit. He invented the Paris Metro, and he said he would have no first class in it, it would be equal for everybody – which was a bit of a breakthrough.
Sometimes I put people together because I thought they would annoy each other. They then sometimes change carriages to get away from each other, or to pursue each other. So I suppose I have all these little vectors of antagonism, attraction, all sorts of feelings.
Ligori: As you mentioned, some of the folks in your book were actually on that train to Montparnasse.
Donoghue: About 12 of them we know were on that train, including three members of parliament, which is as far as I can tell why the disaster happened, because it distorts the system when some really entitled VIPs get on the train.
Ligori: [Laughter]It distorts the system, we could just leave it there.
Donoghue: The gigantic spanners – well you’d say wrenches – thrown into the machine.
Ligori: And then some of the characters like Annah could have been on the train, and then some were just totally made up. Can you talk about sort of your research for each of those categories, how you decided the mix?
Donoghue: I began with the people I knew were on the train. My source is about 40 articles from French newspapers and magazines. And luckily for me, standards of journalism were super low in those days. They had to be lively, but there was no fact checking. There was probably no means of fact-checking either. There was certainly no editors saying, “Do you have evidence for that?” It was all done at top speed. If you didn’t know the name of someone in an accident, you’d just make it up. People’s surnames turn up in many different variants, you’d hear a sound and you say, “That sounded a bit like Jones, I’ll put Jones.” So this leaves a lot more room for the fiction writer to say, “oh, I choose to believe that version of things.” So even in terms of, say, the number of carriages that were on the train that day, all these estimates vary.
I knew who the four crew were: the driver, the stoker, the senior guard and the junior guard. And luckily, the French state is so bureaucratic. The year we spent there, for instance, if our daughter wanted to go on a day trip to Belgium with her school, we’d have to send in her passport and our passports, and then they would want proof we were married – which we’re not. So then we had to do the whole, “We are lesbians. In Canada, it’s OK just to be lesbians, you don’t have to be married,” which I suppose was enlightening for the French bureaucrats.
But anyway, I was able to look up these guys’ military records, their birth and death data, their wives’ names, how much they earned. And that was all very, very inspiring, even when it might seem generic. My driver, Guillaume Pellerin, he had a father with exactly the same name and a son with exactly the same name, and they were all drivers for the same railway company, and they were all buried together in Montparnasse. That’s like being in the mob, right? [Laughter] That’s a multi-generational commitment to the job, which might explain why- you take your job so seriously that if you’re running 10 minutes behind, you start to speed up.
Ligori: You often have characters in your book who haven’t received a lot of attention in history or maybe even have been erased from history: queer characters, People of Color, children. Is that something that’s intentional in your writing practice, giving voice to the voiceless?
Donoghue: You know, Crystal, it’s not just intentional, it’s the wellspring of many of my books. I ran out of my own material quite quickly, given that I’ve never had another real job. [Laughter] I wrote my first novel about my student years and my second novel about my convent school years, and then there’s nothing left. And then I discovered history. I’d been doing a PhD in Cambridge where the buzzword was “revisionism,” find the people who’ve been left out. And I found this so exciting, putting the women back into history, putting the enslaved people back into history, the people who were put on show as freaks. All the odd bods, and the great masses of the working class whose lives often would only be recorded at the point where they showed up in some kind of conflict with the state, arrest records. The troublemakers. And with historical fiction, we’re really not looking for the average person. We’re typically looking for the troublemakers, because our readers and we are more likely to be able to connect with people if they’re a bit more like us, but not anachronistically so. So I would say every historical novel is kind of a reaching out and grasping the muddy hands of the past.
I would say it’s a huge ongoing source of inspiration to me, to look at the lives of those who’ve been left out, who sometimes were famous and have since been forgotten, or sometimes were never famous at all. And quite a few things I’ve written have been inspired by just one recorded phrase or line by someone who would have been considered a lowlife. I did a story once about a medieval woman who took part in a riot, and she took the university charter in Cambridge and she threw it on a bonfire and she said, “Away with the learning of the [clerks]!” She is absolutely forgotten, except for her name, Margery Starre, and this one line she said. And I was like, I’ve got to take her and make her heard again.
So yeah, it gives me a real feeling of kind of mission to get these people the attention they deserve.
Ligori: I love that. I think also the perspective of writing from a child’s point of view is something you’ve had in multiple books. That includes this book where we have a young boy, Maurice, who’s on the train. How do you approach that childlike wonder?
Donoghue: Well, my kids would say that I just cheat and copy them. You could chart their upbringing, and all these books of mine that have children in them, they’re all books from the last 22 years. And my kids, they don’t really read my books, but they’ll go to a movie or a play if it’s on. So that’s a real motivator for me to adapt my work for the stage or the screen. [Laughter] If it’s in book form, say, my son will pick up some book and he’ll go like, “Would I be the young monk, the one who climbs?” Yeah, you would. They turn up in many, perhaps distorted variations. I basically am very interested in kids, and I’ve found the past 22 years of childrearing fascinating. So worth it! Worth it just for the material, I tell them, quite apart from the happiness. [Laughter]
So yeah, you could say that there’s nothing special about Maurice Marland. He, like many of my characters in this book, would go on to be special. He would be a French Resistance hero in World War II in the town of Granville. So how I came across them was when I was reading about that town, and I thought, “Oh, if that schoolteacher who fought so bravely in the French Resistance was on my train, he would have been like 7. Could a 7-year-old go on a train alone?” And next thing I knew, I was inviting young Maurice onto my train.
I just think children are a really fresh perspective. They don’t know the rules and the protocols of social interaction. They think to ask the questions that others wouldn’t. They are often quite anxious about things like, “How will I wake up at my stop? Where will I pee?” But they are also full of appreciation and relish for everything they see, and they’re fascinated. If you told me I had to limit my fiction to children or adults, I’d pick children anytime.
Ligori: I love that. I know that a lot of the characters in your stories are queer, and I just have a question if you feel like, when overlaying a queer storyline on someone who is a real person, if you have any pause for that. I’m thinking specifically in this book about Albert, a politician who steps off the train mid journey for an illicit rendezvous with a man in a railway station bathroom. That was a real person.
Donoghue: No, you’re right, you’re right. I have a slight qualm about that one. [Laughter] But first of all, perfectly plausible – rich man having a little man-on-man action on the side. It has been known to happen in history. [Laughter] Basically, that scene was inspired by the last 19th century urinal in Paris was near where we lived in Montparnasse. And it’s this kind of S-shaped grill of rusty, old metal, where men could just sort of step into the seclusion of the two curves. And I remember thinking I’ve got to put that urinal in my book.
The ethics of it are interesting because anytime I have this little qualm about, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t imply that the person was gay if they weren’t.” And then I think, “Have we ever worried about ascribing heterosexuality to characters in history?” Characters about whom we know nothing, and you’re like, “I’ll invent a love of his life and a marriage,” and so forth. There’s that double standard, too. Two women can have spent their entire lives together and they’re often assumed to be best pals, whereas a man and a woman glance at each other across a room and it’s a hot affair. So I decided that I wouldn’t allow myself to fret about the burden of proof.
All I really knew about this man was that he delayed the train, and he delayed it in several respects. We know for sure that he asked the train to make a special stop so that his carriage could be attached. Then I looked up the sort of biographical details I could find, and I found that his wife wouldn’t live very long after this particular train journey. So I thought maybe she’s an invalid. His marriage began to sort of take shape in my mind. And I found myself quite sympathetic to him, because there he is with this invalid wife who’s not much fun and his thoughts are elsewhere. And I could relate to that. So suddenly, instead of critiquing this rich entitled man, I was quite sympathizing with the day he was having.
It’s a dangerous thing, fiction. To read it or to write it. Your sympathies are worked on as you think about things from somebody’s point of view. I would never write a novel from Stalin’s point of view, because I’m sure I’d start seeing the sensibleness in his actions. [Laughter]
Ligori: I feel like this idea of class plays out a lot in this novel too. And I think the example you just gave, in the book, the train is not just added to the end, it’s specifically the additional train car that the stop is made for, it’s added in the middle because …
Donoghue: Safest there, if there’s a crash. On a road, cars can be hit from the side. But trains, typically, it’s from the front or the back. So they always put the third class at the back as the buffer, cause that way if there was a crash from the back, it would only be third-class people who got telescoped into themselves. And the insurance companies preferred not to have to pay out for a first-class passenger, cause that would be big money. Whereas nowadays, we may complain about first class, economy and so on planes. But I don’t think first class are any safer than the rest of us.
Ligori: Even though there are dozens of people in this book, there are two in the story that it somewhat centers on: a 21-year-old anarchist named Mado, and then Blonska, an older Russian immigrant who’s kind of the yin to Mado’s yang. Both women see the horrors of the world but approach how it could change in different ways. Were you intentionally writing these characters as sort of a mirror to one another?
Donoghue: Absolutely. And those two are the kind of moral center of the novel. They’re both real people who I don’t have any reason to believe that they truly were on the train. But they’re the ones who have the crucial conversations on the train, because I knew that the story of the train would be kind of powered by anger about social injustice, given that it’s a survey of this highly stratified, class-ridden society. And I thought, if I put someone on the train who has a real and immediate reason to be thinking about these things, who has a plot, basically, it’ll mean that her thoughts aren’t just sort of random, like, “Oh, life’s so unfair.” It’ll be very specifically, “him, her, those bastard politicians.” Her opinions would be sort of anchored in the now.
And then I wanted somebody as a sort of corrective to her. So for the first one I chose Madeleine Pelletier, who I nickname Mado because I had too many people in the book whose names began with M and A. She was in anarchist circles, and she was a fiery feminist. She wore men’s clothes just on principle. She was like, “I will not wear skirts until we’re free!”
And so as a corrective to her, I chose this very quirky, sort of intellectual librarian and volunteer social worker. She was called Blonska, just one word. She was Russian. She was dirt poor because she gave away every penny she had. And so these are both burningly idealistic left-wing women, but very different in what they want to do with their rage. In a way, the whole book is engineered to bring those two together and to see how their struggle will play out.
Ligori: They do have a lot of the same ideals, and it’s just the idea of how they could be resolved, how the world could be better. They’re coming at it from totally different angles.
Donoghue: And of course, it’s like every bitter fight between people on the left leading up to an election, say. Each of them sees their views as so right, but they have far more in common than their enemies, but neither wants to concede. And there’s always that spectrum between, “Let’s tear it all down,” and those who say, “Let’s incrementally improve.” That’s a timeless pattern I wanted to look at in the context of 19th century politics, when anarchism was a huge thing, and in particular, anarchist terrorism.
Ligori: I’d love to talk in general about the research for this book. In addition to researching people and history, just from reading it, you must have had to take a deep dive into the mechanics of how a steam-powered train works and how it was operated.
Donoghue: Oh, I was in a cold sweat about whether I would plausibly represent the movement of the train. Because if this was just a novel about the people on the train, the passengers, I wouldn’t need to explain the tech. But because the crew are really important to me, I wanted to sort of take the working-class lives of the railway system very seriously, so I had to show that the men of the train actually operating the train. And in particular, I remember thinking I can’t leave out the stoker. I know that he puts coal in the fire, but what else does he do? And so it was really important to me to work out exactly what he did and make it real. Things like the stokers would have to wear wooden clogs because if they wore leather shoes they’d go on fire from the embers.
I loved getting into the deep details of that. I pored over so many diagrams of which pistons went where and read very specialist stuff about the invention of a sort of a scoop that pulled water up as the train was moving so that you wouldn’t have to stop to get more water. One thing I found very helpful was to read the kind of records of union arguments with the bosses about things like pay. A breakthrough moment was when I found that the crew could get a bonus of up to 40% at the end of the year if they kept the train moving on time every day, if they had a high standard of punctuality. So the bosses were really saying, “This matters to us so much.” So even though there were also official rules like, “You shouldn’t speed,” if you were being offered a 40% bonus for something, that really is the kind of implicit instruction from the bosses of, “do whatever it takes to get there on time.”
So I found both the mechanics of the train and the things hidden in the bureaucratic sources really helpful to understand it. Because the train is just such a good image for that kind of forward thrust of nothing can stand in the way of progress, nothing can be allowed to slow down capitalism.
Ligori: I know that you lived in Paris while you wrote this book. Can you talk about the experience of being physically in the place where the book takes place during the writing process?
Donoghue: Oh, I love it. I go into a kind of a fugue state when I’m somewhere that I know I’m going to be setting something, because I’m living in those two moments simultaneously. I’d be literally crossing the road, bringing our daughter to school, and I’d see one of the little street signs. And in Paris, they not only name the streets after, say, obscure 18th century women mathematicians, but they’ll give a little mini bio on the sign. So you could be knocked down by one of the electric scooters that the city is full of because you’re trying to read the details of what happened. Or there’ll be some little oddity in the architecture, which again has a story.
Near where we lived, there was a strange little marking or indentation in the wall of an old nunnery. And I read up on it, and it was a baby hatch, it was where babies were put and swiveled, and then the parents of the baby would scuttle away and then the nuns would raise it. It’s a very palimpsestic city, and I was constantly seeing things that reminded me of then.
In particular, I loved working out the distances. I’d look up the addresses of the train crew, and I’d think if their house was right here, they could hear the trains going by all the time, it was as if they were living in the middle of the train system. So that was hugely helpful. But also the vibes, the mindset of a culture. I’m a perpetual outsider in France, and my French really never gets any better, even though we’ve now spent three-and-a-half separate years in France, but I just stay home reading and writing in English. But I love those sort of encounters with the French mindset and how seriously take food, for instance. Even though there are no dining cars, there’ll be a period in the middle of the train journey when people will start taking out their hampers. And even in the third-class carriage, they’ll be taking their camembert cheese and their sausage, and they’ll be taking it seriously too, even if it’s not posh food.
Ligori: Was there anyone who didn’t make it on the train?
Donoghue: Oh, many of them got effectively pushed off, yes. I feel like I kind of auditioned twice as many. Some really interesting people, I would sort of bring them onto my train and I’d find a position for them. And then I would start writing scenes from their point of view or scenes that included them. And then I’d be like, “You’re just not earning your place on the train.” [Laughter] I feel bad still, cause some of them seemed to be quite enjoying themselves. Maybe they were a bit too much like somebody else, or they were a bit too famous. I got quite far down the road of including the dancer Loie Fuller, who’s known for those extraordinary diaphanous fabrics and so on. But she was just not having a lively day on the train. I don’t know what it is.
Whereas others, much more obscure people, their particular kind of puzzle piece happened to fit with the others. I didn’t want everybody to be a bohemian, say. So there was quite a high rate of culling. Christian Dior’s father was the most famous man of Granville. He basically had a double scheme where he would buy the contents of the toilets of the town, he’d get paid to deal with the toilets, and then he would sell it all back to the farmers as fertilizer. It was from such stinky origins that the Christian Dior fashion house and fortune was made. And I thought that was very funny, so I had Christian Dior’s father on the train. But beyond what I’ve told you, he was failing to produce any further interest.
Ligori: Off he goes. This feels like kind of a silly question, but when do you know when you’re done with the research? When are you ready to start the novel?
Donoghue: I’m never done with the research. But luckily, nowadays, you can look things up while you’re halfway through writing a sentence. The internet is amazing for the past. It’s full of people helpfully sharing their ideas. And not just actual sources of the past, like databases, newspaper collections, genealogical databases and government sources, but also people sharing their thoughts. So, for instance, with some of my novels – I’m thinking of “Haven,” say, set around the year 600 – I used a lot of sources of modern people trying to recreate an early medieval lifestyle and make their own knife, make their own bag for carrying coals and so on. In the case of “The Paris Express,” I would have watched YouTube videos where elderly Englishmen have spent the last 20 years restoring a steam engine and then they take it for a ride. I’m looking at the video going, “oh, that’s how you move that switch!”
I love the research and I go back to it all the time. I do a lot in order to generate my storylines and make my plans. But then I get halfway into writing a sentence and I’m like, “I must check, would her shoes have wooden heels?” And sometimes you’re like, “Oh, historical fiction, my God, can I not write a single line without having to put in square brackets, ‘Is this true? Plausible? Check it!’”
Ligori: You mentioned “Haven,” and I know that “The Paris Express” is much more modern than “Haven.” Did that make the research easier to do at all? Or is it still both of those happened more than 100 years ago, so research is research?
Donoghue: It’s work in both cases, but if I think back to myself researching “The Paris Express,” it was a bit more fine patisserie involved. There’d be a lot of me sitting there, sugar dusted in a cafe, jotting down “could see the Eiffel Tower from this angle.” Whereas my research for “Haven” was more like, “I’m going down this rabbit hole, and will anyone ever want to read about these mad monks?”
So in each case it’s very enjoyable, utter absorption, and following the most obscure trails. But yes, this one felt like a more obviously pleasurable, touristy experience. But again, full of serious stuff too. Little anecdotes about the lives of the poor are just sort of stuck like birds in my mind. I remember finding out that it was illegal to gather twigs in a wood, for instance, because that all belonged to somebody else. I remember thinking I want my characters to see things from the train as well as what’s on the train. So I definitely want a glimpse of somebody taking illegal twigs out of the woods.
Ligori: I mentioned at the top of our conversation about your writing of “Room,” which went on to become a movie which received four Academy Award nominations and tons of other accolades. Do you think or do you think that “Room” changed your trajectory of your writing career?
Donoghue: It’s funny, it didn’t really change the writing, but it got me a lot more readers, which is fantastic. Not just for “Room” itself, but lots more people have either heard of me or are a bit willing to give my wild ideas the benefit of the doubt and try them out. There’s been no pressure from my publisher, no overt pressure, to write anything like “Room,” maybe because it was such a one-off strange book. But there’s just more of a general willingness to try my books. “Room” has helped all my books, before and after. Some of my previous books got reprinted and all those since have sold better. So I’m hugely grateful to it.
And also, it opened the door into film. It’s quite difficult to get into the film world. I feel that anyone can just write a book at home and if it’s good enough, it’ll get published. But the film world can seem like a very mysterious, closed-door kind of institution full of mysterious jargon. They use jargon at points where there’s really no need for jargon. And also, I remember reading the stats when I was writing “Room.” Perhaps more than 50% of novels were being written by women, but films were still at about 85% white men. And I remember thinking oh, no, it’s clearly a last bastion of privilege here. There’s no need for it to be this special, intimidating, technical form of writing. I mean, it’s fewer words than a novel, right? I thought, can’t be impossible.
I decided that I didn’t want to be squeezed out and have somebody else write the screenplay. And I knew people were interested in a film of “Room,” so I decided to write the film script before the novel came out. I’d sold the novel, but there’s always about a year where you’re twiddling your thumbs and feeling nervous, you know. And so I thought, OK, I’ll write this film script then before anybody else can do it. And when they come knocking, I thought, I can say, “Aha! I have the script. You have to use mine.” [Laughter] Of course, they wouldn’t have had to use mine. They could have said mine was rubbish. But it got me to the head of the queue.
So I then was able to write the film, “The Wonder.” And most recently, I co-wrote “H Is for Hawk,” the adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s wonderful memoir that is coming out in January with Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson in it. We’re so lucky. I feel those opportunities have only come to me because of the success of “Room,” so I’m particularly grateful for that.
Ligori: How do you decide what ideas get manifested into what format? How do you know what’s a short story versus a novel when you sit down and write?
Donoghue: I usually have a feeling of the form that is ideal for me. Sometimes it’s a matter of what you can cope with emotionally, because some of my short stories have been about really grim situations that could easily make a big meaty novel, but I don’t want to write it. I’ve got one about an 18th century apocalyptic cult who lock themselves in a barn to starve themselves till Jesus comes. And I remember thinking, in a sense, I’m wasting this material by writing a short story. But somebody else feel free to go and write the three-volume novel about it.
Sometimes it’s because the particular aspect of the project I want to bring out seems to call for, say, the psychological depth of a novel. A novel gives you so much time for all these conversations, for all these subtleties of interaction between people. You can build up a flirtation or an attraction between people so subtly, because they’re saying so many things. Whereas, as soon as it’s in a screenplay, it’ll be more obvious because fewer things are said. On the other hand, a screenplay can be so visually naturalistic. I remember visiting the set of “Room” and the designers had drawn little faces on the electrical outlets, just like a kid would around the three holes. Film can really make you feel you’re there. But then plays are amazingly involving for the audience, because they know it’s a play, it’s being enacted that particular night, using the energy of the audience as well as the cast. So plays are absolutely wonderful that way.
I often have a feeling of what at least the first form should be. And if I think it’s going to be fiction at all, I probably want it to be fiction first, because with fiction, you get to make the whole world up. It would feel a bit odd to write a film of something and then start trying to flesh it out. However, sometimes they’re practical things. If a project fails in one form, if it doesn’t get made, say, film is so expensive, you can sometimes rewrite it into another form. I have one play that was a TV script, but when the producer was sacked for sexual harassment and we were not allowed to make the TV show, I remember thinking, “I’m damned if I’m going to let him take this story down with him.” So I thought I’ll turn that into a play. Make do and mend.
Ligori: Speaking of plays, I read, I think, that you were working on a musical. Is that right?
Donoghue: I had a musical on this summer in Canada, yeah. I don’t write the music, it’s based on Irish folk music. So it uses over a dozen traditional Irish folk songs, and not the more well-known ones. I tried to go for ones you won’t have heard. of. But basically, I felt that music was needed to tell the story I wanted to tell based on these letters between an Irish couple who went out to Canada during the famine, and they were grocers. And he went first, and his wife came a year later, and they were writing back and forward. And it’s just such an eloquent set of letters, you could see those lines of love between them, and yet the tension of. He’d put on the back of the envelope, “P.S., bring the gun.”
So this became my first musical, it’s called “The Wind Coming Over the Sea.” It was just a delightful experience. And because the couple settled near where I live in Canada, some of their great-grandchildren came to the show. And the director had put about 26 of the seats on stage to create that kind of coffin ship, here we all are in the ship together, telling this story. So the great-grandchildren who are now in their 50s, I think were actually sitting there on stage, and the cast were just so overwhelmed, like, “Will you be glad of what we’ve done with your great-grandparents’ story?” It’s an amazing history come to life.
Ligori: Is there something special about historical fiction that makes you keep coming back to it?
Donoghue: I like how it acts as – this is a word I remember learning in my first week at college – a de-familiarization device. It makes you recognize things from your own life but set in a different context. Sometimes you realize that things you think of as modern are actually far older than that. In Paris in the 1890s, for instance, all public spaces had three different garbage bins, so everything could be recycled. You recycled your oyster shells, for instance.
Sometimes it’s that I want people to recognize something like today but a bit different. I remember when I was surveying 19th century clothing to see what might be interesting to comment on in my novel, I came across this campaign to ban birds in hats and jewelry, because it was a massive, massive trade. The left-wing arguments in those days were like, “no, you shouldn’t be wearing an oriel on your hat, Mary!” And I liked that because me and my friends have had so many different qualms about … I remember a long, long boycott of Nestle, for instance. So the idea that progressive people were having exactly the same arguments but about feathers, for instance. That’s a lovely way to de-familiarize something from today.
Ligori: I’ve heard you mention that people often come up to you and say, “oh, I have this great story about my grandma,” or something like that. But what is it about a real-life event, any event, that makes it stick in your brain and makes you want to write about it?
Donoghue: Well, it’s certainly not the stories people bring me. [Laughter] And no insult to the people with the stories, but the stories they bring me are kind of pre-selected as what they think of as “Emma Donoghue stories,” so they’re just shatteringly sad. It’s just misery piled on misery. It’ll be like, “My grandma died in the workhouse. Did you know her three sisters did as well?” And I’m listening to this thinking, “But no, I feel a real Emma Donoghue’s story is where there’s a twist. Like, maybe one of them doesn’t die in the workhouse!” [Laughter] There often needs to be a little bit of a twist. Something a bit odd or a bit unexpected about the situation, or an unusual outcome, or just something unpredictable.
For instance, one story that I turned into a novel about a 19th century divorce case called “The Sealed Letter,” the wife in it, the Admiral’s wife, was cheating on him with his colleague. So that’s like a situation you might get in a Shakespeare play. It’s like a kind of a comic version of “Othello,” almost. But this real wife was actually having an affair with two of his young colleagues separately, and simultaneously. And I just thought, like, that’s a great example of why I use history, because it’s so much odder than what I would be likely to invent. [Laughter]
Ligori: Are there any historical events that you want to do, but you just can’t figure out what the right approach is? Or something maybe you started to write about, but you couldn’t push through?
Donoghue: Oh yeah, I’ve got files of dormant projects. Sometimes it’s that I’m just clearly not the right person to write about this. So there are many interesting historical incidents, and I think, “Ooh, please let someone write about that, but not this white lady.” And it’s not an absolute rule. Because, for instance, my novel “Learned by Heart” about Eliza Raine, who is this young biracial, the first lover of Anne Lister, the Yorkshire diarist. I waited about 20 years thinking, “Somebody should be writing about Eliza Raine. Please let somebody write this novel.” And then at a certain point I was like, “OK, I’ll do it.” But I did it with a lot of trepidation. But there are many other cases where I just think I do not understand enough about the culture in that particular historical incident, so that’s not one I’m going to try and tackle.
Sometimes it’s that they’re too bleak, even for me. Like “The Wonder” is a fictional story about a fasting girl, and there were lots of real fasting girl cases. And I had heard about some of those cases 20 years earlier, but none of them had been quite right. And in particular, most of them had been just too unbearably sad for me. So I only managed to write the novel when I realized that I could write a fictional version, which would be just exactly as sad as I wanted it to be. The calibration of history.
And others, they seem like great juicy stories, and yet somehow, they don’t come to life for me. So it’s a bit of an unpredictable process.
Ligori: I feel like often this is like the, not the question to ask, but I also feel like it’s something people want to know because you do have “The Paris Express” out now. Are you already thinking about what the next piece is?
Donoghue: I’ve already sold the next one. [Laughter] The life of a writer, it’s a bit of a conveyor belt of the imagination. The problem is we’re often way down the conveyor belt. We’re thinking about the edits that our editors will want to the next novel, and we’re simultaneously writing the one after that and planning the one after that. So it’s often quite difficult to remember the names of the characters of the book we’re talking about.
It’s not that we don’t care about it, we do. For the whole first year of publication, it’s sort of like the new baby. You desperately care for it, and you want to defend it from any nasty reviews, that kind of thing, and you have all those protective feelings. But you might be a little hazy on the details. I’ve certainly forgotten how a train engine works, because those files have been wiped and replaced with the obscure details of the next thing.
Ligori: Emma, what character would you be on this train, or would you be your own unique character?
Donoghue: I think the one I connected with most, there’s this woman who sells cars, and she’s there with her teenage daughter, and she just thinks it’s a perfectly nice day. And she’s very fond of her daughter, and I put in a little description of the daughter’s ear and how the sunlight is coming through it. That’s my daughter’s ear, which I’ve perfectly preserved there, by the way. Don’t tell her. [Laughs] But what happens basically is that another passenger in the carriage starts to ask questions about the health of the daughter, which makes the mother start to think, “Oh, am I in a different story? Are we in fact in the story of my child has a fatal illness and I hadn’t realized?” So, I think that particular kind of investment in motherhood does mean that that character is someone I relate to strongly.
But also, Blonska, the Russian emigre, librarian, social worker. But I don’t have any of her sort of courage for activism or her austerity. Like she starts the novel literally sleeping on the hard ground in the train station so that she won’t have to waste money on a hotel. I’m very drawn to these zealots, but I’m not a bit like them.
Ligori: Emma, I just want to thank you so much for joining me today.
Donoghue: It’s been a treat.
Ligori: Please give it up for Emma Donoghue.
[Audience applause]
Miller: That was Emma Donoghue, talking to OPB’s Crystal Ligori about her novel “The Paris Express” in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
