“It’s uncanny – the thought and feeling that someone, in a sense, wouldn’t be identifiable or remembered without this piece of writing. That was a starting point for me. My mother was an amazing person and if I didn’t write about her, well, people wouldn’t even know she had existed!”
Nicholas Royle talks to Samantha Harrold about writing Mother: A Memoir in this richly detailed Q&A – read in full here.
‘It’s as though you’ve stumbled across a private letter, not meant to be shared. As intimate as a diary, you’re privy to cherished memories, which the author turns over like something precious in his hands.”
Dementia Together magazine (August/September 2020 issue) chose Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle as their Book Group read and invited readers to share their thoughts: Alzheimers charity website.
‘Take away the glitz or grit, and many popular memoirs probably wouldn’t keep a reader turning pages for long. What Nicholas Royle, author and professor of English at University of Sussex, demonstrates in this portrait of his mother, Kathleen, is how skilful, honest and evocative writing can bring a person to life better than any film.
‘Royle admits he didn’t set out to write a conventional biography, and the finished book is “less a record of events than a grappling with what escapes words”. Nevertheless, his mother, a no-nonsense nurse and crossword loving autodidact emerges as a forceful, funny, talkative and practical woman whose love for her family knew no bounds.’
Sussex Life review Mother: A Memoir by local author Nicholas Royle for their June 2020 issue. Read online here.
Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle is a beautiful and poignant look at family life, bereavement and the effects of dementia on a mother-son relationship. It has been chosen as the June/July Alzheimer’s Society book group read. Reviews of the book will be included in the next Alzheimer’s Society magazine, which is available on a subscription basis. (sign up here.)
‘As I was writing, I was stumbling upon new memories or a new voice track. That moment in the book where I recount my mother’s reading of Iris Murdoch… I haven’t remembered this for ages but it triggered the memory of me phoning John and Iris at their house in Oxfordshire… It was always a very strange, surreal, poignant, comical experience because every time I did it I had to wait several minutes before one of them picked up the phone. It was always a long time and there’s something about that experience of waiting for someone to answer the phone, maybe patience, maybe suspension of life, feeling a strange languidness which went with phoning that number.’
This talk takes the shape of a phone call between Nicholas Royle and Andrew Bennett. They discuss nostalgia, family, homesickness, Iris Murdoch and Raymond Chandler. Listen in here.
‘As dedicated readers we’re always searching for the next title but Covid-19 has made this much more difficult. Writers and publishers need our support more than ever. I spoke to a few independent publishers about their new books, where they can be purchased and how the pandemic has affected them. For some small publishers this is a battle for survival.’
The wonderful NB magazine discuss publishing under lockdown, highlighting several independent publishers and their latest releases including Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle, She-Clown and other Stories by Hannah Vincent, and The Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs.
‘I have lost plenty of people. Every loss is a lessening. Every loss makes one more aware of how much there is to lose. But the death of my mother was something else. I don’t know when she died. She had dementia. For ten years she was among us in the midst of life cut off. An island going down under rising sea-levels. A skyscraper collapsing in a decade-long earthquake. A sunset sleepier than a druid’s daydream. It began in her mid-sixties. It was over before her seventy-fifth birthday. It wasn’t like an island or a skyscraper or a sunset. These similes are to no purpose. Nothing captures the pace of her descent into where she went.’
Bookanista shares Marbles, a chapter from Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle (available to order now).
The Irish Times chose 59 books to watch out for in 2020 from independent publishers, including Mother: a Memoir by Nicholas Royle and The Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs.
Read the article in full HERE.
Nicholas Royle explains in The Conversation why a good novel will always be about sex—though in ways that may not be obvious—and how, when writing An English Guide to Birdwatching, he was conscious of ‘the phantom eyes of the Bad Sex award judges’ peering over his shoulder.
Taking his latest novel An English Guide to Birdwatching as a starting point, Nicholas Royle talked with psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips about how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other. Royle’s novel engages deeply with Freud, especially in the context of ‘the uncanny’.
This is the podcast of their discussion.
Computer programmer James Burt, also known as orbific, recorded a robot reading Hide 13 from An English Guide to Birdwatching.
You can listen to it here.
‘Like my earlier novel Quilt, An English Guide to Birdwatching is in truth very much a novel about anonymity’ — Nicholas Royle answers questions about his novel An English Guide to Birdwatching from Shiny New Books
‘Like my earlier novel Quilt, An English Guide to Birdwatching is in truth very much a novel about anonymity’ — Nicholas Royle answers questions about his novel An English Guide to Birdwatching from Shiny New Books
From an essential plot device for Chandler to the voice of God in Muriel Spark, the author explains how the telephone has wormed its way into literature, and why the novel is itself a kind of phonecall, in the Guardian.
Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he established the MA in Creative and Critical Writing in 2002. He is the author of two novels, both published by Myriad—Quilt and An English Guide to Birdwatching—and many other books, including studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, E. M. Forster and Shakespeare. His books about literature and critical theory are widely influential and have won considerable acclaim. They include The Uncanny (2003), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (fifth edition, 2016, with Andrew Bennett).
Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle is out now.
