More Phwooar To Her Elbow

“I always enjoyed writing when I was growing up,” says young Wicklow-born novelist Emily Gillmor Murphy. “I was always writing little short stories and stuff, but I never thought I could be a writer because I was actually quite dyslexic as a child. When I finished school my mum encouraged me to get in contact with someone to see if I had any skill at it at all, so I got in touch with [agent] Marianne Gunn O’Connor. She told me I had potential – and to get back in contact again if I ever had a novel.”

The aspiring author didn’t waste her time. Having landed in UCD to study Arts in 2009, she soon set to work on her debut novel. “The first year in college and the summer after, I wrote the first manuscript of You & I. Arts was a great course for me. I had a laptop with me all the time, so whenever I had a couple of hours off, which you do a lot when you’re doing an Arts degree, I just sat down somewhere and wrote away. It was great. So when I finished, I sent it to Marianne and she loved it. So it took off from there.”
Took off is putting it mildly.
“I’ve a two book deal, with Transworld Ireland,” Emily explains, “and also a German publisher and a Russian publisher as well. The second book I’m working away on at the moment. I’ve a few more chapters to write before the first draft is done, and then I’ll send it off to the publishers and hopefully they’ll like it.”
Told from various first-person points of views, You & I follows the misadventures of a group of young students as they attempt to deal with what college life – and indeed life in general – throws at them. However, she insists it’s not a roman a clef.
“The whole book is obviously fictional, but I definitely was inspired by my contemporaries in UCD. I wanted to make it a really realistic book of life in UCD – so while it’s loosely based on real life, the events and the characters are all fictional.”
So none of your fellow students are going to recognise themselves in it?
“No!” she insists. “Similar events to real life kind of happened, but no character is one person. They’re all mixed together.”
While there’s certainly no shortage of casual sex, binge drinking and recreational drug abuse within its pages, she’s also insistent that it doesn’t reflect her own college lifestyle.
“Well, I think everybody’s college life is different,” she syas. “My experience wouldn’t have been at all the same as the characters in the book, but I was surrounded by people who would have had very similar experiences to the characters in the book. I was more of an observer in college. Whenever I noticed something that was interesting, or saw something or heard about something, I kind of took note of it. So things worked their way into the book and slowly turned into something resembling a plot.”
It’s not all sex and drugs, however. The plot also encompasses such thorny issues as broken families, online bullying, mental illness and suicide.
“People think that all students care about is drinking and having sex and stuff like that,” she says. “But they kind of forget that a student is actually an adult and we have to deal with all these very serious adult issues. But what makes it so much more interesting is that we’re not really ready for it yet. When you’re in your 20s and living the student life is probably when you make most of your mistakes and kind of don’t cope with it great. So suicide and mental illness and depression and bullying are part of a lot of people’s lives. It’s very real to a lot of people and that’s what I wanted to honestly address. I didn’t want to gloss it over and go ‘oh, it’s all about partying and all that’, because it’s not. That’s only part of it.”