Being neurodivergent helps me as a writer - Cork author

Award-winning writer Danielle McLaughlin’s latest novel, Rituals, is partly influenced by her autism spectrum diagnosis.

As a child growing up in County Cork, Danielle attended a psychiatrist for OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

With constant reports on the television news of the carnage in Northern Ireland, the young Danielle would have to search her bedroom for explosives before going to bed.

“It was ridiculous obviously but very real to a child,” she says. “I was trying to control my environment and feel safe.”

When she was around 40, Danielle was diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum and got a second opinion confirming the initial diagnosis.

While she says autism is classified as a disability, she embraces her neurodivergence.

“I don’t feel that I’m disabled because in my work as a writer, it helps me in different ways,” she says.

Obsessed with detail and getting everything right, Danielle says her hyper-focus on her writing is actually an asset. When she worked years ago as a lawyer, her focus on detail was very useful then too.

Rituals, set in Cork, is a highly enjoyable read; funny, touching, quirky, and quite unique.

It’s about a public servant, Joan, who is in her fifties and used to living alone. However, an unexpected career break prompts her to take in a lodger, referred to throughout the book as ‘the lodger’ apart from one occasion when he is named Dermot.

The lodger is a young man studying English literature at university. Together, he and Joan must learn to negotiate everything from a shared bathroom to the perils of global warming.

While Danielle says that Joan is a fictional character, there are aspects of herself in the protagonist. Joan has OCD but is never diagnosed in the book. She has various rituals, one involving a conch shell, which she has to enact every day.

“Joan has kind of found her own way of getting through the world, but when she hits a vulnerable patch, she finds it nearly too much for her to cope,” explains Danielle.

“Her coping mechanisms don’t extend that far.”

The character runs into a bit of trouble at work over something entirely innocent on her part but misunderstood by her boss, hence the career-break.

Interestingly, Rituals was written as a kind of collaboration with a visual artist who has her own ritual as part of her practice.

Mitchelstown native, Siobhan Rea, who lives in Dublin, is a friend of Danielle. The artist has an exercise that starts every morning at 8.30am when she does a 10cm sq drawing using whatever materials she has to hand. Siobhan is fed by what’s going on in the world and what she sees in front of her.

“Siobhan has a fantastic archive of art,” says Danielle. “I’ve known for years that she was doing these drawings and when she agreed to collaborate, she gave me drawings from a three month chunk of time.”

Danielle was inspired by some of the drawings. For example, Siobhan gave her a drawing of a jar of ketchup which led to the lodger’s habit of smearing much of his food with tomato sauce.

There is a detailed scenario about the lodger wanting to give his little sister a birthday present of a pink tambourine, which is inspired by Siobhan’s depiction of such an instrument.

But the lodger is stymied by his stepfather’s refusal to allow him into the house. Joan comes to the rescue.

When Danielle studied the set of drawings that Siobhan gave her, she knew she could make a story out of them.

“It was a matter of excavating all the visuals to find out what the story was.

“So what I’ve ended up with came from what Siobhan’s drawings said to me, things that cooked up with things from my own life and experience.

“The drawings spoke to me in particular ways.”

Does Danielle have her own rituals when it comes to writing? Her notebooks must have a cover bearing some sort of detail on them.

“I used to have a very fixed routine when my children were younger and I was starting out writing,” she says. “I would take them to school and then go to a café to write. But since I don’t have the school run in my life anymore, things are much more fluid.”

Danielle tends to start her day doing online teaching via Zoom.

“I love teaching. Some days, I might then write more than one thousand words and other days, there might be no words at all. I might be editing, so it’s very mixed.

“I’ve been saying to myself lately that I must get into the habit of maybe doing some of my new writing first thing in the day.”

None of Danielle’s three university-going children are studying English or creative writing. Her eldest daughter is studying medicine, her second girl is studying law and Irish, and her son is studying business and Spanish.

Danielle firmly believes that anyone who has a love of or leaning towards working with words can be taught how to use them effectively. She has her own writers’ group which is great for feedback and suggestions.

It certainly works for Danielle, who has had short stories published in the New Yorker among other publications.

She has other projects on the go, including a novel, written as a collaboration with a writer friend, that is going out shortly on submission. Her advice to budding writers is to “read, read, read widely.”

There will be art by Siobhan Rea on sale at an event at JRAP O’Meara Solicitors, Thompson House, MacCurtain Street, Cork city, in aid of the Cork Rainbow Club Cork Centre for Autism on May 7 at 4.30pm-6pm.