Sinéad Gleeson is a writer, editor, and freelance broadcaster. She has been published in Granta, among many other places, and is the editor of three award-winning short anthologies, including The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers. Previously, Gleeson presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio One in Ireland. A #1 Irish best seller, Constellations: Reflections from Life is her debut essay collection. Named a best book of the year by The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The Irish Independent, Constellations was awarded the Irish Book Award’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2019. Gleeson currently lives in Dublin.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Céillie Clark-Keane. Clark-Keane lives in Boston, where she currently works as a managing editor. Her work has been published by Ploughshares online, Electric Literature, Bustle, and more.

CCK: What first drew you to writing in general and nonfiction writing specifically?

SG: I always knew I wanted to write but wasn’t sure what form that would take. I’d assumed like a lot of people—because we all grow up with novels—that it would be fiction. On and off over the years, I did write short stories. And like a lot of people, I’m very good at starting things and not so good at finishing them. I have a lot of half-grown short stories, so I never sent the work out. I also had phases where I’d write a little bit and then go a really long time without writing. But I’d talk constantly about wanting to write and then… not do it. Now, having talked to lots of other writers about this, I know that part of this is also fear. I used to present a book show on the radio here in Ireland, so I had to interview a lot of writers and I read a lot of books for work. That’s both a great education and also the most terrifying thing you can do when you’re trying to be a writer yourself.

One year, I wrote a blog post on January 5th, which is the date of my leukemia diagnosis. I was driving with my young daughter and there was a hearse in front with not one coffin, but two coffins. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Was that a fire or an accident? Was it a family? What was it? January 5th for me is a bit like my birthday—I get a bit philosophical, a bit introspective and I’m thinking about mortality.

When I got home, I wrote this little piece about illness and feeling lucky to still be here based on seeing that hearse. I posted it online and a big publisher got in touch and asked, “Look, are you writing something like this?” It hadn’t occurred to me to write about my own life.

So, I tried, and I wrote six or seven chapters based on some of the experiences that are also in this book, but they’re so different to those older pieces. The publisher wanted more death and more illness, but I realized that I didn’t want to write strictly memoir. I didn’t want to write a book that’s just about me. So, I said no, but it made me realize that I loved writing those pieces. It unlocked some things for sure.

CCK: Once you knew what you didn’t want to write, how did you figure out the form you wanted your book to take? What was your process?

SG: Like all of us, I think that to be a writer, you have to be a reader. I started to find work that I thought was doing the kind of thing that I was writing. People like Maggie Nelson, Roxane Gay, and Leslie Jamison—I found a lot of American writers who were writing about their own lives and writing quite personally, but also looking outwards at the world. I thought they were finding a way to take elements of their own life that blended with cultural criticism, and I wanted to try and do that. That’s something that I always talk about as the difference between essays and memoirs. Memoirs tend to look inwards. I think that all good essays, the ones that I like anyway, look outwards at the world.

CCK: This book is beautiful and connects so many different topics and moments from your life seamlessly, and the recurring themes of pain and personhood as a patient, a woman, an artist, and a mother connect these. Could you speak about your process of writing this book and finding the focus?

SG: I was writing these essays individually—I never set out to write a book. I like the length of the essay. You don’t have to commit 400 pages—it can be ten or twelve pages. So, I started writing the essays and submitting them to journals for publication. The first one was published by a brilliant Irish journal called Banshee. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I thought that if I could finish something and submit it, they might consider it. And it was published, followed by two more essays published by Granta.

At that point, I still hadn’t really told anybody I was writing. I was quite secretive about it, because a lot of people know me in relation to books, and I just didn’t want that pressure. Then, once I had four or so pieces, I sent the work to a competition and got a literary agent. My agent asked me for the elevator pitch. I wasn’t sure—honestly, I still have terrible elevator pitch for this book. But I told him I needed time to write the pieces and maybe the theme or a larger framework will suggest itself. I was so grateful he allowed me to do that.

Once I’d written 20 essays, I saw those themes take shape. There are connections between bodies and autonomy, pain, illness, womanhood. Some essays I still love didn’t fit with this and weren’t included. But the essays in the book are clearly connected and linked. That’s part of why the title is Constellations. The pieces are a collection, but they can be read in any order or can be read individually.

CCK: The pieces are powerful on their own, and the collection lends itself to dipping in and out easily. But at the same time, there is still a clear order in the book. How did you decide on this order?

SG: It’s like making a mixtape, painstakingly put together. It’s very specific. Some of these pieces are difficult, but what I tried to do was not put all of the medical experiences together. That’s deliberate. The two essays about my grandmother and the adventure narrative are beside each other purposefully, too; they’re quite converse, because her life was not that life. She didn’t get to go adventuring because she was poor and because she was an Irish woman and she was Catholic. And that wasn’t the life that would have been allowed for her back then.

It’s interesting, actually, in the American version, the order is different, too. One of the essays, “Our Mutual Friend,” is moved to the beginning. Otherwise the first three essays would’ve been quite heavy—the essays about bones, hair, and blood would have been all together.

CCK: Throughout the collection, you include variations of form: some essays are more lyrical, some include poems. The essay collection ends on a “non-letter” to your daughter, which feels so lovely and open-ended. How did you figure out that structure for the end? And how did you know that was ending once you got there?

SG: I wanted the book to end on a helpful note. My life, my great-grandmother, my godmother, Frida Kahlo, all the women in Ireland—I speak about lots of women in the book who have difficult things to face. And yet, there’s a lot of possibility in life. There’s a lot of possibility in the future. I wanted the poem to my daughter to come right after that piece on the Repeal the 8th campaign, because I wanted her to represent that things are changing for women all over the world, hopefully. I know that that’s not the case in lots of other countries; I know that we’re very privileged, and I’m highly aware of that. But for my daughter, I hope life will be better. My life’s pretty good, but my mother’s was hard, and my grandmother’s before her. There’s a deliberate structure to the book, that way. It starts with me as a young girl, and it ends with my daughter as a young girl.

In terms of form, I was again just trying to mix it up. Some of the pieces in the book don’t formally look like essays. My daughter had been having a tough time, and I wanted to say something that would make her feel better. Poetry is so close to music, and people tell me there’s something very singsong and soothing about this piece. We do tend to go to poems for important moments, too. I mean, we read them at funerals and memorials to offer comfort. I never thought about this piece being anywhere else in the book other than being at the end.

CCK: I’m really interested in how you explore language and pain throughout the collection. In “60,000+ Miles of Blood,” you write: “In the ‘after’ part of my illness, my vocabulary expanded” (76). You devote one essay to twenty brief stories exploring the McGill Pain Index, a list of words created as a vocabulary for discussing pain. How does your experiences identifying pain and the precision—or lack of—language to discuss it affect your writing, and this book in particular?

SG: For all writers, the most basic thing is a need to be interested in a word. And in my case, I’m interested in language for pain for other reasons, as well. Pain is difficult, and even the word pain is a one-size-fits-all term, because there are millions of types of pain. There are seventy-seven words in the McGill Pain Index, but they were determined by doctors, not the patients, and people only get to choose a handful of words to describe their pain. I wanted to challenge that.

I’ve had a lot of surgeries, and I had to learn the language of doctors very quickly. In a different part of the book, I explain how doctors treated me differently, saying “Oh, you’re a doctor, right?” This is purely because I asked about my own illness or surgery. As a patient you have to be the lobbyist for your own body in a way, and the only way to do that is to assume the mantle of medical language. If you don’t know what you’re talking about or if you’re asked the very basic questions or you don’t ask anything at all, you’re not going to be any the wiser. I think of challenging the ownership of this language as a way of controlling my own narrative.

CCK: You also write, “Text has legacy and permanence, unlike speech or touch. Our medical narrative is contained in the clipboard hanging on the end of the bed, or in the coloured cardboard folder” (115). In this collection, you recount and explore your own medical history and so much more, and elsewhere you’ve said that you didn’t want to write a focused memoir. How would you say the legacy and permanence of your book, of this text, relates to your medical narrative?

SG: I would say it’s the inquiry. I always start by asking myself, “What do you think about X or Y?” and then I write to figure it all out.

I get asked a lot about catharsis, which I’m not fond of and don’t believe in. I don’t feel better for having written the book, because it was a very difficult book to write. But in terms of the idea of writing lots of parts of my life that have to do with physicality, that’s more than art. Women’s bodies the world over are very political and always have been. There’s part of the book when American author Jamie Attenberg and I were at a reading, and I read a short story about some of the elements I explore in this book, including women’s bodies, and she said, “Oh, you’re a political writer.” And I thought, “This is news to me,” which she followed up with: “Well, surely if you’re writing about the body and you’re a woman, especially if you’re an Irish woman, then it’s a very political thing to do.”

CCK: What do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

SG: The possibility for a more personal identification. I think all of us are reading—whether it’s novels or essays—to make connections. We’re all looking for escapism. But we’re also looking for moments of recognition. You feel less alone when you read about difficult things that happen to other people, too. That’s the kind of work I gravitate toward.

And stories connect many things in life. That’s what people respond to. In this book, I am telling my story, but I know now that when I go talk to readers, I seem to be telling other people’s stories, too. That’s been said to me a lot. “I’m not a writer, but you said something that I needed to hear.” That’s profoundly moving to hear from a stranger you’ve just met.

CCK: What do you find most challenging?

SG: There’s a lot more politics to writing nonfiction. Even though you know the story, you have to do the research and there’s still precision and craft required; the struggle of what to include. What do I want to say? How far do I want to go?

I feel comfortable writing about some of these very personal things. There would have been no other way to write it, because if you’re not going to show up with this kind of work—if you’re not going to be real and authentic, the reader will spot it a mile off.

CCK: Do you have any other process that’s different between writing fiction and writing nonfiction?

SG: I find with fiction that I’m quite good at writing with the handbrake off, so to speak. I can keep going and not look back. Nonfiction, because I’m so focused on getting it right and because it’s all real, I tend to write differently. It’s not a productive way of working at all, and I curse myself for this. I stop and start, stop and check things, read. The great thing about an essay collection, though, is that when you get stuck on one, you can sneak off and work on another one.

CCK: And finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a woman writer?

SG: The opening sections from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

1. “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkins as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.