The Milf and the Fury - Interview with Anakana Schofield

Anakana Schofield is a funny woman. Her acclaimed novel, Malarky, opens with one of the most hilarious scenes in contemporary Irish literature. Her heroine is Our Woman, a recently bereaved farmer’s wife from Mayo. Our Woman’s husband is three days dead when she confesses to her grief counsellor she is plagued by thoughts of homosexual orgies.

“Well now,” her counsellor responds, at a loss for words. He recommends she scrub the kitchen floor “very vigorously and see if a bit of distraction would help.”
In person, Schofield’s sense of humour comes at you from leftfield as well.
“Oh, you’re gorgeous,” she says when we meet at Brooks Hotel in Dublin.
“You’re very kind,” I respond.
“I’m not,” she says. “I’m telling you the truth, although I do have facial blindness.”
Professional demeanour forgotten, I nearly fall off my chair laughing.
“That’s not what I meant!” she laughs. “I’m wearing my glasses! Actually, I’ve got the same glasses as my teenage son. I’m so cheap!”
Writing a novel is no easy task, and first timers like Schofield are frequently asked to provide content – unpaid for – to promote their work.
“It’s suggested you write personal stories that relate to your novel. I really object to it. I feel like I just spent 10 years making this up and now I have to find personal entry points to suggest to the reader that I actually did not.”
Instead Schofield wrote an article, or as she puts it “a tirade”, for The Guardian decrying this aspect of modern day publishing.
“It went viral. Well, viral by my standards! I write three tweets about bird flu and one person reads it.”
The devaluation of all kinds of work in contemporary society has some parallels with her novel, she notes.
“I only realised this after I wrote the article. In the book, Himself, the husband, sits in a chair and observes that, when a man can’t get a fair price for his cow, all is lost, and nothing is worth anything any more. The form of the book speaks to the fact that, for ordinary people, there are not necessarily big resolutions. You have to carry on.”
Amongst its many themes, Marlarky is a story about an older woman’s exploration of sexuality. Our Woman learns that Himself may have had a fancy woman in Ballina and she has seen her son getting up to no good with a neighbour’s boy. So she sets out to learn more.
“I was very keen to explore these cauterised depictions of older women’s sexuality. I have come to narratives and fictions, often by very well respected male authors, and always feel, ‘Why does this woman have to be experiencing this? Why does she have to be wincing as she is experiencing some sexual encounter?’ I felt a need to respond to that. I also – and it’s going to get a bit dirty now – I was aware of this category in pornography, the MILF. The mother I’d like to fuck.”
Schofield bursts out laughing. “I’ve been talking too loudly! There is a man in the bar staring at us.”
Sure enough, one of the hotel patrons is looking askance at us. Schofield’s voice drops to a whisper. “Sorry, sorry! Back on track! I was asked to collaborate with a performance artist, Lori Weidenhammer, for ‘Chaos’ in Victoria [Canada]. It was with a bunch of Irish women performance artists that came over. We decided we would deconstruct the MILF, the genre and the trope and what she stood for. I was kind of enraged by the misogyny.
“I was in Iceland years ago,” she adds, “and older women had a status there they don’t have anywhere else that I was familiar with. I found that they had a really healthy attitude to sexuality. I feel that definitely influenced my perception of older women. Anyway, I was processing this MILF thing and feeling angry. Then I realised that the only people that seem to have a problem with the idea of a younger man being attracted to an older woman was, in fact, an older man! And you know what? I wanted to speak back to that.
“Jane Austen used to do this thing where she would give women status on the page they didn’t have in real life. I wanted to use that in a more subversive manner. So I used it in terms of a Mayo woman on a farm. I wanted to give her possibilities on the page. Maybe she is going to go to Ballina next week and get laid – I don’t know!”
Our Woman spends much of the novel trying to understand her husband’s and her son’s sexuality. In a sense she is trying to recreate and reconstruct their sexual experiences.
“I almost took that out – that first scene where she is watching her son. I was ‘Ah, it’s too much!’ I have a friend who is interested in psychoanalysis and pornography and sexuality and she said I should leave it in. I am glad I did. The book is now taught at a university in the US, as part of a course about writing about sexuality.”
Our Woman’s sexual inquisitiveness begins with the homoerotic, notes Schofield.
“I’ve only since learned that there is a huge genre of commercial woman’s fiction – schlock basically – about gay male relationships.”
Schofield says the focus on sexuality in the novel was a surprise to her, as much as it will be to anyone else.
“I really wish I knew where this book came from. If I knew, I’d probably need some sort of psychiatric treatment! It is really tough to write about sexuality. I had been writing around the really difficult stuff for years. I resolved that I wasn’t going to do that – I was going to go into the dirty stuff, even though it was hard for me. It didn’t come naturally. I can’t believe I am the woman who wrote this book. I mean, I’m in the library a lot (laughs).”

Malarky by Anakana Schofield is published by Oneworld