More than zero

Although she’s an attractive, Dublin-born mother-of-two, still on the right side of 40, novelist Emer Martin doesn’t do chicklit. This won’t come as any great revelation to anybody who’s ever read one of her books, but it seems to have confused a few Irish critics.

“Baby Zero hasn’t had one review in Ireland that hasn’t mentioned Cecilia Ahern,” the raven-haired writer sighs. “A lot of the reviewers seem to be saying almost accusingly, ‘This book isn’t chicklit!’ They seem to assume that a woman writing in Ireland today has to be doing chicklit. Maybe I should be! [laughs]
“But I can’t even read that stuff. To tell you the truth, I think it’s utter shite.
“Fair play to them. But if Pat McCabe or Joe O’Connor or Colm Toibin bring a book out, they’re not being compared to detective novels or something,” she continues. “Nobody is saying to them, ‘But this isn’t a mystery story!’ or whatever. So there’s a touch of sexism in that. You know, that if you’re a female writer, you must be writing crap books for money.”
Rather, Martin writes excellent books for substantially less money. She first appeared on the literary scene more than a decade ago, with the publication of her strange and turbulent debut Breakfast In Babylon. A sort of female European version of Kerouac’s On The Road, it was named Ireland’s Best Book of 1996 at Listowel Writers Week.
Four years later, More Bread Or I’ll Appear – a story about the far flung travels of a dysfunctional family – consolidated her reputation as one of the most talented, daring and interesting young Irish writers around.
And the perennially rebellious and nomadic Martin has certainly been around. Having left suburban Dublin behind at the age of 17, she travelled the globe on a shoestring – squatting, begging, busking and living everywhere from London to Paris to Bali to Israel to New York to San Francisco.
“I need to change my environment constantly,” she admits. “I’m still always travelling – even if I have no money, I’ll just get up and go. Besides, Ireland in the 1980s was such a bleak and depressing place, there was absolutely no reason to stay.”
Somewhere along the way, she got married to Afshin, an Iranian scientist, and had two daughters, Jasmine and Jade. The family settled in California in 2001 but, not wanting her children to grow up in such a propagandistic environment, she returned to Ireland three years ago and is currently living in Meath.
“America is quite a scary place at the moment,” she maintains. “Especially given that my children look very Persian. What pissed me off the most was that even the liberal Americans in cool places like San Francisco keep on talking about the war in terms of themselves. It’s all this hand-wringing over 3,000 dead US troops. They don’t seem to care about the thousands of dead Iraqi women and children. They seem to think of the war as something that’s happened to America. And now they’re talking about invading Iran. My children are half-Iranian. So I just decided to take them some place where people didn’t want to kill them.”
She’s interested in Irish politics and followed the general election, but maintains that American politics is really all that matters these days. “Irish politics can be quite entertaining, but American politics is where good and evil are really being played out. That’s where it’s really serious. That’s where an election could cost us the environment or the planet or 160,000 dead Iraqis or a war with Iran.”
Her husband is still living and working in California, but they get together as regularly as possible. “A long distance relationship isn’t exactly the ideal situation, but it’s working at the moment,” she says. “We’re meeting up in Seville next week, and we were in the Canaries a couple of months ago. It’s mad – like I’m having an affair with my husband.”
In her latest novel, Baby Zero, a pregnant Irishwoman named Marguerite is imprisoned for taking a stand against the fundamentalist government of Orap (a fictional country obviously based on Iran or Afghanistan). This government has turned the year back to zero, as if to begin history again.
To retain her sanity as she awaits her fate, Marguerite tells her unborn child the stories of three other baby zeros – all girls from a family that has been scattered across the globe. Set in Orap, LA and Ireland, Martin is once again writing about the diaspora, albeit in a very different kind of way.
Although her descriptions of fundamentalist Orap are extremely vivid, she’s never actually visited Iran. “No, I’d love to go, but because my husband is a scientist it could be extremely dodgy for us to go there. The authorities may decide to not let him leave. He left before the revolution anyway, so the country would probably be just as strange and alien to him as it would be to me.”
Her husband’s family still live in Iran, but have visited the US on a couple of occasions. Initially, her in-laws didn’t realise that she was a writer and, at her husband’s insistence, she went to great pains to avoid telling them.
“When we lived in New York, Afshin’s family came over from Iran. And he was saying, ‘Please don’t tell them you’re a writer – tell them you’re a computer programmer!’ So I did, and then his mother said, ‘Oh, you can teach our daughter computers.’ And I was thinking, ‘She’s gonna be doing cut and paste for hours, because that’s all I can do.’ [laughs]
“It was August and New York was really hot. We had a roof garden. And I had to leave the house at 9 o’clock. But the only suit I had was one I’d bought in Ireland years ago, that my mother made me buy thinking that one day I would get a job – which never materialised! And it was this red wool suit, with a tartan skirt. So I was wearing a wool suit sitting up on the roof writing. I think I lost about 10 pounds a week while they stayed.
“I’d come in, in a puddle of sweat, everyday around 5 o’clock and go, ‘Oh, what a day at the office!’ So I faked it. And then finally the father was walking through the Village, and he spotted a poster of me in the window of a bookshop. So he went in and bought Breakfast In Babylon. Actually, he probably didn’t buy it! He probably just leafed through it. But he came home and said to my husband, ‘Couldn’t you have found anybody more degenerate?’
“And my husband said, ‘No, I looked long and hard!’” [laughs]
Between maintaining a long distance relationship, raising two children and working on other creative projects (she’s also a painter and filmmaker), it’s surprising Martin has any time to write at all.
“It’s hard to find a balance,” she admits. “There is no balance. It all goes out the window once you have a family. Like, before I thought I was busy. I wasn’t busy, because I could have two consecutive thoughts. Now I can’t.”
Unsurprisingly, this new book took a very long time to complete. “It took years. I started this in the year 2000. It took me about four years to get a first draft. And then I rewrote and rewrote.”
Unfortunately, when she finally finished the manuscript, her US publishers were less than ecstatic with the incendiary subject matter.
“The American publishers freaked out when they got the manuscript. They were just very alarmed by it. I didn’t expect that reaction. Because you write in a vacuum and, when you’re writing, you’re not really thinking of audience.”
The situation is still ongoing, but there are no immediate plans for Baby Zero to be published in the US. No matter – she’s already hard at work on her next book.
“I don’t really want to say what it’s about,” she apologises. “That can be dangerous. You can talk it away to nothing instead of writing it.”
Undoubtedly, long distance relationships will be a theme. It seems that Emer Martin has always written about what she knows. It’s hardly coincidental that she was pregnant twice throughout the writing of Baby Zero. However, it’s only now that she’s willing to acknowledge that her work is autobiographical.
“I pretended Breakfast In Babylon wasn’t autobiographical for many years, but now I’ll admit it,” she laughs. “There’s enough distance! Still, though, my two girls won’t be allowed to read it for a very long time. I’ll still be walking up to the roof pretending to them I’m a computer programmer.”

Baby Zero by Emer Martin is published by Brandon Books €14.99.