Martin Doyle

I don't want to be reading the same stuff.

And I don't think readers want to be reading the same stuff.

So say when I interviewed Sally Rooney, there'd been a lot about her politics.

And we did touch on that.

We touched on Gaza.

Of course we did.

But, you know, what struck me reading her latest novel, Intermezzo, was...

Something that I'd kind of noticed elements of in her previous fiction, and that was, you know, religion and Catholicism, which, you know, Sally Rooney is family a Marxist novelist.

And guess what?

She's a Catholic Marxist.

I probably, you know, had the lazy presumption that because her mom ran an art center in Castle Bar, her dad was a trade unionist.

I probably, you know, had the lazy assumption that she was she'd grown up in a kind of a post-Catholic family.

family or household.

But actually, you know, she'd gone to, I think, a convent school.

She'd done the sacraments.

She'd had a probably pretty similar childhood to my own.

And I find that really interesting talking to Sally about, you know, her kind of coming to the realisation that when she had kind of maybe rejected Catholicism as a teenager because she understandably rejected its teaching on...

on sex, on abortion, contraception, divorce and so forth, those kind of social teachings.

She kind of realised that she'd kind of maybe thrown the baby Jesus out with the bathwater and actually a lot of the moral kind of foundation of her own worldview or outlook was based on kind of Christian principles and philosophy.

So I kind of thought, yeah, that's worth exploring, for example.