Maggie O'Farrell
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Maggie, welcome back to Waterstones.
Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.
I should point out that whilst people watching this will be watching it in the summer, we're recording it literally a week after you were at the Oscars ceremony for Hamlet.
What was Maggie O'Farrell's experience at the Oscars?
How are you?
I'm fine. My jet lag, I think, has abated.
Okay.
The whole thing was very strange and very surreal. It's been a bit of a wild ride, but I'm happy to be back in the bookshop.
Okay, good. Happy to be back in a familiar place.
Yeah.
We are here to talk about Land, but I did think it was worth just sort of mentioning Hamlet because the experience that you've had with that book has been a sort of a long road. And your involvement with the film is not just simply because you happened to write the book. You co-wrote the film and therefore you had real skin in the game when it came to the Oscars. Were you able to enjoy that experience or is it just terrifying from start to finish?
It wasn't terrifying. I mean, it was just very, very strange. It was very strange to be at the Oscars and thinking, oh, look, just in the row in front of me there's Spike Lee, and behind me, oh, Steven Spielberg, just sitting behind me. Yeah, very, very strange. I mean, it's not... It's not really my world, you know, not at all. I'm very happy to be in the book's world, but it's certainly very interesting to dip my toe in it briefly.
You think you might be able to dip your toe in the future? Who knows?
I don't know. I mean, it was such a strange thing to happen, you know, up until I was actually standing on set and I could hear Chloe Zhao shouting action. It was only then that I thought, OK, I think actually this is going to happen. Because up until that point I kept thinking, it's so likely that it won't happen, the film won't happen. But I was only on that day really when I was on set where I thought, okay, I think this is happening now.
Well, huge congratulations to you and to everybody involved with that film. It was fantastic for me to get a chance to see it as part of the whole publicity for it and great success for everyone involved. As I say, we're here to talk about Land, which is your new novel. And I was really struck by the letter that was at the beginning of my proof where you talk about the fact that this is an incredibly personal book for you based on some of your real family history. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about what that family history is.
So I think all families have their myths. And in my family, we were often told as children that... We had an ancestor who'd worked on the first ever maps of Ireland he'd drawn. And the myth sounds a little bit like he'd been a one-man band and drawn the whole map of Ireland himself. And it was just a story that I was very used to. And I've always wanted to know a little bit more about that. So I went looking for him to see if I could find out if this was true and to what extent it was true. and it turns out that there is truth in it, and of course, like everything else, the truth is much more complicated, so I did discover that my great-great-grandfather, Tomás, worked for the second revisions of the map of Ireland for the Ordnance Survey, and this happened in about the 1852 to 1856, something like that, and
As I was looking at those dates, I was thinking that's, in the kind of broad spectrum of Irish history, that's a very fraught time to be working on maps of Ireland. Because, as you know, of course, the Great Famine began in about 1846 to about 1852. And I thought that's a very strange time to be surveying and mapping a country. And what must that have been like? What could that possibly have been like for somebody who lived through it? But he wasn't easy to find because if you were Irish and you worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, you were not allowed to sign your own work. It had to be signed by a British army officer. So he himself was quite difficult to pinpoint. I did manage it after a lot of researching through archives in Dublin.
So it turns out that, like all myths, part of it is fiction and part of it is actually true.
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