Page Turners: ‘Eat The Ones You Love’ author Sarah Maria Griffin

Sarah Maria Griffin is from Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of the novels Spare & Found Parts and Other Words For Smoke, which won an Irish Book Award in 2019. She writes about video games for The Guardian, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Irish Times, The Winter Papers, and The Stinging Fly, amongst other places. She also makes zines.

Her newly released book, Eat The Ones You Love, is on sale now.

After losing her job and her fiancé and moving back from the city to live with her parents, Shell Pine needs some help. And according to the sign in the window, the florist shop in the mall does too. Shell gets the gig, and the flowers she works with there are just the thing she needs to cheer up. Or maybe it’s Neve, the beautiful shop manager, who is making her days so rosy?

But you have to get your hands dirty if you want your garden to grow—and Neve’s secrets are as dark and dangerous as they come. In the back room of the flower shop, a young sentient orchid actually runs the show, and he is hungry… and he has a plan for them all.

When the choices are to either bury yourself in the warmth of someone else’s fertile soil, or face the cold and disappointing world outside—which would you choose? And what if putting down roots came at a cost far higher than just your freedom? This is a story about desire, dreams, decay—and working retail at the end of the world.

Did you always want to be a writer? Tell us about your journey to becoming a published author.

I did. It was something I wanted from the time I could read – to somehow make books. I wanted to do it before I even knew what it would entail – and wanted to do it more when I was warned by all the adults around me that it was difficult, almost impossible, to make happen.

I was very blinkered, very determined. I think this myopic, weirdly driven approach was probably what led me down multiple trapdoors over the years, but there would have been no telling me to do things any differently than I did. To chart the wonky path I have taken to where I am now is daunting, and my CV is a patchwork quilt, so I will just tell you I tried on every hat in the world of writing (as well as working almost infinite retail and service jobs) before I finally was confident enough to actually name what I wanted to really do, which, somehow, is what I do now – write books.

I did spoken word, I taught, I did journalism, I wrote essays, wrote plays, I worked corporate-creative, I was a bookseller, I cleaned houses, I sold pets, clothes, shoes, ice creams, video games and pints – I was multiple different stripes of receptionist. I put myself in so many places at once that I thought eventually the right-time-right-place would find me. It didn’t, for a long time.

It was only when I sat with the work and kept still that things began to fall into place. There is a simpler, cleaner path than the one I took, and looking back I wish I had known that – but nonetheless, the books got written, and are getting written still. And, all things considered, I picked up some pretty good stories along the way, too.

What inspired you to start writing?

I read a lot as a child, and played a lot of video games, and watched a lot of movies that were most likely geared at people much older than I was. I loved the feeling of escape that came with being truly engrossed in a story – that sense of exit. I’m still looking for it every day, now.

Tell us about your new book, Eat The Ones You Love. Where did the idea come from?

Eat The Ones You Love is a story about two women who work in a flower shop in a crumbling Dublin shopping centre. They are being watched closely by the narrator of the story, who is a talking orchid, called Baby, who has one hell of an appetite.

It is a book about falling in love and working in a shop, and the place where hunger and desire meet. The idea came when I had thrown in any hope I’d had of continuing to write, deep in burnout, and I was retraining as a florist. I kept staring into the faces of these tiny orchids I was using to build a flower crown, and all I could think about was how hungry they looked.

What do you hope this book instils in the reader?

On the surface, this is a story about a monster with a very serious appetite. But at heart, it is a book about the way people treat each other in their thirties. What baggage we bring into new relationships, new friendships – what we owe each other, what both romantic and platonic love looks like in a difficult world. I hope it encourages readers to seek or build a village, to be honest, because even in the face of horror, the answer to almost everything is community.

What did you learn when writing this book?

Resilience. I wrote this book during the pandemic and held on to it like a lifeboat. No matter what else is going on in the world, the work will always be there. Your relationship to the sentences, paragraphs, pages – that is what will keep you going.

Tell us about your writing process?

I used to be very particular, and kind of ceremonial. Light a candle, handwrite everything, then transcribe a messy first draft into a document. Now, I have a seven month old, so for the duration of her life I have just been writing while she sleeps – either on me, or elsewhere. My process is now, simply, steal as many single minutes, single lines, single paragraphs, as you can, and eventually, the book will be there. Like building a mosaic.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

Everywhere. I do a lot of walking, and now that I am heaving a buggy with me, I am more invisible than I was before. So I look at the world, I listen to people. I feel very alien most of the time, so I try to receive the world with a kind of newness, if that makes sense. I’m interested in visual art, video games, everyday architecture – I try to look at the world with an openness, and see what takes root from there.