Page Turners: ‘Girl With A Fork In A World Of Soup’ author Rosita Sweetman

Girl With A Fork In A World Of Soup is a disarmingly candid portrayal of Rosita Sweetman’s turbulent upbringing and a marriage marked by abuse and frequent infidelity. A woman who refuses to succumb to the least self-pity, Rosita tells her story with a dispassionate, piercing humour that readers will find irresistible.

Set against the backdrop of mid-20th-century Ireland, Sweetman’s narrative weaves through the idyllic yet troubled early years, the heart-wrenching loss of her sister Cathy and its devastating effect on her parents’ relationship, and the harrowing experiences of boarding school. Delving into the darkest corners of her troubled marriage and her husband’s affairs, she tells how she finally managed to break free and begin on her own journey to self-discovery.

Did you always want to be a writer?

My Dad was passionate about writing. Going through a trunk of ‘stuff’ (for my memoir Girl With A Fork In A World Of Soup), I came across a poem I’d written to him, aged nine, and at boarding school. I think Dad decided if he couldn’t finish a novel, or a book of poems, because of fragile health, no money and nine children, at least he’d have a daughter who could. As in all big families, we were assigned roles: Perfectionist, Ballerina, Boy. Mine became Writer.

I had early success: three books in succession — On Our Knees, Fathers Come First, and On Our Backs — which were all 60,000-plus PAN Best Sellers. A marriage descending into abuse brought on a career collapse. And a marriage collapse. Afterwards, I seemed stuck trying to write the same book two million times. Having it refused.

In 2015, the Lilliput Press re-published my debut novel, Fathers Come First, as a modern classic. As a follow-up, my wonderful daughter Chupi said, “Mum, you were a founder of the Women’s Movement in Ireland. Write about that.” So I did. Feminism Backwards was published in 2020 thanks to the amazing Mary Feehan of Mercier Press, and I was back on track again. After a 41-year drought.

What inspired you to start writing?

I was born in 1948. There was no Netflix. No YouTube. No social media. Reading and writing were what we did. As little ones, Mum read us all the classics, Alice in Wonderland, Little Lord Fontleroy, Black Beauty, Little Women. Mum on one side of a big log and turf fire in the drawing room, Dad on the other, us little ones, enraptured, between them. As we got older, we got our own books off the bookshelves (I still have them) or from the library. A world at one’s own fingertips.

Reading, or ‘staring at slices of wood with marks on them, for hours, while hallucinating vividly,’ is crazy when you think about it. For many, writing is the next stage along that winding path.

Tell us about your new book, Girl With A Fork In A World Of Soup. Where did the idea come from?

I’ve been trying to write this story for such a long time. The story of a marriage, my marriage, that turned abusive. It was only when I found a really good therapist — bless you, Ursula Browne — that I was able to finally get to the truth of it.

Ursula, who trained with Prof. Ivor Browne (no relation), uses ‘abreaction’ or the methodology that believes the only way to heal a trauma is to revisit it, feel the feelings you couldn’t feel at the time because you were too young, too overwhelmed, too terrified, and, with the help of your therapist, become that six year old, twenty year old, 46 year old self again — whatever the age you froze at — and go through the trauma, but this time feeling the feelings. Screaming, crying and beating the hell out of your pillow are encouraged. Anything that will bring those frozen feelings to the surface and allow you to release them.

It was only after completing multiple abreaction sessions with Ursula that I was able to access the pain and trauma of what I, and my children, had been through at the hands of my ex-husband and my family.

What do you hope this book instils in the reader?

So many women, after reading Girl With A Fork In A World Of Soup, have told me about their own abusive marriages. People whom I thought were sailing along without a bother have also been through hell. If this book helps a woman to confront or get out of a bad situation, that would be amazing. I also hope all of us, everywhere, remember how incredible children are, how easily they are hurt, and how incredibly important it is to love them.

Love, love, love is everything.

What did you learn when writing this book?

I learnt for the millionth time that only by finding out what you really feel about something can you act with integrity. The alternative is to skate over the surface of life, distracting yourself with media, gossip, shopping, never getting down to where the real stuff is.

Tell us about your writing process.

When I’m writing, everything — housework, shopping, gossiping, even reading other people’s books — goes to the wall.

Getting stuff down is key for me. You can always revise afterwards. Or as Colette said: “an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroys most of it.”

I like writing by hand. John Le Carre said the brain moves at about the same speed as writing by hand. I love a loaded black pen and sheets of white paper. Bits of cardboard, used receipts, already written on sheets will also do if inspiration strikes. By the time you get to transcribe the scribbles onto your laptop, you’ve already started the editing process.

I don’t play music. Don’t drink. Don’t (usually) work at night. Music and wine turn the writing soppy. In the morning, everything has to be bonfired.

An invaluable lesson I’ve learnt from writing for newspapers is editing. I’ve raged mightily when asked to reduce a scintillating 900-word piece to a bald 600, only to look back and marvel at how cutting has improved things. As the great master Roald Dahl said, “Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.”