It's a largely feminine and chatty crowd that fills Tūranga's Tautoru/TSB Space on a glorious spring afternoon to hear broadcaster and memoirist Noelle McCarthy discuss her latest book, Stakes: Dracula and the Secret to Happiness. I have recently finished the book and am trying to fight the worst of my fan-girlish impulses - in addition to being a brilliant writer, McCarthy is also extremely chic, has a great head of curly hair, and an accent that I could listen to all day long (she's from Cork originally). Journalistic subjectivity, dear reader, may not be possible, but given that a I'm a librarian and not a journalist let's not get too angsty about it.
The genesis of "Stakes"
Speaking of angst, there's a fair amount of that in Stakes, and on-stage McCarthy (ably interviewed by author and Verb Wellington founder, Claire Mabey) is lightly angsty about the book that Stakes started out as; a work of fiction about Dracula which she describes as a "terrible, wooden, stilted novel". The writing of said novel features in Stakes, a nice bit of writerly recycling - from the grave of a dead novel comes a memoir about life (and also The Undead).
But literary ironies aside, this book, the one that actually ended up being published, came from the earlier novel, yes, but also her first memoir, Grand, which dealt with her relationship with her mother. But there were things McCarthy didn't address in that book. Topics only skirted around and so,
"It didn't feel like a choice to write this book. It felt like a debt."
Another reason it felt like something she needed to do is that Dracula was her focus of post-graduate study. McCarthy said she that she has long felt like "a failed academic" - she did not complete her thesis, and so there was the aura of unfinished business about her relationship with Bram Stoker's iconic novel:
"It was something I needed to do out of respect for the first book I ever loved.'
A teenager reads Dracula and falls in love
Some books, "get you at exactly the right time" and for teenage McCarthy, Bram Stoker's tale of an undead Transylvanian nobleman was it. Dracula is "the big guy", the smack, the heroin and came into her life at the same time that Whitney Houston's "I will always love you" cover of the Dolly Parton (RIP, Queen) classic was, "number one for a geological era". So if her introduction to that book had a soundtrack it would be that song.
When it comes to pinning down exact times that things happened, McCarthy says that "time is elastic". She doesn't know the exact age she was when she first read the book, and Mabey seems surprised by this because McCarthy is so good at capturing the specific time and place when she writes about her life.
In the book McCarthy describes lying in her childhood bedroom with the window left open, hoping to invite Dracula in for a nibble. Mabey wonders why she wanted to be changed? McCarthy says that at that age she just wanted something to happen. That she "was waiting for my life to start". She already knew that she wanted to get out of Cork and join the Irish diaspora. She had both examples of relatives who had settled elsewhere (specifically the US and Australia) as well as a certain snobbishness. Her father was a plumber with 11 siblings, her mother a psychiatric nurse. Dracula has a castle. He speaks several languages. He is an aristocrat. The man has his own library. Why wouldn't you want that?
"We will have our struggles as a couple... but why wouldn't it work?"
McCarthy also reminds us that this was an era of sexy vampires in the culture, from The Lost Boys to the Vampire Lestat. And vampires as a sexual fantasy are "safe" in that they're not going to get you pregnant. This is said in a light-hearted way but takes on more gravity when you consider the trauma in McCarthy's mother's life.
Secrets and trauma
A key part of McCarthy's memoir is a reckoning with regards to sexual assault in the era of #MeToo, experiences in her youth (and later), and crucially that of her mother, Carol, who was raped by a colleague while working as a psychiatric nurse and subsequently had a baby that was placed for adoption. None of this is easy to write about, nor easy for family to read about, but McCarthy felt that she "could not, in good conscience, write about being frightened without saying what I was frightened of." It was not something that she could discuss with her mother, despite her background in journalism - "We never had an adult conversation about THAT". But when her first book, Grand, was published in Ireland nurse friends of her mother got in touch and she was able to learn more about who her mother was then, and how she was. She was well-liked and good at her job, the alcoholism that became a feature of family life in the McCarthy household not yet evident.
The looming, gothic asylum
Lots of scenes in Dracula take place in an asylum, McCarthy's mother worked (and had her life unalterably changed) in one, and that large gothic asylum forms a backdrop to McCarthy's early life. It was frighteningly easy to end up in one. At a certain time in Ireland it only took two signatures - one of a priest, one of a lawyer - to be committed so people were sometimes put there by family members for reasons other than genuine need.
The "Celtic Tiger" of property development has seen the asylum in McCarthy's hometown partly turned into executive apartments, "this is where the old and the new co-exist... covered over with glamour", says McCarthy.
Memories of youth (via The Body Shop)
Mabey asks how McCarthy finds her "specificity". In both her books this reader has found the McCarthy's ability to recreate the look and feel of an earlier area almost immersive so it's something I'm also curious about.
McCarthy reckons that smell is what gets her there, "I can smell myself back to anywhere" before eliciting murmurs of recognition and agreement from the audience by pinpointing that precise moment in time when the various fragrances of products from The Body Shop ruled the olfactory landscape of teenage girls. As soon as she says "White musk" I am standing in the Cashel Mall store in the 90s. At the mention of "Dewberry" I can see the exact shade of pearlescent purple that the bath pearls came in. By the time McCarthy is talking about the non-Body Shop) St Ives apricot scrub her point has been thoroughly made.
She also claims that New Zealand has a particular smell that she notices when she gets off the plane but doesn't elaborate on the nature of the smell but I hope it's nice (for the tourists, you know).
Another way into the past is via photographs (photos often revealed that she was remembering things incorrectly), she also read old letters to an ex-boyfriend - "I could see what a conniving individual I was" - and she also had Dracula, of course.
Bram Stoker's "Beyoncé of Monsters"
Mabey asks about McCarthy's "literary pilgrimage" to Whitby. Bram Stoker wrote while on holiday there and there are scenes in Dracula that are set there and in particular at the Abbey, and Dracula is now a key part of Whitby's appeal to tourists which McCarthy discovered, to her horror, when she visited during their annual "Goth weekend". "I had a terrible time," she says "because I am a snob". But going was good to have "boots on the ground" and part of the sense of debt that she felt around the book.
McCarthy gets choked up when she talks about Bram Stoker dying penniless. He never knew what Dracula would become:
"He had no idea what he had unleashed upon the world... the Beyoncé of Monsters"
Dracula as IP is thoroughly embedded in the culture. He's a muppet for goodness sake. McCarthy reads a little from the Whitby chapter of Stakes that describes her dismay at all the goth-touristy goings on during her Whitby weekend.
The secret to happiness and becoming a writer
The subtitle of Stakes is not to be taken seriously, McCarthy says. She is the last person you should ask about that topic. It is definitely tongue in cheek and comes from the unpublished novel.
She and Mabey also discuss the experience of being "a late-blooming writer". McCarthy spent years interviewing writers in her broadcasting career and that she was fascinated by them - at one point not wanting to let Marian Keyes leave, and wanting to ask just one more question - she thinks "there was something shadowy going on because I wanted to be one".
And though her novel never saw the light of day she credits this period of time in her life with teaching her "how to get up every day and write".
Later on when discussing Stoker, she points out that he was a civil servant until the age of 30 before he left to run a theatre with "a piece of work" named Henry Irving.
How writing works out your stuff
McCarthy recognises that the act of writing is also the act of knowing or understanding: "I actually don't understand my life at all a lot of the time - I need to write it to understand it".
Similarly, of Stoker, she says, "I'm not convinced he knew what he was doing", but certainly Henry Irving's magnetism and entitlement made it into the pages of Dracula, and perhaps some of Stoker's understanding of trauma, death, and starvation too - Stoker would have been aware of the famine and its catastrophic effect.
Audience questions: Transylvania, Movie Draculas, and Editing
One audience member wants to know has he ever made to Transylvania?
She hasn't. It's still on the list but she will get there.
Another asks: Who has done your favourite portrayal of Dracula?
Christopher Lee was the first to really do it for her (the widow's peak is very important), but also which Skarsgard was in David Egger's Nosferatu (it was Bill).
A question about editorial choices: How do you navigate what to leave out?
McCarthy admits that the manuscript for Stakes included a lot of Bram Stoker "trivia" and a lot about Stoker's wife, Florence, who was interesting character in her own right. A famed beauty, she refused to be photographed or painted after the age of forty (and one of the first notes that Stoker made when writing Dracula was that he could not be photographed - coincidence?). Florence had also famously once been Oscar Wilde's girlfriend, with all the questions that raises, and was a strident protector of the Dracula copyright, causing original prints of the German Expressionist film, Nosferatu to be burned.
McCarthy says there was a lot more rage, a lot more music, and a lot more "flotsam and jetsam of my teenage years" but ultimately unless something was "touching" Dracula it couldn't stay.
And with that, we are done, with appreciative applause and a robust signing queue afterwards (then it's time for fan-girls to melt away into the non-existent shadows...)
See our Flickr album for more photos from this session.
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