You Must Read This:

Nell Dunn, Talking To Women

Republished by Silver Press

During the spring-summer of 2018, I read and was beguiled by Nell Dunn’s Talking To Women. The book is a series of candid conversations that the author had in 1964 with nine friends over a bottle of wine. The women are in their twenties and early thirties, and their conversations – as per the book’s blurb – are about “sex, work, money, babies, freedom and love”.

Encountering these conversations was a life-changing experience for me. I was 32, and in the preceding couple of years I had become severely stuck and extremely low, sometimes barely leaving my room for days or weeks on end. I had little to no insight into why I felt this way: my body was a seismograph, registering tremors whose origins I didn’t understand. To put it baldly: I had no fucking clue what I thought or felt. So it was revelatory to witness these friends as they helped one another navigate and delineate their inner lives, which bloomed and blossomed on the pages before me now. Time and time again, I found myself feeling stunned and inept in contrast to the emotional fluency I encountered in the interviews, as these women detailed their wishes, their frustrations, their conflicting desires, their anger and their joy. 

And my own projections aside: I was deeply struck by the parallels between the lives of women in 1964 and the lives of women 54 years on. It was profoundly chastening to hear Nell Dunn and her friends – including the then-32-year-old Edna O’Brien – reflect on the meaning of freedom, and describe the patriarchal binds they were trying to loosen themselves from. Especially so, in that hot May of 2018, as my own friends and I anxiously counted down the days to the referendum on the Eighth Amendment.

When I finished the book a few months later, I felt simultaneous buoyed and bereft. Buoyed because of the pulsing life-giving energies I’d encountered in these pages, but bereft because now I suddenly felt the profound lack for never having had access to my own inner life. Eager to start talking, I gifted the book to many of my friends, male and female. And inspired by the candour of Nell Dunn and her pals, our conversations became more open, more vulnerable. 

Over the next few years, in both my life and in my writing, I began digging inwards, and started uncovering an interior life – finding the stairs to a basement I hadn’t even known existed. On some level, I was afraid of going down there, dreading what I might find. But amidst the rubble and the dark, I found something unexpected: in each of our basements there are tunnels. And the tunnels are what connect us to others. 

—Published in The Irish Independent, Sep 2, 2023