An Interview with Sinèad Gleeson

“To write about the body if you’re an Irishwoman has become quite a radical act.”

Gender and Power Dynamics Are Embedded In
The medical humanities
Catholicism
Most things

I first met Sinéad Gleeson more than 25 years ago in Grogan’s pub of Dublin, that scruffy literary lair, that portal into the pages of Flann O’Brien.

We were introduced by a mutual friend, Conor Creaney, who now teaches writing and literature at New York University, and then taught “a horse walked into a bar” jokes at Grogan’s. Sinéad was the first young woman I’d met with a shaved head, and she wore it more spikily than her namesake, O’Connor. Sinéad Gleeson brimmed over then—as she brims over now—with high-speed conversation about books, records, and everything that matters.

In the years to come, when seated in Grogan’s with old college friends, a rhetorical question would arise to fill the snug with pride: “Did anyone see Sinéad’s latest?” Creamy pints were raised when she first published criticism in the Irish Times, the Republic’s paper of record. Glasses of amber were transported between fingers when she began a distinguished tenure as host of the national broadcaster’s Book Show. Memory-stretching rounds were ordered when she edited The Long Gaze Back, a ground-breaking collection of female Irish writing past and present that was named the official book of Dublin in 2018.

The first essay in Sinéad’s new collection, Constellations: Reflections from Life, “Blue Hills and Chalk Bones” is a heart-stopper, experimental in form, revelatory in content. It’s a reflection on Sinéad’s experience with a rare childhood bone disease; on the multiple treatments—and mistreatments—that she endured in Irish hospitals; and on the pilgrimage she undertook in search of a cure. The essay stunned the Internet when first published in Granta, but it’s all the more stunning when you know what Sinéad survived as an adult. Her experiences since childhood include a blood clot, blood cancer, and two pregnancies.

In Constellations, Sinéad opens up many of these veins, telling a survival story as spectacular and compelling as those of T.E. Lawrence or Jack London, and exploring the interior universe as boldly as they did the wilderness.

Sinéad won the 2019 An Post Irish Book Award for non-fiction, one of Ireland’s highest literary awards, for Constellations. Like the fighter Conor McGregor, she grew up around the no-nonsense Dublin neighborhood of Crumlin. (Unlike McGregor, she has not exchanged the 15A bus for a “yachtsie.”) Sinéad frequently performs arrangements of her work with her husband musician Stephen Shannon.

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