I was just thinking of what I have read and reread this year, and remembered one of my favorite moments!! I reread Come and Go while on my first solo-backpacking trip, and it was such a dear companion for me! I read it for the first time 3~ years ago while on another solo trip camping trip, and each reading has such a special memory tied to it. I’m in such a different place (mentally and geographically) this year then I was the first time, and it was so wonderful to revisit it. Your writing has been with me on some amazing adventures and in some beautiful places, and it has brought me so much joy and comfort. It sounds very cheesy, but when I’m stressed or need something familiar, I will reread SYTL, and it has given me peace in some of my hardest moments. Sorry to unload on you haha, I just hope you know how important your writing is and what a gift you have!
(obligatory photo from my reading spot :)
this picture is so staggeringly beautiful and this message is so deeply kind that I truly don't even know what to say! I'm so glad c&g could keep you company and give you a bit of peace. what a special, beautiful thing. thanks for letting me (or a little part of me, anyway) tag along on such a beautiful adventure.
just to be so tbh, I've been feeling rly frustrated and impatient about writing lately, just getting some close-call rejections and generally wishing things would happen faster, so this message hit extra hard today. so thank you x2!
(answering this publicly so I can save it. plz let me know if you'd prefer I answer privately!)
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absolutely Everyone must read this fic NOW.... it’s so good and GODDDD the characterization is fucking perfect ... it’s the perfect mixture between fun and repression yay! and it’s a fleabag au so whoever is not reading it rn is turning away a perfectly good opportunity to be moved and to Feel https://archiveofourown.org/works/21128534/chapters/50280608
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Reread seek ye the living recently and i wanted to say how much it means to me that you wrote something which deals with the painful grief of Ronan + the barns but which doesn’t make the solution being giving the place up/destroying it entirely. That instead the story is about moving through grief and moving forward in your life without sacrificing the parts that you love. That whole story feels healing in a mature and nuanced way that’s what I want for those characters ❤️ (Also every time I read it I go listen to softly and tenderly and weep im just a bitch who loves Johnny cash what can I say!)
hi beloved!! I love the uptick of people rereading sytl during november. that is so correct of you all <33
(some TDT/Greywaren thoughts below which you definitely did not ask for)
yeah tbh I was always strongly against the barns burning down theory that was circulating last year and I am also... pretty against the actual canon fate of the barns. to be fair, I am ferociously attached to my own childhood home? I love stories about growing up and grieving/leaving home, but I also love stories about people who choose to stay--and what sacrifice that entails.
idk. one of my favorite contradictions about ronan was always how ferocious and awful and #edgy he was, and how at the root of all that cool YA angst he just wants to go home. I do not really jive w the idea that ronan's happiest future is a rootless one. so I'm glad the ending he gets in sytl resonates w you :) thank you for these kind words
Hey this is sort of a weird ask, but here goes! Do you have any book recs that have similar vibes to SYTL? It’s such a captivating and haunting story, and I find myself wanting more in that vein! Anything that has that melancholy but not depressive, understated and cyclical style of writing. Or just any books that you’ve read an enjoyed :)
wow what fun, beautiful, special question. i've been mulling it over for a couple days trying to get my answer right and trying to remember what I was reading while writing sytl, though mostly I think I was just listening to a lot of music. anyway. some possibilities:
if you like weird religious/magic stuff: "mariette in ecstasy" by ron hansen is weird and stirring and lush.
if you like stories about grief and healing:
"the hours" by michael cunningham: this is a sad book about grief, but it's stunningly written and it's doing fascinating cyclical things with storytelling. it's a take on "mrs dalloway" but you don't need to have read it--though you should at some point in ur life
"the friend" by sigrid nunez: a book about grief and dogs and how loving someone means acknowledging they'll one day die. also a sad book, but it's profoundly hopeful, too.
"the buried giant" by kazuo ishiguro: on the surface doesn't have much in common with sytl, but there's a lot about grief and memory and cyclicality. it's a slow burn but the ending is stunning.
"the english patient" by michael ondaatje: someone recommended ondaatje to me as a comp for my own writing, so there's that? this is a beautiful weird drifting book, set in the quiet aftermath of war, another ending that made me gasp
and finally, if you enjoyed the feral lynch childhood content: may I recommend "the summer book" by tove jansson! captures the fearful fantastic nonsense of childhood
and in like roughly 4-100 yrs maybe I'll have my own book and I can rec you that, too :) in the meantime happy reading!!
hi - i reread seek ye the living yesterday because i have been obsessed with your writing lately (have been rereading like a dog with a bird & the uploaded chapters of where the dark remembers way too many times these past few weeks) & i noticed ronan was often described as ‘wretched’ (wretched and raw, a wretched thing) in it & that struck a chord within me. i was wondering if that was a conscious decision, if that word by itself meant something to you. at one point you also write of adam being ‘wretched with it—that kindness’ - what a line. i’m really interested in what recurs in a writer’s work & i was wondering where you came from. anyway you make me feel insane in the best way possible
wow what an incredibly fun cool thoughtful question. I feel very lucky to have you reading my stuff so closely <3
I didn’t intentionally deploy that word, meaning I didn’t go into the fic w the idea that this word would Mean Something. but I went in w the intention of creating a certain vibe—a kinda hushed, holy, melancholy feeling—and so I was picking words from a certain, like, register yknow? the repetitions of “wretched” were unintentional, but they make sense bc I love that word and the kinda heightened gothic quality of it and how it means a lot of things: angry, miserable, despised, abandoned by God even. which is soooo dramatic but felt right when writing about Ronan, who can rarely label his feelings
I love tracking intention/intuition in writing. what’s there on purpose vs what is the purpose of this word/image my brain keeps pushing. so much fun. thank u dearly for caring <3
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Good god, I'm loving all your director's commentary answers. So interesting!! SYTL is one of my favourite things ever, so of course I'm jumping on the opportunity to ask about that one, but honestly everything you write is a gift ❤️ Please, can you tell us a little more about the Lynch brothers playing saints and old testament? I find that so, so endearing for some reason and I think about it all the time lol.
oh gosh HI this is incredibly kind--thanks so much!! and thanks for picking out another of my favorite details from sytl haha
quoting the lines in question below:
When Ronan was young, his father brought him a great book about the saints—each page edged in gold, displaying colorful illustrations of martyrdom. St. Stephen, beautiful and birdlike, pierced by arrows. St. Lucy, bearing her eyes on a silver platter. Perpetua and Felicity, intertwined, pecked to death by crows. Joan of Arc, crop-haired and boyish among the flames.
The book inspired hours of elaborate games of Saints, which mostly involved Ronan tying Matthew to trees and prodding him with a stick, saying, “Confess, confess.” Matthew’s role was simple: He was meant only to say “Never! Never!” and to prayerfully accept his fate, but he was not very good at playing martyr. He was too agreeable by far and generally proceeded to say, “Alright, I’ll confess” before the real agonies could even begin. And yet the Lynch brothers never considered trading places. Even then, they knew their roles.
They played wilder, frenzied games of Old Testament, too—tearing through the woods in breathless, jubilant terror. The rules of the game were loose, except to note that God was angry and would have His wrath. God took various forms—the swollen creek after a rainstorm or the crazily spinning wheel of an overturned wheelbarrow or the mean, half-blind goat in the back pasture—but the point wasn’t really God at all. The point was the running and the being afraid.
...
corny to say but I remember feeling really proud after I wrote this. haha. lame but true!! I genuinely did have a Big Book of Saints as a kid that I was obsessed with, and I really did spend a lot of time reading about gruesome methods of martyrdom. this was somewhat formative I guess?
I LOVE writing/reading/thinking about the Lynch brothers as kids, the Barns as this fantastical storybook setting for childhood, where childhood isn't an ideal thing but ferocious and kinda feral like in Where The Wild Things Are.
in the same way, the stories they seize on aren't the tame children's parables but the gnarly violent parts of the Bible. they're weird isolated homeschool kids so they're not playing superheroes or whatever, they're acting out the stories they know, and those stories are mostly about God. even then, Ronan's the zealot, Declan's agnostic, and Matthew is the holy one--they keep acting out these roles all their lives, kinda
I don't know. I don't think I'll ever understand God or religion or belief in the effortless instinctive way I did as a kid, and this is an effort at capturing that--how easy it was, how mindless, how it hurt when you stopped being able to play along.
This is so exciting. Honestly I’d take directors cut for all of “seek ye the living” but specifically Chapter 5 church/Adam’s apartment scene!
omg :,) thank u. that chapter is probably the thing I'm proudest of.
I wrote a lot of that scene in my notes app while on a long drive at night. my brother had gotten a concussion so we had to keep stopping at gas stations to get him fresh ice packs? (lmao he's fine now) so I will just always associate that scene w the weird hush of driving at night.
the confession/"kneel" scene in fleabag is obviously extremely iconic, so I wanted to pay tribute while also doing something that felt true to adam and ronan. I couldn't write anything as sexy as the "kneel" scene so I went for emotional honesty instead haha
so much of their dynamic in sytl til then is ronan expressing interest, ronan being open, ronan saying "wanna see something?" etc. and adam not being able to share in turn. so this scene is where adam is honest--about his past, but also about his feelings for ronan and his ambivalence towards the priesthood.
my favorite part is when ronan starts to say "I wish I'd known you then [back at aglionby]" even as they both acknowledge how impossible that would've been--ronan ragged w grief, adam too closed off. I like that moment bc it's such an honest moment between them, but also bc they're WRONG!! adam can't see past his self-imposed loneliness, ronan can't see past his belief that he hurts people, but WE know there's a world in which they did actually meet at aglionby. even as adam says "I won't let you get close to me," he's the one who saw ronan's car and came and found him in the church.
my other favorite part: “Intellectually, the idea of God wanting anything is flawed. Want implies lack. God implies perfection, lacking nothing.” people go crazy for this, but I can't fully claim it, it's paraphrased from something a favorite undergrad professor said in a literary theory class once, and I've been chewing on it ever since.
I really love this chapter. It feels like the closest I've ever gotten to writing something exactly as it exists in my mind. I'm glad it means a lot to others, too <3
hi! i just wanna say that i adore the fleabag au and still think about it regularly even though i read it a while back, as a repressed queer with repressed grief it resonated with me so well, i wanna ask if there are any works that u derived inspiration from?(other than the obvious, fleabag)
hi! what an amazing question--thank u for asking! when I write an AU there has to be an initial spark (adam as hot priest) but there also has to be some sustained link btw the internal logic of the two stories. so in this case, I knew catholicism and grief and healing were at the middle of the venn diagram. I took a lot of inspiration from poetry:
I reference Seamus Heaney's "Antaeus," I read a lot Heaney, trying to capture the uniquely Irish qualities of Ronan's faith and grief. There's a poem "Drawing Ballerinas" by Medbh McGuckian that I thought about a lot, too. I don't think I reference it outright, but it's a beautiful poem about grieving a friend, imagining cleaning their body in the wake of violence. Something about ritual and caretaking as a remedy to grief--that was how I approached Ronan
I read a lot of Marie Howe, too. Anything about the beauty and tragedy of everyday life, the bewilderment of continuing to live, I owe all that to her. Also: "Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed / it would start to happen; / then I'd beg it to stop, and it would." That's Adam.
Also I was in a weird stage of life where I was living at home and both desperate/terrified to leave. I wasn't going to church but didnt want to hurt my parents, so on Sundays I would sit in the church parking lot and read for an hour and then drive home again. So, that's somewhere in the mix, too.
Everything is a collage of everything else <3 Thanks for this question.
