Every time I visited Ireland, my father would ask, ‘What kind of rent are ye paying over there?’ I would admit that Paris rents were high – even then, ours was what would soon be called a thousand euros. But we loved it.
My father’s questions may have eventually influenced the decision we made, shortly before the millennium, to buy a place. There were still some bargains to be found in Paris. We soon found a small apartment, applied for a loan, and waited. In a parallel move, using a small sum supplied by my dear and now departed parents, I bought a smaller place I hoped to use for writing. Writing was all I ever wanted to do, but there was never enough time, or a place for it.
We gave notice on our rental, a lovely place near Bastille with marble fireplaces, parquet floors and ceiling moldings. It was one room too small. The owner promptly put it up for sale, having paid too much for it some years earlier during a kind of boom. She had been very fair and easy to deal with, so when her estate agent announced he was bringing a client to visit, I pulled out all the stops.
The agent and the client visited one evening after dark. I had the lamps lit, Mozart piano in the background. The client told the agent he wanted to buy it. Now there was no going back. We waited for news of the loan. And waited. After what already seemed too long a time, I started harassing the bank. My husband’s work schedule didn’t allow him to hang onto the phone for an hour during the day. Anyway, he was too nice to harass anyone. My teaching schedule was more varied. I finally rustled up suitable interlocutors at the bank. At first hesitant, they finally suggested I call the insurance company dealing with the loan. Again, there was a lot of delay. I sensed kerfuffle and kept digging. The purchase of the writing studio went ahead.
I finally managed to wiggle it out of the insurance: my husband was unacceptable for a loan application, because he’d had stomach cancer. The cancer had been removed some months earlier, along with 4/5 of his stomach (that was when we learned that the digestive system is ‘outside the body’ – think about it). He hadn’t received treatment because he hadn’t needed it. His oncologist’s report, which we’d supplied to the bank and the insurance, contained one magical word: CURED.
Back in those days this wasn’t enough for the insurance. They refused the loan (they’re no longer allowed to refuse a loan in France on those grounds). Our rental lease came to an end. We packed up our stuff and got a removal company to drive it all to my new writing space, which luckily had a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom.
There was torrential Parisian rain the day we drove past the hospital in the removal truck, and eased into the narrow street to our new abode. Everything looked sad and run-down in the rain. Some buildings were in bad condition and would later be evacuated by the city before restoration. The removal guys worried for us. All the things that had seemed attractive and even romantic when I’d found a suitable – and cheap – place to write, especially on a sunny afternoon (narguileh parlors, Chinese herbalists, a broad variety of foreign food and music places) seemed to them doubtful.
That night, our boxes piled to the ceiling, we lay in the only flat space left on the floor. The move began to look like a terrible mistake. My gentle husband felt it was his fault. In fact, it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened. We were about to discover, only a short walk from central Paris and its tourist hotspots, a universe teeming with immigrants of all stripes with their problems and the exacerbation of these by French habits and rules – or their own misunderstanding of these.
It was an amazing revelation and a life-enriching experience. I was paying attention to a new place, where our own dilemma, and my status as another immigrant, drew me to relate better to those of my new neighbors and friends. I’d had some success with a few early short stories when living in Morocco. Now, more stories were inspired in that Paris quarter, and Plugging the Causal Breach was born.
Mary Byrne graduated in English and Philosophy from University College Dublin. She has been a scientific and academic editor, French-English translator and English teacher in Ireland, England, Germany, Morocco and France. She now lives in Montpellier, and loves philosophy, art, and anything baroque.
“Why,’ so many ask me, ‘write about this period?’ That is to say, 1860, and London, no less. I’m not English, and honestly, I wasn’t around then.
And it struck me, while indulging my fascination for all things Victorian by writing a novel about this most interesting time (remember, 1860 was also the year after Darwin’s theory of evolution crashed onto the scene) that some intriguing questions could be asked. What, I mused, would happen if the patriarch of this most Victorian of households were to lose his hold on it? What if he and his domestic influence were to fade? What would change?
JL (Judy) Crozier’s early life was a sweep through war-torn South East Asia: Malaysia’s ‘Emergency’, Burma’s battles with hill tribes, and the war in Vietnam. In Saigon, by nine, Judy had read her way through the British Council Library, including Thackeray and Dickens. Home in Australia, she picked up journalism, politics, blues singing, home renovation, child-rearing, community work, writing and creative writing teaching, proof reading and editing, and her Master of Creative Writing. She now lives in France.
I use a computer. One of the best things my mother ever did for me was pack me (and my older brother) off to Stott’s Business College in Melbourne for a summer course in typing. She’d gone there herself about forty years before, and I have to say the place did seem to hark back a bit. We had huge typewriters that were possibly 20 years old even in the 70s. Perhaps one of them still had my mother’s fingerprints on it. We all typed in rhythm – one-two-three, one-two-three – and we’d bring our finished paragraph up to the teacher to check. Any mistakes and we’d have to do it again. My brother, a post-graduate at the university at the time, kept making so many mistakes he began to cheat and not take his paragraph to be vetted. Then we’d begin to have a bit of a giggle, outraging the teacher who, it turned out, thought I was flirting with this boy. Ah, the 70s. Recall this ‘boy’ is and was six years older than me, but, hey, it must be the girl’s fault. Still, she blushed fiery red when she discovered our surname was the same.
Quill and the blood of virgins took me down a narrative path that I finally had to opt out of. It became too messy. Before computers became an essential writer’s tool, and when typewriters were my only other option, I wrote exclusively with a pen on yellow lined pads. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to write creatively on a typewriter, and I never did. But when computers seduced me into their world, I could no longer hold out. Previously, I not only hand wrote my drafts of poems and fiction, but I also typed them up afterward so I could then revise them. That involved further (multiple) rounds of typing and revising. Those of you who are writers know how many revisions are necessary before a draft becomes viable.
Since most people who will likely read this interview won’t know me, they may wonder, after learning about my novel 
