Sophie White: ‘When you have a baby, you suddenly are hit by your own terrible power’

If there’s an embodiment of the word versatile, Sophie White is it. We’re meeting over coffee to talk about her new novel, Where I End, but there’s no shortage of other topics we could touch on, namely her background in fine art, her years as a chef, her newspaper column, her screenwriting, podcasting, knitting, roller skating, pole dancing ... But first things first, though, how’s the hair growth coming along?

“I finally grew it out!” she laughs. Followers of the 38-year-old on Instagram (@sophwhitewhoop) will have found themselves oddly compelled by her “undercut journey”, a log of her attempts to regrow the shaved hair on the bottom half of her skull. After some false starts, and a bout of (fabulous but high-maintenance) hair extensions, she sits before me with a fringe and shoulder-length blonde hair, which she had dyed for the first time recently.

“I coloured it because my kids kept getting nits. It’s so glamorous!” she says, with typical candour. “It took about five hours. I was like: how do people do this on the regular shift? But I sat there and wrote my column while they did it.”

This phenomenally productive streak is another undeniable aspect of White’s character. Where I End is her sixth book, and the second she’s published this year. She’s also written a draft of her next novel, due to be published in May. How on earth does she do it?

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I was mentally ill through my 20s and continue to this day to be mentally ill. In a way, I was following some of that to its worst possible conclusion

“I genuinely feel very lazy,” she says. “When anyone says anything like that, I’m like: I watch a lot of YouTube. I don’t ever work after six.”

Instead, she’s one of the many authors who gets up “before the cacophony of the day starts” to write.

“If I’m writing a first draft, I write from six to eight in the morning,” she says. “I work to word counts […] it’s a lot about just getting it down and getting it in place. And then I do so much editing.”

Where I End is a departure from White’s previous novels in terms of style. Filter This (2019), Unfiltered (2020) and The Snag List (2022) are what she refers to as romcoms, or chick lit — “a phrase I have no issue with [though] I can understand how older writers in that genre do, because they obviously worked very hard to elevate perceptions”.

This fourth novel, meanwhile, is touted as her “literary fiction debut”.

“I didn’t approach Where I End as: this will be my literary fiction debut. But I’m very happy that they’ve decided it is because I love literary fiction. I read as much literary fiction as commercial fiction. I don’t differentiate. I don’t think a lot of readers do.”

Besides, as she points out, she’s “played Whack-a-Mole with genres” throughout her career. Her first book, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown, combined cookbook with memoir. Her next work of creative non-fiction, Corpsing, was infused with elements of horror. Her podcasts Mother of Pod, The Creep Dive and The Vulture Club walk the line between serious and hilarious as they delve into parenting, bizarre and creepy news stories, and pop culture. And though her previous novels are written in the comic mode, readers often notice “surprisingly darker” themes coming through.

“The thing I think is that every story can be told in every way,” she says. “I almost think that Filter This is the comedy version of [Where I End], in that there are two parents that are bedbound.”

The bedbound parent in Filter This is a father suffering from Alzheimer’s — a disease White is all too familiar with, having lost her own father — the writer and television producer Kevin Linehan — to it in 2017.

In Where I End, the bedbound parent is a mute and incapacitated mother, whose every need must be met by her teenage daughter, Aoileann, and mother-in-law, Móraí. Set in a remote corner of a remote island, the book is a horror about a young woman’s attempts to find motherly love, and to get to the bottom of family secrets that made her who she is. Ideas of care and neglect, isolation, family, and so on run throughout, though they are approached obliquely and it’s up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about what’s being said.

One thing White says she drew on when writing were “deep-seated fears” surrounding motherhood and mental illness.

“I think when you have a baby, you suddenly are hit by your own terrible power, and how your work from then on is to not harm your children, whether overtly or passively. And I think that’s something that constantly interests me in my work.”

“I was mentally ill through my 20s and continue to this day to be mentally ill.” (Her experience, beginning with a drug-induced psychosis when she was 22, is well documented across her work.) “In a way, I was following some of that to its worst possible conclusion. And [the book] was almost an exercise in exorcising the fear.”

The book features an artist-mother figure, Rachel, who struggles to combine her work as an artist with caring for a newborn.

You do feel a bit hamstrung, I think, when you have a baby or children and you want to make art

“It ties into that working mother guilt,” says White. “The artist mother, I think, has it even more because in this really f*cked up, capitalist regime, making art can seem like it’s not an imperative, when, of course, it absolutely is. But it’s often seen as kind of icing on the cake of society, rather than being as important as doing your job and things like that. So [ ...] you do feel a bit hamstrung, I think, when you have a baby or children and you want to make art.”

White says that her own experience of motherhood was slightly different from Rachel’s, though.

“I’ve always found that my children have spurred my creativity so much. I can’t even describe it exactly. But I just feel … the precipice of human experience is that delivery of a child and then witnessing the first moments of life. It’s really awesome, in the true sense of the word. Awe is the feeling I always have. And I think there’s such an urge when I have a young baby to tap into it and document it. I’ve always written through those times.”

White’s own mother is the journalist Mary O’Sullivan, who “absolutely inspired none of this”, the book’s acknowledgments jibes. But writing about motherhood tends to come under a lot of scrutiny, no matter what way you present it.

“It’s funny because I do think when women write about their lives, people worry about their children.” (White and her husband Seb have three young sons, Roo, Ari and Sonny). “I don’t know if they worry about the children of male writers. But I do think it’s just always more transgressive, or more taboo, for a mother to write honestly about motherhood and her experiences.”

The island of Inis Meáin, a place White first visited over 10 years ago on honeymoon, was another big influence on the book.

“The geography of the island in Where I End is kind of an outsized version of what Inis Meáin is like,” she says. “It’s got a really beautiful sandy beach at one end, and at the other end are these absolutely desolate sheer cliffs.”

She and her husband were walking by these cliffs one day when they became “overcome with this pervasive weirdness”.

“I had this really potent sense of dread […] It wasn’t just wild and windswept and any of those clichés, it was actually more the stillness and the strangeness of it. And I noticed it was really getting to my husband as well, this kind of dread seeping up into us from the rocks and the sky and the ocean.”

This feeling is planted directly into the book, where the borders between landscape and psyche feel porous.

“I suppose I do think that we’re all produced very much by the environment that we grew up in, not just emotionally but geographically. […] I wanted to play with that.”

With writing, White always has an idea of the next project. “I do tend to always be thinking another book beyond, and I think it’s really exciting with Where I End to be moving into this slightly different genre and [wondering] if I will be accepted there. I definitely have more stories that I think sit there, that I would like to tell.”

But when it comes to much needed down time, she turns to her diverse range of hobbies.

“I literally have my knitting in my bag right now. I would take it out if I didn’t think it was rude,” she says.

She’s also been learning to pole dance and roller skate, endeavours which are “massively good for slowing me down a bit, making me be more in the moment and trying not to think a million miles an hour.”

In contrast with her work, she feels it’s important to be “really bad” at these hobbies.

“You don’t have to be doing your needlepoint but parlaying it into an Etsy shop or something like that. I feel we don’t say enough that it’s very good to be very sh*t at your hobby … I’m in a skate group called the Huns of Anarchy and they’re amazing. Some of them are just so spectacular, dancing and doing all the moves and stuff. And I’m fairly happy with the level I’ve achieved. I don’t think I’ll ever be a better skater than I am now.”

Where I End by Sophie White is published by Tramp Press