‘I’ve written about my pubic hair and drunken adventures so there is a fear of loss of gravitas’

When asked what historian Elizabeth Boyle’s book Fierce Appetites is about, I find myself struggling to define it. If I’d had time to think, I might have come up with something like “memoir-meets-introduction to medieval literature that deals with motherhood, sex, blended families, grief, love, self-destruction, mental health and the social status of women then and now”. In the end, I think I mumbled something about how she finds strands of universal truths in medieval literature and relates it to her own life. Either way, this book is – as Hilary Mantel notes in the cover blurb – “like nothing else you will read”.

I ask Boyle about its genesis. We had been supposed to do the interview in person, but it is scheduled for the day when a red weather warning keeps most of the country at home. So Zoom it is. The project, she reveals, came about after her editor, Patricia Deevy at Penguin Sandycove, stumbled on a letter she had written to her students in lockdown – she works in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University – and asked if she would be interested in writing something more longform. She agreed and found the words just “gushed” out of her. “It was the fastest and most pleasurable writing I’ve ever done.”

The book offered a way to bring medieval literature to a wider audience and “a way to show that [it] still speaks to the same stuff we live through today. People back then were also dealing with grief and heartbreak and fears about the future.”

She is unabashed about her own sex life, weaving stories about the aforementioned threesome, a relationship with a man 30 years older, and various brief encounters

Writing a hybrid memoir and medieval history book was not without risk. “Ultimately I make a living by standing in front of a roomful of people having to be authoritative. And now I’ve written about my pubic hair and my drunken adventures, so there is a fear that maybe there’s some loss of gravitas.”

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‘Most Irish people say yes to everything you ask them’

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There’s no doubting the lifelong passion for medieval literature, whose stories and characters permeate the text. But it occurs to me later that the intertwining of these with her own life had another benefit. It allowed her to approach some of her most deeply personal or painful episodes from a safe distance. She deals with her subjects – whether it’s the death of her beloved father, her troubled relationship with her mother, her perception of her own failures as a mother, her anxiety or the threesome she had on her 40th birthday – with a lack of sentimentality that occasionally feels as though she is acting as her own historian.

Loads of sex

One of the things that intrigues her about early Ireland is the dichotomy between its misogynistic power structures, its earthy attitude to sex and the notion that the people writing these texts were “ecclesiastically trained, literate elites … writing these stories that feature loads of sex, both consensual and non-consensual sex, masturbation and homosexuality.”

She is similarly unabashed about her own sex life, weaving stories about the aforementioned threesome, a relationship with a man 30 years older, and various brief encounters through the text. “I burn with sexual desire, but I want to act on it on my own terms,” she notes. However, those trawling the book for the salacious passages hinted at by the title may be disappointed: the passages are dispatched in the same way that you suspect she deals with it in real life, with more pragmatism than drama.

More impactful are the comparisons she draws between the way early Irish law dealt with victims of sexual assault. The law, she writes, differentiated between rape and what it called “sleith” – “which is non-consensual sex with a woman who is in a drunken stupor, sleeping or comatose. If a woman falls asleep in a mead-house, and is raped while unconscious, she forfeits her entitlement to compensation because she should not have been alone in a mead-house in the first place.”

She is almost scathing about her own decision to leave her six-year-old daughter with her father in England to move to Ireland

Boyle says: “If you were a woman who is deemed to be ... sexually immoral, or you’re a sex worker, you’re deemed unworthy of compensation. Arguably, you could say that in that sense, very little has changed. There is still a lot of victim blaming.”

Although she has little tolerance for these double standards, she is almost scathing about her own decision to leave her six-year-old daughter with her father in England to move to Ireland for her dream job. She writes: “I have variously ascribed my actions to the postnatal depression, to the effects of traumatic childhood events … those things probably did play their role. But I was also just a selfish arsehole, no bones about it.”

Isn’t that a bit harsh, I wonder, considering there are many men with similar arrangements? “I don’t feel like I was being hard on myself necessarily. I just was expressing a real conflict that I felt and still continue to feel.”

History repeating

Part of this is because she had an unsettling sense of history repeating itself. When she was three, her own mother left her to be raised by her father and stepmother. “It is different from my situation with my mother, because I continued to go back every fortnight and see my daughter,” she says. And yet her guilt quite literally crippled her. Her daughter was, “safe and loved and looked after by her father – he’s a brilliant father – and she has a lovely stepmum, lovely home, and a little brother and everything. But at the same time, I ultimately made a choice, and I felt conflicted about it. I have never regretted taking the job. But I had extra negative emotions, just because I felt like I was repeating what my mother had done to some extent.”

Boyle’s mother’s absence from her life story permeates the text – she merits only a few mentions, including thanks in the acknowledgements for allowing her daughter to write about their relationship. In the final chapter of the book, Boyle confronts another connected absence; her total lack of any memories or knowledge of what happened during the first three years of her life.

"I was like, 'Okay, I've always known I wasn't wanted as a baby, I'm kind of okay with that.' Then bizarrely, when I was recording the audiobook version, I broke down in tears"

She pursues it as a historian, and she finds clues in fragments of court documents, shattering in their brevity and cruelty. “Elizabeth is wicked as always.” “Her behaviour was ruining the holiday.” “I don’t think you will have any problems with her when you take her away from me.”

Writing it, “I felt matter-of-fact about it. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve always known I wasn’t wanted as a baby, I’m kind of okay with that.’ Then bizarrely, when I was recording the audiobook version, I broke down in tears. It was like I was reading about another child, not me. I felt this empathy for this little child.”

There has been a lot of talk about how we’re in a golden age of memoir, something that initially gave Boyle a few qualms about taking on this project. “I thought, you know, does the world need another memoir? Why does anyone need to hear my story?”

But “when I started to think about it as being my small contribution to a bigger genre, I stopped having the anxiety. And then when I started to think about it, I realised academia is a very privileged world. So for me to come from a relatively less privileged background, have gone to a comprehensive school and got through the system with council assistance and scholarships, I thought that maybe this was a story worth telling.”

Few readers of this fiercely smart, strange, surprising, unsettling and unflinching hybrid of a book will disagree with that.

Fierce Appetites is published by Penguin Sandycove