Mia: The book takes us on a chilling and addictive tour of Europe's scary and often hilarious underworld. How much of this world have you experienced yourself?
Emer: I escaped from Ireland when I was 17. The nuns in my convent school had spent so many years ranting about the dangers of drugs and sex that I couldn't wait to dive right in and try it for myself. I knew they were obsessed for a reason. I flew to Paris on a one way ticket and took care of various people's snotty little toddlers but I was so wild that I couldn't bare the confines of a roof and four walls let alone sitting all day polishing French people's silver and wiping their kid's arses. So I ended up living on the streets with a bunch of lunatics and it is from these surroundings that much of the material for Breakfast In Babylon was gathered.
Mia: You really have a genius for characters and dialogue, it would make a wonderful movie. The Characters literally leap off the page and grab you by the throat.
Emer: I was writing about real people and real events, the book is a composite of fact and fiction.
Mia: Did any of the real life characters object?
Emer: Taffy the Welsh punk with one leg is a character everyone loves. I didn't know him very well and made up the story of how he lost the leg, but apparently he got hold of the book and was delighted to find a version of himself there. Now he carries the book around waving it about and claiming it's the truth. He's adopted my account of his life as his own. That's a strange instance of fiction becoming more real than fact.
Mia: The book is about people who travel the world. Many young Americans would be interested in how to do it without any money
Emer: I never had any money in my life. The characters in Breakfast In Babylon might come into money in the afternoon but they are always broke by next morning. Once my friend and I left Paris and took the ferry to London, we had about a pound between us but when she went up to buy some chips, the barmaid bullied her into putting all her change into a poor box for more lifeboats. We arrived in London with nothing at all.
Mia: How did you survive?
Emer: Eventually four of us women, all Irish teenagers, moved into a studio with three mattresses and fought bitterly for the whole winter. Six months later I decided to escape the endless squabbling about who used whose razor etc., by going to work on a Kibbutz in Israel. I worked in a condom factory, chicken shed and peanut field, which I set on fire by mistake. So it was a roasted peanut field when I left. Eventually I arrived in the Sinai desert, stayed in a hut in a Bedouin village, traveled throughout Egypt, down the Nile to Nubia, lived with an Egyptian family in a suburb of Cairo, fell ill with Amoebic Dysentery and spent the rest of my time delirious in bed with an intravenous drip and a fever with the father trying to convince me to marry his only son or at least his Uncle Showie. I escaped to Israel by walking over a minefield unawares while listening to the Bee Gees "What are you doing in your bed you should be dancing, yeah". All these soldiers were waving at me frantically, I was thinking 'what a friendly bunch!'
Mia: What are your good memories?
Emer: I worked as a cleaner in a Motel for Orthodox Jews on the Sea of Galilee, near Syria. There I was cleaning toilets and mopping floors on the night-shift and sometimes I would drop my mop; run down to the sea, and jump in naked. That was lovely. A real job perk.
Mia: How did you eventually make it to these shores?
Emer: Like every other time, I just hopped on a plane with a few bucks and winged it. The first place I lived in was Savannah, Georgia with a lesbian librarian I met in Paris. There I worked in an Irish bar run by an Italian from Queens. Toured the South with my waitress money, met a woman in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and hitching a ride in her truck we drove cross country for weeks. She dropped me off in San Francisco where, as usual, I didn't know a soul. I soon found a waitressing job on the wharf and lived in this woman's closet. In Autumn I headed to Mexico and Cuba and the following spring I settled in New York. I wrote Breakfast in Babylon while shacked up in New Jersey with a mad scientist. So you see you can travel the world on $0 dollars a day but you don't exactly end up in the Ritz, unless you're washing dishes in the kitchens of course.
Mia: That's what's so cool about Breakfast In Babylon. We have a zillion road novels and movies but at long last here is one great female character Isolt and she makes Thelma and Louise look like two old aunts from the Waltons. Are you a feminist?
Emer: Of course.
Mia: Why do you say of course? Are all women feminists?
Emer: All the smart hip ones are.
Mia: Do you think women writers are at a disadvantage?
Emer: It's a question of trust. People are not trained to trust women. I was on the subway platform yesterday and the train came and this idiot starts freaking out shouting 'there's a woman driver, I ain't getting on the train.' And he didn't. So if people can't even trust women to drive them through those dark tunnels how will they trust them to take a can-opener to their tin hearts and delve inside. It will only change when we de-emphasize gender. By gender I mean both biological sex and sexual orientation. In fact, gender, race, and class are the three main things in this world which affect our position in the society at large. The system has necessitated that there should be divisions in these categories that reward one side for oppressing the other. Male is to female, as straight is to gay, as white is to black, as rich is to poor. Our culture has been degraded as a result. We need an underdog to do the cheap labor.
Mia: Do you think this will change?
Emer: It's up to us. Change will not come from the top. It's no accident that a disproportionate amount of the poor in the U.S. are people of color; with women at the bottom of the scale. As long as we can see the ultimate underdog as a poor dark-skinned woman then rich white males can disassociate themselves from all guilt.
Mia: Why?
Emer: Because it's so inculcated into the culture that this is the natural order of things they see no reason to alter the balance.
Mia: What advice would you give to other young women out there?
Emer: Don't pay any attention to the rotten mainstream culture that tells you what you should look like, who you should sleep with, and what you will become. All women are beautiful so quit fretting in the mirror and get out there and kick some ass.
