On Monday night, Michelle Gallen won the top prize at the Comedy Women in Print (CWIP) awards for her “fun, politically rich, and topical coming-of-age novel.” factory girlShe was so busy “sitting on the couch talking to me face to face” that she almost missed the announcement. Infected by the ordered champagne because she thought she wouldn’t win, she giggled, in high spirits from so many cheerful women gathered in a room at the Groucho club in central London. “Then someone said that I won. I was literally speechless, and I’m not the type to be speechless. I couldn’t say anything. To be honest, soon after that I had to go home and lie down.
Speaking with Gallen via Zoom from her home in Dublin, it was clear how much this award means to her. In 2021, she was nominated for her first book. Big girl in a small town, while the award, presented to comedian and actress Helen Lederer and honored by other women in comedy such as Sharon Horgan, Jo Brand and Sue Townsend, has been working remotely during the pandemic. “When you receive awards like this, you sit down at the table with a little more self-confidence,” Gallen says. CWIP is especially “thrilled,” she explains. “All that energy and power – you don’t get that feeling and that vibe very often.”
Gallen began to write factory girl – which follows 18-year-old Maeve in a “shitty town” near the border with Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles – eight years ago when she was on maternity leave for her second child, but she first came up with the idea in 1998, soon after she graduated from college. Due to a serious illness that temporarily confined her to a wheelchair, she did not start writing at the time; She says it’s a complex thing and she’s still trying to piece together a coherent story about how the book came to be. It is based on formative events in her own life: she, too, grew up during the Troubles in a town near the border in Northern Ireland and, like Maeve, spent her summers working in a shirt factory.
Gallen is interested in “melting pots,” she explains. “The idea of being thrown into a small space” – like a factory – “and waiting for people who are a lot like you, but also different.” is quick to point out that this is still the case, her young nieces and nephews still attend the same same-gender Catholic schools as she and her siblings. “This echoes a pattern that I refer to very intensely in the novel: how can you live in such a small town and in such a small space, but only meet people in a forced environment like a factory?”
She chose to move to Dublin with her French-Moroccan husband and children rather than back to Northern Ireland because “we felt it was important to raise them in more mixed communities where the school system is totally agnostic”.
But Gallen feels “more at home: I get into the manner and sense of humor, which I really like.” You can tell it from the book: the dialogues are written in the colloquial language of Northern Ireland and have a loud, unfiltered quality reminiscent of watching Derry girls (Gallen cites creator Lisa McGee as inspiration, as well as Sharon Horgan, Cathy Burke, Naoise Dolan, and Jane Austen.) Her American editor, Gallen explains, made her “remove about 70 percent of the ‘orphan’ in the book — she said no one would believe it. And I said, but let’s do it, Betsy! Come into the store and let us show you, “Could you get a little check with your little bread, please?”
Gallen also finds much of his comic inspiration at home. “When I think about the funny, I immediately think of the time when I was small and surrounded by funny women – strong women who had their own opinion and who also expressed it behind the scenes,” Gallen says. In fact, Northern Irish humor can be so fast and poignant that at the shirt factory, Gallen was “constantly afraid of how smart, funny and hot everyone was.” You left with nothing.” Although she just won a critically acclaimed comedy writing award, at home, she says, she often fails. When she announces something to her family (Gallen has two brothers and three sisters) on WhatsApp, “They love knives – it’s amazing. By the time I wrote something back, someone else had written something smarter and funnier.”
Read smart, insanely funny factory girlI can hardly imagine it. It’s this real-life sense of humor – the kind that comes “in response to awkward situations” and that doesn’t “captivate” – that helps. Michelle Gallen was “so shocked she couldn’t speak” when she received her CWIP award on Monday, but she had nothing to worry about. factory girl says enough.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.