Emma Donoghue: ‘In Ireland we start with the slagging. That is something I really treasure’

I was named after Jane Austen’s Emma. My dad Denis [the late academic and literary critic] wanted to call me Emily because he had been working on Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte, but my mother Frances didn’t like the idea of Emily. She said, “You’ve also worked on the novel Emma, let’s go for that.”

People – especially in the United States – often ask me questions that I can tell assume I had some kind of very traditional Irish upbringing, that we were storytelling around the turf fire. To be fair, we did have a turf fire, but it was in Mount Merrion in Dublin. It was suburban.

It is hilarious to me, but my red hair also means people assume I am the most authentic of wild Irish women. If I am directly asked, I tell them that it’s all fake, I’m brown-haired.

Living in New York for a year when I was nine was mind-blowing. In 1979, Ireland was a very different place, and nine is such a formative age. It had a lasting effect on me. It made me loud and confident, and I became a little bit Americanised with a can-do attitude. I think if I had always been at school with Irish nuns, it might have kept me a bit more low-key.