The Queen of Dirt Island

The motif of storytelling is central to the narrative of The Queen of Dirt Island. Saoirse grows up in a house surrounded by stories, from both her grandmother, who tells entertaining and bawdy stories of her childhood in Ireland, and her mother, who often tells Saoirse stories about her family and father. These stories shape Saoirse as a person and inform her arc. However, the novel also demonstrates how storytelling can be harmful. When Josh tries to write a novel based on Saoirse’s family, he fails to represent them in a respectful and vulnerable way, instead twisting the narrative into a generic potboiler thriller. Saoirse is hurt and offended by Josh’s novel because of the value placed on stories in her childhood, and she breaks up with him. Saoirse eventually becomes a writer herself, thus completing this aspect of her character arc: She develops from story-listener to storyteller and has become successful at it.

In the novel, stories are a form of self-knowledge; the women at the center of the novel define how they see themselves and their family through the stories that they tell. This motif is reinforced by the experimental structure of the novel; each of the 500-word chapters functions as a mini-story or