LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 58

“There was a sense that maybe I didn’t feel that same drive, and I found
myself questioning, ‘Is there something else I really want to do?’” she
says.
The question proved to be both a catalyst and an inspiration. Owens
realised what she really wanted to do was write, and so resigned from
her job to embark on the creative writing MA at the University of East
Anglia. Her resulting novel – Not Working – explores the idea that
today’s 20- and thirtysomethings are lost in a sea of career options that
many find paralysing.
“We were raised to think we could do whatever we wanted to do,”
Owens explains. “And I think that pressure is quite difficult, because
people think, ‘How do I choose when I could do anything? How do I
make the right decision?’ It sounds like a very first-world problem, of
which I’m completely aware – I have to caveat it with that!”
People would ask what I was writing, and I’d tell them, and they’d say it
really rang true to them
Owens laughs, as she does a lot throughout our interview. She has a
natural warmth and wit that leaps off the pages of Not Working, a novel
as insightful about the contemporary dilemmas facing young
professionals as it is sharp, incisive and laugh-out-loud funny. And
it’s Not Working’s humour that gives its protagonist, Claire Flannery,
such a fresh voice. In the novel, Claire gives up her job in marketing to
try to find her real vocation, only to struggle locating it. Much of the
book – told in vignette form – follows Claire’s job-search, and is filled
with blisteringly acute observations of the mundane thoughts and
obsessions that fill the lives of people with too much time on their
hands.
Owens didn’t, however, always intend her debut novel to be comedic.
She’s a fan of “sparse Irish domestic fiction” and had imagined she’d
write something in that vein. But for years she’d been noting down
58 | P a g e