The past is written in present tense, more alive; the present is written in past tense.
In the quiet hours before the world intrudes, Irish novelist Sarah Gilmartin has built a body of work that asks what it means to want something — and what we destroy in the wanting. Her third novel, Little Vanities, arrives as a meditation on midlife, desire, and the slow-motion wreckage of betrayal, drawing on a lineage that runs from Flaubert to Yates. It is the work of a writer who has learned, through reviewing and studying and rewriting, that literature's deepest purpose is to slow us down long enough to inhabit another life entirely.
- Two couples approaching forty find themselves haunted by the roads not taken, their old friendship triangle quietly warping under the pressure of envy, chronic pain, and unspoken desire.
- A character's role in Pinter's Betrayal at the Abbey becomes an uncomfortable mirror for everyone watching from the stalls — the novel's architecture and the play's reflecting each other with unsettling precision.
- Gilmartin wrestles the timeline into an unusual shape: the past written in present tense to keep it alive, the present unfolding across a single stretched day, as if time itself is resisting what is about to happen.
- Rachel, the working-class outsider who married into this world, refuses to be a stooge — her agency and clear-eyed perspective becoming the novel's moral anchor amid the wreckage others are making of themselves.
- With Little Vanities launched and a prestigious Iowa residency ahead, Gilmartin is already turning toward rural Limerick and two male voices in dialectic opposition, carrying her conviction that fiction is the last act of genuine empathy in an age of rampaging reaction.
Sarah Gilmartin writes in the early morning, at a narrow desk facing a blank wall, before the day's noise can reach her. This discipline has carried her through three novels, and her latest, Little Vanities, is the most assured of them — a sharp, funny, and quietly devastating book about two couples circling forty, bound by a friendship triangle that began at Trinity College Dublin.
The novel's geometry is deliberate: two against one, always, with an inbuilt sense of loss. Dylan, a retired rugby player carrying chronic pain, and Stevie, a physiotherapist, fall into the trap of imagining how differently life might have gone. Their wives orbit this restlessness, and a four-year-old character named Leah is described as already consumed by the greatest human quest — the hunt for more and better love. The title comes from Madame Bovary, and Gilmartin reread the infidelity canon — Flaubert, Tolstoy, Yates, Eugenides — as she wrote. Ben, an actor in the group, lands a role in Pinter's Betrayal at the Abbey, a play whose backward-moving architecture mirrors the novel's own preoccupations uncomfortably closely for those watching from the audience.
The book grew from pandemic reading and a personal encounter with long Covid. Gilmartin wanted to explore what happens when sickness burdens a marriage, when pain becomes either something you endure with adult patience or something you flee from — and Dylan flees. She found, to her surprise, that pain could be comic. The present timeline, she discovered late in the writing, unfolds over a single day, time stretched thin and resistant.
Rachel, Dylan's wife and the group's outsider, is perhaps Gilmartin's favourite character — a woman with full agency and perspective, never reduced to a victim. Across her three novels, Gilmartin has traced how the past reaches into the present: anorexia and family trauma in Dinner Party, sexual assault and its long aftermath in Service, and now failed ambition and envy as the ghosts haunting her male characters.
Her path to fiction wound through English and German at Trinity, a brief acting career, arts journalism, and years reviewing debut fiction for The Irish Times. She credits Claire Keegan with seeing something in an early story, and Anne Enright's MFA programme with giving her the structural confidence to turn it into a novel. She has learned to distinguish what stories do — catch a fleeting moment before it dissolves — from what novels allow: development, riffing, comedy, the full unfolding of a life.
In autumn, she heads to Iowa's International Writing Program, the first Irish writer selected since Sara Baume in 2015. Her next novel will leave Dublin for rural Limerick, told through two male voices in opposition. She speaks of it carefully, not wanting to disturb the early thinking. What she is certain of is why any of it matters: literature, she says, is the opposite of the age's rampaging and reaction. It is the act of slowing down, observing, and placing yourself — without borders or passports — inside the mind of another.
Sarah Gilmartin has learned to write in the early hours, before the day's noise arrives. She sits at a narrow wooden desk facing a blank wall, a print by Felim Egan just beyond her line of sight, and she writes fiction first—while her mind is still dreamy, still liminal, before emails and the world's demands encroach. This discipline, honed across three novels, has brought her to a particular moment: her third book, Little Vanities, launches next week, and in autumn she will begin a residency at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, becoming the first Irish writer selected since Sara Baume in 2015.
Little Vanities is a novel about two couples circling forty, bound by a friendship triangle that began in Trinity College Dublin. There is Ben, a struggling actor; Stevie, a physiotherapist, and his wife; Dylan, a retired Leinster rugby player; and Rachel, Dylan's wife, a working-class woman who married into this world and still feels like an outsider in it. The geometry of the triangle—two against one, always—creates what Gilmartin calls an inbuilt sense of loss and inequality. It is a midlife-crisis novel, sharp with wit and wisdom, populated by characters taking stock of their lives and wondering whether they are happy. Dylan and Stevie fall into the trap of the road not taken, imagining how differently things might have unfolded had they made different choices twenty years ago. The novel's four-year-old character, Leah, is described as "entitled, lonely and, at four years of age, already preoccupied with the greatest of all human quests, the hunt for more and better love"—a line that captures the book's sensibility entirely.
The novel began with desire. During the pandemic, Gilmartin was reading American fiction about miserable marriages—Richard Yates, Jeffrey Eugenides—and she found herself thinking about what characters want, what drives them forward. "Even before relationships and infidelity, desire is a great driver," she says. But as she wrote, pain emerged as equally central. Gilmartin had suffered from long Covid and wanted to explore what happens when you are young but have no energy, when sickness burdens a marriage. Dylan, in the novel, carries chronic pain from an old rugby injury; the question becomes whether he copes with it in a boring, adult way or whether he seeks distraction—which is what he does. Pain, she discovered, could also be funny. "I wanted to write a book about how people cause themselves pain but in a way that balanced comedy and tragedy. I think this is my funniest book."
The title comes from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, from the lament of Emma's mother-in-law about "her shattered, broken little vanities." When Gilmartin realized her story was fundamentally about betrayal, she reread the infidelity classics: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, and the twentieth-century American writers—Yates, Cheever, Eugenides, Wharton. Ben, the actor, gets a role in Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the Abbey Theatre, a play whose plot mirrors the novel's own architecture uncomfortably closely for the others watching from the audience. Gilmartin had considered mirroring Pinter's backward-moving structure, but she realized that for her story to feel organic, the past needed to keep interfering with the present. She writes the past in present tense—more alive—and the present in past tense. The present timeline, she discovered only late in writing, unfolds over the course of a single day, a technique meant to convey a sense of time being dragged out, stretched thin.
Rachel, the outsider, may be Gilmartin's favorite character. She is not a stooge; she has agency and perspective. "It's important she wasn't the stooge," Gilmartin says. The character emerged from something she took, perhaps unconsciously, from Anna Karenina—the sense that everyone can see the affair coming, that it is a slow-motion car crash unfolding before them. Across her three novels, Gilmartin has been interested in how the past reaches into the present, how legacy shapes us. In Dinner Party, her debut from 2021, it was anorexia rooted in family trauma. In Service, from 2023, it was the line between sexual assault and how a character lives years later. In Little Vanities, for the male characters, failed ambition and envy are the ghosts that haunt them.
Gilmartin studied English and German at Trinity, tried acting—she played an Ogham stone in a production—and first wrote seriously in a class in San Diego, a thinly disguised account of her grandmother's descent into dementia. She went on to study creative writing at UCD under Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and James Ryan, then switched from business to arts journalism, reviewing debut fiction for The Irish Times for several years. "I learned an awful lot reviewing," she says. "Not just 'don't confuse the reader' but also structure, time, voice and style." But the more she wrote, the less she wanted to review. She read John McGahern say that writers should observe but not judge, and that shifted something in her.
Dinner Party began as a short story she could not get published. A friend persuaded her to take a workshop with Claire Keegan, who saw something in it. Another workshop with Keegan gave her the confidence to apply for an MFA at UCD led by Anne Enright. The story became a novel when Gilmartin realized it was Kate's story, and that too many points of view were fracturing the structure. "Now it's the bit I love most," she says. She has learned the difference between stories and novels: stories deal with a fleeting moment, a thing almost caught and then swallowed by the usual madness of life. Novels allow for development, for riffing and experimentation, for comedy. "A short story, because of its length, doesn't go into character so much." She thinks often of Maeve Brennan and Mary Lavin, writers who capture the emotion of a moment suspended in time.
In autumn, Gilmartin heads to Iowa, where she will work on her next novel—set in rural Limerick, not Dublin, with two male perspectives in dialectic opposition and a focus on cross-cultural exchange. She is in the early stages and does not want to unsettle her thoughts by speaking of it too much. But she is thinking about literature as an act of empathy, a slowing down and observing in a time marked by rampaging and reaction. "Literature is the opposite of that," she says. "It's about slowing down, observing, contemplating; an act of empathy, of imagination, that places us, without borders or passports, in the mind of another."
Citações Notáveis
Even before relationships and infidelity, desire is a great driver, what a character wants.— Sarah Gilmartin, on the central tension in Little Vanities
Literature is about slowing down, observing, contemplating; an act of empathy, of imagination, that places us, without borders or passports, in the mind of another.— Sarah Gilmartin, on why literature matters in turbulent times
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
You've written three novels now, each examining how people damage each other. What made you want to keep returning to that territory?
I think it's because I'm genuinely curious about how fragile things are. How easy it is to break something. And once you've broken it, what happens next? The consequences ripple outward. I've been interested in the reach of the past—how something that happened twenty years ago can still shape you now.
In Little Vanities, you have Rachel as the outsider looking in on this friendship triangle. Why was it important that she not be a victim in the story?
Because that's not how life works, is it? She's the one with the clearest view. She's not caught up in the mythology of these friendships the way the others are. She has agency. She can see what's happening and she can act on it. That felt more honest to me.
You write the past in present tense and the present in past tense. That's a deliberate inversion. What does that accomplish?
The past feels more alive that way. More immediate. The present, written in past tense, has a sense of it already being over, even as it's happening. And I wanted the past to keep interfering with the present—not as flashback, but as something that's still active, still shaping what people do.
You spent years reviewing fiction before you wrote your own novels. Did that teach you what not to do?
It taught me structure, voice, the architecture of a story. But more than that, it taught me to see the variety of ways a novel could be written. That was freeing. And then I read McGahern say writers should observe but not judge, and something shifted. I realized I wanted to be inside the story, not standing outside it.
What draws you to pain as a subject? Not just emotional pain, but physical pain, chronic pain?
Because it's real. It's something we all experience but we don't talk about much. And it can be funny—the absurdity of what we survive. I wanted to write about how people cause themselves pain, but in a way that balanced comedy and tragedy. That felt more true to how life actually is.