Tag: Writing

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing News

Writers Chat 79: Celia de Fréine on “Even Still” (Arlen House, 2025)

Celia, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to talk about Even Still (Arlen House, 2025) your debut short story collection in English which also includes “The Story of Elizabeth”, your short story shortlisted for Short Story of the Year Award at the An Post Irish Book Awards. The collection has been described as having “compelling” prose with “characters’ voices pitch perfect” and a “unique, characteristically stark, witty perspective on the lives of women and girls.”

SG: Even Still invites the reader into the emotional heart of each narrator – over a range of ages – and stays with some of them as they create life-paths out of places of poverty, away from damaged families and through schooling and employment that only echo where they’ve come from. Did these themed threads dictate the title and running order of the collection?

CdF: Thank you for the invitation, Shauna. I’m delighted to take part in the Writers Chat series. The word ‘debut’ seems strange applied to me at this stage of my life and so late in my literary career, but Even Still is indeed a debut collection of stories that were written on the side, over many years, while I worked in other genres. The title was chosen at the last minute, and with difficulty. I feel it suits the collection, however, as it suggests the possibility of alternatives. As for the running order, I thought it best to place the three stories that feature the character, Veronica, in chronological order. “My Sister Safija”, “Vive La Révolution” and “Irma” grouped themselves together. It seemed appropriate to place “La Cantatrice Muette” and “Félicité” between later stories, some of which have characters common to them. As you say, many of the stories explore the lives of  characters who emerge from disadvantaged backgrounds, then attend schools / are employed by institutions in which they are challenged as a result of that background; the question as to how they manage to improve their lot is one that intrigues me, not only in this book, but in general.

Cover image of Even Still showing part image of the painting ‘Fitzwilliam Square’ by Pauline Bewick – side profile of a woman on a balcony in Dublin looking down on a road on which seven cars move along.

SG: The collection is as much about place as people – starting with the cover art (‘Fitzwilliam Square’ by Pauline Bewick) – and the opening story “Pink Remembered Streets.” In these stories villages, towns, cities, and the buildings that form them rescue and trap their inhabitants. Can you comment on the importance of place in your stories?

CdF: The cover art, suggested by publisher, Alan Hayes, with its buildings, winding street and traffic, viewed by a woman from a height, is indeed appropriate. This is the first time I’ve been asked about place in my work and am happy to provide answers, insofar as they relate to this book. The buildings, in which the stories are set, are imagined, apart from the brief mention of a boarding school in “These Boots were Made for Me” and the houses described in “Pink Remembered Streets” and “The Accident”. Both of these houses were places in which I spent time; both were places of insecurity. The former is a flat in a house in Rathmines where I lived with my family during my early years, and from which we could have been evicted at a moment’s notice; the latter is my grandmother’s house in a seaside town in Northern Ireland where I spent my childhood summers, knowing the fun and happiness would end when summer drew to a close. Both houses have appeared in other work, as has security of tenure and the buying and selling of property. Another place that permeates the stories is the past, L.P. Hartley’s ‘another country’ where, in this case, there were few opportunities for girls and women.

SG: You tackle themes (such as domestic abuse, gun running, suicide, the poverty trap, cruelty) that could be weighty with, at times, a narrative voice that is wry and humorous. I’m thinking of the voices of Stella in “Panda Bears” and Eithne in “His Ice Creamio is the Bestio”. Was that a conscious, writerly decision or did those narrative voices emerge through the writing of the characters?

CdF: I tend to see the absurd in many situations and this is reflected in the stories “Panda Bears” and “His Ice Creamio is the Bestio”. In the former, Stella feels she must marry, not least on account of the urging of her friend, Eileen. The fact that both men she sleeps with wear hideous underwear and are poor lovers emerged naturally, as did the time in which the story is set: the opening occurs in late 1969, as suggested by the Mary Quant lipstick and the Beatles’ song; the fact that the timing of the gunrunning, set during the following Whit Weekend, coincides with the 1970 Arms Trial, was serendipitous. “His Ice Creamio is the Bestio” began life as a play in which I examined the lives of three generations of women from the same family, each of whom spent their formative years in different circumstances: grandmother, Eithne, from Northern Ireland, worked as a shorthand-typist during World War 11; her daughter, Francesca, an academic, grew up during the fifties in Dublin; Francesca’s daughter, Alannah, grew up in the Connemara Gaeltacht during the eighties. I found it bizarre, though credible, that three generations of one family could emerge from such different backgrounds on the same small island, and set out to explore how those differences impacted the characters.

SG: I’d love read a novel with these three generations! The stories often hold their power in the unsaid – or shown at a slant – whereby they rely on the readers’ close attention and intelligence to know or feel the real truth. Veronica’s stories, in particular, are great at this (the absence of Clara, for example). We know what happened to her – or we use what the narrative has stoked in our imagination. This makes it feel like these stories are a dialogue between writer/narrator and reader. Can you comment on this?

CdF: The subtlety probably spills over from my poetry where the number of words is more measured and the point never hammered home. I feel this approach works well in the Veronica stories, each of which focuses on the fate of a child: Clara, who falls prey to a paedophile in “Pink Remembered Streets”; the baby, Elizabeth, born of incest in “The Story of Elizabeth”; the unnamed boy, illegally adopted in “These Boots Were Made for Me”. I hadn’t planned that the common denominator in these stories would be the ‘child as victim’, as seen through the eyes of Veronica. Perhaps, because they are told at a slant, the stories demand the reader’s close attention, creating, as you say, an additional element to the usual dialogue between writer and reader; if this is the case, it was unintentional.

SG: And the unintentional is often the magic of the work! War, gender, and displacement are also explored in these stories, overtly in “Irma” and “My Sister Safija” which, as they’re bookmarked between other stories, seem to echo concepts of the outsider, whether it’s ideas of blow-ins, internal movement within the island of Ireland, or belonging through marriage. Did you set out to explore these themes or did they emerge through the stories?

CdF: War, gender, and displacement feature regularly in my poetry and it comes as no surprise that they have spilled over into Even Still. In addition, I should mention that some situations and characters in the collection are inspired by real events, though said situations and characters have been changed out of all recognition. The theme of the outsider, insofar as that person is from Northern Ireland, is one that worked its way into these stories. Having been born in the North and grown up in Dublin, I’ve always struggled to find out where I’m from, a question which drives much of my writing. I used to question whether I was entitled to explore my ‘Northerness’ as I hadn’t lived in the North during the Troubles but, more recently have come to  better understand how the fallout from the conflict reaches beyond the Border. Though I didn’t set out to write stories populated by Northerners, these characters presented themselves and exerted their influence to varying degrees on the situations in which they became involved. As for belonging through marriage, Stella in “Panda Bears” is a young woman from Dublin who ends up marrying a Kerryman and moving to Tralee. This idea was also triggered by personal circumstances: I worked for some years in the Civil Service where the vast majority of colleagues were from the country and cast me, the Dubliner, as outsider – even though when I finished work and went home in the evening I was cast, alongside my family, as outsider because we were from the North.

SG: Much of your writing has the poet’s eye for detail, the dramatist’s narrative curve, and the prose writer’s depth. Your descriptions and visual take on lives also has the film maker’s sensibility. Could you see any of these stories as short films? (I’m thinking of “The Short of It”, for example).

CdF: It has already been suggested to me that some of the stories would work on screen. As soon as someone gets back to me with a firm proposal, I shall give it my serious consideration! “The Short of It” is the only story I set out to write as part of an agenda. Some years ago I was devastated when my work was plagiarised and exploited on a very public platform. One of my sons suggested I write a revenge story in the style of Michael Crichton: Crichton finds novel way to exact revenge on critic | The Independent | The Independent. Although my son’s suggestion triggered “The Short of It”, the story changed out of all recognition once I got going and now bears no resemblance to the travesty which gave it its initial impetus. I like the juxtaposition between the narrator’s circumstances when young, cash-strapped and working in the Civil Service, she adapts sewing patterns to recreate dresses featured on the catwalk, and her response, years later, when she realises her writing has been plagiarised.

SG: You are a bilingual writer. Were any of these stories first written in Irish, and, if so, how did you find the translation process in terms of idioms, flow, and narrative voice? If not, would you consider translating any of them into Irish?

CdF: “My Sister Safija” was originally written in Irish and is published as “Mo Dheirfiúr Maja” in Bláth na dTulach (Éabhlóid, 2021) an anthology of work by Northern writers. As such, I had to transpose it to Donegal Irish and needed editorial assistance. You can listen to it, beautifully read by Áine Ní Dhíoraí, here: Mo Dheirfiúr Maja le Celia de Fréine – Bláth na dTulach (podcast) | Listen Notes. I would consider translating any of the stories in Even Still into Irish for a film script or play.

SG: We will end this Writers Chat, Celia, with some fun questions:

  • Bus or train? Tram. I love the LUAS. For longer journeys, I prefer the train but find myself travelling more by bus as bus stops are more accessible than railway stations.
  • Marmalade or jam? Marmalade. Thick cut.
  • Coffee or tea? An cupán tae, always.
  • What are you reading now? When I’m writing I read little other than newspapers (at the weekend) and research / fact-checking articles. As well as the above, at present I’m dipping into There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die (Penguin UK, 2025) the selected poems of Danish writer, Tove Ditlevsen. Recently I read The Forgotten Girls: An American Story (Allen Lane, 2023) by Monica Potts; and You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Canongate, 2023) by Maggie Smith (not the actor). All three books explore themes covered in Even Still.
  • These sound like great recommendations (I love Ditlevsen’s work!) What are you writing now? I’m about to sign off on the second edition of my poetry collection Aibítir Aoise : Alphabet of an Age (Arlen House, 2025); I’m also reworking my play Cóirín na dTonn with the team from An Taibhdhearc. Cóirín na dTonn was originally published as part of the collection Mná Dána (Arlen House, 2009 / 2019) and is recommended as an optional text on the Leaving Certificate Syllabus. I also have two projects on Louise Gavan Duffy, inspired by my biography Ceannródaí (LeabhairCOMHAR, 2018), on the back burner. As all these projects are based on, or inspired by, earlier work, I long to clear space for new poems, and get back to a YA novel in Irish which I began a couple of months ago.

Thank you, Celia, for such insight into your writing life and process. Here’s to finding clear space over the coming months and continued success with Even Still which can be purchased in Books Upstairs.

Photograph of Celia de Fréine, Princess Grace Library, by Judith Gantley used with permission.

Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Awards

Writers Chat 78: Nuala O’Connor on “Seaborne” (New Island: 2024)

Nuala, You’re very welcome back to my Writers Chat series. This time we’re here to chat about Seaborne, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and described by Donal Ryan as “sublimely imagined and beautifully told.”

Multiple images of Seaborne by Nuala O’Connor with the title and author name in gold lettering and blue/grey art showing a woman’s face formed by seaweed.

SG: The cover art is stunning. It’s inviting without having read the book and once you’ve read it, you realise the cover totally reflects both title and the complex character of Anne Bonny. Did you have an input into the design and the title?

NOC: I did, yes. New Island are brilliantly collaborative when it comes to the cover. They asked me to make a Pinterest board of images and book covers I liked. I gathered lots of pics of swirly water, women in water, women with big hair and ships on their heads, and so on. Then Karen Vaughan, the designer, came up with loads of possibilities. The final cover image is the one we all had the biggest love for and there were many colour and font tweaks until everyone was happy. The gold foil was an added bonus and I love it. A great experience.

SG: I loved the gold foil! Stunning. It struck me that where Anne is located is a vital part of her identity as much as are people around her. How important was place to you in the writing of this epic book which follows Anne from Kinsale to Carolina?

NOC: Hugely important. There are a lot of myths that swirl around Anne Bonny, and the places she lived or hailed from are included in that. There is no solid evidence of her origins at all, but I chose to use Kinsale and the Carolinas because they were already cited. I travelled to Kinsale but the pandemic prevented my research abroad, so I had to rely on the net, archives, and books for research. Luckily, historical houses, bloggers, and archives are very generous digital sharers of their wealth and knowledge.

SG: Anne is a maverick, and you said in our Writers Chat about Nora Barnacle, another maverick, that you like “women who push against societal norms.” How did you find your research helped or hindered in the creation of the Anne Bonny we meet in Seaborne, given scant records about her illegitimacy, fluid identification with gender, and the push against the barriers of class?

NOC: Any woman who became a seafarer or pirate was considered untoward. With untowardness – in this historic, patriarchal paradigm – goes low morals, bad temper, wantonness etcetera, so Anne was perceived as a feisty dissenter, a rulebreaker and, therefore, bad. It’s not hard to jump from there to the strong-willed quester that I made of Anne. But she has her soft side too – her loving nature.

SG: And you capture her warmheartedness throughout Seaborne. I enjoyed your representations of the changing relationship Anne has with her body – from how she feels and is seen in clothes, to her interaction with men and women, and how she is driven by feeling (physical and emotional) through the book. Can you talk about how your sensory writing is such a fit for a sensuous character?

NOC: I’m an empath and, being autistic, I’m hyper-sensitive to my environment, to clothing, to sensory input and so on, so it’s really easy for me to write those kind of characters, because I live that way – I knock against the world and everything in it as I move through it. So I made Anne is like that too.

SG: Language is at the heart of this book. In the chapter “Quelling an Unsettled Heart”, speaking of Gabriel Bonny, Anne tells the reader that

“The truth stands, though I treat him with disdain, that I like Bonny’s company, I enjoy being near him, and he enjoys me – I see the kindle in his eyes when he looks at me…I like the weight my sailing outfit gives me, it makes me both strong and invisible along the wharf, and there be power to savour in that.”

How did you decide on chapter titles, and what was the process in keeping them inline with the narrative voice which is true to its era and character?

NOC: I had some of the final titles already and then Aoife Walsh, Commissioning Editor at New Island, suggested strengthening them to reflect the content more. I worked with her, and the copy editor, to pick juicy bits from the text as titles. I like all that finessing of a manuscript before it gets to be a book – the cherries on the top, so to speak. I was delighted when Aoife said I could have a map, too – I love novels with maps.

SG: Thank you for being so open about the process! One of Anne’s strengths is her openness and adaptability to linguistic expression – the changes of speech from Cork to Carolina are deftly handled, as are her imitations – while at the same time, she stays true (and firm) to her need of the sea. Was this an important element of the reimagining of Anne, for you?  

NOC: I wrote her as neurodivergent before I even knew I was autistic myself. I got my diagnosis shortly after finishing the manuscript, if memory serves. So, she blends, mimics, and adapts in order to fit in (the same thing I’ve been trying to do for all of my life). This masking/imitation includes speech patterns, ways of behaving, clothing and so on. Anne is a chameleon the way many autistic people are.

SG: And this ability to change and blend shines as a gift rather than any type of limitation. The power and strength Anne gets from some female relationships is also explored through her friendships with Hannah Spratt and Bedelia. Can you talk about the role of this trio of women in the overall narrative and how it might compare or contrast with Anne’s relationship with her mother?

NOC: Bedelia is Anne’s beloved friend. There is an imbalance – Bedelia is her servant – but Anne loves Bee fiercely, relies on her totally. Anne is wary of Hannah from the start, she seems too fond of Bedelia. But Anne learns to like her a little when she sees that Bedelia likes her. It’s an unbalanced trio and it never quite goes right, as the reader will see.

Anne’s mother Mag was steady and wise, she was Anne’s main advisor and, her early death left Anne a bit rudderless. With no steady hand to guide her, we see Anne flounder, fragment, and act chaotically.

SG: Lastly, Nuala, some fun questions:

  • Boat or plane/Sea or land? I’m not a fan of flying. Too little control. At least on a boat you can walk around. I love the sea but, if I had to choose, land.
  • What was your favourite place you visited as part of the research for this novel? Kinsale – such a beautiful, colourful, rich part of Ireland. Also, the Caribbean of my mind. I enjoyed describing tropical beaches while locked down during the pandemic.
  • The power of words! Is there an era in history you would not like to explore through historical fiction? If so, why? I’ve done 18th, 19th, & first half 20th C, so I’ve covered a fair bit. A WW2 novel is appealing, but I have no firm plans. The novel I’ve just finished writing is contemporary.
  • What are you reading now? A book of Greek poetry. And I’m back with Ferrante because I’m going to Naples this year. I’ve blurbed nine books so far this year and have one more to go, so my reading has been prescribed a lot (time to take a blurb break, I think!). I have Seán Hewitt’s new novel lined up and am also finishing some Virginia Woolf, because she comforts me, and I’m always reading Elizabeth Bowen’s stories again, because I’m in a Bowen Reading Group. I always have loads of books on the go. Plus podcasts.
  • That is a lot! Naples is stunning – in all the senses. What are you writing now? A memoir about late-diagnosed autism, writing, depression, the alcohol-free life – I’m throwing the lot at it!

As always, Nuala, thank you for your generous answers and insight into your process as well as the editorial process with New Island. Wishing you continued success with the novel and good luck with your memoir. Seaborne can be purchased directly from New Island.

Nuala O’Connor sitting on a wooden chair on a beach with the sea behind her. Photograph by Úna O’Connor. Used with permission.

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in spring 2025.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 76: Catherine Dunne on “A Good Enough Mother” (Betimes Books: Dublin, 2024)

Image of covers of A Good Enough Mother and Una Buona Madre (Images used with permission of Catherine Dunne)

Catherine, You are very welcome back to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to talk about your highly successful A Good Enough Mother, for which you have won the European Rapallo BPER Banca Prize, and the Jury statement about the Italian translation Una Buona Madre (published before this English version) accurately said that in this novel you weave “together the lives of several diverse and ill-starred women” and link “a compelling present to a troubled past”.

SG: So let’s begin with the structure of A Good Enough Mother which is both a history of the treatment of women in Ireland and a beautiful, moving and gripping intergenerational story. Almost every section is dated and named according to whose story we’re immersed in. Can you talk about the mechanics of structuring this complex narrative that spans over several generations?

CD: Thank you for inviting me back, and thank you also for that very kind introduction. Structure is always a tricky issue. But it’s never something I decide on in advance – I tend to let it emerge during the writing. I love being surprised. I love the way the whole process is organic, the way the novel, including its structure, comes to life as I write.

I have always written in scenes. The patchwork quilt is the best metaphor I can come up with for the way I work. The act of sewing becomes a possibility of healing for the women in A Good Enough Mother, and it also serves as a metaphor for the writing process. In AGEM, I chose 66 scenes out of what I had drafted, reworked them endlessly and then sewed them together, like a classic patchwork quilt. I hope the seams don’t show.

The first scene I wrote involved Tess, and it was inspired – if that’s not an insensitive word – by the aftermath of the Belfast rape trial in 2018. That trial, and the not guilty verdict that resulted, convulsed the nation. The appalling public nature of that legal process, the retraumatising of the victim, and the deeply troubling attitude towards women that emerged during those horrifying days fuelled a significant public conversation. It is a toxic attitude that we’ve had to confront again and again in other high-profile cases of sexual assault.

When I began writing the trilogy of novels based on Greek myth – The Years That Followed, A Good Enough Mother, and The Way the Light Falls (to be published in 2025) – my overarching theme was motherhood.

Tess was the first character who appeared to me; and with her arrival, I wondered: what if one of her sons were accused of sexual assault? How would she feel? What would she do? How would she reconcile her unconditional love for her son with her revulsion at his alleged offence? The writer’s eternal ‘What if?’ propelled me into writing her story.

Once Tess’s character began to form, a cast of other women began to clamour to be heard. Catherine Corless’s unearthing of the secrets of Tuam’s Mother and Baby institution – they were not ‘homes’ in any meaningful sense –  fuelled my stories of Maeve and Joanie. My research for An Unconsidered People formed the inspiration for Betty and Eileen’s lives in Kilburn, and so on…Each character led me to the next – the kind of organic growth of narrative that I referred to earlier.

SG: That’s really interesting about letting the writing lead organically, and the practice of writing in scenes (and no, the seams don’t show!). This novel gives voice to that which can’t always be voiced – the violence of assault and rape – and in such a way that this narrative threads through and above each of the individual narratives. And yet each of the narrators have a very distinct narrative voice which is not an easy write. Did the movement from silence to voice come as you were stitching the novel together?

CD: Time and place were my friends in this regard. The sections of the novel move between the 1960s and the present, back and forth from Dublin to London, and to an unidentified location somewhere in rural Ireland. ‘Seeing’ each character in their distinct location, and at different times, made their individual voices begin to come alive inside my head.

I always find it interesting that the character closest to me in age/location/circumstance is always the most difficult to write. Familiarity is my enemy. I struggled in the early drafts with some of Tess’s scenes. I had to take the decision to place her on constant high alert, to make her anxious and fearful for her family. That anxiety became one of the defining features of her voice.

With Eileen, I drew on my extensive research for An Unconsidered People. Years of going back and forth to Kilburn, interviewing elderly Irish immigrants, meant that my sense of London in the fifties and sixties was already part of my imaginative landscape. And I was able to give her a passion for fabrics and sewing, all of which helped me develop the individual nuances of her voice.

This novel took me about four years to complete. During that time, the characters became my friends and I saw them as individuals. The more time I spent in their company, the more I grew to love them and the more real they became.

Writing is an act of imaginative empathy. The predicaments I created for each character were different, the challenges I gave them were demanding in different ways. Each draft of the novel meant I could stitch in more and more detail about their lives and their attitudes that made these fictional characters differ from each other.

SG: I’m glad you refer to drafts (multiple) and the process of stitching in more detail. You’ve spoken above and in The Irish Examiner  about how Tess’s narrative came to you fully formed and was then followed by Betty’s story. Tess recalls that:

Family is family, Betty used to say. You fight with them, you fight about them, but above all you fight for them. Tess stands up. She needs to find her fight again. Needs to access that spirit that will help her to reach Luke. No matter what he’s done. Then she switches off all the downstairs lights…

I loved how you anchored Tess’s story in the continuing running of a household, the shopping, the cooking, the simple turning off of lights. There was something so moving about the simple, every day actions that carried the weight of terrible violence. Can you talk about Tess and her movement through the novel?

CD: Tess has to deal with one of every parent’s worst nightmares. Luke’s challenging and dangerous behaviour, the accusation he faces, the threats to her family’s wellbeing are all emotionally draining. But despite being consumed with worry, Tess is anchored in the real world. She has a job, an absent husband whom she loves dearly, but financial realities mean that he is frequently away from home – a source of significant tension between them. Tess must manage home and family – Luke and Aengus, her two sons – on her own.

Despite the crisis facing her, Tess still has to deal with all the tasks that I believe sociologists call ‘love labour’. She needs to cook, to clean, to shop, to keep the household running so that everyone gets fed, everyone has clean clothes, that the home environment doesn’t descend into chaos…

Research tells us that most of this kind of work is still carried out by women. Whether women willingly assume responsibility for these tasks, or whether that responsibility is thrust upon them is another day’s discussion. The daily reality that I create for Tess is familiar enough, I believe, to be recognisable to most readers.

I also tend to bristle that domestic detail such as making a list for the supermarket, or picking clothes up off the floor, or trying to put a meal together under pressure, has frequently been dismissed as ‘small canvas’ stuff in women’s writing – as though the domestic is not a fit subject for fiction.

In an essay entitled Writing for My Life, I observe:  

I’ve experienced the accusation many times that women work on too narrow a canvas: that of the ‘domestic’. The wider world, that of big issues and important causes, belongs to men. It’s an argument that might also be familiar to Jane Austen.

In the Odyssey, Telemachus tells his mother, Penelope, to be quiet. He tells her: ‘talking must be the concern of men’.

In this version of the tale, she obeys; we don’t know how she feels, but she obeys.

He means, of course that talking – all the public, the weighty, significant discourse – must be carried out by men. The chatter can belong to women, tidied away into their domestic spheres among the dishes and the brushes.

And so, I like to give the dishes and the brushes their own special place in my fiction.

SG: Thank you, Catherine for such a full and brilliant response which puts me in mind of the importance and power of the domestic in the fiction of Elena Ferrante. Those dishes and brushes are witnesses.

I found Joanie’s narrative particularly heartbreaking and you voice her confusion and naivety in St Brigid’s, the Mother and Baby Home so authentically.

“Joanie imagined that the girls, the penitents, must use up every single punishment in the whole world, so that nothing was left over for the nuns.”

And then after her baby is taken away,

“Joanie’s howls filled the long corridor and ever since, she’d wandered about like a lost ghost, trapped somewhere between two worlds.”

It felt like she stayed trapped between two worlds for most of the novel. Was some of her story based on your extensive research for your non-fiction book An Unconsidered People: The Irish In London?

CD: Nottingham was one of the cities I visited briefly during the time I was researching An Unconsidered People, but my main focus was Kilburn and Cricklewood. However, in one of the many mysterious ways that ideas and memories float to the surface during the writing process, Nottingham came to me as somehow fitting for Joanie and Eddie.

As before, familiarity has its dangers for the writer, and I wanted somewhere to place Joanie that I didn’t know as well as I knew London. I wanted a place that, within the world of the novel, was special to Joanie. And Nottingham just…elbowed its way to the front of my mind. I had to research its parks; its houses close to the railway station; its hotels.  None of those places was familiar to me, and that was a gift. All of it became food for the imagination.

Maybe, like parents, novelists shouldn’t have favourite characters. But Joanie is mine. I have to confess that. Perhaps because her life experience is light years away from mine – she’s from a poor rural background; she’s treated harshly by her parents; she’s dyslexic. Her predicament elicited the most empathy from me.

Her story has so many echoes of the stories I read of some of the 56,000 women incarcerated in Ireland’s Mother and Baby institutions. I wanted to give those stories space and dignity – and so Joanie arrived in my imagination.

SG:  Maeve’s father drives her to St Brigid’s. Maeve tells us

“I don’t know which was worse: being betrayed by the boy I loved; feeling frightened about what lay ahead; or knowing that my father was lost to me for good.”

Later, she tells us (in stunning prose!):

My days began to fill up with possibility. Hope became a bright blur, the colour of sunflowers. At the same time, I kept thinking about this secret army of women. All of them – all of us – all over Ireland. Mothers of lost children.

These are themes you deftly thread through the novel – boys and men betraying and casting women into hidden spaces and places, and women together creating bonds of safety and possibility.

CD: I remember, even as a young teenager when I became aware of the power of words, that I wondered about the phrase ‘unmarried mother’. In the 1970s it was still a loaded term, redolent of shame and immorality. It was one of those phrases that filled my generation of young women with a terror of getting pregnant.

But even then, another question became insistent: what about unmarried fathers? We never heard a word about them. Did they not exist? Were these so-called ‘illegitimate’ babies the result of mass miraculous conceptions all over Ireland?

It would be years before I even began to understand the potent nature of shame as a method of social control. Years before I learned that around the time the Irish state was founded, there was the belief that the value of such new states resided in the virtue of its women. It therefore followed that if the women that populated these newly formed states were not ‘virtuous’, then they needed to be hidden away.

Hence the development of Ireland’s ‘shame-industrial complex’, as Caelainn Hogan calls it. Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby institutions: all of them methods of the social control of women, a system devised, developed and maintained by Church-State collusion. Photographs of the time show that the power of both the Catholic Church and the Irish State was entirely in the hands of men – a symbiotic relationship that was at the root of this country’s problematic relationship with women and women’s bodies.

In the world of the novel, I wanted to give life to what I have so often observed: the ways in which women work to strengthen social and familial ties; the way they support and nurture each other as a way of challenging the misogyny that is still such a part of modern society. 

SG: And we don’t always see these ways in which women support and nurture each other. Furthermore, you tackle difference with acceptance and tenderness through the wonderful Eileen and all that she does for women. She was my heroine of A Good Enough Mother.

Sometimes, when I look around at the three of us in the evenings, I have a powerful sense of being bound to a great circle of other women, other times. Our tasks feel ancient, full of history, the threads of connection pulling us tightly together as we work.

Can you talk about her formation and the role of material, thread, sewing and mending?

CD: I loved Eileen’s steely defiance. That’s where she came from: her refusal to bend to what was expected of her. Her character, and her life experience, came from some of the many stories I listened to in Kilburn and Cricklewood over the years.

A nurse I interviewed – who chose to remain anonymous in An Unconsidered People – told me about her uncanny ability to detect even the earliest signs of of pregnancy in the young women arriving at Euston Station, alone and terrified.

She used to meet the mailboat each morning and said that her ‘mission in life’ became helping those pregnant young Irish girls, who had been sent away lest their condition bring shame on their respectable families.

She had the insight, however, decades later, to wonder whether she would have to account for her actions on the Day of Judgement.

What actions? I asked.

In the belief that she was doing what was best, she handed over dozens of newborn babies to good, Catholic families in London – babies born to those terrified Irish girls – without any paperwork whatsoever. She did not profit from this in any way, but understood, years afterwards, that these transactions may not have been ethical.

Her ‘mission in life’ made me ask the eternal writer’s question: What if? What if Eileen had been one of those girls? What would it have been like to search for your lost child for the rest of your life?

Her name, Eileen, is in memory of my own godmother. A most beautiful human being, who had no children of her own, a grief that stayed with her all her life. My character, Eileen, is named in a loving tribute to her.

SG: That’s beautiful and what a loving – and lasting – tribute to your godmother. We will end with some short questions, Catherine:

  • Cats or dogs? Oh, dogs, every time!
  • Mountains or Sea? Sea, with mountains a close second.
  • What do you do after you’ve published a novel or a long manuscript and had a launch? Usually, mourn its absence for a bit, before diving into something new.
  • One stand-out fiction and non-fiction book of the year for you? Not sure what year it was published, but I loved Wifedom, by Anna Funder – non-fiction. A blend of so many forms of writing. And far too many novels to choose from, but if you insist, Soldier Sailor by Clare Kilroy and Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer-Hickey.
  • What are you working on now – if you can talk about it in a general sense, I know it’s not always possible to articulate what’s not yet formed.  I’m currently working on The Way the Light Falls – part of the trilogy of novels inspired by Greek myth. It has already been published in Italian and was shortlisted for the Strega Prize for Fiction. But I’m glad to have the opportunity to revise it before it’s published in English by Betimes Books sometime in 2025. But, as a little bit of superstition, after 30 years as a professional writer, I have the opening paragraph of a new novel already written…There is always the lurking fear that the writing well might run dry!

Thank you, Catherine for such enlightening answers and insights into your process. I wish you continued success and look forward to The Way the Light Falls.

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Photograph of Catherine Dunne smiling, wearing a black blouse, a window onto a street and a bookshelf with books is behind her and flowers sit to her left. Photograph by Simon Robinson, used with permission.