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Save this story Save Story Save this story At 59, the Irish novelist Louise Kennedy is the literary world’s latest great find. She’s also her own self-discovery project: After working as a chef for nearly 30 years, Kennedy was in her late 40s when she first tried to write fiction.
She’s since set raw-hearted and tragically romantic tales in the shadow of the Troubles, the decades-long political conflict in Northern Ireland. Sexual and political awakenings exist side by side in Kennedy country. Trespasses (2023), her debut novel about a Catholic-Protestant love affair in 1970s Belfast, was translated into more than 20 languages and made into a miniseries starring Gillian Anderson Anderson. Her follow-up novel, Stations , published this month, is a punkier and even more electric work. It opens with Róisín, a bolshy and unpopular teenager, striking up a friendship with Red, a troubled local boy from a wealthy family. The story then jumps-cuts into the future, where Róisín finds Red living in a London squat, and arcs all the way into midlife.
Kennedy spoke to Vogue over Zoom from her home in Sligo about being a late bloomer, Irish-granny maximalism, and why the Troubles have been taking off.
Vogue : According to the lore, you didn’t write a word of fiction until you were 47.
Louise Kennedy: It’s true, I wasn’t scribbling away in secret. I didn’t write a thing until I joined a writing group, and even that was under duress. A friend who was involved when it was being set up kept messaging me all day, and I kept saying, “No, I’m not going.” I was busy, I was tired, and it was a ridiculous notion. I’m a cook. Why would I go to a writing group? Then she turned up at my house and told me to get in the car, so I went along. I’ve no idea why she did it.
I don’t think it was a bad thing to be older and trying to write. I couldn’t have done this in my 20s. I’d have been way too self-conscious, and I wouldn’t have had the discipline. And if, in the very unlikely event, I had managed to publish something and anybody liked it, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the attention. Not in any shape or form.
You talk about writing in a way that isn’t tortured. You can write thousands of words a day. Is that the chef in you?
I think maybe it is. I was a chef for nearly 30 years. We worked what were called split shifts but were really double shifts: in at 10 in the morning, still there at 11 at night, then out for a few drinks. The only break you’d get was sticking your head out the back door for a cigarette. So I tend not to feel sorry for myself about deadlines.
Writing from the point of view of a teenage girl seems to come easily to you. What were you like at that age?
I was awful. I was probably a bit like Róisín, fighting with everybody, really self-centered, really dramatic, deeply unpleasant a lot of the time. And I think, like her, I imagined there was some better, bigger life outside the place I’d ended up.
You don’t shy from portraying the horrors of alcoholism.
I was practically brought up in a bar. My family had a pub, and if there’s a lot of drinking, some people will become alcoholics. Three out of four of my grandparents were alcoholics, and I had uncles and aunts and neighbors who were, too. I went to London in the ’80s and lived in that precarious way; we were all out drinking cider and smoking and doing whatever else. A lot of us stopped and some of us didn’t. Even when we were 18, 19, 20, there were signs that some people were going at it harder than everybody else. Several of them are dead.
Nobody asks a child what they want to be and hears, “An alcoholic wrecking my home.” Nobody wants to end up like that. In the early days of surgery, before proper anesthesia, they poured whiskey down people’s necks before they amputated an arm or a leg. For a lot of people it’s still the acceptable form of painkilling.
In Trespasses , it was gutting to read about Cushla’s constant vigilance and anxiety where taking care of her mother, Gina, is concerned. How did Gillian Anderson end up playing Gina?
On publication day for Trespasses in the UK, in April 2022, there was a dinner, and I knew Gillian was going to be there. I was nervous so I drank too much. I was sitting beside her and she told me how much she loved the book, and how much she loved the character of Gina, the mother. Because I was a bit drunk, I thought it would be entirely reasonable to ask whether she’d play Gina in the adaptation. And Gillian said yes! I thought: This is fantastic. Then I woke up in the morning going, “Oh my God, what have you done?”
Róisín grows up to write about interior design for a living. How would you describe your own aesthetic?
Irish-granny maximalist. My house is full of stuff. I’m obsessed with old hot water bottles.
Why do you think American readers are so drawn to books about the Troubles right now?
I think a lot of it is about time. There were books published about the conflict in the ’70s and ’80s, and then it seemed to dry up. It had gone on for so long and became such a dirty conflict that maybe editors didn’t want to publish it, and maybe people didn’t want to read about it. More than 25 years have passed since the Good Friday Agreement, and I think it took that long before people were ready. I do think it was about trauma, and it needed to be put to bed for a while.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
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Source: Lifestyle
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