Elaine Feeney on her new novel: ‘I was pushing a sort of Chekhov dinner party in the west of Ireland'

Irish Times

2 days ago

Fresh from submitting a batch of student grades, the novelist and poet Elaine Feeney bursts into the Oyster Bar accessorised with a Penguin-branded tote from her 'lovely publishers' and the exuberance of someone who thought she might be late thanks to a train delay but isn't.
We're not in the Hardiman Hotel on Eyre Square in Galway for oysters or cocktails, yet it feels like a celebratory occasion: the publicity push for Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, Feeney's third novel, is officially under way.
'You're my first interview,' she says, though she has only just reached 'the very end' of talking about her
Booker Prize-longlisted
second novel,
How to Build a Boat
, and is 'finally comfortable' with her understanding of it.
She would like to have 'a nice coherent linear narrative' for me about the kernels that led to Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way – the title of which comes from Sophocles' Elektra – but she's never been one for straightforward hooks.
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'It would be good if I could just package this for marketing, but actually, no, it was a very sporadic, cacophonous journey, this book.'
It started with a couple, Claire and Tom, and at first she thought it might be a love story, but realised it couldn't just be that.
'People come from long deep histories that they bring into their relationship, and it affects it. There's no such thing as a love story that doesn't have these layers of the past.'
In the novel, Claire has moved from London back to her childhood home in Athenry to care for her dying father, only for English ex-boyfriend Tom to relocate nearby. As she wrote it, Feeney found herself sidelining 'poor Tom' to examine Claire's relationship with everyone from a '
tradwife
' influencer to her two brothers.
'This is my first Irish family saga,' she says.
'I have four siblings and, because we grew up in the countryside, they were my best friends. They might not think that, but they were. You're so close and it's a small space and I just loved them. And there's very little done about the transition from your family-of-origin to your partner and your own children and how much you can miss your siblings, weirdly.'
But 'family saga' risks oversimplifying the novel, which, although mostly set in 2022, also slips back to Claire's childhood and the lives of her ancestors in Athenry during the War of Independence.
Feeney had to concentrate hard on the final edits, because despite studying history and teaching it for many years, she's not good with time. 'I can't fathom it at all in my head. I have a very sort of shadowy idea of what time means.'
She likes having 'muddy little avenues' in her novels, though what is clear is that Claire is 'at a bit of a loss', being back in a place that should be familiar to her yet somehow isn't.
'I don't know if you have ever experienced that. You're in a space that is intensely familiar and suddenly you start to look at it and you see other things, and it's not the shape you thought it was.'
She knows not everyone has to 'constantly walk the same paths' they walked as a child, but she does this, having bought the Athenry house she grew up in. She lives there now with husband Ray Glasheen, a designer, and sons Jack (23) and Finn (17).
Did that feed into this novel?
'It feeds into everything. It feeds into absolutely everything,' she says instantly.
Claire is 'unsure what world she is meant to inhabit' – a confusion that comes to a deliciously dramatic head when Tom, unaware of the delicate alchemy of mixing friends, panics her by inviting her neighbours to a dinner intended for her university colleagues.
'All the worlds collide at the end. I was pushing a sort of Chekhov dinner party in the west of Ireland,' she says, laughing. 'I come out in a rash thinking about that, seriously.'
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Elaine Feeney: 'I was shocked at what boys were expected to do from a young age'
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The book explores the political dimensions of the domestic space – the power and value of which so often go unrecognised, she says – with Claire becoming obsessed with a Texan trad wife. Feeney researched this in a 'very Gen X' way: by watching TikTok videos through Instagram.
'I got really good recipes for cakes and stuff, and I'm a really bad baker. It may have pleased my husband momentarily. I didn't tell him for a little while, and he thought I was very pleasant for a week or so. He thought I was in really good form. Then I said, 'I'm doing a deep dive on tradwives,' and we laughed so much about it.'
She doesn't have a big take on the 'movement', thinking it 'has to be about choice', but worries this is also 'the hackneyed response' to a phenomenon that is both 'another fiction on your screen' and a business that possibly gives the women some agency and economic reward.
'What it taught me is that people do dabble in this. But I think it's absolutely mind-blowing the idea of scrolling past tradwives, lemon tarts, meringues, unpasteurised milk, 'cottagecore'; on to war, on to dismembered bodies, then on to fertility sticks, or whatever. I get a lot of those ads. The brainf**kery – sorry – that it must be causing,' she says.
The juxtaposition of banality and brutality, she notes, is also a facet of her novel.
We talk about how hard it is to be shocked now, and I mention the sense of powerlessness that can result from online doomscrolls.
'Powerlessness! Powerlessness is something I would feel acutely, and I think a lot of people feel it,' she says. 'I feel powerless, but as a writer I also feel a certain creative weight of responsibility as well.'
That responsibility includes interrogating Irishness and the complications of identity.
'Sorry to keep doing the sociological sort of stuff, but I am really interested in the cultural export that is Irish people now.'
She fears countries are being branded as if they are material things. 'But who gets to brand them? I'm very proud of my Irish heritage, but I often wonder what that means, when I really interrogate it. It's complex, because of Ireland's treatment of women in particular, and also now with direct provision and the housing crisis, and I'm not just naming things. These are things that I would really consider.'
Every human feels pressure to perform, and not just to perform their national identity, she thinks. She wouldn't like to enter a space with her 'whole unbridled self'. Still, she does tend to say what she wants to say most of the time.
'Sometimes I really wish I didn't, that I had some sort of polish.'
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Elaine Feeney: 'I write what I know, so the west of Ireland aesthetic permeates everything'
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Feeney is warm and engaging. Over the course of our two-hour chat, we touch upon alleged cures for shingles, the 1995 divorce referendum, terrible audio-transcription apps, the disappointing third season of The White Lotus, whether a magpie might hang out with a blackbird, both being born in the summer of 1979, our mutual love for Chris O'Donnell in the 1995 adaptation of Maeve Binchy's A Circle of Friends, and the 'fantastic' classroom scenes in Another Round.
The reference to this Oscar-winning, teacher-centric Danish film in Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is one of its 'Easter eggs', or clues to her own life: Feeney taught English and history at St Jarlath's College in Tuam for 20 years.
She loved teaching and the 'incredible people' she worked with, she says, but she didn't love the hierarchical structure and religiosity of the diocesan educational system, and it was this that crystallised her decision to leave.
After the Tuam mother-and-baby home scandal broke, she felt acutely that she was 'on the wrong side of history', though she also wrestled with concern she might be 'giving up' on the boys she taught.
'It did come down to an ethical question for me in the end.'
She is now involved in both the Tuam Oral History Project and writing charity Fighting Words, while lecturing full-time on the University of Galway's undergrad creative writing and postgrad writing degrees.
'They're all such brilliant writers, and I want them all to have publishing deals,' she says of her students. Lately, she has seen 'big interest' in gaming narratives, political poetry and fantasy/romantasy stories that demand world-building of the kind she says she can't do.
Why would I risk everything by committing my love to paper? But anyway, I wrote a love poem
Feeney, who began her literary career as a poet, always had a strong imagination – 'as a child I was a bit, you know, out there' – though it was her 2014 hospitalisation with life-threatening sepsis that proved the catalyst for her first novel.
'I was like, 'You nearly died, you better write a book, you wanted to write a book, you better do it.' So that – my own mortality – put fire in me.'
Last year she published All the Good Things You Deserve, her first poetry collection in seven years. Its powerful, devastating title poem deals with a sexual assault that happened to her while she was in college.
'That was very personal, and I've done very little media about it. I just brought that softly, softly into the world,' she says.
'It took a long time to write the title poem, and to come to terms with putting any sort of narrative arc on the violence that I experienced as a younger woman. Of course, it was cathartic in some ways, but I really feel that art has to be more than a 'non-fiction of Elaine'. I wanted to tell that particular event in a way that I felt I was now controlling that story, finally, and it was no longer in control of me.'
The collection ends with a love poem for her husband, though she had always told herself she was too cautious to write love poetry.
'Why would I risk everything by committing my love to paper? But anyway, I wrote a love poem.'
When she alludes early in our conversation to a fourth novel in the works, I say I normally wait until the end to venture that question. So, she's already thinking about the next one?
'Of course I'm thinking about it. I wish I could just relax,' she says, but she doesn't sound too unhappy about being unable to, nor does she want to 'do the whole 'oh my god'' about being busy. 'Choices, my mother would say.'
Mainly she feels relief that she got Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way down on paper and delight about everything from the joy of being served lemon and honey tea every day while recording its audiobook to the loveliness of being Booker-longlisted in 2023 alongside three other Irish authors. Sebastian Barry sent her a 'very generous' email, she says, when neither of them made the shortlist cut.
'I have nothing but gratitude now. That is genuinely how I feel about it. The journey has been mind-blowing for the last six or seven years. I haven't really stopped and taken stock of it, but once or twice I have, and I've just gone, 'Oh yeah, I'm really lucky.''
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is published by Harvill Secker