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Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Author interview: 'What are the politics of belonging if you don't have it'
Back in 2020, anxious to escape from post-Brexit Britain, Sarah Moss left Coventry, where she was teaching, and brought her family to live in Dún Laoghaire. The novelist had accepted a post teaching creative writing at University College Dublin and, in spite of the lingering covid restrictions, the family felt happy and settled at once. But it got her thinking of the whole theme of belonging. 'My father was Russian-American Jewish, and my mother is Yorkshire working class,' she says. 'I grew up in a bunch of places and have lived in a bunch of places. I've never been able to say, 'that, there, is where I come from'.' This had never much bothered Sarah, because her friends are also internationally mobile, but coming to Ireland where there is more investment in belonging, ownership, identity, and land made her investigate her sense of place. 'Can you make belonging if you don't have it?' she wondered. 'What are the politics of making belonging if you don't have it, and particularly if you are an English person in Ireland? 'It's not up to me to say, 'I belong here now'. That doesn't have a good history.' We're in a Dublin's Brooks Hotel talking about Sarah's ninth novel, Ripeness, which centres on Edith, a happily divorced 73-year-old who has found utter contentment since settling in the Burren. Daughter of a woman who lost most of her family in the Holocaust, she's wondering if she's finally found a place to call home. Why did she choose an older woman as the third person narrator? 'It never feels like a decision,' says Sarah, explaining that she has characters living in her head. I've been living with Edith for years in different ways. I tried to write about her in the forties, but that didn't work, and she sits quite nicely here Alternating chapters take us back to the sixties, when, at 17 and soon to start at Oxford University, Edith spends a summer at an Italian villa, helping her sister Lydia through late pregnancy and childbirth. Lydia's friends, fellow dancers from her company, are also there. Although on holiday, dance practice remains a constant in their lives. Sarah had been thinking about writing a ballet book for years, and seeing photos of Margot Fonteyn taken by Joan Leigh Fermor — the wife of the famous writer scholar and soldier, Sir Patrick — gave her a focus. The couple, living in Greece, had set up a glamorous bohemian house. 'There is a sequence of photos of Fonteyn on holiday, including a set of her with Frederick Ashton on a boat. 'They are practising, using the side of the boat as a bar. You can see the sails behind them. There's another of Fonteyn sunbathing naked. Her poise is exquisite — she is totally in control, and that gave me the idea of dancers at play. They are still inhabiting the dance with their bodies, though not with discipline.' This idea came to Sarah when she was on a six-week writing retreat on the shores of Lake Como in the spring of 2023. 'Ripeness' is a gorgeous book; sunny, sensual and absorbing. The author writes so brilliantly about the physicality of dance, and the scenes of childbirth and new life are exquisitely described. 'The villa was absolutely gorgeous. It had been used for artists since the 19th century as a place to go to support yourself in the summer, and that gave me the setting. 'But being liberated for six weeks didn't work for me at all. It turns out that I actually need the rhythms of domestic life. I need to be cooking and doing laundry and looking after people. Though, obviously you need a balance.' Sarah's first novel, Cold Earth, was published when her two sons were small. 'My entire career has been as a parent. I have never known it any other way. It's a shifting balance, like standing on a wobble board.' The Burren was the obvious Irish setting because, having lived for a year in Iceland, Sarah adores the barren limestone landscape. Which isn't to say that she doesn't find it frustrating. 'These walking guides say: 'This is 10k, and it will take you five hours.' You think, don't be ridiculous, what nonsense, but it does! 'I like to stride out and cover ground and get there, but the limestone won't let you. It insists that you slow down, pay attention, and read the land under your feet. If you don't, you're going to fall over or fall down a hole. I really love that. It's frustrating, but I think it's good for me, both as a hiker and as a writer.' Ripeness is a gorgeous book; sunny, sensual and absorbing. The author writes so brilliantly about the physicality of dance, and the scenes of childbirth and new life are exquisitely described. 'I was a friend's birth companion shortly after my son was born, and it made me realise that most women never see birth. 'My son was five months old, so it was vivid. I knew exactly what she was going through and how it felt, but it made me think that the only women who see birth now are professionals, and it must have been so different in the days when you helped your friend or your sister and would have known what was going to happen.' Lydia's baby is going for adoption, and she refuses to see him. My second son was a home birth, and the midwife told me that one of her most important roles, straight after the birth, was to hand the baby to the mother. She said that otherwise the mother might walk off 'I thought, how could anybody do such a thing, but I can, kind of, imagine it. All that work; hours and hours and hours of it — and you just want to lie down and have a cup of tea.' Sarah has always taught and has no trouble with public speaking. 'Put me in front of an audience of 500 and tell me to talk for an hour — I will be fine. But send me to a party, and I will want to hide behind a curtain with a book. I met the woman who is still my best friend at somebody's seventh birthday party. 'I hid behind one end of the curtain, and she hid behind the other. We met in the middle.' Currently on a year's break from UCD, Sarah is doing some freelance teaching. 'I absolutely love it,' she says, 'and can't imagine not doing it in some form. I find it very generative because it forces me to think properly about what I'm doing. So much of my practice is playful and experimental. It's a good being made to think rigorously about it.' What is the benefit to students of an MA in creative writing? 'It won't make a good writer out of people who are not, but it can intensify a process that would have happened over a long time. 'You can help people to experiment, to think well about reading and writing, and to bounce off each other. Done well, it can be exciting, productive, and generative, but that's not to say that it produces publishing contracts.' As someone who came from England half my lifetime ago, I can vouch for Edith's feelings about a dual nationality. I tell Sarah that she has got Edith's emotions exactly right. Currently applying for an Irish passport, Sarah says she wrote the novel as a hymn to Ireland, and to the Burren in particular. Does she intend to stay in the country indefinitely? 'I hope so,' she says. 'Friendship is hugely important in my life, and I have good friends here. They're the joy of my life. I have the occasional yearning, but you have to stop somewhere and its pretty good here.'
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ripeness by Sarah Moss – a beautifully written novel of place and identity
Sarah Moss's post-Brexit novels, Ghost Wall, Summerwater and The Fell, have dealt centrally with the anxieties and hostilities of the white working and middle classes in contemporary Britain. This trio of short, vivid works has also quietly established Moss as a revered chronicler of the political present. Though Ripeness bears many of the hallmarks of her recent fiction – evocative descriptions of the natural world abound, no speech marks used, chapter titles plucked suggestively out of the narrative – it also departs from it. It is longer, slower, European in setting, and its political critiques are ultimately muted. Ripeness is structured in alternating narrative strands, both following an English woman called Edith: one as a septuagenarian living comfortably in the west of Ireland in the post-pandemic present, and another as a bookish, Oxford-bound 17-year-old travelling to Italy in the late 60s. These strands are initially connected by stories of babies given up. In the present, Edith's best friend Méabh is contacted by an unknown older brother who was adopted and raised in America and now wants to 'see where he comes from'. In the historical strand, Edith is travelling to help her older sister, a professional ballerina, pregnant with a child she will almost immediately relinquish. Together, a textured and affecting story about place and identity emerges. Early on we learn that Edith has four passports – English, Irish, French and Israeli – and that her French-Jewish mother was granted refuge in England in 1941 while her grandparents and aunt were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Edith's 'Maman', an artist and 'iconoclast' to her friends in rural Derbyshire, advised her to always 'leave before you're certain, because if you wait until you know, there are boots coming up the stairs and blood on the walls'. While her mother's migration was driven by genocide and trauma, and her grandparents before had fled Ukraine for France, she and her sister were able to travel freely around Europe, and the young Edith's only real concern was that 'the rising hemlines of the mid-60s had not reached the thigh of Italy'. But in the novel's present, military aggression is again forcing migration. Edith reflects on the cyclical nature of conflict, noting that the 'great grandparents of the people now fleeing Russian invasion and taking refuge here in the west of Ireland were the aggressors from whom her great-grandparents fled Ukraine'. A central tension is established when Edith discovers that while Méabh is sympathetic to their village's Ukrainian refugees, she is actively protesting at the use of a local hotel as emergency housing for African refugees. Edith is sickened and wonders briefly if she can remain friends with 'someone who thinks the problem is refugees'. Quickly she decides she can, though Méabh's position continues to trouble her. She supports her plans to meet her brother, but stews over her own belief that 'national identity isn't genetic, that blood doesn't give you rights of ownership', that 'Méabh's brother can't just come here and call it home, say he belongs, when nothing the Ukrainians do will ever entitle them to say such things, when the lads at the hotel aren't even allowed the air they breathe'. These convictions are not unconsidered, and Edith gives much thought to various claims to and erasures of identity – including the Jewishness of her unknown nephew, adopted by nuns, and her Maman's traumatic experiences of loss and migration. Yet, despite her personal connection to histories of genocide and displacement, her dismay at Méabh's position fades. Edith's convictions about 'blood and soil' logic are betrayed by her lack of reproach to Méabh, and the novel's shifts in narrative perspective allow us to view her critically. The chapters depicting the present are narrated in the third person, while those depicting Edith's trip to Italy are in the first person. While the latter invite us to see the world through her eyes, the former allow some detachment between Edith and the reader and emphasise her privilege, biases and uncertainties. Edith is also increasingly reflexive and self-deprecating, eventually describing herself as having 'remained more of narrator than a participant'. This evocative distinction between storytelling and action aligns with the novel's dual narrative, which both connects us to and distances us from this compelling and at times frustrating character. However, because of her increasing self-deprecation and reflection, and at least partial awareness of her mistakes, Edith is ultimately presented as sympathetic. Her flaws are human and relatable and by its conclusion, the gap that has opened between the novel's politics and its protagonist's views has shrunk. Just as Edith's dismay at Méabh's comments fades, the anger of Ripeness wanes too. But while its critiques of contemporary attitudes towards migration, and failures in historical thinking, and the ways some refugees are accepted while others are not, do lose some force, it remains a powerful and beautifully written story of family, friendship and identity. Ripeness by Sarah Moss is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Nostalgia and longing in the best literary fiction out now: RIPENESS by Sarah Moss, LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY by Elaine Feeney, WHERE SNOWBIRDS PLAY by Gina Goldhammer
Ripeness by Sarah Moss is available now from the Mail Bookshop RIPENESS by Sarah Moss (Picador £20, 304pp) BACK in the 1960s, Oxford bound teenager Edith was dispatched to idyllic rural Lombardy to look after her elder sister Lydia, a ballet dancer in the final stages of an unplanned pregnancy. In the present day, seventy something Edith is living comfortably on the wet west coast of Ireland, enjoying an on-off dalliance with a German potter. As one strand of Moss's typically beautifully-crafted novel follows the ripening Italian summer, Lydia's pregnancy and her adamantine intention to give the baby away, the other follows Edith in the autumn of her life, as she reflects on mortality and the state of the world she'll leave behind. Above all, it's a meditation on belonging: Edith's own Jewish mother, who lost her family to the Holocaust and found peace in a kibbutz; the Ukrainian 'Good Refugees' who are welcomed by Edith's Irish neighbours; the African asylum seekers who are greeted with protests. As an outsider herself, Edith is well placed to observe it all, to thoroughly absorbing and moving effect. LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker £16.99, 320pp) THIS hugely powerful third novel from the Booker-longlisted Feeney ostensibly follows university lecturer Claire in the wake of her victimised mother and tyrannical father's deaths. Blowing up her relationship with her solicitous boyfriend, she returns from London to the family home in Ireland, a place that, as the novel unfolds, we realise has been the scene of unspeakable horrors during the Irish War of Independence. It's only in the later stages of the novel that the two timelines coalesce, as Feeney excavates the overlapping oppression and violence of colonialism and patriarchy from a typically left-field angle. Questions of revolution, restitution and, perhaps, resolution swirl in the unsettled mix of this visceral, stimulating tale that is likely one of the most original you'll read this year. WHERE SNOWBIRDS PLAY by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press £9.79, 264pp) THE author's own backstory here is every bit a match for her exotic plot, and in part its inspiration. A longtime personal assistant to Henry Kissinger, she was also caught up in the same 2000s insider trading scandal that embroiled US TV personality Martha Stewart. The backdrop is Palm Beach in the 1990s, a world of 'sculpted faces, sham marriages and designer-decorated homes'. Hannah and Philip are both English incomers, but only Oxford marine biologist Philip knows the shady family connection linking him to Hannah's disabled son. The glossily privileged milieu is sharply drawn, but elsewhere the execution is wanting, with slow-to-arrive intrigues out of focus and an ultimate descent into pure melodrama.
