Claire Keegan

Genre to be determined.

You know, sometimes it's literary with a Claire Keegan.

Sometimes it's a romance book.

And actually, I'm excited.

Yeah, the topics or the way the writers put it together.

I've been reading Claire Keegan at the minute and I'm obsessed with her, honestly.

I'm absolutely obsessed.

She's an Irish writer.

So I think it's very literary.

It's weirdly reminded me of Claire Keegan, particularly small things like these, just that sort of rural working class life type, slow narrative.

The

horror in it is based quite around animals, but in the same way that Katie kind of talks about animals in that it's traditional farm life and, you know, there's lambing and stuff and stuff's going wrong with the sheep.

I think that was really exciting to me.

And then I started reading other shorter long fiction like Claire Keegan's beautiful novel Foster, which is just this absolutely stunning story that reveals its backstory in these kind of patiently surprising ways and that breaks the barrier between reality and something beyond our commonly experienced reality in a way that is so matter of fact and so stunning that I just thought, oh, that's, why have I not delved into that area? Why have I not considered that as a deep possibility in my work in the way that she seems to move into so easily in her novels? So those were a few of the books that were important to me as I was writing this book, but this book would not exist if it had not been for George Saunders' incredible book on the craft of writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which was the book that I was listening to at the height of the pandemic.

He reads the audiobook himself, and over the course of that book, we get to hear a series of I think it's maybe five or six Russian short stories and then hear George unpack the craft of each of those short stories line by line, section by section in a way that felt so intimate and so revelatory not just of what we're seeing on the page but also of his own craft that I just felt like I was revisiting my own initial joy in the reading of fiction and my own original desire to be able to communicate human experience on the page.

So, I mean, there's no way that I could have written, that I could have stayed with this book in the way that I did if I had not had the impetus George's voice in my ear saying, you got to go back and really hold yourself to the highest standard with every line, or here's how a writer captures the complexity of human life and why it's worth it.

Yeah.

I'm thinking about like the Claire Keegan's that have been packaged in this way.

And if you only know her from like Foster and So Late in the Day, she has this collection called, wait, what did I just say? If you only know her from Foster and Small Things Like These, she has another collection that interests you to a much weirder, more sinister Claire Keegan called So Late in the Day.

It's three stories packaged together and it's a doozy.

I think it would count as something weird for many, many readers to But also, this is how I came to Toni Morrison's only short story she ever wrote called Recita Tief with an intro by Zadie Smith, which read that last, unless you don't mind spoilers.

And I think it makes people more interested in things.

Or Claire Keegan, you know, all those wonderful those books that people produce and and And people read it like, what is it about this country? I don't know.

I think it keeps them in the forefront.

It keeps the Irishness at the front of the culture.

I enjoy it.

Do you know, I did think Claire Keegan when I read it.

I

know,

The beautiful films, small things like these.

I mean, that's a very recent film, Claire Keegan's book, but they're very recent.

But I think the Maitland Laundry women or the Maitland Laundries were the last, the late comers to this language, to this talk about imprisonment and detention.

So it was the media.