Louise Kennedy Interview On Stations | ‘I’m Always A Stranger In Places’

Well, that's a great question. It was actually terrifyingly easy for me to slip into that voice. I don't know if that's because I have two children, they're now in their twenties. So it isn't long since I've had young people in my house who are very concerned about themselves. They're lovely and all that, but they would, they tend to think about themselves before way much quicker than they think about anybody else. Also they feel things. I think that young people are really idealistic. They feel things very deeply and maybe they haven't yet learned to kind of regulate their feelings. So the reactions tend to be very, very dramatic. I guess the other thing as well is about Róisín. She first appeared in a short story that I wrote. It's a story called Belladonna that was published in my collection, The End of The World As A Cul-De-Sac. It was my first book. It was the shortest story in the entire collection. However, I felt I had unfinished business with her because Róisín’s voice is remarkably close to my own writing voice, closer than anything else I have ever written. I think that is largely because, like me, she left the North of Ireland in 1979 when she was 12 years old and moved to the Midlands, where she did not fit in very well. She was unpopular at school, just as I was. People in the North spoke differently, and it was not just a matter of accent. There is a distinct humour in the North that people in the Midlands of Ireland simply did not share. There is almost a dangerous garrulousness to Northerners where we tend to laugh about awful things because, if you didn't, you would cry. Róisín carries that same quality, so it was natural and easy for me to slip back into her character.

My family left the North due to the Troubles. I should clarify that Róisín’s family left for a specific reason: her father made the controversial and unwise decision to join the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a predominantly Protestant police force. Since the Good Friday Agreement, evidence of RUC collusion with loyalist paramilitaries has come to light, showing it was far from impartial. In fact, the force was later renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland. My own father is always very keen for me to clarify that he was never a member of the RUC, though we did leave because of the Troubles. He said, “Oh they know that a lot of this is autobiographical, you know, that some of her background is like yours. But please tell them all I was never in the police.” It's very funny.

I was 12, the eldest of three children at the time, and I did not want to leave. I had just transitioned to secondary school and made friends, so starting over was difficult. My parents assured me that moving to the South would be wonderful and that everyone would be just like us, but that was not true. While the people were Catholic, they were far more devout and conservative than what we were used to in the North. My teenage self was horrified.

Moving there was jarring: there was only one television channel, the Angelus prayer bells played twice daily on the radio and at school, and there was a heavy culture of neighbourly surveillance. We had to stop to say our prayers. Furthermore, the country was socially conservative. Divorce was illegal, artificial contraception was strictly restricted. Thousands of Irish women went to England every year to deal with unwanted pregnancies

Additionally, the South was not particularly welcoming to Northerners. After partition, many in the South harboured guilt over not achieving independence for the entire island. To assuage that guilt, people often adopted a partitionist mindset, rationalizing that Northerners were simply chaotic or predominantly British.

Yeah, they just stayed. Ireland is small, so it's only about 120 miles or something that we travelled. But it felt like oceans because it's so different. Two or three months after we left, we went back up to visit to visit my grandmother. I went to the street that we had lived on. I knocked on my friend's door and already her accent sounded weird to me. It sounded unfamiliar. So already it just felt I was in a strange place, like one of the neighbours had painted their front door. My friend was talking about her new friends. I just thought, I don't belong here anymore. For me, the place is frozen in time. It's like as it was on the day that we left. But actually places go on without you when you leave. There's no going back at all.

I don’t think men are good at talking about their feelings. But there are other issues. From the very first scene, the first day she meets him, he comes to her house and eats with her and her mother. She’s just never asking the right questions because from the outset, he doesn't want to go home. But why doesn't he want to go home? And I think this is the thing. She's not really seeing it. Maybe her mother sees it. But again, which is quite an Irish thing, that even when there was a lot of evidence like her mother certainly reflects much later in the book, none of us ask the right questions. There is a sort of code of silence around things that that maybe we suspected might have been happening.  That's the case in lots of societies as well. It certainly was the case with the clerical abuse cases that happened in Ireland. I've heard the same for America and Australia, that there were kind of suspicions that nobody really acted on. Maybe that's about power and organisations or something as well. With Red, because his family is kind of middle class, there's a certain protection around that, too. I wonder if maybe if Red had been a working-class boy who wasn't going to school very often, maybe social services would have been called in. I think sometimes with middle class people, they get away with more.

Yeah, so that was kind of a surprise to me as well, because I don't plot and I don't plan in advance. I guess I have a very strong sense of character. I certainly did with Róisín and I did with Red when I started. And then the other characters, you know, kind of and I had a very strong sense of place and I knew it was going to move to London at some stage, but I didn't know what other characters I was going to need to kind of move it forward. At the beginning, I didn't write Lynne with a lot of sympathy; I thought she was just going to be a ridiculous person in Róisín’s life and a source of tremendous comedy. But when Róisín has a crisis in the summer of 1985 and goes to visit her father and Lin, I realized Lynne shouldn't just say 'I don't want to know.' I thought, there could be something here, and that's really when that relationship turned into something else.

Róisín hasn't managed to sustain other relationships. Her friend Sinead only stays because of her persistence in the face of Roisin's foolishness. Sinead is loyal and practical, speaking to Roisin in the way she needs to be spoken to—like, 'What are you doing with your life?' But with Red, his own family is so broken and beyond him that he sees what Róisín needs. He can't give her anything else, but at least he can help her have people and accept her."

In earlier drafts, the very first section I wrote was Christmas Eve, 1984, when Róisín is walking out of Victoria Station and doesn't know where she's going. The first lines I wrote were, “The sky was so low, it was like a twilight scene.” She goes through, finds Red, and explains to him what happened in her father's apartment. But then I thought, OK, now I have to explain why Red is living in a squat in London and how they know each other? I realized it was ridiculous—there would just be too much backstory. So I thought, why don't I write this as if it's happening in real time and go from one second to the next?

I didn't know if that was going to work, but writing involves a lot of trial and error. Trespasses was a very different book. It was more conventionally plotted. That wasn't the original intention, but by the end of it I thought, Oh my God, not only is there a plot, but there are a couple of subplots I have to tidy up here. I always want to learn something from whatever I write, and a few times I was daunted by managing the temporal frame. It was really difficult, but I just kept with it and tried to make it work.

Róisín is my age. My generation is the one that got into the most trouble during the Celtic Tiger economy. We were the ones who had left with nothing, gone on the boat to England, lived in squats, and lived very simply. Then when things got better, a lot of us went home, and it looked like we were doing really well. But we went bananas, borrowing money and trying to make money from selling houses to each other, which is just insane. We were the ones who had lived so simply in the '80s who were going bananas in the late '90s and 2000s.

I didn't want to go through that entire period, but the contrast was really interesting to me. In 1989, it's on the cusp of the Celtic Tiger, but 2007 is the very end of it. I didn't want it to end up being a story about people losing all their money on property, or who was at home versus who wasn't. So I thought if I pick up in 2007, right at the very end on the cusp of the economic collapse, I could just see how they're all doing.

That’s tricky. I didn't know that was going to be the last scene. Neither did I know what was going to happen in 2007 until I started to write it. If I set out with too much of a prior structure and clear idea where to take the story, I'd feel the book was done. I like when the characters surprise me.

I was speaking to someone who works with my publisher, and she said, “Oh, you remember, I read a different ending.” I was startled. I knew that I wrote two or three different endings, but I didn't recall sharing them with anyone. I guess the ending she read was a little bit more fairytale, but I ultimately thought that was dishonest. The final ending is maybe not the one people would like those characters to have—I think people might want more for them. But I just felt it would be really dishonest to deliver anything more conclusive or happy than the ending I did write. This had eight full drafts followed by two-three rounds with a copy editor and maybe two rounds of the proofreader.

Place is really, really important. I need to nearly smell where the characters are. I need to see it. I need to know it. When I wrote some of Trespasses under lockdown and couldn't physically walk around Belfast, I used to drop myself onto the street on Google Maps and walk around Belfast.

As for the other details, I guess I just know them. I know that all the adults chain-smoke. I know that people have those really crazy, swirly patterned carpets, so I know what their homes look like. All of that is really important to me, and I think a lot of it comes down to being a stranger. Ever since I left my childhood home place, wherever I live, I'm always a stranger in places. You just notice more when you're like that.

There's a writer called Mary Costello who wrote beautiful short stories and a novel called Academy Street. There's a book that I was very grateful to be allowed to quote from—one that was very important to me in the writing of Stations. It's called I Could Read the Sky and it’s by Timothy O'Grady. I think everybody should read that; it's a really, really, really beautiful book. And what else? There's a book by Michael Magee called Close to Home, and that is a wonderful book.