Louise Kennedy’s debut novel taps into her childhood
SLIGO, IRELAND >> Louise Kennedy grew up Catholic on the outskirts of Belfast, in Northern Ireland, during the height of the Troubles, and her earliest memories are shot through with violence: Her grandmother was cut by flying glass and needed several hundred stitches after a bomb detonated in front of her during a walk to the bank. The pub that her grandfather ran suffered two bombing attempts.
After the second attempt, Kennedy’s family moved to Ireland, where she still lives. But the experiences and images from her time in Northern Ireland are at the core of her debut novel, “Trespasses,” which received stellar reviews when it was published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Ireland in April, and will be published by Riverhead Books in the United States on Tuesday.
The book’s title hints at the love affair between Cushla, a 24- year- old Catholic primary schoolteacher, and Michael, a married Protestant barrister more than twice her age, whose secret trysts unravel in a town on the outskirts of Belfast in 1975. Many of the chapters in “Trespasses” begin with the children in Cushla’s class reciting the news of the p r e v i o u s day.
“B o o b y trap. Incendiary device. Gelignite. Nitroglycerin. Petrol bomb. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act. Vanguard. The vocabulary of a seven- year- old child now,” Kennedy writes.
The pub in “Trespasses” where Cushla supplements her income by working shifts and meets Michael for the first time is reminiscent of Kennedy’s grandfather’s pub. The characters who frequent the pub in “Trespasses” are drawn from Kennedy’s own experience of working as a chef and bar manager for nearly 30 years.
“I have a ridiculously good memory,” Kennedy said. “The interior of the bar is completely from my memory of what our pub looked like inside, right down to the color of the tweed banquettes and the teak furniture.”
Kennedy, 55, began writing “Trespasses” in early 2019, not long after getting a diagnosis of melanoma, when she realized she couldn’t presume she would have a long life. She wrote most of the novel in a shed in her garden, taking breaks when the children from the neighboring school went out to play. And she did it largely for herself, she said in an interview at her home in Sligo.
“I didn’t think that anybody would necessarily ever see it,” said Kennedy, whose melanoma is now in remission. “I think there was great freedom in that.”
Rebecca Saletan, Kennedy’s editor in the United States, thinks that American readers who are less familiar with the Troubles than their Irish and British counterparts will be drawn in by the novel’s love story and how it lays bare the taboo represented by a relationship between a Catholic and a Protestant.
Cushla “is so complex from the beginning,” Saletan said in a telephone interview. “She understands what she is getting into.”
The novel contains interesting echoes of the present, she said. It shows the Irish Republican Army destroying statues of historical figures and also explores how violence and insecurity can beget conspiracy theories. “It’s why it feels like a classic to me,” Saletan said. “It does not date, and I do not expect it will date.”
Kennedy’s flair for creating authentic working- class characters — especially Cushla’s mother, Gina, who smokes and drinks like it is going out of fashion — stems from extended family
get- togethers round the kitchen table, she said.
“I come from a family of very good mimics,” she said. “So we were always expected to be kind of entertaining. My father came from a big family and so did my mother, so you’d sort of have to vie for your place a little bit.”
Kennedy’s first collection of short stories, “The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac,” was published last year by
Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Ireland, to significant acclaim. Riverhead Books is planning to publish “The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac” next fall in the United States.
Kennedy’s route to becoming a writer was an initially reluctant one. Though she has always been a voracious reader, she said no one in her family engaged in creative practices, and the idea of writing didn’t come naturally.
“It wasn’t like I was dying to write,” she said. “I probably thought that it was something that magical people did, and I wasn’t magical, so why would I be doing something like that.”
Then, in 2014, a friend of hers, award- winning short story writer Niamh Mac Cabe, persuaded her to join a creative writing group in Sligo that had been started by another fledgling writer, Una Mannion. At first, Kennedy refused.
“I probably wasn’t in great order in my head at the time,” Kennedy said. “My husband and I had a restaurant that had been very slowly and kind of agonizingly going down the tubes for seven years. I was on antidepressants. I used to see my kids off to school and get back into bed and watch daytime television.”
When Kennedy eventually relented, joining the writing group, something seemed to click into place. “I discovered that my voice on the page is more like the voice in my head,” she said. “I just think I feel more like myself when I’m writing.”
Within eight months of joining the writing group, Kennedy had weaned herself off antidepressants. “My husband says that ever since then I’ve been holding my laptop and trying to run away from him and the kids to write,” she said.