Debut author Catherine Airey talks to us about first novel 'Confessions' which follows three generations of Irish women, and shares the books that left a lasting impression on her and her writing style.
Catherine Airey grew up in England in a family of mixed Irish and English descent, and now lives in County Cork. Confessions is her first novel. It was published by Viking on 23 January. You can also find Confessions on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I’ve always loved reading. As a child, I went to the library every week and maxed out my sisters’ cards as well as my own. My dad is a big reader too, so there were lots of books around the house. Neither of my parents pressed books into my hands, though. I’m really grateful that I was free to choose what I wanted to read. I can still remember some of my favourite books I got from the library as a child. River Boy by Tim Bowler and Dr Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam. I also loved anything by Michael Morpurgo, and was particularly haunted by Out of the Ashes, which is about the 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic. When I got a bit older, I’d sneak into the adult section and hide these books between the children’s ones, worried that the librarian would tell me that they weren’t appropriate. They never did, though!
I’d made the decision that I wanted to go to Ireland during the Covid lockdowns, which meant I had to wait a while before I could go. I was very attached to my bike in London, especially at this time. I spent about five minutes looking into taking a bike on a plane, but it seemed too complicated. The idea formed after that. I’m quite impulsive, and I like a challenge. It was very satisfying, cycling the whole way (except for over the sea, of course). I actually cycled on to the ferry itself, which was a wonderful moment. We’d always taken the ferry when visiting Ireland when I was a child, and it’s how my grandma first came to the UK in the 1940s.
For Confessions, I was quite strict with myself, writing 1,000 words a day. I didn’t really have a plan, so I had to do a lot of retroactive planning and re-writing, but committing to getting those words down each day (even if they were terrible) was what pushed me through. I actually do most of my writing on my laptop in bed! Maybe because I’d spent eight years doing office jobs at a desk. I didn’t have the luxury of a special writing room with a nice view. I was doing volunteer work at the time and staying in a small ground-floor room that could fit a single bed in it and not much else. But even now I still write mostly horizontally.
Confessions follows three generations of Irish women, from the 1970s to the present day. The story is set very much in the real world, as ordinary lives are changed by historical moments (from 9/11 to the fight for reproductive rights in Ireland). At its core is the relationship between two sisters, Maire and Roisin, and the very different lives they lead, separated by the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also a bit of a mystery novel, with lots of secrets to uncover and exploring the impact these kinds of secrets have on future generations.
You are right. I didn’t have a big glittering idea for a novel, but waiting around for an idea to come was making me quite unhappy. I just had to do it. The first section of the novel was the one I wrote first. When I got stuck, it was because I felt I needed to know more about what had come before. So I started writing about Cora’s parents, their childhoods back in Ireland. I was writing these bits originally just for myself, but it dawned on me that they had stories to tell, as well.
So many! I read a lot of contemporary fiction. My favourites are probably Jonathan Franzen and Ali Smith, for very different reasons. This year, the novel I admired the most was Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald. It’s told through the eyes of a girl called Jean as she grows up in the Dublin suburbs in the 60s and 70s. In the first chapter, she is three, and the language and style develop as she does. Theres a scene quite near the beginning where Jean is watching TV on her own which I still think about all the time. Being a child is such a raw, confusing experience which we mostly just forget. I’ve not read anything else that captures this aspect of childhood so well.
I’m writing my second novel, which I’m finding quite difficult. This time, I actually did get a glittering idea, which involves a lot of research and planning. So it feels very different to when I was writing Confessions. Most of the time I’m excited by the new challenge, but I have many moments where I worry that I won’t be able to make it work, ironically because I have more of an idea of what needs to happen.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s an all-time favourite of mine. I first picked it up when I was about sixteen (from the library), and I’ve re-read it many times, always surprised again by how much I still love it. When I was younger, I was totally enchanted by the love story and the time travelling. Then I was dazzled by the feat of its structure. Now it’s the level of granular detail I’m so impressed by. The Chicago setting, the way it connects to the culture of the time. It has everything.
That was my first job after I finished university, but I wasn’t there for very long (about a year). Honestly, I wanted to be working in editorial, and secretly I really wanted to be actually writing books, not editing them. I did learn a lot from the process though which has been quite useful in terms of having a basic understanding of what publishers actually do between acquiring a manuscript and the book being released. There’s a long wait for the author (in my case nearly two years), and knowing a bit about the process helped soothe some of my nerves.
In the spirit of it being important not to harbour too many secrets (a theme in Confessions), I’ll tell you about the first book I ever wrote when I was seven years old. It was a zig-zag book I made at school called Henrietta the Very Hairy Hippo. The secret is that I stole the story from an episode of 64 Zoo Lane. I felt very ashamed about this especially as I was picked to read the story out in Good Work Assembly. I was sure someone in the audience was going to call me out and call me a cheat. But they didn’t, and I felt terrible about it for years.
