Award-winning Irish author Roisín O'Donnell talks to us about her debut novel 'Nesting' and shares the thought process of her previous short story 'Present Perfect' which was the novel's foundation.
(Image: Ruth Medjber)
Roisín O'Donnell is an award-winning Irish author. Roisín won the prize for Short Story of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2018, and was shortlisted for the same prize in 2022. She is the author of the story collection Wild Quiet, which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award.
Her short fiction has featured in The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, the Irish Times and many other places. Other stories have been selected for major anthologies such as The Long Gaze Back, and have featured on RTÉ Radio. Her debut novel Nesting was published in January 2025 by Scriber UK and Algonquin US. It became an instant bestseller. You can find Nesting on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
My mum is an avid reader and she had me enrolled in the local library when I was only a few months old. I grew up surrounded by books, and also by a great tradition of aural storytelling. My granddad, my mum and my dad are all great story tellers, and I think that listening to them weaving stories around the kitchen table really had a profound impact on me. Then at school I had a number of teachers who were very encouraging. My spelling was awful, and my handwriting was also a bit dodgy, but luckily I had teachers who saw past that and encouraged me to write. I only really appreciate now how fortunate that was.
I held aspirations of becoming a writer from a very young age, and I attempted to write all through my teens and twenties but I never had the confidence to show my work to anyone. When I turned thirty, in 2013, I decided it was time to take my dreams seriously, and I enrolled on an evening class at the Irish Writer’s Centre. The teacher Dave Lordan was incredibly encouraging, and he advised me to start sending my short stories to competitions and journals. I followed his advice and luckily my short stories began to be published. I published a collection of stories, Wild Quiet, in 2016. Then I became a parent, and took up a full-time teaching post to support my family, and writing time seemed to evaporate completely. Sometimes honestly I look at Nesting and think ‘how did that happen?’
My routine varies quite a lot, and is often a matter of grabbing writing time whenever I can. When I was writing Nesting, I was working as a primary teacher and solo parenting two young children, so I had to come up with creative solutions to create writing time. I used to set my alarm to get up half an hour early in the morning to write, or I would stay up late. I often wrote on my phone during the day, using the Google Documents app, whenever an idea occurred. At the moment I am on a career break, so I have a little more time. I don’t have an office, so my writing space is my car, the sofa, my bed, wherever I happen to be! People think that you have to write full time and have a perfect set-up to produce anything of value, but that just isn’t true. All you need is a pen and a cheap pad of paper, or a phone with Google Docs.
Nesting is the story of one woman’s attempt to break free from a toxic relationship and build a better life for herself and her children. Ciara Fay initially seems to have the perfect life, but behind closed doors she is completely controlled by her husband Ryan, who has cut her off from her friends, her work and her beloved family. One spring day, Ciara has a moment of clarity when she realises this is not the life she wants for herself and her children, and so she makes a split second decision to leave and seek a better life. With family across the sea and nowhere to go, Ciara finds herself living in emergency homeless accommodation, dealing with red tape, Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back, and the voice of her own demons. Help comes from unexpected places, and Ciara gradually begins to rebuild and rediscover the strength that has been taken from her. As I was writing, Nesting became a sort of quest narrative. It became a story about the meaning of freedom.
That’s right – it all started with a short story. I was commissioned to write a story for radio on the theme of ‘independence.’ This was at the height of lockdown, when we were all being told ‘stay home, stay safe.’ But what if home was the least safe space you could be? Coercive control had only recently been made a criminal offence in Ireland, and I felt that there were so many stories which were still untold. I wrote a story about a woman called Ciara Fay who was raising her children in a hotel room, having left a toxic relationship. The short story Present Perfect unfolded over a single day filled with struggles and small triumphs. After the story was finished and had been broadcast on the radio, I kept thinking about it. I honestly think I was just really worried about the characters! I had got them into a terrible situation and I needed to know how or if they were going to find a way out. Deciding to continue the story felt like a type of loyalty to Ciara, and to all the women who have been in her shoes. It was stubbornness on my part. Refusal to look away, or to give up.
I have always been drawn to untold stories, and silenced voices. Stories like this were shrouded in shame and stigma in Ireland for so long. Even now, when faced with stories of domestic abuse and homelessness, our default reaction is often to look away, or to stick to the safety of the statistics. I wanted to bring these stories into the light; to give Ciara back her humanity, and to challenge unhelpful stereotypes around coercive control and homelessness. Perhaps that is the central message, but it’s not really for me to say. I really believe that the reader completes the picture, and each reader will take something different away from Nesting. Maybe it’s a story about breaking away from the misguiding comfort of the familiar and taking a chance on the unknown. Maybe it’s about rebuilding your life in the wake of trauma. Or perhaps it’s about found family and the meaning of home.
There are actually a few magical realist stories in Wild Quiet, along with stories that play with narrative form. My earlier work was quite experimental. I think I was trying out lots of different ideas as a way of finding my voice. Among my early influences were writers like Donald Barthelme and Roberto Bolano. I think I was drawn to the subversive power of the sci-fi or magical realist elements. Aspects the sci-fi definitely continued into Nesting. It hasn’t really been picked up on, but there are elements of surrealism woven into the novel; the crow, the circus performers. I think those elements of the surreal provide a slightly unsettling, disquieting strand to the story. For me, it’s about challenging perceived notions of what is ‘normal,’ ‘realistic’ or ‘acceptable.’ With a story like Nesting, Ciara’s sense of reality has been constantly undermined by years of gaslighting, and she is caught in a state of not knowing what is normal or believable.
I am working on a new novel. It’s too early to talk about it yet. I am highly superstitious in that regards! If I try to pin down a story too soon by explaining it to someone, the entire project seems to fall apart. I am enjoying being back at the very start of the novel-writing process, with a new set of characters and settings. I am allowing the story to lead me, and allowing my interests to wander quite freely. It’s quite a messy process at first, jotting down lots of notes, not knowing how all this will come into play. George Saunders says that ‘editing is a chance for a writer’s intuition to take over,’ but I actually think that tuning into your intuition is a major part of the entire writing process. It’s possibly the thing that draws me to writing the most. Writing is pure instinct.
Beloved by Toni Morrison. The way she makes history so sharply relevant, and the way she weaves the supernatural elements into the story so skilfully. There is a hypnotic quality to this novel, but when you start to look at the structure, it is incredibly complex. Her writing is fluid and poetic, and the reader is caught in a state of dread and rapture. Morrison was a genius.
I love animals, and I used to want to be a vet. This was when I was a very young child, and I think I’d already decided I wanted to a writer too. So, a writing vet?! I loved watching All Creatures Great and Small, and shows like Lassie. My family always had pet dogs and cats, and gerbils at one point (a food chain, a neighbour once pointed out). Anyway my ambitions of being a vet faded once I got older and realised that a) I don’t like the sight of blood and I’m quite squeamish and b) it would be too heartbreaking. Now I just have one pet, a nine-month old Cavapoo called Rosie. She is spoilt rotten.
