A Conversation with Alan Murrin, Winner of nb.’s 2024 Book of the Year
Image Credit: Lena Obst
Hello and a huge congratulations for being voted as our readers Book of the Year!
First, I would love to know about your earliest memory of enjoying writing? Do you remember when you realised it was something you loved and were good at?
Yeah, I think it was that situation where it was the thing I got praised for at school, which is so important to a child. I’ve always worked really hard at the things that I’m naturally good at, and not at all at the things that cause me any difficulty whatsoever. I had a natural inclination towards the reading, and I just gobbled up books but, you know, I’ve always been bad at Maths, and I would just absolutely crumble under the effort of trying to improve in that area. But anything that involved storytelling has always felt like a natural fit.
I remember watching a cartoon or a puppet show where they stole a rubber chicken full of diamonds, and I just thought, ‘Oh, what would happen if I continued that story?’ I must have been about six or seven and I remember, I had this spiral bound lined notebook, and I remember thinking, what if I filled it with words? And when I was a bit older and my mother was occupied with something, I would go with my father to his office, and I loved it there because there was a fridge full of KitKats and a whole room full of stationery. The other thing he was able to do through his office, maybe when I was a little bit older, probably around 10 or 11 years old, was that he ordered me a typewriter. I was spoiled – it wasn’t even a Fisher Price plastic typewriter; I specifically asked for a proper typewriter like the one his secretary had, and I used to order my typewriter ribbons and erasers and all that kind of thing through him as well.
I’m also the youngest of five and my brothers and sisters are quite a lot older than me, so from a very young age I had in-laws. When they would all come back for weekends and holidays, the house would be very full of relatives, and I remember writing an account of the weekend on the typewriter and sticking photographs of the house into my narrative about the weekend. It must have been really annoying actually, taking original photos from the big box of photographs and cellotaping them into my book. I was also reading Roald Dahl at that age, and I remember thinking that I’d like to write a book like he had, but it didn’t occur to me that I could actually do it.
You’ve just proved that you can! I read that you worked in the art world and as a bookseller before studying for an MA in Creative Writing, and I wondered how these experiences affected your relationship with writing – how do you think your writing career would have differed if you had studied Creative Writing straight after university?
I guess you can only ever know what happened because there’s no parallel universe where I have the vantage point of knowing what might have transpired. What I do know is that, when I did my undergraduate degree, it was the right choice for me because all I wanted to be was a writer. I studied English at Trinity and there was nothing else I wanted to study. I had zero interest in doing anything else.
In some respects, I think having that academic grounding in literature can hold you back somewhat because you start to think there’s a particular writer you have to be, and that is often a very exclusive one. On my own writing journey, I discovered that intellectual rigour is not necessarily my forte, but it took me a long time to realise that writing, at least for me, is actually just about telling a story well. So, to some extent, academia provided an obstacle on that front for a while. I also didn’t take my undergraduate very seriously. Unfortunately, I had spent six years at boarding school, and I was ready to start living and nothing was going to hold me back, especially not studying. It was a four-year degree, but I didn’t start knuckling down until my third year. Even now, there are great, bloody holes in my understanding and learning of the canon through a sheer focus on being cool rather than intelligent at that particular phase in my life.
I did the same… I did English Lit as well and I have so many gaps in my knowledge. It’s bad!
It is. It’s a bit of a regret because, actually, there’s nothing cooler than someone who knows their shit like that. Even so, the entire time at university, I knew I only wanted to be a writer. I couldn’t have been an academic, my brain just doesn’t work that way; I finished with a solid 2:1, but that was with a great deal of effort. I left my undergrad thinking, ‘I’m going to move to London and be a writer, and I don’t need to do an MA’. It didn’t quite work out that way.
I got to London and was prepared to do a certain amount of living before I knuckled down to the serious craft of writing novels. I just didn’t think I’d do quite as much living for quite as long before I actually published a book. Throughout my 20s, I started as an invigilator in an art gallery and then I worked on reception and in studios in a press office role, and I ended up working in arts PR. I had no intention of doing any of those things. I had no plan, but it was as though I’d accidentally slipped into a viable career. I wrote in the evenings, and even wrote a novel that didn’t work, but I still always believed I was going to write a book. I had completely arbitrary and crazy ideas like, ‘I have to write a book before I’m 30’. But, you know, I hit 30 with a job in PR, but I hated it so much I quit after three months. I had such an incredible sense of failure at that point because I had burned all of my professional bridges in that career, and I still wasn’t a writer… I was at a point when I was too old to not be doing what I wanted to do, but young enough to start again, I suppose.
So, I started to work as a bookseller and applied for a master’s at UEA because I had done my Erasmus there and I fell in love with the place. At that stage, I was so keen and ready to be back in full-time education; I was really thirsting after the challenge and the idea that I’d have a year to just write. I was so ready for it at that point. I think I was thirty-two, so I was almost ten years out of full-time education and this time, I didn’t take it for granted. I think if I had gone straight from my undergrad into this amazing master’s programme, I would have taken it for granted, but I really had to have a lot of the illusions about what it means to be a writer and what the craft of writing means taken away from me. Somebody just needed to tell me that I only had one job, to communicate a story to a reader. If someone had told me that when I was 20, it would have been the most helpful thing I could possibly have heard.
On that theme of storytelling, a lot of Irish authors have spoken about the cultural importance of storytelling, so I was wondering about your own experience of Irish storytelling – was this something you grew up with? If so, could you tell us a little bit more about that experience, and maybe your thoughts on the richness and talent coming out of Ireland right now?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don’t actually know a time when Irish writing wasn’t having a moment. I know that a lot of people have been saying this for a few years now, but also, I just think of Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Edna O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, John Mc Gahern and William Trevor.
Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that there are a lot of young Irish writers and maybe there’s more visibility of young writers online?
Yeah, maybe, and it could also just be the fact that Sally Rooney is such a huge phenomenon, and she happens to be Irish, which beams a huge spotlight on Irish writers more generally. I think what Sally Rooney does, and maybe what other Irish writers do as well – she combines intellectual rigour with the ability to keep the reader turning the page. That is a very rare thing – to be able to sell books in the millions that have philosophical weight. And it also pisses writers and critics off, you know, because she does the thing that every writer wants to be able to.
In terms of the wider literary scene, I mean, I could just read Irish writers and be satisfied. I could read only debut Irish writers and be satisfied! I don’t just read Irish artists, but there really is no end to what is coming out. I love Megan Nolan’s books and was particularly struck by Ordinary Human Failings. That was one of the best books I’ve read this year. I also just finished Barcelona by Mary Costello, and her short stories are exquisite and excoriating. A real heavy hitter.
The Arts Council Ireland are also incredible in terms of the funding they gave; they also fund great writers who might not find a commercial publisher, which really keeps writing alive. Literature Ireland also works really hard to get Irish writing into translation in countries all over the world. In fact, the Irish government is really into the soft power of Irish artists, so Irish embassies all over the world do a lot to promote Irish artists in countries where embassies are set up.
In terms of the cultural importance of storytelling in Ireland, that’s absolutely true. I mean, my mum in in particular, and the family that she came from. She’d have to sing a song or tell a story; everybody would have their little party piece that they would have to perform. There definitely is a difference; I have friends in Germany, for example, who find it surprising when they have dinner with Irish people, and somebody will show up and just launch into a story about what happened in their day, and everyone will lean in and listen. Or maybe someone, almost apropos of nothing, will start telling a story about a thing that happened in the past, which not every culture would see as dinner conversation. It’s not that conversation doesn’t happen at the German dinner table, but they discuss current affairs or politics or maybe what’s happening at the moment.
With Irish people, there’s definitely a sense that you have to be good at storytelling, you have to be funny. The worst thing you could be is a dose, which means you’re tedious. The value that is placed on being good fun, good craic and entertaining is paramount, so the worst thing you could do is be dull.
For readers who haven’t yet read The Coast Road, could you tell them a little bit about the book and where the initial inspiration for the novel came from?
Of course, it’s set in 1994 and 1995 in County Donegal, in a fishing village on the northwest coast of Ireland. It’s set in a town that is economically prosperous at a time when Ireland wasn’t economically prosperous, and it focuses on three marriages: Izzy Keaveney, who is married to local politician, James Keaveney, and the question surrounding their marriage is whether she will stay or not. Then, there is Colette, who is married to a wealthy businessman called Sean. She’s a poet and she has left him to start an affair with a married man, but it hasn’t gone well. She’s returned to this small town to try and reclaim her old life, and the question is, will she get her life back? And then the third marriage is Dolores, who is married to Donald. She’s in an abusive relationship, and the questions surrounding their marriage is whether she will be able to survive and leave.
That was great! You must have done that a lot of times recently…
I have indeed!
I love the fact that The Coast Road is about a small community looking into other people’s lives and engaging in the more insidious form of storytelling – gossip. I’d love to know more about what you wanted to explore in terms of the power of spreading tales around a small town and the consequences of what happens when stories are assumed to be truths.
It is definitely a book about storytelling, to some extent. When I wrote The Coast Road, I actually wrote the prologue first. It started off being maybe four pages long and the challenge was how to whittle it down until it’s just enough to start the ball rolling, but I had always finished the prologue with the line when Izzy is asked how she knew about the fire. And she just takes a deep breath and says, ‘Well, that’s another story altogether’. Even though it’s a really on the nose, heavy-handed line, I didn’t care because I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that, you know, you’re going to be told a yard; I wanted to tell the readers, fasten your seatbelts, you’re in for a bumpy ride.
The story you’re going to be told is about the existence of a woman, Colette, who suffered a great tragedy, and that’s the main story that people toy with and play with throughout the book. We get to a point, maybe in Chapter 7 or 8, where there’s a man called Michael Breslin – the local butcher –who walks up to the cottage to visit Colette. This section is the only point in the narrative where the close third person isn’t attached to the person it’s describing, and I wanted it to give the effect of a Greek chorus; I wanted it to feel like there was a camera or a drone flying over Michael while he is walking. He’s being observed and the book follows the collective voice of the community.
The effect I wanted it to have is that, when it cuts straight to Izzy and Theresa in the clubhouse after the game of golf, the reader is asks themselves, did that really happen? Did Michael actually go to Colette’s house? We understand later that he did, although he lied about the circumstances, but Theresa and these women don’t care that it’s a lie as long as it’s a good story. To some extent, they know that it didn’t happen, they know Michael is lying about Colette letting him into the cottage.
Izzy says at one point in the book that seeing Colette and speaking to her is like sliding into a current of warmth and charm and good humour. But then she remembers that she’s not supposed to like her. She remembers she’s done a terrible thing. But, in her heart, Izzy feels this huge fondness for her. She has a strong sense of justice so, when she hears this lie being perpetuated, she can’t perpetuate it and she has to step in and say, you know that’s not true.
And also, Izzy has a real sense of the danger that Colette, a woman living in that cottage in the middle of nowhere is in. And yet, anyone can say whatever they want about her and, as long as they’re a man, they will be believed. But she’s in huge danger all of the time. She naïve about this though, you know – she thinks she’s going to go into this cottage and write poems and get her life back, but she is behaving in a way that is so eccentric to the people of the town. Later on in the book, Colette asks Izzy for help and Izzy says no because she’s worried about the scandal it could cause, but when she hears these lies, that’s what makes her think, would it be such a bad thing if I let her see her son for a little while? So, I guess it is this gossip that ultimately creates a set of circumstances and a societal situation that allows for women to not be believed. The system operated in such a way that there was nowhere for a woman like Colette to go; she couldn’t get divorced, she couldn’t leave her husband, and she ends up in this dire situation, as vulnerable as it is possible to be.
I really wanted to talk about Colette because I just found her fascinating. Both Colette and the other main female characters were so satisfying to read because they felt so real and really speak to the real impossibility of being a woman – she is both incredibly vulnerable and undeniably powerful in some ways. Could you tell us a little bit more about your own feelings about Colette and why you chose to centre your narrative around a character like her?
It was always the intention was for a difficult woman to be the star of the show, but I actually started with this being Izzy. You know, it’s funny, I’ve done so many interviews where people say, how did you write this woman? And I’d say, ‘Well, I wanted there to be this difficult woman at the centre of the book’. And people say, ‘Yeah, I know, I love Colette’, but that’s not who I’m talking about! Colette has stolen the show because I think she does have this pull. She draws people in, and people gravitate towards her, I think possibly because she is an innocent to some degree; she is naive and full of love and hope and glamour, and everyone loves glamour!
I had written a short story called ‘What Poets Do’, and it focused on Izzy reflecting on the moment when she finds Colette drunk in the pub and escorts her out. For me, that was one of the central images in the book because, when Izzy sees Colette in that state, she thinks, that woman is rich, beautiful and educated. There’s a certain woman of a certain class who behaves like that, but it’s not Colette; she has broken the rule and let the side down. So, Izzy is reflecting on how, you know, if that can happen to Colette just because she left her husband, there’s no hope for anyone else.
The hardest part about writing Colette was her backstory. There’s a chapter where Colette drives back from seeing her son and she is alone in the cottage. It was originally 27 pages long when I first wrote it because I wrote her entire back story, but then I realised that her story could be reduced to a sentence: She was a fool for a man.
Even though there is the idea that Colette has a great deal of sexual power, she’s actually someone who’s sexually inexperienced, which is why she says at one point – it’s actually stolen from Yeats poem – that she’s sick with desire. She’s listless and very happy at this juncture to indulge in some self-sabotage and escape through this person who has appeared. I had an editor who kept saying that it wasn’t too clear why Colette would think Donal was the sexiest man alive, they didn’t understand this attraction. It reminded me of ‘A Streetcar Names Desire’, so I went back and rewatched it and, there’s a scene in the movie when Blanche says to Stella, how could you be in love with such a brute? And Stella says, haven’t you ever ridden on a train like that? And I thought, hang on a second… So, when Izzy and Colette are having this conversation in the car when Izzy is saying, I know he’s really handsome, but why are you behaving like this? And Colette just says, you have no idea. It was important somehow to establish that her desire made sense to her at a time when very little else did.
The other thing about Colette is that she is someone who understood real, deep, life shattering tragedy in a way that the other women in the book don’t. There were so many times when I had to step back from writing about the death of her son; I didn’t want to write it, I didn’t want to have to do it, but I felt like I just knew it had happened to her in the same way that I knew her name, you know? It’s not that this experience explains away everything, but it makes sense that she is defiant in wanting to be happy and live her life because she has known real abject suffering, but she’s punished for it. She is a prime example of the woman who can’t do anything right. If she smiles too much, people think that she’s too pleased with herself. And if she’s too unhappy, people think she feels sorry for herself. She’s actually written by the other people in the book to such a large degree, and there’s nothing she can do.
The novel takes place with the backdrop of a Divorce Bill – why did you choose that particular social circumstance to be in the background of your novel and how do you think it might affect the reading of The Coast Road?
Almost accidentally! I had been trying to write a collection of linked short stories that were set in this community, and a number of them happened to be in years 1994 and 1995; there seemed to be something compelling about the narratives that were set in that time and place. And then, the more I thought about expanding these stories into a novel, I realised that the political context of that time was that the divorce referendum was just around the corner, so I thought, what would that mean for the novel? I had no agenda in setting it at that time and it only became more interesting the more I began to develop it and redraft the book, as it adds an extraordinary poignance to the marriages when you realise that they can’t just leave.
And yet, in a way, it’s not integral to the story because the characters don’t know they will be able to get divorced in a year. It’s not an option. They’re living their lives without this possibility. Izzy even reflects in the final chapter that, actually, a change in the law wouldn’t make that big a difference for her anyway. This was something I became interested in because Ireland still has a low divorce rate and, even after it was legalised, there was no mad rush for people to get divorced. It did not bring about the end of marriage as an institution and you have to understand that, in Ireland, one third of the population lives in Dublin. Once you get outside of Dublin, it is an underpopulated country and, in these rural communities, there just isn’t the infrastructure to support women to leave their husbands and set up on their own. So, you know, you have to think about her particular situation. Izzy is a middle-class woman married to someone with a good job, and she has social standing in the community at this particular time. She wasn’t going to leave James. What was she going to do? Rent an apartment on the main street in this tiny town and start working in the laundrette? She wouldn’t. She would never have done that in a million years. She would have lost her standing socially and even if she had wanted to go and get a job, she didn’t have the education to do it. Life would have been pretty thin for a woman like Izzy if she actually was to leave her marriage.
That’s actually almost even more interesting in itself – the fact that this huge political change in these communities is not actually where the power lies. The power is in the people, and their thoughts about your place in the community.
Exactly, and another thing I was thinking about was the fact that people don’t live their lives walking around saying, I see the referendum of divorce is coming up next week, how are you going to vote? You know, people often see their lives as divorced from politics. They don’t live their lives thinking consciously about the ramifications of political positions. And even if some women were sitting around talking about the divorce referendum, I believe that a lot of women would not have admitted that they were going to vote in favour because that was like admitting that your marriage wasn’t working. It was shameful. And, if the option of divorce exists, that gives them an option that maybe they don’t want to have because life on the other side of it could be worse than life in in the marriage.
Our last question, which we ask every author we speak to, is do you judge a book by its cover?
I certainly, certainly do, but I wouldn’t not read a book based on its cover.
