Your story “The Bridge Stood Fast” involves a father and daughter from Dublin, who go to visit the mother’s parents in the country. Complications, of course, ensue. What part of the story came to you first?
In September, 1973, when I was eleven, I kept my father company on a visit to his family in west Clare. I sat in the back of the car, without a seat belt, and he played a game with me that used the names of the towns we passed through. I placed my character, Orla, in the front seat, and, from that moment, the fiction pulled away from my life, though the blackberries and the mushrooms that Orla picks are also real.
The father, Ivor, has a particular tenderness for this daughter Orla, the youngest of his three children and, he feels, the most curious and outward-looking. What qualities in her make him feel such an affinity?
Ivor decides that Orla’s curiosity is a boyish quality, and this plays into his slight regret that he has had no son. Also, she is still a child, very “stuck” on her father, and that is lovely for both of them. This is a very underrepresented relationship in fiction, and it is hard for me to know how fathers see their daughters. I am intrigued by the mechanism of repression that kicks in—sometimes imperfectly—when a daughter hits puberty and her increasing indifference to her father makes her an object of either joy or unease to him. For insight, I found myself looking very intently at Thomas Gainsborough’s tender double portraits of his two girls, Mary and Margaret.
The grandparents, Seán and Melia, are from another world both geographically and temporally. The grandfather is controlling and dominating; the grandmother doting and submissive. This is something that finally repulses Ivor, and that Orla also grapples with. What made you want to explore this particular generational gap?
Since my father’s death, in 2016, I have been thinking about good men and about the less good men they sometimes admire. Many of the men I know are terrific; I also come across some like Seán, who are wounded and interested in swagger, and some—fewer—who sexualize their dominance. I don’t know why better men put up with these last types and sometimes elevate them. There are plenty of Seáns around today. The geographical and generational gap was a convenient shorthand for exploring versions of masculinity.
You mentioned that you’d been reading Reddit posts about misogynistic grandfathers. Are there a lot of those?
A few. At a guess, there are more complaints about sexist fathers. Sometimes, when I am teaching creative writing, I float the idea of the adored father into the workshop and draw a bit of a blank. The women in the room tend to find the father figure more problematic than I did, especially in their teen-age years.
Ivor leaves Orla with her grandparents for several days, and those days seem to change her. We have hints of what happens, but it is not part of the written story. Why did you choose not to narrate those scenes?
Ivor does not know what happened. In 1979, the idea of a child suffering sexual damage could not be named, or even properly brought to mind. I was interested in Ivor’s realization that, given Seán’s many tiny gestures and the nature of the power he wields over everyone in the family, anything was possible. The reader’s guess that Seán’s actions were not of the worst kind is supported by Orla’s unbroken relationship with her father and the sense of her newly toughened resilience. It’s all there in the title.
The story is set in 1979 and then 1981. Why did you place it at that specific time? Was it a particular turning point in Ireland?
It was only in a late draft that I realized that the story was set in the month of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland, which was a slightly ecstatic national event. One of the co-celebrants of the papal “youth Mass” in Galway, the very popular Bishop Eamonn Casey, had to retire thirteen years later, when it was learned that he had secretly fathered a son. Forty years after that Mass, child sexual-abuse claims against Casey were publicly revealed, including one by his niece, now in her sixties, who said she had been raped by him repeatedly from the age of five. He died in 2017. This morning, as I took a break from typing these answers, I read in the paper that his remains have been removed from Galway Cathedral to be privately interred elsewhere. There is a proverb that my father liked to repeat in Irish: “Meileann muilte Dé go mall, ach meileann siad go mín,” which he rendered as “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.” I don’t know about historical “turning points” in general, but I can certainly point to moments of peak denial. ♦
