The much-acclaimed Irish author of Small Things Like These on her quietly devastating new story and why George Saunders wouldn’t read it aloud for a podcast
laire Keegan’s five books to date run to just 700 pages and some 140,000 words. “I love to see prose being written economically,” she tells me. “Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.” Revered by critics and prize judges for the miraculous density of her short fiction ever since her 1999 debut,, about an Irish coal merchant whose eyes are opened one Christmas to the horror behind the walls of his biggest customer, a laundry run by nuns.
Writing the language people use is part of what a writer does to portray the lives we lead, the world we live incame first – and she says she’s never tried to write quickly; tellingly, she speaks not of completing a manuscript but of getting “the text right”. Even more than her other work,deploys her typically hushed technique to devastating effect; plain sentences unfurl their full implication only on rereading, the narration a veiled disclosure of the protagonist’s poisonous habits of thought.
Raised on a farm in Wicklow, she became the first in her family to go to university when, as a teenager in the 1980s, tired of being “a second-class citizen” on account of her gender, she left to study politics in New Orleans. That she ended up studying literature there, too, was down to Mary McCay, an inspirational lecturer who took “all pretension and academia out of the subject” . “There was no right answer all of a sudden.
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