Elaine Feeney told David Hennessy about her new book, Let Me Go Mad in my Own Way.
Booker longlisted Galway author Elaine Feeney has just released her third novel, Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way.
The Athenry writer’s debut novel, 2020’s As You Were won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. She followed it with How to Build a Boat, which was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year.
Elaine first made her name as a poet and in 2015, she was heralded as “one of the most provocative poets to come out of Ireland in the last decade”.
Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way is a story about trauma, both intergenerational and repressed, grief and colonisation.
The story centres around Claire whose life has been on hold since breaking up with her boyfriend Tom and returning home to care for her dying father.
After years in London, she is back in her family home where childhood traumas that had been long locked away return to the forefront.
In addition to this her former boyfriend Tom moves to Galway causing her two worlds to collide.
We spoke to Elaine at the London launch of the book which took place at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith recently.
What inspired Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way?
“I was really itching to tell a story about this woman in Athenry called Claire, and I didn’t know why.
“She kind of was haunting me.
“She kept turning up when I’d sit down to write.
“She had broken up with her boyfriend, who’s a Londoner, and I didn’t know why that had happened so these characters were burning in me.”
It is returning to her home that opens Claire up to the traumas she had long left behind..
“It’s so fascinating that when her parents are alive, she doesn’t even look back at all and she distances herself completely from them.
“She almost runs away to London and is upwardly mobile as well because she’s the generation that’s had a university degree and autonomy and freedom as a woman.
“And then when they die, she’s haunted by trying to piece together the past but in a weird way: She’s not looking directly at it and I think that’s an Irish sensibility to come at something slant.
“And, of course, lockdown had us all locked up in our houses as well, and she’s locked up in her childhood home and I think that that is just a whole plethora really of the past coming back through objects, through the wallpaper, all that sensory stuff.
“You’re seeing the way your parents lived and they’re not there.
“She had really ignored her mother’s death and tried to move away from it.
“And weirdly, she came home for her father’s dying but not her mother.
“She just couldn’t connect with her mother because of all that had gone on in her childhood and all of that she wasn’t really vocalising.
“She hadn’t told the boyfriend.
“He’s not the worst guy but I suppose they’re two characters from two different backgrounds in the English and Irish tradition and how closely aligned and intertwined we are.
“It’s a complicated relationship and I realised she didn’t want him to see her in Athenry.
“There was a shame, she didn’t want him in her space.”
Have you spent a lot of time in London? I ask because in the early part of the book you write about Claire and her life there, the South Bank even, so vividly..
“No, I’ve stayed rooted but lots of family have come and gone to Boston or Cricklewood in the past so I know the stories and I know the city, and I’ve seen the city change.
“It was obviously very different.
“My grandmother had come to London many years ago and worked as a cleaner in St Thomas’ Hospital and every time I seem to come to London, I seem to pass that hospital.
“It’s like I’m drawn back to her and I keep trying to find her there.
“In a way, I was tracing a little bit of her but in a modern way, or trying to find a little bit of her because I was very close to her growing up.”
We said about her not wanting Tom back in her home place but then she also never wanted to bring her folks over to London…
“I’m interested in people who go away and reinvent themselves, or try to.
“You can totally understand that because everybody thinks of their past in different ways.
“She tries to keep everybody separate in the novel and actually it culminates in everybody coming together in the worst way.”
It is very Irish to- as Claire does- not talk about the issue. Even at her mother’s funeral she seems determined to talk about absolutely anything else except her mother’s passing..
“I do agree with you.
“I feel there’s subterfuge in the way that the Irish have communicated or how we’ve learned to communicate.
“Where, culturally, has that come from? And why do we talk about things slant? And why have we not faced things?
“I think Claire is absolutely a product of that.
“We’ve exported this idea of what Ireland might be and I think she’s probably very subtly putting it up to that idea of what it is.
“There’s the great big narrative of Ireland as a commodity and as an object for sale which is weird because that certainly negates the experience of the individual.”
Did you see the comments of CMAT recently where she was deploring how the Irish have played up to certain stereotypes boiling Irish identity down to GAA jerseys and not much else when that is not the common experience..
“I love CMAT.
“I think countries seem to be branding themselves for the last 100 years, they even seem to have even almost a gender like ‘the motherland, father..’.
“It’s a very strange thing to for me to go to school (as a teacher) and hear these really great stories of national identity which make you proud on the one hand but then as a woman, you were very much outside of it because the legislation was so conservative around women and agency and autonomy.
“So you’re like, ‘Oh, this is fabulous. We have our freedom’, but, ‘Actually, wait a minute. I don’t know if we do’.
“I’m trying to write contemporary Ireland as well as delving into the past and history in this novel.
“The hardest was the contemporary because we’ve been told the stories of the 20s but now is a different time to put a shape on.
“How do you do that? Because everybody’s experience is different.”
You speak about countries having a gender. If Ireland was to have one, it would have to be male so difficult has the female experience been..
“You said that now, not I.
“You’re absolutely right: Paternalistic for a very long time, colony and then really quite fearful in its infancy as a country.
“I want the place to be ambitious for itself.
“There’s a lot of emigration historically from the west and I understand it.
“I felt it.
“I saw it.
“I saw aunts going to America and they were getting those Donnelly and Morrison visas.
“And the tears and the crying and the Irish wake.
“And now we fly over to America and we’re all dressed up to go shopping, that’s unreal.
“I thought that the airport was a place filled with sadness because I used to watch my mother get upset.
“I was in an airport in Eastern Europe recently and I saw a woman crying.
“I realised, ‘Oh, she might be emigrating and never going back. I’m just flying here to do a reading. She’s leaving her family’.
“And I just thought, ‘Oh, that reminds me of the 80s in Shannon Airport’.
“I thought it was very profound. It just shifts to other countries economically or for many other reasons.
“It’s a fascinating thing.
“It’s not fully at the core of the novel.
“I think I’m more interested in why she cannot love him (Tom), what the block was and it was so subconscious in her.”
Coming home forced Claire to revisit past trauma but the relationship broke up before that. She had shut down and shut Tom out..
“Correct, he couldn’t be with her because he couldn’t talk to her.
“She wasn’t going to open up to him.
“I am fascinated by missed communication in people, how we miscommunicate all the time.
“I do it all the time.
“I don’t know if I inherited that from my grandparents, ‘Don’t be so direct’, ‘Hold your wisht’, ‘Stop talking’…
“But I understood looking back when I went back into my own past, ‘Oh, they were doing it out of a real sense of fear of reprisal and worry’.
“They had a small piece of land but they were minding it and it came with all this baggage.”
The story flashes back to the 1990s where Claire’s trauma took place..
“That’s actually where it is: Just growing up on the farm, just the violence she sees with animals.
“It deals with the layers of violence as a novel even though at the core of it, I think it is a love story, but it’s also a love story in the time of post-colony and then also the foundations of the state and the women’s genuine lack of agency.
“The mother has no access to financial freedom to get away.
“She is at the behest of this man who is so angry.
“And Claire sees all this.
“She’s watching all this, and she’s shut that moment out.
“I wouldn’t be glib.
“I’m not interested in neat endings or anything.
“I don’t think you ever would recover from stuff like that.
“But I witnessed a lot of violence growing up, in many different guises and in many different ways.
“I think it was a very different Ireland weirdly, it was only the 90s.
“That was the 90s: Casual violence, violence on a farm.
“And gender based violence statistics have never improved which I find really, really compellingly shocking.
“That’s a universal statistic.
“It’s a difficult thing to talk about but it’s very present.”
It is in that flashback that someone refers to Middle Easterns treating their women ‘like dogs’ in reference to the Iraq war breakout…
“But the funny thing is we were doing exactly the same thing.
“I work on the archive of the Tuam mother and baby home in the university in Galway.
“That’s directly at odds with the narrative of ‘we freed ourselves’.
“We incarcerated more women from 1920s to the 1960s than any other country in the world.
“Everybody seemed to be afraid.
“There was a culture of fear.
“How do you whip up a culture of fear?
“Powerful people do it so quickly and we give our power to people so differentially.
“We did give an awful lot of control to the powers that be in small towns and the little dictators that had themselves at the top of committees.
“And women’s bodies were policed.
“Their agency was taken.
“They were silenced.
“And you can see this in this book, Claire’s mother has no option but to do what she does to herself.
“She probably does have an option but in her head, she has no option.
“They certainly didn’t have a voice because they were living in the shadow of what happened to a woman with an opinion or what happened to a woman that got pregnant outside of marriage.
“So you kept your head down and got on with things and you had to be morally virtuous.
“I ask more questions than I can ever answer.
“What is really hard is the immigrant experience of the women who came here and never went back and never were able to face that because they couldn’t.
“They had reinvented themselves here.
“They’d reinvented a life.
“They may have remarried or married and got on with things.
“But it was the most appalling treatment of people, it’s diabolical.
“We will never end finding ways to just destroy each other.
“You just have to go online now and they’re live streaming genocide and murder in Gaza.”
Is Ireland finally dealing with its issues?
“With the mother and baby stuff, I feel like there’s a lot of good work going on in those areas. I really do.
“But you think of the immigrant experience, they were left out of the reports, the Ryan Report, the Ferns Report.
“I think that wasn’t looked at closely enough.
“I think it’s very hard for any country to look at itself objectively and its wrongs and to change the national narrative.”
The book does say something about the digital world with Claire taking an interest in trad wife Leslie Purchase..
“Claire has all this freedom and what does she do with it?
“There’s a lack in her, there’s something missing and she tries to fill it with online content.
“I am interested in that idea that you are scrolling the most barbarous, barbaric brutality being meted out now on a people.
“Will it always be this way that people will find endless ways to take from others, to destroy them, to brutalise them?
“Then (1920s) there wasn’t the literacy, there wasn’t the access to newspapers, there was propaganda coming out of Dublin Castle.
“Now we can see it and we’re still ineffective because we cannot change it and it’s frustrating.”
You say it was harder to write the modern day, was it perhaps easier but more emotional to write about the 1920s and the Black and Tans?
“It was.
“I went to an RIC barracks in Clare.
“I stayed there for a week.
“It was on a graveyard so I was going around like a crazy lady talking to the dead.
“I could really get into the mother with regards to the son, especially who had the problem with the legs.
“I always think about, in times of war and crisis, how these mothers coped, tried to keep children quiet in situations where there was danger.
“But he’s her weakest child and her weakest link.
“He’s the one she worries about the most.
“And I, just as a mother, could really empathise with that situation.
“And the shameful way they (Black and Tans) came in to people’s houses around rural Ireland.
“And just the shameful way that they carried on just to demean people to other people.
“But these were boys that had fought in the First World War.
“They were traumatised.
“They were sent over here with their bellies full of hate and their brains full of anger.
“And they were not in a good place either.
“And they were under Henry Hugh Tudor who moved from Ireland to Palestine after the war, after the Treaty. So that tells us a lot.
“But it’s about othering people, that idea of othering people as well and that’s really is at the root of the book.”
What’s next? Will you look at these themes again in your next work?
“No, this is the third in a very loose trilogy.
“I’m going away into some other space, I think.
“But who knows? I think I’m going to write the same write the same book for my whole life.”
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney is out now on Penguin Random House.
