Young Irish Writers Part 2: Claire Kilroy

Three emerging Irish writers offer insight into their lives, their work, and what it’s like to be a writer in Ireland right now

    SL: Your two previous novels, All Summer and Tenderwire, were narrated by women. What was it like to write from a male perspective, this time?
    CK: Liberating.  A worry with the first two was that people felt that the female voice was my voice, and that I was Eva Tyne, and that I was Anna Hunt.  Although I didn’t let that censor what I wrote, it did make me uncomfortable. So when I did hit upon Declan’s voice, I felt free.  I had a male editor, Angus Cargill in Faber and Faber, so I trusted him to let me know when the voice didn’t ring true. The only correction he made was that Declan described a hearing aid as “knicker pink.” No man would use that adjective, according to Angus.  It was very interesting to try to write about the girls from Declan’s point of view.  I knew what the girls in the novel were thinking, but I’ve had to wonder at various junctures in my life what on earth certain men were thinking, and so in All Names, I tried to join the dots. 

    SL: All Summer and Tenderwire orbit around art objects that may or may not be authentic yet are capable of producing intense rapture: a painting and a violin, respectively. In All Names Have Been Changed the focus of your characters’ obsession is Glynn, a writer. What were the differences and similarities in creating your characters’ relationships with him?  
    CK: Rapture is rapture, and you can be enraptured with anything or anyone.  It’s all about what captures the imagination, what ignites that spark, and writing about rapture is a shared characteristic of those three novels.  They feel linked that way.  With All Summer and Tenderwire, the enrapturing object remains aloof, perfect, and as unattainable as it is inanimate.  However, in the case of All Names, Glynn, the adored one, has feet of clay, he answers back, and so Declan’s rapture cannot be sustained.  It sours into frustration and disillusionment – he’s growing up, really.  I loved writing the closing scenes of the novel, about the acceptance of imperfection, about the fragility of your heroes, and about picking yourself back up. 

    SL: What writers made you want to write? How have they influenced you? 
    CK: John Banville and Vladimir Nabokov are the two biggies for me.  They both write beautifully and illuminatingly and wittily about rapture and its pitfalls.  As novelists, they function on every plane – not only at the level of the unit of the sentence (“the greatest invention on earth,” is how Banville describes it), but also at the bigger picture, the arc of a finely tuned and devastating plot. When I read Lolita at the age of 16, I transcribed bits of it into a notebook, as I wanted to be able to write sentences of my own, and I wanted those sentences to be as vivid as Nabokov’s sentences, and as piercing.  I wanted to be able to capture the way, say, an afternoon in late September feels, that sadness of summer fading.  Glynn is one of those writers.  All Names opens – and indeed closes – with the observation that “Nobody wrote about September like Glynn.” 

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