For many millennials, adult life is starting later and later. This is one of the main subjects of Caragh Maxwell’s engrossing debut novel Sugartown, in which a young woman in her 20s self-destructs after moving back to the family home in the midlands. Written in a candid style full of wry humour and swagger, the book is arrested development in action: mother issues, romantic woes, alcohol and drug binges, life as one big party and a never-ending hangover.
Though Maxwell is a millennial from Mullingar, her own life trajectory has been quite different. Diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 18, she spent the next few years undergoing treatment that ultimately saved her life. At 22 she moved to Sligo, where she still lives with her fiancé Keith. Now 30, she credits the move with changing the direction of her life, allowing her to escape the identity of ‘patient’ that she felt branded with in her hometown and to explore, through a literature degree at ATU Sligo and a subsequent MPhil at Trinity, her love of writing.
“[Cancer] kind of shattered me,” she says. “I started college and then dropped out, didn’t really know what to do with myself. Moving to Sligo was the best thing I could have done. If I didn’t go, I wouldn’t have done my undergrad, and I wouldn’t have written a book.” The result is a novel full of casually imparted wisdom that was clearly hard-earned.
“Well, the adolescent cancer really sped up the maturity,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t have a lot of time to be resting on my laurels, thinking I was an invincible 20-year-old. It was like, okay, the fun part of life is over. You’re not invincible and death is inevitable. It’s very grim to think about but I came out the other side a bit more weathered than most 21-year-olds.”
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Throughout our Zoom interview Maxwell is engaging, funny and thoughtful. Speaking from her rented home in Sligo, she has plenty to say on a range of topics, from the impact of the recession on her generation, to complicated mother-daughter relationships. As part of the book’s publicity campaign she has written essays on these matters, drawing from experience.
The Cork author Caroline O’Donoghue recently wrote an excellent piece for The Bookseller criticising the fact that female authors are often asked to bare their souls in personal essays in return for publicity for their work. Did Maxwell find it taxing?
“Personally I’m kind of lucky in the sense that I don’t mind writing about, you know, things that have traumatised me,” she says with a laugh. “I actually loved doing it. I have a lot of opinions and nowhere to put them. I was a mouthy feminist 16-year-old who started family arguments over women’s rights and the Catholic Church at Christmas dinner, and not much has changed there.”
But on the broader point she agrees with O’Donoghue. “I don’t think it’s right that we should be expected to trot out the most horrible things that have ever happened to us in order to sell a book or achieve publicity or acknowledgment. It feels a bit gross. And I just can’t picture any men being asked to do that, like the ones I’m thinking of, I don’t remember seeing a confessional essay published in a national newspaper before their latest novel.”
Ironically, it was a personal essay on her teenage cancer, published in The Irish Times in 2019, that first drew her to the attention of agents. In the end, under the guidance of her lecturers at ATU Sligo, Una Mannion and Eoin McNamee, she went with Peter Straus at RCW. Maxwell’s editor is Juliet Mabey, co-founder of Oneworld, whose authors include three recent Booker Prize winners in Paul Lynch, Paul Beatty and Marlon James. On paper this reads like a dream combination for a debut novelist, but in reality the path to publication wasn’t straightforward.
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“I got so many rejections when the manuscript was sent out. And it really knocked me. Because you go into it with such hope for it. But I think it was good for me too, because once I got the wall of initial rejections, I was like, okay, well, I’m completely broken down now, my ego is gone, and we’ll just move on to the next thing. Kind of that crushing realisation of, okay, this book is, for all intents and purposes, dead in the water right now.”
When the offer came in from Oneworld, Maxwell jokes that she would have sold her novel for a fiver. “I would have been like, yes, please, just take it. Somebody take it. But I couldn’t have asked for a better publisher than Juliet. She’s been absolutely brilliant with me and really gets the book and is championing it at every turn.”
While the story of Sugartown is fictional, it is driven by real emotion. “It lends itself to good storytelling,” she says. “I have a habit of writing bits of myself, over and over, like I’m trying to work out the knots in my psyche by graphing them on paper. I think that ‘write what you know’ is good advice, in the sense that writing filled with authentic emotion is often the best writing.”
One of the central aspects of the book explores the crippling effects of the recession on small-town Ireland and on the generation who had the misfortune to come of age as things deteriorated. Maxwell witnessed this firsthand in Mullingar.
“I won’t be able to buy a house anytime soon because of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the recession,” she says. “My family lost our house when I was 18 due to foreclosure from the bank. And I’m one of thousands. It feels like we were sold a lie as teenagers and now as adults there’s nothing.
“Over the last 10 years, the heart has been absolutely cut out of my hometown. Like it’s such a simple thing, but when I was still living there, on a Saturday night it would be buzzing, there’d be people everywhere my age. And now you go there on a Saturday and it’s dead because everyone’s either emigrated or [people] have passed away. I know three people who have taken their own lives in my generation.”
I have a habit of writing bits of myself, over and over, like I’m trying to work out the knots in my psyche by graphing them on paper
Mental health supports can help to a point, but they can’t fix the wider economic backdrop or societal issues. “You can throw all the holistic stuff at it, like you just have to take care of yourself, you should just try antidepressants, go to the gym, for mental health walks and see a counsellor, but the fact of the matter is, it’s systemic issues, like the aftermath of the financial collapse and no adequate housing, that are to blame. Having a mental health walk isn’t going to fix that.
“The underlying issue is still always there. How can you heal that in yourself if it’s a constant problem? If you spend the first 15 years of your life being told, ‘you will have a house, a car, you will be married, you’ll have kids, a good job’. And then you get to your 30s, and you have maybe one or two of those things and no solid plan to get the rest in line. Of course that’s going to affect your mental health and your outlook on life. If you’re depressed because you can’t afford a house or a stable place to live, the only thing that’s going to fix that is affordable, safe housing.
“I know plenty of people my age actively putting off having children not because they don’t want children, but because they don’t have the money to give the children the life that they deserve. Who wants to bring a child into the world when it’s on fire and you’re renting a black mould apartment in the middle of a city? It’s just not sustainable. It’s not feasible. And I don’t really see an end to it anytime soon.”
Much of Sugartown is concerned with parent-child relations. The protagonist Saoirse’s father is an alcoholic who was largely out of the picture when she was growing up. Her relationship with her mother Maura is intense and fractious, a dark legacy handed down through generations of women in the family.
“I think mothers and daughters can kind of be each other’s absolute worst critics and best friends, and often at the same time,” Maxwell says. “I know that in generations previous to mine women have had hurt imparted by their mothers on to them and that then is put on to us, but I find a lot of women in my generation have gone, okay, no, I don’t want this inherited inner critical voice of mine to be passed on to my child. So we’re doing the inner work to heal from that. To process it differently.”
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Would it be fair to say, with the notorious mistreatment of vulnerable women by State and Church in 20th-century Ireland, that her generation might be the first with the freedom to do so?
Maxwell wholeheartedly agrees: “The last mother and baby home in Ireland was still open when I was born; it shut down two years later. It wasn’t safe to be a woman with an opinion until quite recently in Ireland. You were just labelled as insane and hysterical. I’d never look on my mother’s or my grandmothers’ and my great-grandmothers’ generations with anything but empathy, because it was not a country that was safe for women for a very, very long time, and even now it’s tenuous.”
Sugartown is published by Oneworld on September 18th.
