Several times during our phone interview, I have to ask writer Louise Kennedy to repeat herself, such is the speed at which she is talking. Her sentences hurtle towards me as if they've been objects squashed up in a cupboard for years, and someone has unexpectedly opened the door and they all randomly fall out together. But then again, when you are publishing your first book in your 50s, as Kennedy is, there is a lot you have been saving up to say.
“I’ll tell you, until I started to write, I probably had terrible anxiety,” she says, speaking from her home in Sligo. “It is no exaggeration to say that from the minute I started to write, I didn’t care if the house fell down around me. I just didn’t want to do anything else.”
Kennedy’s first book, a collection of stories called The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, is published in April. It has already created a stir, between excellent advance praise, the fact that two of the stories in it were shortlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and that it went to a nine-way auction. Auctions for short story collections from previously unpublished writers are rare.
It’s a surprise to hear Kennedy confess that she’s jittery about this interview and, even now, after her considerable success to date, doesn’t feel confident about her talent at all.
“When people say nice things about the book, or good things happen around it, I feel really good for a little while, but that doesn’t really last any longer than the amount of time it takes me to sit at the computer again,” she confesses.
Her voice on Twitter, for instance, is sassy, funny, opinionated, and entirely confident. Last spring, a series of her – extremely useful – tweets about cooking tips for people stuck at home in lockdown went viral.
Random examples of recent tweets:
"People of Ireland, would youse ever shut up about the British royal family."
“Call me doctor. But only if youse are really fucken desperate.” This, along with a photo of an email on her computer screen, confirming that she has qualified as a doctor of philosophy at Queen’s University.
“The 15-year-old niece just asked if she could read my book and I said she should ask her ma first and she said ‘Ah yeah, is it dirty?’”
“I really hope I don’t have a Twitter persona, but maybe I do,” Kennedy says in response. “I suppose it is something you can control. You can decide what you are going to say. You can decide how you are going to conduct yourself on there.”
Kennedy was born in Belfast and grew up in Northern Ireland. When she was a small child, a family member bought a pub in Holywood in Co Down, Several extended family members, including Kennedy's, then also moved to Holywood, with many of them working in the pub; an extended clan of her father's.
She was five when she became aware of divisions in the community. “I remember being at a birthday party; it was a Protestant child’s party, and somebody at the party asked me if I was Protestant or a Catholic. I said I was a Protestant, because I didn’t know. And I went home and told my mother and she was like, ‘But you’re a Catholic,’ and then had to explain to me that there is a difference.”
I had quite a bit of anxiety about interviews, so I found it difficult. I used to go to interviews and be terrified of having to speak, so I didn't get any proper sort of social worker job
At the time, Holywood was predominantly Protestant, not that she noticed it then. “Probably hitting 90 per cent Protestant and 10 per cent Catholic. The adults around me probably felt unsheltered or something. We were sort of exposed and noticeable, especially with having a pub.”
The pub was bombed twice in the 1970s. “Not big bombs that killed people or anything, just enough damage to damage the business quite a bit,” she says matter-of-factly, as if two bombs in your family’s workplace in themselves wasn’t bad enough. “But bad enough to make people wanting to stop having a drink there.”
The pub was sold not long after the bombings, and the Kennedy family moved to Kildare. She went on to study social sciences in UCD, and then left for London, hoping to get a job as a social worker.
“But I had quite a bit of anxiety about interviews, so I found it difficult. I used to go to interviews and be terrified of having to speak, so I didn’t get any proper sort of social worker job. It was an irrational fear.” Instead, she worked for a year as a filing clerk in a merchant bank, putting microfiche into alphabetical order. Then she returned to Ireland.
"I saw an ad for a cordon bleu cookery course in Alix Gardner's Cookery School, so I borrowed money and did it. I had become interested in food in London, because they always had cool things in the corner shop, like okra and things I hadn't seen at home. It was for three months, and was really intensive. We cooked all day every day. When we learned to make meringues, we did it with a balloon whisk and a copper bowl; that sort of thing."
For the next three decades, Kennedy worked in the restaurant business full-time, first in Dublin, and then in Sligo. “Once you have trained as a cook, you don’t have to do an interview. You turn up with your two hands and you work. And either you work hard enough and you make things taste okay or you can’t. So it was a great way to be employable and circumvent my neurosis.”
Along the way, as she puts it, not long after she arrived in Sligo, “I met a fella in a pub, and then ended up him being him, and then very quickly had two children. I bought a house and have been here ever since.”
Later in the interview, when asked about identity, Kennedy says she considers herself a “northern writer with a small N.”
I could very easily never have written anything and I wouldn't know the difference
In 2014, a friend, Una Mannion, encouraged her to attend a writing workshop in Sligo IT, then facilitated by writer Brian Leyden. Kennedy had not wanted to go. She wasn't interested. "I refused several times, and then I agreed to go, and I found it very difficult in the beginning. Even the very first day, when he [Leyden] asked why we were there, I said I was there because she brought me. And it just sounded idiotic. I wasn't one of those people who had always been scribbling away in the background. I was 47. I literally hadn't written anything, but I agreed to try to write a short story, and I spent about five weeks at it."
Something changed once Kennedy sat down, focused, and opened the cupboard in her head where so many things had been gathering over so many years. She wrote, and wrote.
“In a way, I felt I was in some sort of mania with it,” she says. “What I think now is that I could so easily never have written. I’m not really the kind of person who joins things, or goes to things, because I worked a lot in the evenings. I could very easily never have written anything and I wouldn’t know the difference.”
She built her collection of short stories, one by one, like bricks in the substantial wall they now form. There are 15 in the collection. They’re dark stories, where people are trying, but mostly failing, to connect with one another. There are misunderstandings, and people getting lost in all kinds of ways, and then the occasional small glimmers of light that flicker briefly.
Kennedy is already five drafts into her first novel, due out next year. She may have started later than some other writers, but that’ll be two books in swift succession.
'Emerging' seems to me to be fairer than saying young, under 30, or under whatever. Under 40
I ask if she thinks there is an ageist element to the promotion of new writers; an expectation that starting off equates with being, say, under 30. It’s a subject she’s been vocal about on social media.
“Oh, yes there is,” she says.
How could it be fairer?
“‘Emerging’ is a word that is used a lot, and I know some people don’t really like it. But for new writers, people who haven’t had much published, or haven’t done very much, ‘emerging’ seems to me to be fairer than saying young, under 30, or under whatever. Under 40.”
She also finds the media focus on “younger” writers puzzling, because when it came to selling her collection of stories, her own age was not a negative factor.
“When my stuff went out on submission, I spoke to all of the potential publishers on the phone at some point while the auction was going on, and every one of them seemed to be really interested in the fact I hadn’t written at all until I was 47. So being older wasn’t a bar or an issue for them. They actively seemed to quite like it. I don’t know whether they liked it from a selling point or if they liked it from just the point of view of finding someone who started really late,” she says.
“That’s why I wonder why this emphasis is on younger writers. There are so many reasons why people can’t write until they’re older. People with busy jobs: I don’t know how they’d find the time. I think a lot of the time, people just don’t have confidence. There are so many reasons. They could be caring for children or parents or whoever.”
Kennedy talks again about the difficulty she has in accepting praise for her work, and her lack of confidence. “I’d say nearly the hardest part of this has been learning to not trash my own stuff when I’m talking about it. That actually nearly killed me; accepting compliments.”
Accepting compliments is something chef-turned-writer Kennedy better get used to, given the degree of advance praise her short story collection is gathering.
The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy is published by Bloomsbury.
