The difficulties of being a girl in Ireland of old has been the basis of many a great story, from Edna O’Brien to Claire Keegan, Sebastian Barry to Mary Lavin. The reader can anticipate the broad outlines: inequality, hegemony, voicelessness, constraint, the grimly recognisable conditions that encourage and may lead to abuse. Anna Fitzgerald’s debut novel Girl in the Making is a reminder that while a backdrop may feel dated or done, it can come to life again in the hands of a gifted writer.
Fitzgerald’s story of the girlhood of Jean Kennedy, from a middle class family in southside Dublin, absorbs from the opening chapter in 1966, when we meet the protagonist aged three, to the surprisingly hopeful and cathartic end of her new life at college 15 years later. These early sections, beautifully written with the inchoate logic of a young child, show Fitzgerald’s attention to style. Another marker is the capitalisation of HE every time Jean’s father is mentioned, which in the hands of a lesser writer could prove irksome over time but in this instance adds an appropriate, accretive sense of menace.
The author’s bio offers little information except to say that she was born and raised in Dublin and that Girl in the Making is her first novel. While the title and themes recall Eimear McBride’s remarkable modernist debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Fitzgerald’s novel adheres to a more traditional type of storytelling. The characterisation of the father, in particular, would not be out of place in McGahern. Fitzgerald hones in on his vanity and his insidious, mostly verbal brutality, depicting in brilliant fashion how the moods of one parent can dominate a household. In Jean herself, an unusually perceptive child, there is a poignant mix of insight and innocence that harks back to O’Brien’s The Country Girls.
Fitzgerald’s pitch-perfect capturing of voice is the standout feature of the novel. As she scales up through the ages of girlhood the tone is nostalgic, rich, intimate and authentic. On the loneliness of her unmarried Aunt Ida, Jean notes, “the web on her eyes was even deeper now”. Elsewhere, she considers an abusive uncle across the dinner table “the way you are drawn to look into a cage in the Reptile House, and you keep looking, though you do not have to”.
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Readers will feel for this sensitive, intuitive child who internalises so much of the darkness of the adult world: “A strange thing happened inside my mind. I saw a picture of myself knocking all the food off the table, spilling all their wine. It was a strange, out of control feeling.” Despite her own woes as the put-upon eldest girl in a large family, Jean remains tolerant and compassionate (occasionally a little implausibly, more saint in the making than girl), always putting her siblings ahead of herself.
From a young age she understands the gender imbalances inherent in Irish society at that time, firstly through the preferential treatment that her brother Tom receives from their father, but more innately through the desperate power dynamics of her parents’ marriage, where HE rules supreme.
Jean tries her best to escape girlhood: she cuts her hair, wears her brother’s clothes, and into her teenage years she begins to starve herself, happy with the boyish figure it produces and the feelings of goodness it gives her in a misogynistic, hypocritical world: “I knew that I had fallen in love with this hunger, that it would sustain me, and I knew it to be the only thing that was really mine.”
Fitzgerald doesn’t go into the physicality of the illness, or the practicalities either. Sustained by one bowl of cereal a day, Jean somehow manages to keep going. In the end, her efforts have no effect. One of the cruelties of her situation is that as she grows older one terrible man leads to another, in a way that could be construed as overkill, except that in reality we know this to be true – abusers often seek out the vulnerable.
Throughout Girl in the Making the milieu of middle-class suburban Dublin of the 1970s and 1980s comes through in bright detail: home help, shopping in Switzer’s, a holiday to Mosney, a (very Maeve Brennan) laburnum tree in the garden. Without overtly referencing the toxic culture, Fitzgerald shows us a world where the voices of women didn’t matter. “I was really good, her little helper. And I was being really good,” Jean says towards the start of the book. Her journey, and that of the reader, is to learn that a girl’s role in life, her raison d’être, is not to make other people happy.
