A married couple and their two young children are driving home from Sunday lunch at the grandparents’ house. It’s been an afternoon of “heavy” food and “almost unbearably light” conversation. With darkness falling over the Wicklow Mountains, children asleep in the back seat, the man turns to the woman and says: “I’m sorry.” Two familiar words, but there is something “wild and terrible” in his voice. In a split second, he has slammed his foot to the floor, wrenched the steering wheel to one side, and sent the car flying into a deep, tree-filled ravine.
So goes the tense and powerful opening of Show Me Where It Hurts, the debut novel by Claire Gleeson. The book, told using alternating timelines, explores the before and after of this unexpected tragedy in the life of a young mother, Rachel, who is left bereaved and picking through the wreckage after her husband Tom’s unthinkable act.
“I’ve been aware of these types of stories in the news, as we’re all aware, unfortunately, of the phenomenon of familicide,” says Gleeson, when we meet in a hotel in Dublin to discuss the novel. “At some point, I just started to think what it might be like to be somebody who had come through or survived that – how you’d start to deal with a cataclysmic loss, not only of people but of your relationship, and your trust in your own memories, and maybe your judgment. There’d be a lot of conflicting feelings of anger and probably guilt. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I just started to write.”
There are many brilliant novels that explore the manifestation and effects of a physically violent or coercive relationship, but Gleeson wished to develop a different kind of scenario.
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“There’s lots of contexts in which men – mainly – kill their families, and sometimes it’s the culmination of a cycle of domestic violence, or an act of revenge on the breakdown of a relationship. But I wanted to explore a scenario where it came out of the blue – where there hadn’t been a precursor of violence – and the extent to which that would shake everything you had faith in.”
The themes Gleeson deals with are fraught, yet her careful and thoughtful prose elevates the story beyond its initial premise. To read the novel is to plunge into a vividly familiar and ordinary world; one in which there are romantic walks in the Phoenix Park, trips to the supermarket, a honeymoon in Italy. Like the breakfast accoutrements photographed on its cover (by photographer Niall McDermott), there is something real and prosaic about the world and its characters, pierced only by the uncanniness of the situation Rachel finds herself in. We trace her and Tom’s life together, searching for subtle clues of what’s to come. The more we get to grips with Tom’s mental state, the more heartbreaking his actions seem.
A GP by profession, Gleeson had done some training in psychiatry as part of her qualification. As such, she was familiar with the psychology and pathology of severe depression, which can lead to delusion.
“I have dealt with patients who are very, very severely depressed who just lose complete touch with reality. Delusions of guilt or nihilism – that there’s no future for them or their families – is something that you do see repeatedly in people who are at that end of the spectrum of depression.”
She works in an area of Dublin that has “traditionally been under-resourced and socially deprived”. Mental-health consultations form a huge part of the workload.
“A lot of what we see are social issues presenting as mental health ones: depression and anxiety directly related to the stress of living with poverty, housing instability, drug and alcohol addiction,” she says. “Medication and counselling can sometimes help, but if I had a magic wand and could provide every patient in our practice with a basic income, secure housing and some help with childcare, I think the mental health of the community would dramatically improve.”
She has seen first-hand the “huge strain” mental health services are under, but she says cases like Tom’s are on “the extreme end of the spectrum of depressive illness” and “thankfully rare”.
“I’m wary of suggesting that tragedies like this can always be averted, because even with the best mental health services in the world, I’m not sure that’s true. But I think risks can certainly be reduced. People bereaved by familicide in Ireland have been advocating for a better model of communication between medical teams and families, so that when someone’s mental illness takes a turn for the worse, those closest to them are made aware. Obviously, this needs to be balanced with a patient’s right to confidentiality. But I think it can be done in a way that’s safe for everyone.”
What is her take on Tom as a person, and what he does? “I think he’s ill, and I think that is the driver for what he does. I think how you feel about somebody close to you who does something like that is very complicated. I don’t think there’s any right answer. But certainly, I think the phenomenon of an insanity defence is a real thing and is accepted. I don’t know if people who are capable of doing this when they become unwell are different to people who aren’t. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know if anybody does.”
Show Me Where It Hurts was the third novel I finished. I finished the first two and sent them to agents, but they didn’t get picked up
Gleeson was raised in Drumcondra in Dublin, the middle child of three. Her father was a teacher, her mother worked with young offenders before training to be a counsellor. The house was full of books.
“I read to the exclusion of almost everything else when I was a child,” she says. “And my dad’s a big Shakespeare buff, so reading and books were a big part of the household.”
From Enid Blyton to Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, to her “gateway to adult reading” Agatha Christie to Stephen King, she read all manner of things and also tried her hand at writing.
“I sometimes come across the starts of stories that I wrote ... Things that are clearly really derivative of whatever I was reading at the time,” she says, laughing.
She considered studying English at university, but from a young age, she had also felt a calling to medicine.
“I had a friend when I was 11 or 12 who had a life-limiting illness and spent a lot of time in hospital,” she says. “I used to go and visit her a lot on weekends, and I remember just being very comfortable in that environment. I liked the smell of it – which I know a lot of people don’t – and the sense of things always going on. I started feeling that it was something I wanted to do.”
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When she started out, working long hours as an intern and later a senior house officer, there was little room for other pursuits. But as she moved into general practice, around the age of 27 or 28, she began writing short stories and sending them to competitions.
In 2014, Aesthetica Magazine published her story Next of Kin. “That gave me the boost to start working on a novel.”
But the road to becoming a published author was not straightforward.
“Show Me Where It Hurts was the third novel I finished. I finished the first two and sent them to agents, but they didn’t get picked up. Looking back, I don’t think I’d want either of those to be published as they are now. I suppose that’s the way it should be. You do get better as you go, and you can see the faults in your own work with a bit of distance.”
Slowly the rejections began to turn into acceptances, and Gleeson built up a selection of published stories and competition listings. In 2021, a Words Ireland Mentorship, which paired her with author Henrietta McKervey, helped her to develop the manuscript that would eventually become Show Me Where It Hurts. She would go on to be runner-up in the 2023 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair.
Initially when she sent the book to agents and editors, those who rejected it did so based on the subject matter rather than the writing.
“I was concerned at times that that would be off-putting to people ... But I don’t think people by and large are put off by difficult topics. I think reading fiction is one way that we process those kinds of things – at a remove. That makes it safer. I think you just have to try and deal with them sensitively.”
Eventually she landed on her agent, Julia Silk, at Greyhound Literary, who sold the novel to Sceptre Books.
“It felt quite surreal. It still does now. That was 18 months ago. It’s a long path to it actually coming out on the shelves ... But it’s been really enjoyable.”
These days, Gleeson fits writing novels around a part-time role as a GP.
Gleeson points out that she is joining a cohort of Irish doctors who are also novelists, among them consultant oncologist Austin Duffy, and anaesthetist Clara Dillon.
“Most doctors I know are interested in other things as well,” she says. “There’s a stereotype of them being very one track – I remember watching an episode of some medical show on TV and the doctors, in their time off, watching videos of other doctors performing surgery. No doctor I’ve ever met in my life has spent their down time like that. I’ve a friend, a GP, who plays music to a really high amateur level. And a consultant friend does stage acting in her spare time.”
Gleeson is also a mother to three young children. Was the writing of the book difficult or traumatic in light of this?
“It wasn’t traumatic to write, to be honest,” she says. “I think you’re trying, with a book like this, to create an emotional experience for the reader without being emotionally manipulative. But that’s an iterative process. It’s writing and rewriting over and over again to get to where you are creating that effect. By the time you’ve done that, you’re so close to your own work you’re not going to be affected by it in the same way that a reader coming to it will be.”
I’m a big believer that reading fiction makes us better people
It’s not possible, she feels, to write effectively when in “a state of heightened emotion”. But she took the subject matter seriously and was very keen to get the tone right.
She has received feedback from early readers whose real-life experiences draw parallels with Rachel’s.
“[They didn’t experience] the very specific situation here, which is thankfully rare, but people who had lived with close family with severe mental illness ... What I worried about most in publishing it [was] that I would depict those things in a way that was inauthentic or that felt cheap or exploitative. So it’s really nice to hear back from people that it feels authentic and true.”
Gleeson is a prolific reader, and a member of two book clubs, which she says are great for introducing her to works she might not pick up otherwise.
“We read for entertainment, and that’s fine and perfectly legitimate. But we read for more than that as well. We read to experience aspects of the world that we haven’t experienced in real life. I’m a big believer that reading fiction makes us better people. It makes us more empathetic, and kinder and smarter.”
As she prepares to release the novel for the consumption of readers and book clubs like her own, what would she like people to take away from it?
“I suppose that people contain multitudes,” she says. “We’re all complex and there aren’t easy answers to most things in life. And there’s a possibility for happiness and contentment in life, even alongside grief.”
Show Me Where It Hurts is published by Sceptre on April 10th
