Claire Keegan

It is a drizzly Tuesday in southern Ireland, and the Marlfield House hotel, where I am meant to be meeting Claire Keegan, is closed. The taxi that brought me here is on its way back to town, and I’m wondering what to do.

By “town” I mean Gorey, which I travelled to on a scenic coastal train from Dublin this morning, and which is vividly evoked in Claire’s short story Foster when its young-girl protagonist is taken there to buy clothes. As a teenager Claire worked in Gorey as a cook for an American family, who then invited her to stay with them in New Orleans. She studied at Loyola University there before returning to Ireland and becoming – after certain other steps – a very, very famous author, but also something of an enigma given the infrequency with which she publishes new work. Setting aside various repackagings, there have been just five Claire Keegan books in the past 25 years.

To see what happens, I push the ornate door to the hotel and am surprised when it swings open, revealing the deserted lobby of a repurposed Regency house. It seems that someone must be home, and indeed the proprietor, Margaret, walks in, only to explain that nothing is possible today. But when I mention Claire, whose work is canonical to the point of being on the Irish school curriculum, the line softens. “I’ll see what I can do.” She vanishes for a few minutes before returning to usher me into a drawing room where a pair of armchairs sit either side of an ornate fireplace. It is perfect, not only for the lit fire and the pot of coffee but for the feeling of chronological ambiguity: the oil paintings, glowing candles and glass-panelled bookcase could as easily belong to the 1920s, maybe even the 1820s, as they do to the 2020s. It’s a quality most of Claire’s stories share. The Forester’s Daughter, a slow-burning story of a desolate marriage, is almost entirely set against the timeless routines of a farm in rural Wicklow. It is only when someone gets an Abba record for Christmas that we realise we are actually in the 1970s.

I wait back at the hotel door until I see Claire walking over from her car. Her hair is red, her corduroys are brown, and her boots, jumper and blazer are black (of the blazer she will tell me: “I bought it from the charity shop, because there was a book in the window”). We shake hands and head down the corridor to our armchairs.

Although she hasn’t published any new material since 2023, it feels as if more people are reading and talking about Claire’s work than ever before. Her most recent book is So Late in the Day, a 64-page short story originally published in The New Yorker in 2022. It inhabits the perspective of Cathal, an office clerk based in Arklow, a town in County Wicklow. As is often the case in Claire’s work, seemingly mundane activities are infused with a sense of unease or pain, whose source is revealed through a series of subtle disclosures (in this instance, a clue comes courtesy of the story’s French title, Misogynie, or “misogyny”). Asked how she began the process of writing it, she says that, as with many of her stories, the first component wasn’t the plot or even the character; it was Arklow itself. “I usually begin with a place. Then I just see what happens.”

In the 2021 novella Small Things Like These, the place is New Ross, a port town near the Wexford – Kilkenny border. The story follows a coal merchant named Bill Furlong as he grapples with the horror of the Magdalene laundries – where “fallen” young women were forced into slavery by the nuns who housed them – as well as the fear that kept the town’s community complicit. The 114-page book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, and, despite her not having set out to write a political book, it won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. “I’m not trying to be, I just am, political,” she says. “I think that your beliefs as a human being will come out in your work, even if you try to have them not come out, if you’ve done your best.”

The release in 2024 of the sombre film adaptation of Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong, is no doubt playing a part in Claire’s ballooning readership. But ultimately it feels as if it is love for the books themselves that is driving the new level of recognition. A couple of days after our interview, Claire will go to New York for a publicity tour. The American edition of Small Things Like These was also published in 2021, and although last autumn she visited Nashville to give a reading in Ann Patchett’s bookstore and, in 2023, Charleston, South Carolina, for its literary festival, her US publisher, Grove Books, wants to capitalise on the new surge of interest. Oprah’s Book Club, the holy grail of celebrity endorsements, is a key fixture in the 10-day schedule, and Oprah will call Small Things Like These “a classic” and “a beautiful Christmas story” (given the time of year when it is set and its underlying theme of kindness, the book is often seen as a festive cultural artefact, though it wears that status lightly, more Joni Mitchell’s “River” than Wham!’s “Last Christmas”). Yet despite such starry treatment, something that comes up repeatedly in our conversation is Claire’s discomfort in seeing herself as “a writer” in the sense of it being a persona, an identity, something that defines her. This is partly about the related but distinct role she has held for 30 years as a teacher of creative writing, whether through the university system or her own private workshops (it is exclusively the latter these days). Many authors teach, of course, but Claire sometimes talks as if it is her real métier – as if her towering reputation has simply been an accident of wanting to be more credible when she shows others how to improve their work. “The first job I got was creative writing, and I liked doing that. And then you can’t really teach creative writing if you don’t write, can you?” she says. “I’m somebody who’s just really interested in paragraphs, and if that means that I’m a published writer sometimes and then trying to really teach it well at other times, all of that’s fine with me.” (After New York, Claire will return to Ireland to host a four-day writing retreat that will take place, as her courses often do, in Tullow, County Carlow. It has the title “Paragraphs and Syntax”. “The worst writing I’ve ever seen is written by people who want to write beautiful sentences and don’t know what a paragraph is,” she tells me.)

It’s also about resisting a certain self-regard that writers often cultivate, a sense of themselves as set apart from others. “There’s a wonderful Irish writer called John McGahern,” Claire says, “and he said that a writer needs a good boring life with no excitement. Of course, he wasn’t bored by his life; he wasn’t meaning that. But something I’m very much drawn to is a quiet life, where you kind of live invisibly as part of the community and don’t talk about it.”

Claire moved recently and is in the process of renovating both the house and the “little farm” that surrounds it. She is, she says, “about as solitary as you get without being a complete recluse”. While she does inevitably mingle with others through teaching and local goings-on, she is “just as comfortable being at home in an old man’s coat, pushing a wheelbarrow full of dung around the yard”. She’s excited about the new desk she’s bought secondhand from a solicitor’s office, and about her new tractor as well. She mentions cutting down a eucalyptus that was too close to the house, and it’s somewhat revealing that I can’t tell if she means she did it herself. She has three horses. “I have an ex-racehorse I retrained; a thoroughbred mare I started myself; and I’ve recently just bought a thoroughbred Connemara pony cross foal who I’m going to start. So that should be a bit of fun.”

To “start” a horse means to begin its training. For several years Claire’s been going to rural Queensland to start brumbies, as Australian wild horses are known. “You get a completely unhandled horse who may not even have seen a person until a week or two before they’ve seen you,” she says. “There’s a horseman, Ken Faulkner, in the Brisbane Valley that I worked with. He ropes them in a round pen, gets a halter on them, gives you the end of it, and off you go.”

Are there parallels between starting a brumby and finishing a work of fiction? “There are huge parallels, I think, and overlapping qualities to do with all art forms,” she says. “In an interview Ken was asked, ‘What is the difference between a rider and a horseman?’ And he said, ‘Well, the rider rides the outside of the horse, and the horseman rides the inside.’ So he’s aware of the horse’s emotions. You’re riding a horse’s emotions.” She pours herself more coffee. “I think that interesting parallels could be made between that attitude and writing. I’m really interested in the inside of the character. Rather than being clever or being an ‘author’, I’m interested in disappearing and having the character and having the place and having the story speak to the reader. If a rider is riding badly, you watch the rider. And if somebody is riding well, the horse shows off. I try and watch what Ken is doing sometimes when he is riding, but I can’t take my eyes off the horse, because what he’s asking the horse to do is so interesting. And it’s the same thing, I think. You know about the famous quotation from Flaubert? He said that the author should be everywhere, like God in nature. Everywhere, but no place visible.”

Margaret, the hotel proprietor, drops in to see if we’re OK.

“I’m sorry I can’t show you more hospitality,” she says.

“You couldn’t possibly show us more,” Claire says.
“It’s lovely.”

“Have you been here before?”

“I interviewed here for a cleaning job when I was
too young.”

“How young?”

“Oh, I think I was 14 or something.”

“Did you live locally?”

“Well, I’m from Clonegal.”

“You interviewed here probably with my mother, then, in those days.”

“No, there was a gentleman. I don’t remember his name.”

“And did you get a job?”

“No, I think I was too young.”

“We never have people that young. I was wondering if that didn’t happen.”

“But I was really tall for my age.”

“You thought you’d put it off that you were older?”

“Well, I don’t know that I was lying. I just thought
I looked very big and capable, and I was.”

When she was a child, Claire’s parents would milk more than 20 cows by hand, twice a day. “My mother had incredibly strong hands. I remember once she was at the shop in the village and she brought me a Granny Smith apple. You know how hard they are? She put her thumbs in the top of the apple, broke it in two and gave me half of it. I loved her for that.” Claire was born in 1968, when second-wave feminism hadn’t quite begun its long fight in Ireland. “My mother had no contraception, she had no money, she couldn’t drive,” Claire says.

Her family’s 53-acre farm was on the border of Wicklow and Wexford. She was the youngest of six, the third of three sisters, the eldest of whom was 17 years her senior. When Claire was six, the house got running water. At nine, she started to help on the farm and to assist her lumberjack brother in the wood, commandeering a draft horse to drag timber to the road.

Her parents didn’t have any books, but “my sister left a copy of a book one time. It was Jamaica Inn”. And an aunt would leave behind Mills & Boon romance novels after visiting. As potential aspirations go, a career as an author wasn’t so much unrealistic as unimaginable. “You might as well say you were going to turn into a marble fireplace,” she says. “I mean, it was just ridiculous, and I didn’t think about it anyway. It just turned out that that’s what I either was or turned into or became.”

Sometimes Claire would sit in the woods nearby instead of going to school – “I found it a horrible place to be as an institution” – hiding the truancy from her parents, going without food. But she did finish school and became the first person in her family to go to university, a life choice that was “thought very odd at the time”.

As for Claire’s parents’ parents, the details are hazy. All she knows about her father’s side is this: his own father died when he was 11 months old, leaving his mother unable to feed his siblings. So his brother and sister were put, for a time, “into the poorhouse, which was a kind of a shameful thing, if you like, at the time,” Claire says. “It was for homeless people. They’d be given bread. There was a lot of TB. And anyway, he said his mother brought him to the beet fields where she worked, in a Moses basket, and put him on the headland until she could get enough money together to get his brother and sister, Mick and Mary, out of the poorhouse again. I know it sounds like something out of Thomas Hardy, but that was my father in the basket. He was born in 1916, before the Irish Republic was formed.”

Claire’s mother, who was 10 years younger than her father, had parents who worked in a “big house” in County Wexford. “I think her mother worked as a cook,” Claire says, “and she used to say her father was the gamekeeper, but he was probably more labourer-gamekeeper.”

The poverty Claire was surrounded with has underwritten one of the main motifs of her work, which is kindness. The girl in her third book, Foster, has scant experience of kindness until she moves in with a couple on a farm, a fact demonstrated when she wets the bed and the woman avoids humiliating her by blaming the situation on the mattress.

This is, Claire tells me, a rare example of an autobiographical story appearing in her work, drawn from a time when various relations would come to stay with them during summer. “We’d only a tiny cottage and a whole lot of us, so I used to sleep on a foam mattress on the floor in the bedroom with Aunt Bridget, my mother’s sister. I remember her picking mine up, and I had wet the bed. And I remember her looking at the wet linoleum underneath it, and she said, ‘These old mattresses, they’re damp. They’re always weeping. I don’t know what I was thinking of putting you on this.’”

When Claire left home at 17 it was for New Orleans. She read political science at Loyola, became fascinated by the social theories of thinkers like Hobbes, Voltaire and Rousseau, and three years later read English literature, in part thanks to a class she took with the “wonderful teacher” Mary McCay (who now makes cameos on Claire’s own teaching programmes). By the time Claire returned to Ireland in 1992, her parents had separated. She moved in with her mother and began the task of looking for work in a country that had, at that time, the highest unemployment rate in Western Europe. “I applied for 300 jobs,” she says. “I got 300 rejection letters.”

An employment body found her part-time work in a library in a Dublin suburb. The long commute meant the position, perversely, left her with less money than before. Soon afterwards, she taught her first creative writing class at the library, and loved it. Inspired by the experience, she took a master’s in the teaching and practice of creative writing at Cardiff University, then received a scholarship to study for a second master’s, also in creative writing, at Trinity College Dublin, from which she graduated in 1999.

That year saw the publication of her first short story collection, Antarctica. It was what they call an auspicious debut, taking home quite a few Irish literary awards (the Rooney Prize, the Allingham Prize, the Francis MacManus award) and gaining a certain amount of global attention, including being named a Los Angeles Times book of the year. “I think I was regarded as somebody who was very promising,” she says. “Like I was a girl who wore the right dress to the prom. Every chance of getting married.” The Los Angeles Times was more effusive than that: “When it comes to dialogue, Keegan has oblique genius. She has an unerring sense of odd pathos. Reading these stories is like coming upon work by Ann Beattie or Raymond Carver at the start of their careers.”

Eight years passed before the publication of Claire’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields. Since then, there have been two short stories, Foster (2010) and So Late in the Day (2023), each of which originally appeared in The New Yorker before being published by Faber as slim-yet-handsome standalones. And, of course, the similarly dimensioned Small Things Like These. Each has been hailed as a stone-cold classic. In 2022, Foster was adapted into the Oscar-nominated Irish-language film The Quiet Girl.

Claire puts the gaps between books partly down to the demands of teaching and partly to a refusal to write for the sake of it. “I don’t mind doing less and doing it well,” she says. Indeed, her stories are known for being devastatingly efficient in their use of language. “You know how there’s somebody at a wedding and they want the microphone because they want to go on and on?” she says. “The kind of stories I am interested in, they don’t want the microphone. So what do they do then when you give them the microphone? They’re not going to say a lot.” Everything she’s produced, with the exception of Small Things Like These, is classed as a short story. As Claire defines it, the distinction between literary forms is less about length than about the narrative arc at play. “I think a short story begins after what happens happens,” she says. “The novella, the long short story, often begins before what happens happens. And the novel begins way before what happens happens.”

Contacted by email, the novelist Colm Tóibín (who grew up half an hour’s drive from Claire’s parents’ farm) says, “Claire Keegan has only one ambition: to get the next sentence right and the next image and then the next paragraph. She is ready to erase, delete and wait. She works for readers.”

Reading is the key to making good work, Claire says, though she doesn’t really read contemporary writing. She prefers to study the classics: today it is Chaucer (“marvellous, and introduced iambic pentameter to the world of literature”), and she is thinking of revisiting The Bell Jar. Her favourite living writer is not a novelist or poet but the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, whose movies tend to be based on scripts he writes himself – “I consider Amour to be a masterpiece”.

From her three-decade vantage point as a teacher, has Claire noticed any changes in the kind of work students are producing? “I have,” she says. “The writing has disimproved.” In what way? “People aren’t reading closely,” she says, “and it’s impossible to teach people who don’t read carefully how to write. Some people are listening to audiobooks and mistaking that for reading, and listening to an audiobook is not reading. People are imitating bad television and mistaking drama for tension. Any fool can take a chair and put it through a window. It has nothing to do with loss, and narrative lives on and is nourished by loss. What we lose, what we are losing, what we fear losing, what’s gone, what we worry about. And that can be anything at all, from the death of your child to your health, your home, your wealth, your reputation, your wife, your identity, your memory – you name it. I cannot think of a book that can be called a classic piece of literature that isn’t filled with loss.”

From the tight-lipped stasis of So Late in the Day to the radical act of kindness that drives Small Things Like These to its agonising finale, Claire’s books certainly adhere to that maxim and would be good bets if one were trying to guess the classics of the future. As for her future output, readers might once more be waiting a while. “I’m not a natural writer,” she says. “I don’t write very well at all at the beginning.” Her first drafts can’t be bad, surely? “They’re terrible.” Does that make her feel dejected? “Of course it does. But the worst thing you can do is give up. You have to be prepared to allow every single thing in it to change. If you’re open-minded, then what you have in front of you will turn into what you need.”

Time is the secret ingredient, she says. “Language is older and richer than we are, and when it really matters to you to find the words you’re looking for, the language will be generous back to you and give you what it is you’re looking for. But you have to be prepared to wait.

“I believe the next book I write will be set on the farm where I was raised, but what happens within it, I don’t know.” But she does have a sense of the form – one that, given that she’s never actually published in it, seems noteworthy. “I’m almost sure it’s a novel.”