Author interview: A novel about the women who leave — and the ones who stay

There were many remarkable symmetries in the making of Catherine Airey’s debut novel,  Confessions, which she describes as “a story about women — the ones who leave and the ones who stay”.

To write the book, Airey herself had to do some leaving of her own — moving from London back to her ancestral home in West Cork where she had holidayed as a child. 

It was a reversal of the journey previously made by her grandmother, Margaret O’Donovan, one of the inspirations for the novel. 

Her story was a remarkable one for the times — born deaf in 1921, she underwent experimental surgery to regain some of her hearing, later qualifying as a doctor and leaving her home in the town of Dunmanway for England.

“I spent a lot of holidays going to West Cork and visiting family. I grew up with my grandma in the same house and she was an inspirational figure to me,” says the 31-year-old.

“When I decided that I wanted to go away and write a novel, West Cork was the place I thought of, I wanted to go and spend some proper time living there.” 

So, in 2021, a century after her grandmother’s birth, Airey, travelled by bike from England to west Cork. 

She had been working as a copywriter in the civil service and describes herself as “lost”. She saw writing a novel as a way to get out of her rut and change her life.

It was always something I wanted to do in the back of my mind but it was very much a big dream.

“It was only as I was getting to the end of my 20s that I was getting a bit disappointed at myself for not trying to do the thing I really cared about.”

In West Cork, she ended up volunteering on a boat restoration project near Baltimore, with a couple, Anne and Sean, in exchange for bed and board. 

She would spend a few hours every day working on the boat, which provided a necessary counter-balance to the solitude of writing.

“It was the perfect work environment for me, because it was doing physical work outdoors, which is very different to sitting in front of your laptop,” says Airey.

Confessions is an ambitious and accomplished debut, featuring the alternating narratives of sisters Máire and Róisín, who grow up in the village of Burtonport in Co Donegal, and the two generations that come after, Cora and Lyca. 

It begins in New York on 9/11, as a teenage Cora, in the middle of an acid trip, realises that her Irish father will not be returning home from his job at the World Trade Center, and wanders around Manhattan for days, putting up posters of him. 

The attacks proved to be a natural starting point for Airey and the novel.

I just committed to starting to write 1,000 words every day and letting the plot go where my interests were.

“It is not a coincidence that it opens on the day of 9/11 and it was actually September 2021 when I started writing, 20 years after it happened.”

Airey was eight years old when the 9/11 attacks occurred, and it had a profound effect on her.

“It was the first time I was really aware about the impact something on the other side of the world can have.

“Everyone had their TV on and it was showing the attacks over and over again. I think I was quite a sensitive child to pick up on that.”

She found another source of inspiration in her host and fellow boat restorer, Anne, who, it turned out, had been a member of the Atlantis commune, which set up home in Burtonport in the 1970s. 

They became known as ‘The Screamers’, due to their practice of primal scream therapy, and attracted much attention before relocating to the island of Inishfree and later Colombia.

In Confessions, which was originally titled ‘Scream School’, the commune is a source of fascination for everyone in the village but it exerts a particular pull on Máire. 

Her life changes forever when she moves in with the commune to follow her calling as an artist, leading her eventually to New York, where unfortunately, life is far from a fairytale.

“I thought it was so interesting that back in the ’70s and ’80s, there were these women who were living lives that were not the norm,” says Airey of the commune members. 

They weren’t living in nuclear families. There were men in it as well but I focused on the women in the novel.

“They weren’t living normal lives, and that was an unusual thing, especially in Ireland.

“There was a lot of media attention on them as a commune but I didn’t want to retell that story, the thing that really spoke to me was the idea of what it would be like to be a girl or a teenager living in this ordinary fishing village and then to suddenly have a very strange cast of characters turn up.”

As well as finding her writing groove in West Cork, Airey found a welcoming community and the connection she was seeking in her life, even joining a local swimming club.

“My mental health got so much better after I moved over. Really it was that sense of living in a community which I don’t think I had growing up in England — I grew up just outside London in a suburb where you didn’t really talk to your neighbours.

“I turned up at a stranger’s house who took me into her arms straight away and I just became part of their family.

“When I would imagine myself writing a novel, I thought I would be very lonely and quite miserable, and that wasn’t the case at all. It was really nice to be in a place where people are connected.

“There was so much going on that my life was actually quite rich socially.”

Having finally fulfilled her dream of writing a novel, Airey had prepared herself for a long road to publication. 

She was shocked when the book was snapped up for a six-figure sum 24 hours after the manuscript was submitted.

“It was very overwhelming. When I was writing it, I wasn’t really thinking about it being published.

“Then, when I did a bit of research into the process around getting an agent and submitting it to publishers, I was aware that there might be a really long wait.

“So I definitely wasn’t expecting to get that kind of news so quickly and for it to be such big news. I wasn’t really ready for it,” she says.

Airey ended up spending a few years in West Cork, but was unable to secure long-term accommodation. 

She is now back in England, and is currently living in Bristol with her boyfriend, who is from Northern Ireland.

She is working on a second novel and the long-term plan is to return to West Cork at some point.

“I only left because it was impossible to find summer rentals in West Cork and I was moving every six months. I would like to come back.”