‘The Long and Painful Death’ by Claire Keegan

I don’t believe that writing just takes place when you’re sitting at your desk. Trying to write a story can also mean hours spent wandering off, messing about, seemingly wasting your time. The protagonist in this story has been awarded a residency at the Heinrich Böll House on the beautiful Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland. She’s looking forward to concentrating on her work. But what does she do? She goes for a swim, she bakes a cake, she takes a bath, she thinks about a Chekhov story. One cause of her distraction is the intrusion of a German professor who wishes to see the Böll house — a person from Porlock, you might think. When he arrives he is shocked at her inactivity. But I suspect that supposed laziness was necessary for her to start writing, in order for her pen to move across the pages of her notebook.

Collected in Walk the Blue Fields, Faber 2007

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

The cruelty meted out to children by adults in the Florida School for Boys is reminiscent of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, as described by Claire Keegan in Small Things Like These. Though that novella is among the finest I’ve read, it’s Keegan’s short story ‘Foster’ that has had the most impact on me.

‘Foster’ is narrated by a young unnamed Irish girl who is sent away to live with relatives she doesn’t know because her mother is pregnant and her parents have too many mouths to feed. From the outset, it’s clear that John and Edna Kinsella care for the girl more than her parents ever have. “‘God help you, child,’ Edna whispers. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’”

Edna bathes the girl and clothes her, cleans out her ears and brushes her hair. John talks to her kindly, holds her hand, and gives her money for choc-ices in town. These are the parents you wish the girl had. The Kinsellas have their own reasons for wanting to pour out their love; we discover that the couple lost their own child in an accident.

Keegan writes about the small kindnesses people show each other and the quiet powerplay between people who do not much like each other. Her writing is spare; it’s as much about what people don’t say as what they do, what doesn’t happen as what does: “My father takes rhubarb from her, but it is awkward as a baby in his arms. A stalk falls to the floor and then another. He waits for her to pick it up, to hand it to him. She waits for him to do it. Neither one of them will budge. In the end, it’s Kinsella who stoops to lift it.”

Keegan has a way of making you ache with longing for her characters. The ending of ‘Foster’ is enough to hollow you out. The first time I read it, I cried and cried. Keegan has said that, for her, the girl ends up back with her parents. However, she’s also said that it’s for the reader to end the story for themself. For me, the final sentences offer ambiguity. When the child utters the word ‘Daddy’, so clearly intended for Kinsella as she grasps him tight, I find myself willing her back into his arms and choose to feel hope.

First published in The New Yorker in February 2010, and available to subscribers here. Published in book form by Faber and Faber, 2010. Revised paperback Faber and Faber, 2022

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

Here we see a family considered the poor relations with many children, and their better off relatives who are childless. In the depths of poverty, our poor young girl who has a hard life at home, ill-used by her elder sisters. She is sent away to be fostered for a time by the better off relatives. We gather that the father is a louche individual as he drives her there thinking about another woman and being generally unpleasant in the way he talks to his daughter. The girl’s mother and family are Irish-speaking but the father ignores that and speaks English with them. The uncle and aunt are wonderful in the way they greet and look after the girl when she arrives. They get her washed and dressed and when something about her home life comes up, the girl says it’s a secret. Well, the mother tells her gently there are no secrets in this house. The uncle seems quite harsh with the girl when they’re out in the farmyard, shouting at her not to go near a certain place. It’s only when we learn that they lost their only child who fell into the slurry pit and drowned that we understand the father’s concern. The girl loves her new caring uncle and aunt and her life with them. When eventually the father returns to collect his daughter, we are presented with the most enigmatic and heart-rending ending ever. It’s a long story of about 10,000 words and is being marketed like a novel, as is another great long story by the same author, ‘Small Things Like These’, which I could as easily have chosen, also concerning the treatment of children. ‘Foster was made into an Oscar-nominated film, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) and ‘Small Things Like These’ is also in production in a film starring 2024 Oscar winner Cillian Murphy.

First published in The New Yorker, 2010, and available to subscribers to read here. Also published in book form by Faber, 2010

‘Walk The Blue Fields’ by Claire Keegan

Beneath the still surface of Claire Keegan’s stories there is often a darker or surprising or shocking element. This story is no exception. While I nearly went with the story, ‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’, from her debut collection, Antarctica, which shares similar qualities, I instead settled on the titular story of her second collection. It is difficult to describe what happens without giving too much of the story away. Only to say that, told in clear, vivid, and unaffected prose, it is an achingly beautiful and melancholy story that lingers long in the memory and the heart. A story about love and faith, disappointment and regret, and as it draws to a close, the hope of restoration and peace.

Collected in Walk The Blue Fields, Faber, 2007

‘Men and Women’ by Claire Keegan

There is a timelessness to Claire Keegan’s stories which makes them reminiscent of fable. I find the mythological feel to her work surprising, given the specificity of her prose and its attention to detail. She writes very powerfully of the gap separating children and adults and the lack of understanding between men and women. Her awareness of these gaping openings and where they occur, how they are made manifest, is what distinguishes this story. It is narrated by a young girl who wants to be big. ‘Big’ means licking the nibs of special pencils and sitting behind the wheel of a car while someone else opens the farm gate. For now, though, she is the one opening gates. At a dance at the local village hall she watches her father slow dancing with a neighbour “like slowness is what he wants” and she struggles to understand the strange atmosphere that gathers between her parents as a result – “like when a cow dies and the truck comes to take it away”. By the end of the evening she is not the one opening the gate and she is one step closer to being ‘big’.

First published in Antarctica, Faber, 1999)

‘Quare Name for a Boy’ by Claire Keegan

Christmas is an excellent way of testing a character. The in-built structure of Christmas, with its romantic and familial expectations, its association with heavy drinking and the anti-climax and nostalgia many readers will remember from childhood, means it is a festival that serves the short story well. Claire Keegan’s first collection Antarctica makes strong use of Christmas and New Year in the stories ‘Quare Name for a Boy’, ‘Men and Women’ and ‘Love in the Tall Grass’. Her writing is very precise and takes the reader right inside a way of life, right to the heart of a character and their particular seasonal agony.

‘Quare Name for a Boy’ is a post-Christmas story, a memory of an unconventional Christmas during which a couple had a six-day fling “to break the boredom of the holidays”. The story takes place when the woman, who lives in England, returns to Ireland to meet the man in a pub and tell him that she is pregnant. Her memories of their time together at his mother’s house are wonderfully atmospheric:

I wore nothing but your mandarin-collared shirts that came down to my knees, your thick brown-heeled football socks.

She sits up in the night and listens to cars passing through the slush. The story carries an entire country’s history of sexual relations inside it: “Irish girls should stay home, stuff the chicken and snip the parsley,” but the narrator is unwilling to snare the man like a fox and live with him “that way”. She doesn’t want to look into his eyes “years from now and discover a man whose worst regret is six furtive nights spent in his mother’s bed with a woman from a Christmas do.”

The tension builds as the “green wood hisses in the grate” and the man carries their drinks “like a man carrying the first two bucketfuls of water to put out a blaze in his own stable”. This is a story about Ireland’s future, too – the narrator doesn’t want to be the woman “who shelters her man same as he’s a boy. That part of my people ends with me.” Equally, (spoiler alert) there will be “no boat trip, no roll of twenty-pound notes, no bleachy white waiting room with women’s dog-eared magazines.” Published in 1999, it is especially moving to read this story in 2018 – a year in which Irish people voted to repeal the eighth.

First broadcast on RTE. First published in Antarctica, Faber 1999

Chosen by Hannah Vincent. Hannah is a novelist and playwright. Her first novel, Alarm Girl, was published by Myriad in 2014 and her second, The Weaning, was published by Salt in 2018. She teaches Creative Writing on the Open University’s MA and life writing on the Autobiography and Life Writing programme at New Writing South.