‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ by Mary Costello

Costello’s stories are generally rigorous, austere, unconsoling – stylistically, the sort of thing I gravitate toward very easily. Her latest collection Barcelona is mostly stories of pain distilled into precise prose. But this, the longest and perhaps best story in the book, is a bit different. It’s more expansive in both story and style, about a woman whose husband has a sex addiction. She “loathes people with big appetites”, which is probably connected to those qualities in Costello’s stories I mentioned earlier. But it also has unexpected comedy, and the feel of a writer stretching herself in different ways – so it feels both more traditional than Costello’s other work, but also excitingly new because it’s unlike that work. It’s a complete thing.

First published in the New Yorker, 9 Oct 2023 where it can be read online, and as part of the collection Barcelona, Canongate, 2024

‘The China Factory’ by Mary Costello

‘The China Factory’ is the title story of the debut collection of short stories by Irish writer Mary Costello.

Costello’s narrative is woven from the social architecture of working-class rural Ireland, where life pivots around the church. Costello’s worlds are very real, allowing us to enter the lives of her characters. A woman reflects on her past, casting her mind back to when she was 17. The teenager, shortly to leave for college, takes a job for the summer as a “sponger” in a china factory. Her mother drives her unwilling daughter to ask a neighbour, Gus Meehan, for a lift to the city every day for work.

“That’s an awful way to live” her mother says when they get into the car to leave. “The people who went before him would be ashamed.” But it happens that Gus is a distant relative. Gus’s life was ruined by a harsh upbringing, and, later, excessive drinking. His story is told indirectly as the story progresses.

The woman recounts: “I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. I could smell other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke, he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.”

The story unfolds as the girl integrates herself into the life in the factory, knowing that it was temporary for her, but not for those who will work there permanently, including Gus. The other girls are appalled that she shares a car with Gus. “How d’you stick it – the BO?” She denies being related to him. “They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?”

She has told no one that she is leaving for college in the autumn, and dreams about her future. The china they make forms a metaphor for a more gracious life, the factory Visitor Centre selling gilded plates to wealthy American tourists.

Gus’s deeper character is revealed to the young woman through her daily interactions with him. He talks about the factory brochure, “Earth, water, air and fire – that’s what goes into the china. Who’d have thought it? …The same stuff as we’re all made of…”

A dramatic event occurs where Gus intervenes to stop a gunman – a mentally ill relative of one of the other girls. The men exchange quiet words. Later, the woman reflects: “I wonder if it was to the man or to his madness he spoke?”

First published in The China Factory, The Stinging Fly/Canongate, 2012

‘The Astral Plane’ by Mary Costello

“She had never met this other man, or heard his voice, and she had tried not to love him.”

This exquisite story by Irish author Mary Costello explores the loss of faith in marriage and the temptation to stray. On holiday in Co. Clare, a woman spends time with her husband while plagued by thoughts of another man.

Known only as E, the man lives in New York yet recently visited Dublin. While attending an author reading, he found a novel with the woman’s email address inside the back cover. A prolonged correspondence begins between E and A: “He sent her quotations, lines from songs; he sent her poems. Did he not know the effect such words, such lines, such poems might have on a woman?”

Described as “an affair of the mind”, their correspondence feels somehow more shameful than a sexual liaison, testing the woman’s religion as well as her marriage. I fell in love with this story from the first reading and always enjoy returning to it. Costello plumbs the depths of romantic relationships, the virtues of commitment and the meaning of happiness. The story is also very funny, its humour delivered with an elegant touch.

Recalling Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ (which I recommended in A Personal Anthology’s collaborative summer special), ‘The Astral Plane’ weaves together embodied scenes with epistolary fragments. Both stories dramatise the space between life and writing, highlighting the joys and the limits of literature.

First published in The China Factory by Stinging Fly Press, 2012. Collected in The China Factory, Canongate, 2015

‘The Sewing Room’ by Mary Costello

If you’ve read this far and I still haven’t convinced you to dip into any of the stories, then this is the one. The one that catapulted me into my obsession with the form. I love Costello’s own story almost as much as I love this one, which closes her first collection. (She has since written two novels, the most recent, The River Capture, published this autumn.) ‘The Sewing Room’ is a simple tale about a moment of passion with life-long consequences. The writing is bare and unsentimental, the emotional impact brutal and devastating. Alice opens her story at the end of an afternoon sewing ahead of an evening to mark her retirement as an Irish primary school teacher. “There had been a child,” we learn early on, our readerly hackles right to be raised at that ominous ‘had’. Costello got the idea for the story from overhearing a snippet on the fringe of a gathering about how “so-and-so’s son is a lawyer now, in Boston”. Alice is Costello’s so-and-so, the baby the Boston lawyer. Costello allows Alice only a flash of judgment about what happened, leaving the reader to feel furious on her protagonist’s behalf. Buy The China Factory to read this story and you’ll be rewarded with the rest of the collection, which is equally luminous.

Collected in The China Factory, The Stinging Fly Press, 2012