Claire Kilroy: ‘I haven’t met one mother who didn’t talk about failure’

“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway,” wrote Cyril Connolly. It’s a quotation that the novelist Claire Kilroy may well have reflected on over the years.

Kilroy won the Rooney Prize for her debut novel, All Summer, published in 2003 just before she turned 30, and delivered her next three, all for Faber & Faber, at three-yearly intervals: Tenderwire (2006), shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year; All Names Have Been Changed (2009); and The Devil I Know (2012).

2012 was a momentous year for the author, who grew up and still lives in Howth. She married her partner Alan that May, her fourth book came out in August and she gave birth to their son Lawrence that December.

More than a decade later, and after a difficult, nine-year gestation, from conception to final draft, she has returned with Soldier Sailor, which weighs in at a healthy 60,000 words. Mercifully, it is a beauty and has already received a rave if premature review in The Times, which will not be the last to highlight an exceptional chapter of virtuoso writing about a baby’s night fever that will be spoken of in the same breath as the big “Christmas shop” in Anne Enright’s The Green Road.

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Kilroy’s most personal novel to date, told in the first person, it is a mother’s love letter to her newborn son that threatens early on to turn into a suicide note as, sleep-deprived and unsupported, she reaches the end of her tether. It is also a stirring J’accuse – “Parenting is gender segregation” – addressed to a society where parenthood still all too often means motherhood.

It explores the intensity of the maternal bond – “I would kill for you” – but also the severing of the umbilical cord connecting the mother to the wider world of work and adult society – “Now I lived in your world. It was small” – and the fraying of a marriage as the husband puts career before family – “I tore at my marriage rings until the knuckle cracked, but no joy. Those things were soldered onto me.”

The Sailor of the title is the baby, while Soldier is the mother, one of the ‘infancy infantry’ performing the thankless daily drill of raising the next generation, ‘struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own’

The Sailor of the title is the baby, while Soldier is the mother, one of the “infancy infantry” performing the thankless daily drill of raising the next generation, “struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own”. Reading Soldier Sailor is an intense experience, but an immensely rewarding one. It is full of heightened, hard-won emotions articulated with a rare eloquence. “Love will sluice over you like sunlight,” Soldier tells her son.

[ Claire Kilroy: I found my two favourite novels before I was 20 ]

The early years of motherhood are ironically a barren part of the fictional landscape, with precious few examples that might have opened Kilroy’s eyes to what lay ahead of her. No longer. With mordant wit and acute, astute observations, she charts a world familiar to any parent yet freshly painted.

Here is Sailor in the playground: “You tottered around like the town drunk and I tottered after you like the town drunk’s mate. Little kids bolted around in all directions, their skulls narrowly missing each other. It was the Hadron Collider in there.” And in his high chair: “You tore off your bib and cast it to the floor like a man quitting his job.” The baby blues are not blue. “They are not any colour. They are the colour draining from the world.”

Then there is the fashion: “My coat with the swinging pockets that was essentially a wearable bag.” And the shock to the system of becoming a mother in one’s 30s. “What struck me as the starkest contradiction of all was that, having navigated this much of life – the volatility of youth, of love and loss, the agony and the ecstasy – the closest I had come to losing my mind was during the period known as settling down.”

Kilroy may not have published a novel in a decade but she did not entirely disappear from the literary scene.

Praising Anne Enright in our Irish Women Writers series in 2015, she wrote: “Motherhood often signals the dissipation of a woman (writer)’s brilliant career, as it blasts down the door of the Room of One’s Own that Virginia Woolf asserted was a necessity for a female writer. Anne, however – because she is an empathetic genius – has managed to write from within the chaos of motherhood, and to write brilliantly.”

Asked in a 2016 Q&A about her writing habits, she replied: “I wrote the first four novels in a quiet room of my own (or a room of my parents’ in the case of the second one). It all changed with motherhood. I can’t answer that question yet.”

In 2016, John Banville said in an interview: “I have not been a good father. I don’t think any writer is. You take so much and suck up so much of the oxygen that it’s very hard on one’s loved ones.” I invited other writers to discuss being a parent and a writer. Kilroy replied: “Motherhood meant the end of my writing life. I had written full time for 12 years and published four novels, but I couldn’t afford childcare so that was the end of that.

[ Claire Kilroy: ‘The Irish Times ran a series on how to be a man. Read Solar Bones’ ]

“I started teaching when my son was nearly two, and then I could afford childcare. But I still wasn’t writing – I was now teaching. He was nearly three before I started writing part-time again. Now he’s nearly four and the Arts Council recently gave me a bursary so I don’t have to teach. I write in the mornings while he is in preschool. I don’t yet know whether I am a better writer now that I am a mother, but I am certain that I am a better mother now that I am back writing.”

Perhaps most tellingly, though, in 2015, she contributed F for Phone to Winter Pages while teaching creative writing in Villanova.

“It is now the summer of 2015,” she wrote. “If I hadn’t had a baby in 2012, I’d be publishing a novel this year. I published one every three years, regular as clockwork. They were my babies… Finally, after a three-and-a-half-year absence from the page (more than a novel’s worth of time) I have opened a new file on my computer.... I want [my son] to have a writer for a mother. This is the first step. These are my first words. Lawrence, I am back.”

It was September 2021, however, before she started her first draft, by which time there were 200,000 words of notes in that computer file, “stuff I’d observed, things another mother said to me, all the bits and bobs of a day as a full-time mother or a freelance mother.” The final draft was done in March 2022. Did Kilroy ever doubt whether she would write another book? “Big time,” she answers. “It’s been 11 years, I haven’t been sitting here thinking, ‘I’m brilliant, wait till I get this finished.’”

[ The writing ritual: From blank page to Booker contender ]

Her friend and fellow writer John Boyne described her first three books as “an intriguing trilogy exploring different aspects of creativity – painting, music and writing – and the often unsettling and obsessive relationship that develops between the artist and the art” and her fourth, The Devil I Know, as “a surreal and frequently funny analysis of Ireland’s economic crash... eviscerating but utterly lacking in cliche.”

Kilroy says she made a distinct decision at the age of 14 to pursue an artistic career, to follow her passion. Her first three novels explored this creative pursuit. “The topic really is rapture, finding something so alluring that you chase it down, which lent itself to writing thrillers. Those books were almost quest novels of the path I was trying to track down. There is no path. You have to invent the path like Roadrunner, laying down track in front of you.”

I didn’t want to write this novel. I wanted to escape to my old life and write my old novels, imagining, doing my thing, but it seemed imperative I acknowledge the hugeness of this experience

—  Claire Kilroy

Written during the boom, which she hated as it was all surface, All Names Have Been Changed was “an archaeological novel”, uncovering the bohemian Dublin she grew up in where, in the words of Declan Hughes, you could be “glamorously unemployed”. The boom turned out to be a farce, so she wrote one (The Devil I Know). “I was angry at what I saw as the ransacking of my city. By the time we got to the recession, and it became clear that a great trick had been pulled on the Irish people, I was very saddened. We had been swindled into this monstrous debt we could never repay.”

Soldier Sailor, by contrast, was an unplanned pregnancy.

“I didn’t want to write this novel. I wanted to escape to my old life and write my old novels, imagining, doing my thing, but it seemed imperative I acknowledge the hugeness of this experience, use my art in any way I could to capture it. It was a challenge because nothing much happens. One of the characters can’t speak, it’s extremely boring or panic stations.”

She yielded on subject matter but would not compromise on form.

“It was imperative to me that something as epic as this be fashioned into a fictional narrative. A lot of writers turn to nonfiction and I didn’t want to do that. The imagination is linked to freedom, the immortality of art, to quote Nabokov. Art has always been the escape hatch if you’re of my vintage. I had to take risks but it did rescue me and it has rescued me again.

“A lot of women have gone this path before me, had creative lives and then that was the end of that. I wanted to convey that fear. Also, I felt if I wrote it in my own voice, it would just be a long whine that only dogs could hear.

[ Many strings to her bow: A review of Tenderwire by Claire Kilroy ]

“For a long time I couldn’t imagine. I was too tired, stressed, too much was going on to get to that place I call flow. I was scared for a long time that that faculty was gone. It became a stick to beat myself with that I couldn’t just sit there and create, my brain was fried, I couldn’t remember sentences. Honestly, my vocabulary has shrunk. I haven’t met one mother who didn’t talk about failure. I’d only get going and then have to do school pickup and feel resentful. I’m not a good organiser. Anne Enright said to me: ‘Before you have a baby you have to become incredibly disciplined. When you come home you do not wash up, clean the floor or pick up the pants, you go to your study and you work.’”

I now realise this is the most important thing to get right, otherwise you’re going to leave a trail of wreckage with your child

Kilroy blames the dearth of fiction about motherhood for her being so unprepared for the reality. “I marvel at my naivety now but I haven’t seen it portrayed. The renaissance in women’s writing happened after I had a child. It was a boys’ club. If those novels about motherhood were written, were they published, were they publicised?”

That said, “It’s hard to write a novel about drudgery without it feeling like drudgery. Where one of the characters can’t speak but is there on the page all the time.

“I knew from writing the others that they always start off as horrible failures. Can I say this? They’re sh** until they’re not. You have to live with them being really bad and hopeless.

“For a long time the mother worked in some financial area and had to perform in that arena while going to the toilet with her breast pump, I don’t know why that trickled away but it did. There was to be a nanny, and resentment of the nanny. It ended up being just this intense relationship between two people, Soldier and Sailor.”

Did they always have those names? “No, the child was Darling for years. Then India Knight published a novel called Darling, so he became Sailor.”

I wonder if Soldier’s developing relationship with the Friend, an old acquaintance who is also the primary caregiver in his family, grew out of an anxiety to offer the reader a subplot.

“I realised retrospectively the love interest is my love for the novel, the imagination. I don’t remember that character, my friend, coming, and there is a whole chapter, my favourite in the book, the beach, that was just there in the notes file. I don’t remember writing it. I just lifted it. It was born without the pain of birth.”

We were taught to respect careers, not mothers, the breadwinner, not the breadmaker

Does her husband recognise himself in the novel? “Alan hasn’t read it,” she replies. “He says he’s writing a novel, working title Motherhood: A Father’s Perspective. He thinks this is hilarious, that I’ve written a novel about motherhood and the father does not come off well.”

A fellow school mum quoted Michelle Obama saying that for 10 years she couldn’t stand Barack because of the unfair distribution of labour but having put up with him for 10 years she now has 30 years of happy marriage. “I read that and I felt seen,” her friend said. That said, Kilroy is seeing great improvements. She does Pram Watch, and the percentage of men pushing them is up. Also, when the wife is the main breadwinner, the husband often does his fair share of housework.

It is not just about partners, though. It is a patriarchal society.

“That is unfortunately how society was set up in Ireland. There was no paternity leave. Alan didn’t get a day off work. There is now two weeks but low take-up, I think paternity leave should be compulsory, parental leave should be shared so it becomes a joint endeavour. I asked Sebastian Barry’s wife: did he help out? She said yes, 50:50. I think you can see that in his work. Someone who has devoted time to equality.

“Saying mothers need ‘me time’ is like saying homeless people need homes. You need to give mothers me time. Someone has to mind the baby.” As Soldier asks: “Who mothers the mothers?”

She never asked her mother about motherhood. “Why did I think this was going to be easy? Why did I think the role was unimportant? That’s a biggie. I now realise this is the most important thing to get right, otherwise you’re going to leave a trail of wreckage with your child. We were taught to respect careers, not mothers, the breadwinner, not the breadmaker.”

And it’s harder if you are in the creative arts.

“It it harder if you’re a writer to establish your space. To write I have to justify in my own head the cost of childcare, to buy back my own time. The creche was €962 a month. I’m unsalaried. Could I justify this when we are trying to buy a house? No. Then I got a job teaching to justify it, but it’s still not writing.”

As a young woman, I distinctly remember passing women pushing prams, thinking that’s not going to happen to me

It didn’t help that by the time the family was able to buy their first house together they had had six addresses. They kept getting evicted as landlords went bust. “It sounds very simple but you need somewhere to put the stuff you need. Vital baby supplies were always in a box somewhere. The solution is for the State to build public housing.”

Soldier is rebuked by an old man for blocking the path with her pram. “When he declared me a stupid woman I felt not just abused but worse: disabused – that all along I had believed I was equal.” Alongside her personal run-ins with the patriarchy, the rise of Trump and Putin feels like a geopolitical climate version of the pathetic fallacy. “I could see that to have presumed empire and patriarchy were dead was naive at best. Not only were they alive and well; they had won.”

Kilroy’s novel is addressed to a baby boy. “I presume at some point my boy will read it and have some understanding of what motherhood is, be more aware of the challenges, the importance of it.”

Now she is a veteran, she wants to acknowledge the courage of her comrades with babes in arms, women who had each other’s backs. “These women were not zombies, they were warriors.”

“As a young woman, I distinctly remember passing women pushing prams, thinking that’s not going to happen to me. I thought I had better things to do, now I realise that is the best thing to do, why was I so patronising? I put it down to ideology, the way I was raised in school. Part of the book is to confront that. This is not undemanding, it is the most demanding work.”

The novel is dedicated to her father Jim, who was a very hands-on dad, and to her friend and fellow writer Sarah Bannan, head of literature at the Arts Council, whose son Ruairi tragically died in February.

Kilroy wants to return to her old rhythm of a novel every three years. Is there a potential trilogy on the stages of childhood? “I don’t think so, I’ve said my bit. I will return to pure imagination now.” She has already started her next novel, which is about a ghost.

“The job now is to reflect on middle age and mortality. We know we are going to die, it’s a very unpleasant piece of information. Are we in denial? My cousin died at 39, one of the school mums died at 37, both cancer. Christine was one of the infancy infantry and we watched her slowly die, that’s where the whole warrior thing comes from. She did the whole school run till she couldn’t manage the steps, then she’d wait at the top because she didn’t want to say goodbye. It was terrible. You have a human imagination and you try to shape those feelings into a story. We will die, we will lose each other. How do we accept that? I think that’s what it is, you don’t know what you’re writing or why till later.”

Kilroy does think sometimes of the novels that might have been, but then she wouldn’t have Lawrence, and she would do anything for him, do without anything. “That is the power of being a parent. But I hope we reach a time where we don’t talk about motherhood; it’s parenthood.”

Soldier Sailor is published by Faber & Faber on May 2nd.