Novels often have inauspicious beginnings. A spark lights the mind: a question, a character, an image, a song, a pattern of shadow on a wall. For me, it began in tears when, in the summer of 2016, I left my job, my family, and my fiancé to move to a city I had never been to before. Homesick already, I cried so much on the plane that I’m quite sure fellow passengers were looking about for the imagined baby causing such a fuss.
Philadelphia, my destination, existed only dimly in my mind. It was where American independence was declared, where the constitution was agreed, and where the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was born and raised, though this last nugget of information proved surprisingly irrelevant.
West Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill river, was also home to the campus where I would live and study. I had been fortunate enough to receive a scholarship which made matriculation at the University of Pennsylvania possible and, after several years recording billable hours at a Dublin law firm, I was ready to return to a life of the mind.
I have always loved universities, perhaps overly romanticising them, but this is because they represent one of the few remaining institutions where utilitarian, practical purpose and application are not the chief or primary purpose. On my first night, I took a walk through my new campus with its turreted towers, neo-gothic stone buildings, and faux-classical porticos, wandering along the crisscrossing paths in a crowd of other students, quickly swallowed into my surroundings. The university had a strong sense of history and purpose.
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I went to the cinema to see Small Things Like These. By the time I emerged I had concluded the film was crap
It was there, with the benefit of space, distance and time, that I began to write fiction again. During my years in the law firm, I had mostly given up on writing. They are difficult things to manage in tandem, the law requiring mental rigour and reason, where fiction requires experiment, creativity and flow. Between classes, I dabbled again with creative writing and, in the act of juggling these two divergent activities, the contrast between law and fiction became particularly stark.
Seven years later, there may be another Trump presidency, so publishing this book feels as if I’m returning to the beginning. I don’t expect predictability anymore and I’ve come to see the dangers of complacency
The law tended to deny what books and literature had in spades – depictions of fallible, imperfect and unreliable characters muddling through a set of circumstances that are rarely neatly resolved. The law purports to clean up the messiness of human affairs, but what’s lost in the process? When we iron out the creases, pleats and wrinkles, are we rejecting the complex and confounding reality of human life? It was this tentative idea, playing on my mind in Philadelphia, that eventually grew into a novel.
As it happened, by the time I arrived, the presidential election campaign of 2016 was under way. The experience of being present for that dizzying historical moment would eventually make its way into the novel too. In a lecture hall of the law school, I watched as state after state turned red, expectations upended as the presidency went to Trump. It seems naive now, but it was the first time I had experienced the deeply uncertain and contingent nature of the world. As a child of the 1990s, I had never had reason to doubt the impregnable nature of western liberal democracy, but now the future was suddenly malleable, messy, unpredictable. Anything could happen.
After graduation, I returned to Dublin and began working in politics and policy, but I also started working on a novel with a feverish intensity that I think is probably a reflection of the times I was living through. I completed my first novel during the Covid-19 lockdown and, when it came to write my second, I was drawn back to the ideas and questions thrown up by that year I had spent studying in the US.
On the page, I returned to Philadelphia, to the swampish heat of August, the thin haze clinging to the skyscrapers of Center City and pooling along the narrow cobblestone streets of Old City. I returned to a university setting and drew the reader into the classroom with me, watching my protagonist wrestle with burning anger, shock, grief and a yearning to find meaning in life.
I drew on the feelings thrown up on my return to Dublin in the summer of 2017, when the #MeToo movement was beginning and the Belfast rape trial was all over the news. I found myself asking recurring questions that had long fascinated me when the law denies justice, must justice dispense with the law? Can I really judge someone for losing faith in a system that offers them no resolution? Can we afford to let people grow hopeless and alienated from the laws and institutions that govern their lives? And are we really content to live in a world where the criminal law continues to utterly fail women?
Seven years later, there may be another Trump presidency, so publishing this book feels as if I’m returning to the beginning. I don’t expect predictability anymore and I’ve come to see the dangers of complacency. Though the opposite can feel true when faced with the barrage of atrocity and violence on the nightly news, we shape the world all the time just by being here. We form tiny nodes in a netted community that stretches far behind us.
It is through the law and political action that we make change, but through stories that we find each other, reaching across a chasm of understanding to recognise our common humanity. Perhaps, like universities, I romanticise novels, but, to me, they share the same rare quality. Reading a novel provides a place of mental peace amid the conflict, a place to think, consider, reflect and process the enormous beauty, mystery and tragedy of our lives. To find signal in the noise. We tell stories to know ourselves, to test our assumptions, to ask questions, to find answers. That gives me hope. It keeps me writing.
The Favourite by Rosemary Hennigan is published by Orion
