“To be a woman who defines their own life and has their own goals, you have to be brave,” says Catherine Airey. “And sometimes that involves saying goodbye.”
The 31-year-old, who was raised in Hertfordshire in a family of Irish descent, is reflecting on the life she led some years back in London, an existence that seemed – superficially at least – to be quite successful. Airey, an English literature graduate from Cambridge University and aspiring novelist, was working as a copywriter in the civil service. So far, so seemingly good. But she wasn’t writing any fiction, her relationship was foundering and she couldn’t shake her unhappiness.
“I spent years knowing that I wanted to write, but not really finding the time and space. It just wasn’t really happening.” So she ran away from it all.
In September 2021, aged 28, with £3,000 in savings to her name and newly single, Airey travelled to west Cork, where – having signed up to a volunteering scheme called Workaway – she began helping a couple called Anne and Sean to restore a 50ft wooden boat near Lough Hyne in exchange for bed and board. Airey loved Lough Hyne, having spent summers in west Cork as a child: her grandmother was born and raised in Dunmanway. But she knew nothing about boats.
His leer was so filthy it would have you reaching for hand sanitiser. A man over 40. A man who knew so, so much better
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‘My sister’s boyfriend never left us alone at Christmas. Should I confront her?’
It didn’t matter. She worked four hours as part of the volunteer group every day on the boat, and then she borrowed an old laptop from Sean and began to write. Underneath a duvet in her single bed in the box room, she wrote 1,000 words a day, knitting together a multigenerational epic ranging from 1970s Donegal to 2000s-era New York, and focusing on female members of one family and their struggles around identity, freedom, belonging and control.
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The completed manuscript, first titled Scream School and now retitled Confessions, sold for a six-figure sum to the British publisher Viking in 2023, and then in a six-figure auction to HarperCollins in the United States. The book is Viking’s lead title this season. All of the buzz and hype brings Airey to this current moment: the debut novelist is sitting in a room in the Bristol rental she shares with her boyfriend, who comes from Newry, doing this video-link interview to promote the book. Wearing a black top and simple gold chain, her voice wavers slightly at times, but she comes across as resolute and determined, and is impressively candid about herself and the intentions behind her fiction.
If a glittering book deal seems like the stuff of fairy tales (she must be the envy of her Cambridge friends), the work itself is dark and complicated. Confessions is populated by female characters who are often radically moved around, like pawns on a chessboard, by a patriarchal system that is weighted against them. Addiction, psychological frailty, sexual assault, institutional sexism and the abortion debate are all explored in the 461-page saga.
The book begins in New York with an account of a death: teenager Cora Brady tells us, “Two days after she disappeared, most of my mother’s body wound up in Flushing Creek.” Seven years later, Cora’s father dies in the World Trade Center attacks and Cora, at 16 and already a habitual drug-taker and school-skipper, is left orphaned. Out of options, she elects to move to the small village of Burtonport in Donegal to be with her previously estranged aunt Róisín, who writes a letter out of the blue to offer her a home in her small community.
Cora doesn’t have it easy, but neither did her mother, Máire, before her, whose experiences in New York between 1979 and 1981 are documented in another section of the novel. A student of art, headstrong and naive, Máire is ill-prepared for life in that city: she battles addiction and mental health difficulties, and she suffers deeply at the hands of a number of male characters, including her college lecturer. Some of the scenes are hard to read, in part because they’re given such intentionally matter-of-fact treatment in the book.
The chilling suggestion is that bad things happening to women is a given, to be absorbed like a sponge by the plot because it’s all so utterly normal. Máire never really has control. “I think the writing was driven by the fact that I think women mostly feel like they don’t have choice,” says Airey. “The element of choice, it’s there, but also not there. For me, at least, I’m somebody who’s grown up with far more choices than previous generations, particularly previous generations in Ireland. And despite that, for most of my teens and twenties, it felt like I was moving through stuff happening to me, and not really in control and didn’t really have very much agency.”
“If I felt like that, growing up in the 21st century, then yeah, I wanted to interrogate the fact we do make choices and they are important, but most of what happens to us in life doesn’t feel that way.”
Sometimes, even the characters’ simple act of documenting their feelings is registered as an offence, a notion Airey unpicks in the book as she turns back time to 1970s Burtonport. When Máire and Róisín are growing up in that strait-laced community, they become fascinated by a house called the Screamers’ house. It is painted in cornflower blue and decorated in symbols of the zodiac, and is home to a commune who practice primal scream therapy, where deep-seated tension is released by screaming, shouting and yelling – much to the displeasure of the conservative local community.
“The psychology behind what you’re doing [with primal scream therapy] is that you’re not supposed to repress your feelings,” says Airey. “And I think that, particularly in Ireland, was a radical idea: that you would raise grievances that you have with people and be radically honest about how you’re feeling.”
The Screamers’ house in Burtonport really existed. The Atlantis Foundation was made up of a community of about 30 people who arrived in the village in 1974 and stayed for 15 years. Airey was inspired to research their story after her conversations in west Cork with Anne, who had been raised in a commune and practised primal screaming herself. “I was very inspired by that nugget of history,” she says. “I was enchanted by this idea that this one house would have been alien in the village.”
Later in the novel, the house becomes a clandestine abortion clinic, which again challenges the thinking and laws of the time. “I’m very pro-abortion myself,” says Airey, “and I think that abortion is a key choice that people should have the right to. But at the same time, I wanted to not be too didactic about that and not say anything about how difficult any one person’s decision on that matter might be.”
Did she dwell much on what the people of Donegal might think reading the book? “I’ve spent a bit of time there – Anne is from Donegal – and it is in my mind. It’s something I used to be more concerned about. I think it’s something novelists have to deal with. But more and more, I’m sort of like: ‘It’s a work of fiction. I hope it’s interesting and [they’re] not saying all this is totally wrong, but it’s okay if it is’.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that several of Airey’s characters twist and turn in a world that’s ill-suited to their needs.
Airey knows what it feels like to experience frailty. Her first experience of a panic attack was aged eight, when she saw the Twin Towers collapse via a small television screen in her home in Potter’s Barn, a small town in Hertfordshire. “It was the first big world disaster that I was aware of as a child,” she says. “I remember being picked up by my mum from school, and in the car she said that something bad had happened in New York. I think it was still going on at the time. When we got home, the TV was on, so I remember watching the news footage of it.
“As a child, I was very affected by it. That evening, I got sick and I was coughing a lot. I couldn’t breathe and I threw up. My dad ended up taking me to A&E. I think, looking back, I was having a panic attack. In A&E, I remember looking up, with my head really high, and these little TV screens were up on the ceilings and it was playing the whole time. I wrote about it in my diary. It was the first time I wrote about something that wasn’t just my own little life. I think it’s no coincidence that when I was setting off and starting to think about writing a book, it was September 2021. It was the 20-year anniversary. So it came into my mind.
“And it’s a bit of a starting point: everybody can remember where they were on the day of 9/11. Although I was told by some agents, when I ended up going out to get an agent, that 9/11 books don’t do very well and to even maybe change it. But I wanted to open with a time where everybody was clear about where they were.”
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You wonder how her life has been shaped or altered by having such sensitivity to events around her. Does she have a difficulty in blocking out certain realities, a trait that can be a gift – certainly for a novelist – but can also result in personal hardships?
By way of an answer, Airey speaks about her eight years spent living in London. When she left, she says, she wasn’t just abandoning her old working life. She was attempting to leave behind other things too.
She had been drinking a lot, and although she was just in her twenties, a time when many indulge, she came to understand that she was on a different journey to her friends, who might have partied in college, but who were settling down into calmer kinds of lives. “I was going from being in my early 20s to being in my late 20s and it became clear that I hadn’t transitioned into not doing that stuff in the way my friends had,” she says. “I wouldn’t even say that my drinking was particularly ... like, it wasn’t every day. It wasn’t happening all the time. But I was just aware that I was putting myself in dangerous situations that other people weren’t doing.”
Was Airey’s battle with alcohol mainly? “It was alcohol and other substances at different times as well,” she says. “I was very secretive. [...] Growing up in a Catholic family, there is always a lot of stuff that’s not talked about at the time it’s happening.”
I was quite open to understanding myself as an addict quite early on
Things didn’t immediately improve for Airey when she moved to west Cork, but she did gradually seize hold of the narrative of her own life there. “I think it was the first time, especially as a woman, that I’d really done something for myself and taken a big risk,” she says. “It was the first time I was doing something for myself that didn’t have any kind of career benefit. I mean obviously it has done now, but I was just doing something for myself that I felt I needed to do as a person. It’s not been straightforward: the drinking for me got a lot worse when I did move to Ireland, because I wanted to make friends and meet people and say yes to things. But it was also during the process when I was writing my book that I started going to AA and stopped drinking.”
“I went to AA for a year,” she adds. “I was quite open to understanding myself as an addict quite early on. I went to the Skibbereen AA group and it was a wonderful meeting of people. But for me I would see that some of these mental health issues that go along with addiction, they don’t necessarily go away with sobriety. It’s more complicated than ‘if you don’t drink then everything will be okay’.”
Airey’s life in Bristol seems transitory: she and her boyfriend are renting a place, but hope to move back to Ireland, either to Newry or west Cork, if they can find a cheap enough house to rent. Finding anywhere to rent, long term, is hard. “I could always get winter rentals, and then in the summer, I’d have to move out, because of the holiday homes. My boyfriend and I are really keen on coming back, and I just have to persuade him to come to west Cork rather than living up north.”
First, though, there’s this dizzying phase of life to get through: the phase when everyone interviews her, when the reviews appear, and she becomes a known entity in the publishing world. The metamorphosis from broke boat-maker in west Cork to hyped young novelist sits a little oddly with her. “It’s been a weird adjustment process, going from someone who had quit their job and in some ways wasn’t doing very well – as in, my mental health wasn’t great. I’d run away. I wasn’t earning any money. To then go from that to friends and family seeing you in a different light, it’s a lot to process.”
She’s grateful nonetheless for all that has happened. Although she doesn’t want to spend too much time talking about how much Anne and Sean in west Cork have helped her, as she’s anxious to protect their privacy – “they live a quiet life” – it’s evident that the move to west Cork was transformative for her. “I had come to Ireland knowing that I needed to make my world smaller. I look back on that year now as the richest of my life,” she writes in the acknowledgments.
She cracks a smile. “I always imagined that if I was going to write a novel it would be a kind of sad girl book that followed a couple of years of my life in London going on bad dates and drinking too much. It was a surprise to me that I wanted to do something so expansive. It’s only now that I’m coming to realise that most debut books are not really doing that.”
Confessions by Catherine Airey is published by Viking on January 23rd
