Nobody in my immediate family was surprised when I began writing. Apprehensive, yes. Supportive too, in a way I didn’t expect. I mean, a member of the family, a sister, spilling even fictional realities is bound to hit a few nerves, start the inevitable witch hunt of who, what, when – did that actually happen? The question everybody wants answered: Am I in it?
I grew up in a house beside the library in Shankill, an Arts and Crafts building designed by RM Butler, built in 1912. It is one of 80libraries in Ireland donated by Andrew Carnegie, the American-Scottish industrialist and philanthropist who gifted the world his love of books. My grandparents moved to the house in Shankill in 1934 with my father, then aged two, and his eight siblings. My father and mother subsequently raised three daughters there, and my sister and her husband now live in this house with their own two daughters.
A stoic and somewhat gothic presence, the library looms over our rather ordinary cottage home, flaunting peaks and arches and lead-lined windows, boldly defying modern mantras of practicality over aesthetic. A wind vane tops its clapboard turret. As children, our mother told us if we didn’t stop whingeing the wind would shift and we would be left with our twisted, miserable faces frozen in that moment for eternity. The finely crafted arrow spinning atop a pivot to north, south, east and west reeked to us of suspicion, a finger pointing to potentially sinister consequences if we didn’t behave.
As we grew, the library grounds became an extension of our boundary limits. We were allowed play there after closing time. Modest hedges and gravel pathways became gateways to parallel universes. Monsters were commonplace, competing with witches, vampires and Charlie’s Angels for our imagination and energy. But the real magic hid inside.
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I was known in my family as the Bookworm. To parents who weren’t readers (both finished education after primary school; free secondary schooling wasn’t introduced in the Republic until 1967) this was a bit of a wonder. A definite sign I was taking after my father’s side, the Jones family, who numbered many readers and, indeed, I learned later, a few writers too.
On Sundays, my father’s unmarried sister, May, would take a bus from her flat in the city centre to have dinner with us and babysit while my parents headed to the pub for the evening. I would hang from trees in the front garden awaiting her arrival. When this tiny, dark-haired woman with a penchant for exotic scarves, brooches and Sweet Afton cigarettes appeared at the top of Library Road, the neighbouring dogs would rush forth from their houses as if called by some sonic resonance inaudible to humans, a Pavlovian response to the small white plastic bags of chopped cooked liver she dispensed like alms en route to our house.
She brought gifts for us too. Pick’n’Mix and newsagent toy sets and, for me, five and seven years older than my sisters, comics. Bunty, Judy, Tammy, Misty. I was voracious for the serial stories, the giveaway gewgaw on the front, the cut-out-and-dress dolls on the back. Auntie May would read with me for hours. The comics, then books: The Famous Five, Mallory Towers, St Clare’s, the Adventurous Four series. Sitting by the fire in the kitchen, we’d transcend the domesticity of Sunday evening, take a magic carpet ride to other worlds.
When I was old enough, my mother marched us next door and acquired a library card for me. “We live just there,” she said, pointing to our house clearly visible through the window, by way of explaining that I could come and go on my own. She had her hands full with two toddlers and, after all, I was little trouble. I was a dreamer, a good girl, capable of entertaining myself. All I wanted to do was lose my head in a book. Multiple books. As many as the little pink card with its curious threads tickling my finger pads would allow.
My teachers encouraged me to write, but the instruction was non-specific. Career guidance was limited to options such as nursing or secretarial work
I exhausted Enid Blyton. Moved on to Just William, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Graham Greene, Nevil Shute – choices which strike me as curiously Anglo now, but maybe I was influenced by Auntie May. Or the bespectacled librarian on whom I had an early crush. Maybe these were simply the choices on the shelves. Perhaps in postcolonial south Co Dublin of the 1970s and 80s there was still a lingering tether to a vanishing empire. Perhaps the long finger of Archbishop McQuaid’s suspicion of Irish writers made them unsuitable recommendations. Or perhaps it was only my experience. My lack of bibliophilic confidence.
Lack of confidence was endemic in my generation. For girls, especially from working class backgrounds, it was touted as a positive. It was impolite to be seen as forward, up yourself, having notions. From primary school on, my teachers encouraged me to write, but the instruction was non-specific. Career guidance was limited to options such as nursing or secretarial work. The concept of a writing talent, however desirable, was intangible, ethereal, purposeless. I was told I was clever, but lacked focus. School reports said things like “brains to burn, but doesn’t use them”.
In truth, it was easier to nurture a guilty sort of arrogance that I could write, but choose not to. Writing involved effort, engagement, putting yourself out there. Taking a risk. The wind might change and you might – God forbid – make a show of yourself. As long as a talent is untried, it still has potential. I could nurse its possibility, tease it to the world. Be a reader of books with an experienced opinion – I’ve read quite a few now – the person in work who could competently write a letter or procedure or report. I was happy. I had a job I thrived in, a loving husband and two healthy children. The usual life challenges. The usual excuses not to write. But I never stopped dreaming.
I would argue the ability to be a dreamer is a superpower. If you don’t like the reality you’re in, you can open a book and explore somebody else’s problems for a while. Imagine what it’s like to live in their skin. It won’t solve the issues involved with living in yours, but it might give you some respite. It has worked for me all my life. Distraction therapy. Aged eight, I fell in a neighbour’s garden and split my knee open. My mother marvelled at how I immersed myself in a comic while the doctors stitched my leg. Aged 29, when my much-loved mother was dying, I called in sick to spend a day in bed reading Bridget Jones’s Diary. My mother’s name was, coincidentally, Bridget Jones. And that day gave me strength for the ones which followed.
My 50s look nothing like I thought they would. After a redundancy in my 40s, I finally started to write, joined classes, a writing group. I encountered only kindness and encouragement and they led to 53-year-old me arriving on campus in the University of Limerick in September 2021 to begin a master’s in creative writing. I discovered I had a voice and I could make it sing. Better yet, I had found my tribe. A choir of fellow scribblers.
No life is a straight road. Sometimes you hit a patch which is a series of bends and twists and slaloms. Sometimes you crash. In March 2023, the father of my children, my husband of nearly 30 years, died suddenly of a heart attack, aged only 56. We are still processing. Still navigating the peaks and slopes of shock.
Grief is a strange and complicated bedfellow. I’ve known him some time now, in various guises. We all do. His other name is Life. He moves in with stealth, like a lodger you accept will be in residence for a while, then realise he’s never going to leave. You’re going to have to work around him. He changes you, and yet he doesn’t. He forces you to grow, to employ whatever coping strategies you can muster. In my case, my instinct was again to bury myself for a while in somebody else’s story. This time, though, instead of reading somebody else’s words, I fashioned my own. I finished my dissertation. I wrote a novel. In another strange twist of fate, it got accepted for publication. Has it helped? I think it has distracted us all, and that is helpful. A positive news story for our family, while we continue to deal with our collective and individual loss.
Assembling Ailish is not my story, but it is the story a fictional contemporary who has lived in my times, in some of my places. Writing it was a cathartic exploration of the Irelands I have known, the nuances of those times I wasn’t aware of while living through them now clearer in retrospect. Our collective griefs and complications, hope and wonder, the marvel of our ability to develop and change.
My sisters are proud and – as at this point they haven’t yet read the novel – still a little worried. They tell me their biggest surprise when reading anything I have written is that I’ve been paying attention, been in the room. I must not give this impression. I hope I am. Present. Noticing. At least sometimes. And I hope sometimes I accurately translate into words what being here, being alive, the experience of it, is like. I offer it as a humble effort of thanks to all the other writers who, by sharing their worlds, real or imagined, on the shelves of our libraries and bookshops, have enhanced mine.
Assembling Ailish by Sharon Guard is published by Poolbeg Press
Ireland Reads Day - next Saturday, February 22nd - is being celebrated nationwide
