I try never to leave the house without pen and a small notebook, as you never know when or where you might espy a graphic image, sunlight on coloured glass, say, or overhear a deadly line of dialogue. Or from whom on a lucky day you might even be gifted the germ of a story? Like that long-ago bus journey from Donegal down to Dublin, seated beside a priest home from the African missions, who told of having learned by pure chance in Liberia of an Irish friend who had died in an accident across the ocean in Boston. A story that in time would spark one of my own – only my priest breaks the sad news to an Irish electrician in Nicaragua, given the way in which fiction invariably transmutes and transforms.
Or sometimes, if you’re truly lucky, you needn’t even leave the house – as also happened once in Donegal when a total stranger, after mistakenly knocking on my cottage door, proceeded to tell of his first visit to the village as a young member of the Garda sub-aqua team, and of how he and his wife had come back to that same back-of-beyond corner for their honeymoon. Needless to say, I scribbled down what he had recounted into a notebook soon as the door closed behind him, not so much the bones as the seed of another short story before the year was out.
That somebody might similarly bequest you a novel’s outsized storyline seems more of a stretch, though now that Colours Other Than Blue is out and about, I’m no longer quite so sure. Better yet, my benefactor, as it were, was once again just another travelling stranger, only this time on a flight from Boston to Dublin nearly 20 years ago. I was flying home from my mother’s funeral in Massachusetts, whereas my seatmate Mary, a 40-year-old, first-generation Irish-American nurse, told me how she was heading over to see her ailing father, who had returned to his native Ireland after retiring as the doorman of a Manhattan apartment building, where Mary and her family had also lived.
And yes, Maeve Maguire, protagonist if not heroine of my new novel, is likewise a first-generation Irish-American nurse – only her Mayo-born father is the superintendent, not doorman, of an apartment building in Boston, not NYC, where Maeve and her brother Brian lived with their father James and emotionally complex mother Rose, who herself grew up in Donegal. So yes, here’s another clear debt to the kindness of strangers, and here’s hoping too that the aforementioned Mary might yet hear of my thanks here, in that wondrous way in which word sometimes travels back and forth across the Pond.
As for the novel itself, let me parse here some of what it says on the tin: how 38-year-old Maeve Maguire, single mother of a teenage daughter and senior nurse in a Dublin home for the elderly, is grieving over her Dad’s recent death. And how she begins to keep a notebook at the prompting of her sagacious counsellor, Sister Una, who suggests she write down memories of her Boston childhood, along with whatever else. And how Maeve thus begins to confront a handful of home truths: from her relationship with her own mother who died some years earlier, to her own love life, single motherhood, and the demanding, if often comic, challenges of her nursing day-job. Large stuff, writ small – or at least that’s what I’ve tried to do.
Or in pure blurb-speak: a canny, captivating, humorous portrayal of a Boston Irish woman’s struggle to find her feet, love and a quotient of tranquillity in late-1980s dirty ol’ Dublin.
Beyond that, I’m not entirely sure what more to say, reminded as often happens of the painter Matisse, who advised those who want to make art to first cut off their tongue – which surely must apply tenfold to writers too? Or having chanced your arm at crafting something artful out of words, might it not be best to keep your mouth closed afterwards too?
That said, I’ll chance a few last words here about what else contributed to this novel. Of how my own mother worked as an administrator in an assisted-living complex back in Boston in the 1970s, at which point I began to jot down in a notebook some of the stories, full of pathos and humour both, which she would bring home in the evening from her own day job.
There is also a long-standing fascination with migration – what Roy Foster calls “the great fact of Irish social history”-and part of my familial history too, as two of my great-grandfathers landed in Amerikay from Kerry and Clare back in the 1850s, along with a great-grandfather from Germany sometime that same century.
Something of my own late twentieth-century, Boston-born journey to Donegal and Dublin no doubt colours a wee swathe of Maeve’s tale too, same as it likely shaded something of Irish émigré Fintan’s story in my debut novel, Nighthawk Alley. I could also witter on here about a long-standing fascination with the mother/daughter dynamic, which arguably in turn partially underpins Colours Other Than Blue, though I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to whether that had anything to do with being the brother of three sisters or the father of two daughters in my time!
Enough said here, anyhow, as it’s down to Maeve now to tell her own story to those readers the novel will find. But both of us feel it’s a story worth hearing, so maybe some of you will let us know?
Colours Other Than Blue by Anthony Glavin is published by Ward River Press, at €16.99, and launched tonight at 6pm in Hodges Figgis, Daewson Street, Dublin
