The New York skyline failed to block BELINDA McKEON'sview to Ireland as she set out to complete her novel 'Solace'. And even though her life was coloured by yellow cabs and American diners, listening to radio from home became a ritual

FOR MUCH of the period between 2006 and 2008, I was nowhere near Ireland. For much of that time I was sitting at my kitchen table in Brooklyn, with a far-off view of the Empire State Building and a close-up view of the NYPD cars keeping their daily watch outside the local high school. When I stepped outside my door, the streets were teeming with bodegas and diners and yellow cabs and black town cars, and Manhattan was a 10-minute subway ride away. But in my head I was in Ireland. In a terraced house in Stoneybatter. Walking the narrow paths along the quays. Or standing in the crowd outside Kehoe’s of South Anne Street on a summer’s evening, watching how the last of the sunlight burnished the red brick of the buildings all around.

When I wasn’t there I was on a small farm in Co Longford, somewhere outside the village of Edgeworthstown. Or I was bumping into someone I might have known from school, or someone who might have taught me in college; watching their faces, tracing the stories their eyes told, listening to the way they might talk.

I wasn’t homesick. I wasn’t pining. I had no desire to be in Ireland during this time. I loved New York, and I lived in the city the way I’d intended to live there when I’d made the move; running around, seeing and doing and hearing as much as I could. But there was something else I’d intended to do in New York when I moved there, and that was to finish a novel I’d started the previous year. It was a novel that had grown, very unexpectedly, out of a scene I’d glimpsed on a Longford street one night shortly before Christmas; a young man, standing outside the Chinese restaurant, wearing a paper party hat, holding a tiny baby in his arms and pressing his lips to her forehead. It was raining. It was late. I didn’t think he was wearing a coat.

What was his story? What was their story, his and the child’s? Maybe I was actually conscious of wondering these things at the time, but I don’t think so. I think they tucked themselves away somewhere deeper, and began to turn themselves into something fuller than a half-seen moment. Because the next time I sat down to write, a couple of months later, they showed up, and I recognised them – not as the man and the baby on Ballymahon Street, but as my characters, Mark Casey and his daughter Aoife. And with them – hazy, but in view – was the splintered landscape of their lives; they were pulled between the city and the countryside, between the attempts to build – and then, it soon became clear, to rebuild – their own life and the pressure to fit in with the life of Mark’s own father, a farmer in the midlands. Mark and Aoife and the people who came with them were living in Ireland. It was an Ireland in which many things were happening, in which many things were changing. And it was my Ireland, too, and it was the Ireland in which I wanted to set this novel. But more than that, I wanted to write about these characters.

So I left.

I’m making this sound, now, much neater and more rational than it was at the time. At the time, there were a number of far more obvious reasons for moving to New York. Chief among them was the fact that I wanted to live in the city, and I wanted to write, and had been offered a place on a writing programme there that would give me the kind of deadlines I knew my journalism-coddled head needed in order to produce anything. I was in my mid-20s. It was New York. There was no reason not to go. But if you’d told me back then that I’d become a much more regular listener to Irish radio than I’d been when I was in Ireland, I’d have laughed at you.

And yet I did; I listened to RTÉ just as much as to NPR. I looked at the websites of the Irish papers every morning, always before I made my way to the New York Times. When Twitter came along, most of the people I followed were back in Ireland, and as is the way with Twitter, most of them were people I'd never even known when I lived there. My husband even came home one day to find me reading the Longford Leaderonline; he asked me – jokingly, I think – if I wanted to move to Queens, to one of the Irish communities out there, to Woodside or Sunnyside, where you can get all the Irish papers and teabags and Taytos you might want.

But I didn’t want that, not even slightly. We hadn’t come to New York to live the ex-pat life, and by immersing myself in all this low-level chatter with an Irish accent, I might have seemed to be acting like a lonely emigrant, but I was up to something else. Not consciously – at the time, I couldn’t work out why I needed to maintain this link to everyday life in Ireland, and I was vaguely embarrassed by it – but in retrospect, it makes sense, because it was the kind of background hum I needed to keep building an Irish world. A fictional world, I mean; a world made of the lives of a family, which moved between the bustle of Dublin and the quiet watchfulness of the midlands.

It wasn’t a matter of research. I wasn’t actively seeking things to draw on or to use. That’s the thing; on-the-ground research was exactly the kind I needed to avoid. I think if I’d been living in Ireland while writing the novel, I would have allowed that kind of research to take over. I would have approached the story like a journalist. I would have taken notes. I would have found snatches of conversation to insert here and there. I would have made field trips; I would have been able to draw a map of Edgeworthstown with my eyes closed. But I think that while I would have had my notes, I wouldn’t have had my characters, or I wouldn’t have had their world. It’s hard to explain, but if I was going to write about Ireland it had to be about the Ireland that arrived as the characters arrived. It had to be the Ireland they brought with them, whatever it looked like, whatever traces and scaffolds of reality it brought with it as it came. What research I did do was a patchwork, the pieces of which hung together somewhat bizarrely. I stalked the discussion boards of trainee solicitors in Dublin to find out just how unrewarding they found their jobs. I re-read Marilyn Butler’s biography of Maria Edgeworth, and I sought out old photographs of the Edgeworth manor, long since converted into a nursing home. My husband came home on more than one occasion to find me absorbed in the John Deere website, comparing the latest tractor models. I think it was clear by then that even a move to Woodside wouldn’t be a cure for whatever I’d caught.

The world of Solaceemerged out of a combination of distance from, and connection to, an Ireland that I didn't plan. I didn't have a model for it. And it wasn't anything so glamorous as exile. That glimpsed scene, with the man and his baby on the cold street in winter, never made it into the actual story in the end. The real street, and the real country, burned away, and in its place came the country that I was far enough away to see.

Solace

is published by Picador