After some initial success in the 1990s, Mary Costello tried to give up writing but, thankfully, she found the habit too hard to kick
Ask a writer about their first flush of experiments with words and many confess to the rite of passage that is penning bad poetry as a teenager. Galway-born Mary Costello had no aspirations to be a writer until she was 22 when, after a night of insomnia, it hit her like a train.
“I wanted to write. I had married at 23, lived in the suburbs and was teaching full time,” says Costello in her Dublin home. “I did not think I could call myself a writer. A little voice cautioned: ‘Who do you think you are, having such lofty notions?’, and that voice still sounds sometimes.”
Two stories were published in the Sunday Tribune’s New Writing, which resulted in being shortlisted for the Hennessy Prize in 1993. A handful of other stories were rejected and Costello all but gave up hope of being published. She worked on stories, battled through a couple of novels, but refused to send work out. “I tried to give up writing, to send it underground but it continued to plague me. Thinking drove me to writing initially, but it’s feeling that makes me write. I never fully stopped – there was always an ache to return to it.”
It wasn’t until 2010 – 18 years after her first story was published – that Costello began putting her work back out into the world. She submitted two stories to Irish publisher and website The Stinging Fly, and editor Declan Meade asked to see more. Earlier this year her debut collection, The China Factory, was published.
And what stories. Costello’s exquisite writing has a way of making the most ordinary lives – Irish lives, women’s lives – seem like intense existences that “float close to hazard”. There are lonely factory workers, a teacher who remembers an affair, marriages hanging on by a thread.
Rural life dominates, but this is contemporary Ireland. “Seamus Heaney wrote about discovering Kavanagh’s poem Spraying the Potatoes and how excited he was to find the ordinary details of rural life – like headlands and blue potato spray – standing their ground in the world of literature. Alice Munro was my Kavanagh. Her story Cyprus was my ‘blue potato spray’ moment.”
Munro is a huge influence on Costello’s writing. Along with JM Coetzee and James Salter, Munro is a writer who “brings a longing to climb into the pages, to be ‘home’.”
In reviewing The China Factory in the Guardian, Anne Enright noted: “This is a writer unafraid of the graveside, or the bedside, of filling the space of the story to the brim.” Costello concedes that “there are only two themes or concerns for me: love and death. Some of my characters are preoccupied with secrets or memories. Many of the stories are about women’s lives, but the things I write about are not exclusively about women. Gender and age matter less to me than the interior things. Men and women are not all that different – and joy and sorrow are universal.”
Shy and unassuming
Over the summer, the book was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and now Costello’s work is getting more attention. This brings with it its own problems.
“The Guardian nomination opened doors and the IBA short-listing was a lovely surprise. I find the public side of being published difficult, and a little daunting, but I’m aware of how fortunate I am. Now, though, I’m longing to return to the cave again. I’m working on a novel, which grew out of one of the stories in the collection.
“The short story is the form I know and love. Some days when I’m working on the novel it feels like I’m committing adultery.”
It has taken a while, but Costello is a writer who has finally put her faith in the craft and accepts that her life will be one of literature. “Sensitivity deepens the more I write. Even when it’s going badly something is gained, consciousness is expanded. In that respect it’s like love: it begets more . . . even when it goes wrong, nothing is wasted, because the heart is enlarged.”
