Partway through Fíona Scarlett’s second novel, May All Your Skies Be Blue (Faber & Faber), one of the central characters, Dean, stands in an airport, looking at a set of sliding doors, move “in and out. In, then out”. It’s a brief but charged moment that tells us much about the book’s central preoccupation – sliding doors moments; the small eventualities that have an inordinate effect on a life’s path.
“I’m really, really fascinated with choice,” Scarlett explains, over cappuccinos in Dublin’s Stoneybatter. “The butterfly effect; how tiny little choices – fork-in-the-road moments – can impact the rest of your life. Things like whether you do transition year or not, what course you do in university – these tiny little things. Is there fate involved in some of these choices? And I think in life you don’t always make the choices people want you to make.”
May All Your Skies Be Blue is a story of young love and missed chances between childhood sweethearts, Shauna and Dean. Across alternating timelines – on the one hand, a succession of years in their 1990s youth, and on the other, a single day in the life of grown-up Shauna – we see their lives reverberate against one another and become changed irrevocably. In its bittersweet love story, the book has been compared to the likes of David Nicholls’s One Day, but in its substance and cadence, it is entirely distinct.
For one thing, it is sent in the suburb of “Hoodstown”, a fictionalised mash-up of the Hartstown/Huntstown/Blakestown areas of north Dublin where Scarlett herself grew up. Far from the Trinity-oriented Dublin of Sally Rooney or the leafy south Dublin pockets in many of Anne Enright’s novels, Scarlett’s writing is packed with the shopping centres, Nitelinks, Pizza Huts, Eurospars, greens, games of tip the can, and more, that anyone from Dublin’s outer suburbs will recognise. Was it important to her to capture a lesser-represented side to the capital in fiction?
“Place is really important to me in all my work,” she says. “I always pick somewhere that has significance to me. My first novel [2021’s Boys Don’t Cry] is sort of set where my parents grew up [in Ballymun], whereas this one is where I grew up.
“My sister is one of my first readers, and when she first read it, she was like, ‘Oh my god, I just recognise so much of this and so much of this place.’ She found it hard at first for that reason. Local community is really important to me as well. That’s what I really wanted to portray – community, and people looking out for each other; showing place, nearly, as a character.”
Indeed, characters who are decent to one another despite the drama are a key feature of the book, much of which is oriented around the bustling hub of a local hair salon. Scarlett says she based this on the hairdresser of her childhood.
“I don’t know why, but I was so obsessed with this place ... I remember the first haircut I was allowed to get myself. I was about seven or eight. And I got a mullet. I looked horrendous, but I thought it was the best thing ever,” she laughs.
Today’s 44-year-old Scarlett is neatly coiffed, with soft curls in mid-length fair hair. She got the bus to Dublin this morning from Clane, Co Kildare, where she lives with her husband, Dermot, 17-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter.
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Though books and stories were a large part of Scarlett’s life growing up – her mother would take her to the library every Saturday, and she devoured everything from Agatha Christie to Stephen King – it wasn’t until her mid-30s that she decided she wanted to be a writer. By then she had a career as a primary schoolteacher, and two young children.
“I don’t remember when I decided I wanted to be a writer, but I do remember telling my husband that I wanted to be a writer. We were away for the weekend at a friend’s wedding – at the time the kids were small and the only time we ever got away anywhere was for a wedding. I remember being really nervous about saying it out loud, like this is something that I wanted to do. And he was like: ‘Yeah, go for it.’”
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She tried some online writing courses but soon decided she wanted to take a more serious approach. Finding a master’s whose lecture times were compatible with her work and family schedule was difficult, but eventually she landed upon the distance learning MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
“I did it over a year while I was working, and [looking after] the kids and everything. But I really like pressure. I like being under a deadline and being kept busy,” she says.
It was during this master’s that the first draft of her debut novel Boys Don’t Cry began to come together, under the tutelage of novelist Laura Marney.
“I was writing completely different things at the time – sort of funny little stories for children, because my own children were young, and I was teaching junior infants as well. But near the end of the master’s, I wrote the first chapter of Boys Don’t Cry and I showed it to [Marney] and she said: ‘This is what you’re supposed to be writing. Just go for it.”
Scarlett adds that “you absolutely do not have to have a master’s to be a writer at all. You really, really don’t. But because I was coming to it later, I had kids, I had a whole other career, I had no confidence in my ability at all. And that’s what [the master’s] gave me. It gave me a confidence in trusting my gut and listening to my own voice as a writer.”
I love to try and capture what it means to be human on the page. The whole circle of life really fascinates me – life, death, growth, age, ageing. The whole vast humanity
Published in April 2021, Boys Don’t Cry became a bestseller and word-of-mouth hit. It was shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien first novel award and for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. But what ought to have been a time of jubilation was in fact one of the most surreal periods of Scarlett’s life. Four months previously, in December 2020, her father, Paddy Scarlett, passed away, aged 66.
“He died very suddenly,” she says. “He was rushed into hospital only a couple of days after my 40th birthday. They didn’t know what was wrong. It turned out to be a really, really rare infection. I can’t remember the exact technical term for it, but it’s known as a flesh-eating virus, basically. And it was sepsis that caused it eventually.”
Paddy, a teacher and pillar of the community, had a major influence on the novel. Though he would not live to see publication day, Scarlett recalls that just before he passed, he emerged from a coma and told all the nurses and doctors to buy Boys Don’t Cry.
“He made sure to get the sales pitch in before he went,” she says with a laugh.
The eventual publication of Boys Don’t Cry heralded a period of immense change in Scarlett’s life, not unlike those aforementioned sliding doors moments.
“It was a funny time. It felt like this kind of click in the universe. Trying to even think back to that time is really strange.”
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Literary success, lockdown, and the shock and grief of her father’s passing was a discombobulating combination. On top of this, an Arts Council bursary allowed her to take a career break from teaching – a positive development that was nonetheless unmooring.
“I’d been there for 18 years, working in primary schools, so that was a big change. And the book had sold, so getting from the head space of me just being in my bedroom writing, to all of a sudden it’s out there [was strange]. It was such a surreal time with a lot of big changes.”
A draft of May All Your Skies Be Blue had been written a year previously, before Scarlett had any book deal. But redrafting that manuscript began to seem like a daunting task.
“What happened was, I started to really, really doubt myself. It was about a year where I hadn’t touched it at all. Then I went back to it. When I read it over it, I was like, ‘Oh, this is too quiet, nothing’s happening.‘”
She began inputting major changes.
“There was one stage, with my editor, where I said okay, I’m adding in a car chase, and I’m adding in a wife, and I’m adding in babies. And she had to take me aside and say: ‘What are you doing? The first draft is where your story is.’”
Learning to have conviction in her own voice has been a crucial aspect of Scarlett’s development as a writer. It’s a message she tries to impart to students of creative writing (she has held teaching posts in Maynooth University, and, most recently, The University of Limerick).
“It’s that whole thing of learning to trust your gut and trust your instinct. Because I completely lost that, and I found it really difficult to get back to it again. So that was a big lesson for me. I suppose that whole second album syndrome was the whole thing of just listening to that inner voice and listening to your gut.”
The act of listening is perhaps more relevant to Scarlett than it is to most. She hails from a family of musicians (her father, a trumpeter; her mother, a classical pianist) and she studied music at university. Her husband Dermot, to whom the book is dedicated, is also a musician and music continues to be a big influence of Scarlett’s life and writing.
“Before and after I write something, I listen to music,” she says. “I play songs that are the anthem of the book on repeat. For Boys Don’t Cry, it was Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now ...For this one, Christine McVeigh’s Songbird is Shauna’s song. And then for Dean, there’s a recording of Jeff Buckley singing Dido’s Lament. He’s just in a church and someone captured it – it’s up on YouTube. And it’s just so haunting.”
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The emotion conveyed in music is something she tries to emulate on the page.
“I’m trying to get whatever that emotion may be – whether it’s anger, sadness joy – trying to capture that in the work ... I really like that link between music and writing.”
Equally, silence is an important concept for her.
“The rest, and the sound of silence. Music can’t happen without silence. It’s the same with books: [leaving] space for readers, and not connecting all the dots, are really important to me.”
May All Your Skies Be Blue is replete with 1990s music and references, from Xtra-vision movie nights, to Body Shop perfumes to a Blur concert in Dublin in 1996. On the all-important question – Oasis or Blur – Scarlett is resolute.
“Oh Blur! I went to that concert. The whole rest of the school I went to – Coolmine Community School – they were all Oasis. And they had their guitars. And I was like, ‘What? No!’”
Along with nostalgia and lightness, Scarlett is unafraid to tackle big themes in her work. Boys Don’t Cry, which told of two brothers from a Dublin tower block, one of which is diagnosed with leukaemia, left readers reaching for the hankies.
“I love to try and capture what it means to be human on the page,” she says. “The whole circle of life really fascinates me – life, death, growth, age, ageing. The whole vast humanity.”
May All Your Skies Be Blue is likewise a tear-jerker, with subjects such as alcohol addiction, dementia, dependency and care. Both Shauna and Dean are faced with the prospect of having to look after respective older relatives. What was it that drew Scarlett to this idea?
“A lot of my friends now are in caring responsibilities for elderly parents. And I suppose as you get older these are things that you start to worry about a lot more. So that was in my subconscious when I was writing this book ... I felt it was important to show a young carer role as well.”
The decisions people like Shauna and Dean must make, around what’s best for the carer and the person in need of care, were also playing on Scarlett’s mind.
“That decision of, when do you decide it’s time for them to be in a home or not, all those type of things, and the complexity that comes with that ... Both Shauna and Dean make decisions that are right for them. But even if you make the right decision, it still doesn’t mean that everything slots into place in your life.”
While the book, on the surface, is a love story between Shauna and Dean, Scarlett also sees it as a love story between Shauna and her mother. In Scarlett’s own life, motherhood has been the main caring responsibility to date, and while the pram in the hall has never been a sombre enemy to her art, there was one unusual incident during her master’s that stayed with her.
As part of a publishing module, the students had been asked to write bios and share them with the group for feedback.
“And someone in the group – a young woman – told me to take out of my bio that I was a mother, because it demeaned me and my work. And I was incredibly upset by that. I was going to take it out, but it was really upsetting me taking it out ... [I thought] why should that be taken out? I was really proud of being a mother and showing my children to go for different things and follow your dreams.
“I remember the day Boys Don’t Cry was published, my daughter made a card for me. And on it was, like, ‘Oh, we’re so proud of you, but you worked so hard and followed your dreams' ... The thing that really hit home to me was that it’s what you’re showing your children. But also, my daughter – who would have been about 10, 11 – recognised that it didn’t just happen. It took hard work.”
When it comes to literary influences, Scarlett cites the likes of Donal Ryan, Marian Keyes, Edna O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, and Maeve Binchy, but also credits the storytellers in her family.
“My father and my grandmother, and that whole [tradition] of holding court over the kitchen table and chatting and telling stories – I love all that kind of stuff.”
Having handed in her notice in her former role as a teacher, she’s now halfway through writing book three, though she’s reluctant to give away too much of what it’s about.
“It’s a completely different experience to book two,” she says. “I think a lot of writers go through that process of fear with book two, and the difficulties and expectations that come with that. I just feel so much freer now. Because at the end of the day, whatever happens, happens. I’m really enjoying writing what I’m writing. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll just write something else.”
May All Your Skies Be Blue, published by Faber & Faber, is out now.
