So, the second draft was a hell of a lot of work, but I think that some of the urgency I felt as I was writing it remains on the page through all of the messiness. The characters’ religions changed sometimes, which was really ridiculous in a novel set in a place that’s obsessed with religious identity. And it meant that within three months, I had 60-something-thousand words of what could charitably be called a novel because it was long. That didn’t happen every day, but quite often it did. I suppose to take my mind off the fact that I might be dying, I set myself a task of writing 1,000 words a day. Writing a novel filled me with a sense of urgency. It was Stage 3, and I suppose it made me realize that I couldn’t presume I have 25 or 30 years to arse around the place. I was just kind of puttering around and dipping in and out.Īnd then in March 2019, I had a diagnosis for malignant melanoma. That was maybe late 2018, and I didn’t feel a huge amount of urgency around it. I made a playlist of 1975 music that I remember from my childhood. I thought that I should maybe try something longer, and I wasn’t terribly concerned whether that would work or not. It had never occurred to me that I should be writing a novel because the ideas were becoming a lot more complex. And it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized all of the trouble was that I was trying to stuff a novel into the short form. I probably wrote 60,000 words and ended up with about 8,000 or 9,000. There were two story lines sort of twisted together, and I had a lot of trouble. The last one that I wrote for the collection was really difficult to write. And then something started to happen with my short stories. LOUISE KENNEDY: I had the makings of a short story collection, maybe 10 or 12 stories that seemed to fit together. Shondaland talked with Kennedy about writing as a way of coping with a cancer diagnosis (she’s now in remission!), her decades in the restaurant industry before that, and the political nature of love in a divided culture. Kennedy had an unlikely start to writing, as she snuck sentences in while running her restaurant, but after winning a few literary awards and eventually publishing her first short story collection ( The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac) when she was 54, it became abundantly clear that she had a talent for the written word. As Cushla begins to care for a troubled student, Davy McGeown, and starts a torrid affair with Michael Agnew, a charismatic Protestant regular at her bar, her relatively peaceful life is shaken. She also helps out at her family’s bar and cleans up after her mother’s alcoholic binges.
She teaches primary school students, helping them navigate the chaos of their lives by talking them through the daily news. Cushla, our main character, lives a simple life at the beginning of the novel. In Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, a new novel about a Catholic teacher living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, no love goes unpunished.
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