Booktime: Interview with Roisín O'Donnell, author of Nesting

Nesting is your debut novel – what inspired you to write it? Have you always wanted to be a novelist?
Yes, I've been writing since I was a little girl. I remember putting together little poems and stories when I was about seven or eight. I had a particular teacher called Mrs Doherty, and she loved books and poetry. Her sister-inlaw was the children's author Berlie Doherty. Back then she would have been just starting out, and she came in to talk to us a couple of times. I remember her reading bits of The Children of Winter. I grew up in a working class area of Sheffield. It seems funny looking back that I had an aspiration to write books, but maybe because I had that experience of meeting an author at such a young age, it made me realise that writing was a real job. Like a lot of Irish people, I also come from a family of great storytellers. I wrote through my teenage years, and studied English at Trinity College in Dublin. But then, like a lot of people, I lost confidence for a while. I didn't do too much during my twenties, and it was around the age of thirty that I decided to take it seriously. I did a course at the Irish Writers' Centre, and the tutor there was really encouraging. She urged me to send my work out to journals and magazines. I got a few things published in magazines such as The Stinging Fly and then a press called New Island asked if I'd like to do a short story collection. My first collection Wild Quiet was published in 2016. But writing a novel was really like starting from scratch again, because it's such a different thing.

Did you do a lot of research into the experiences of women who leave abusive husbands or partners to write the book?
Research was really important to me. I wanted Nesting to feel really authentic. I think there’s so many unhelpful stereotypes around what domestic abuse looks like, and what homelessness looks like. I wanted to break through all that. It started in 2020, at the heart of lockdown. I was contacted by a radio station and commissioned to write a story on the theme of 'Independence'. At the time we were all being told to 'stay home' and 'stay safe'. But what about people for whom home is the least safe place? Or people who've had to leave their home, and are living in temporary accommodation? So I took this theme of independence and I wrote this story called Present Perfect. It was about a woman who had left an abusive relationship and was living in emergency accommodation in a hotel. It was just one day in her life – the small triumphs and the struggles. It was read on the radio by Siobhán McSweeney from Derry Girls. That was great, but I felt that I couldn't let the story go. I wanted to know what would happen next to this woman, if her and her kids could find a way out of emergency accommodation, if she could completely break free from her ex husband. I found that I had to write a novel! I did a huge amount of research – I spoke to many different women. I made contact with the local refuge centre, who were amazing, and spoke to outreach workers. That was really powerful because they told me about the patterns they were seeing. It’s coercive control, it's emotional abuse, it's psychological abuse, it's online, it’s stalking. I really wanted to explore those themes.

Do you think that we have a better understanding of coercive control in recent years than we used to have?
I think there has been more visibility. Over here in Ireland, there have been a couple of high profile cases where people have been prosecuted. Women's Aid have run some successful campaigns. It’s about raising awareness and breaking through those stereotypes of what abuse looks like, so we can recognise it. Unfortunately it is pervasive and the statistics are scary – one in four women will experience abuse in their lifetime. I think it’s important to tell these stories. With Nesting I wanted to give that validation to survivors and make it as authentic as possible, but also to give that sense of hope, that it is possible to rebuild your life.

I was intrigued by the imagery of the crows in the book – were they symbolic?
To start off, they weren't, but I think it developed the more that I wrote. I’d seen online that someone had rescued some crow chicks, and I was caught by the appearance of them – they are so gross-looking, but so fragile and vulnerable. The initial idea was that Ryan rescues these crow chicks, but really it’s another form of manipulation, because he uses them to signal how virtuous he is, when really he’s very controlling. But as the book went on, I explored the idea of the birds being trapped, and they did become a symbol of control.

Ryan uses his own children to manipulate Ciara – do you think he really cares about them at all?
When I was writing Ryan, I wanted to make sure that he felt three-dimensional, like a real person. It's so easy to get drawn into creating a 2D villain, and I didn’t want to do that at all. I think he does care about them on some level, but because he has a narcissistic mindset, he sees them as an extension of himself. A bit like the way he sees Ciara. Speaking to survivors of domestic abuse who have children, they would talk about how these people would be a 'Disney dad' sometimes, and shower the children with gifts. But it would be superficial, based on the children behaving in a way which followed their interests. When the children expressed their individuality, then there would be trouble. I wonder if you pick up the story five or ten years down the road, how would Ryan react to his daughters if they were expressing their own opinions? The tragedy of it really is that he can’t love them in a genuine way.

Although Ciara struggles to live on her own at a hotel with little money, she does make friends. How important is friendship in these situations?
It's vital to recovery. When you speak to survivors of domestic abuse, they’ve often been cut off from their family and their friends. It starts so slowly that you might not notice it, with the perpetrator making comments such as 'your friends don’t like me' or 'your family are unkind to me', or 'why would you have people in the house who don't like me?'. The woman, to avoid escalation of the tension, will start to reduce contact with family and friends. She can become so isolated, and the danger of that is she's cut off from people who would validate and support her. The only voice she has in her head is the voice of the perpetrator, who is always criticising and undermining her. It's really vital that when someone is recovering that they have relationships with friends and family. Just to provide a bit of normality, and to feel seen as human. I loved writing about Ciara’s friendship with Cathy. I hadn't planned the character at all, she just stormed onto to the page. She's living in the room next to Ciara, and they get chatting. Cathy is a very straight-talking Dubliner and she makes Ciara see things in a different light. Her friendships are so important.

You say you didn't plan the character of Cathy. Did you plan the story?
The kernel of the novel was the short story Present Perfect. I had the names of Ciara and her children, and the hotel, and a lot of the details. I knew that Ciara was going to leave this abusive relationship, and because her family were living in England, she wouldn’t be able to get back over them. I’d met women in that situation – who had not been allowed to leave the country with their children. But I didn’t know how the story would unfold. Originally I’m a short story writer, and a single mum, and until recently I’d been
working full time as a primary school teacher. I didn’t have a huge amount of writing time. I'd think about a short story for months before I wrote anything down. By the time I started writing, I’d have the whole thing planned out in my head. But with a novel, you can’t do that, carry it all in your head. So I embraced the state of not knowing, which is actually the position that Ciara is in. As a writer I put myself completely in her shoes.

Which other authors inspire you in your work?
So many! One of my favourites writers is Lucia Berlin, who wrote the short story collections A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise. I come back to her again and again, I think it's the way she wrote about quite harsh reality. She was a single parent who experienced poverty and overcame alcoholism, and was in some very difficult relationships. And yet in her writing, there is such a sense of light in the darkness, I really admire her. An Irish writer I absolutely love is Claire Keegan. Her latest novella, So Late in the Day, I loved, I must have read it three or four times. I was lucky to do a few workshops with Claire a few years ago, when I was starting out. I remember her talking about writing through the senses, how it should be a bodily experience, to bring your characters alive. When I read her work now I can really see how she’s doing that.

What do independent bookshops mean to you?
I love them. I wish someone would open one in the town where I live! I have to go to Dublin, and I love going in and supporting them. Places like The Gutter Bookshop, and Dubray Books. When you go into independent bookshops, you’re speaking with real booklovers, you can tell the staff are passionate about what they do. There’s a lovely bookshop in Derry, where my family are from, called Little Acorns Bookstore. It has a writer’s chair, and whenever an author comes in to visit, they get them to sign the chair!