Caoilinn Hughes Is Barely Patient Enough to Write

us revert to our most juvenile, most unreconstructed selves. When I'm with my sisters, decades of adult life drop away, and all I'm interested in is being outrageous, being the biggest, smartest, the most adolescent version of myself all over again. And to be clear, it's entirely their fault. They are a pair of monstrous bitches. I know how lucky I am to have the particular joy of siblings, people who know you better than most people in your life. Sibling dynamics

make for great literature. It's the thing that stays with you when you remember Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. And let's face it, Lizzie Bennett only makes sense because she has to navigate Lydia and Kidding's Nonsense siblings push and pull one another in surprising directions. In a book, they offer fixed points in character alongside the opportunity for shifting perspectives and surprising motivations. So today I'm talking with an author

for whom that dynamic has shaped three brilliant novels. I'm speaking with Irish author kil And Hughes. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read. This a show about the books we love and the stories behind me. Kilan Hughes is an Irish poet and writer, whose debut novel, Orchard and the Wasp, was published in twenty eighteen to rave reviews. Since then, she's written several award winning short stories and

another novel in twenty twenty called The Wild Laughter. Her third and latest novel, The Alternatives, is maybe her best yet. I adored it. It follows the Flattery sisters, geologist Olwin Chefnell philosopher May and political scientist Rona, who were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances.

When the novel picks up, we find them in their thirties, living somewhat distant lives fighting their own unique battles, but the disappearance of Olwin brings the siblings back together, forcing them to confront old wounds and rebuild alliances. As one of five children in her own family, Kilan is perfectly positioned to capture the specific tensions and dynamics that are at play with the Flattery sisters, And so that was

where I wanted to begin our conversation. Siblings have played a major role in all three of your novels, and I'm interested in what it is about the sibling dynamic in particular that is useful as a novelist.

You know, if you do stay in touch as adult siblings, that's not a given, So there is an element of choice there, and the reasons why people stay in touch, for example, if their worldviews are very different, can also be really interesting. For example, you know, if you're in your fifties or sixties and your parents aren't around anymore. Sometimes your siblings are the only people who are evidence of the fact that something happened. You know, they were there,

they know something. So you have this sense of your own life being more real because of their existence. And so that's something that's hard to put a price on it in terms of the trauma that you're willing to go through by being triggered by being around them or putting to bed things that have never been absolved, you know, or discussed between you. In our friendships, you would never put up with big, unresolved issues, and violence is done

to put it kind of in an extreme way. And I do think that in adult siblings, when those relationships are maintained and they're fraud I do think that that's a very unique scenario where people have made a decision well, you know, there's a kind of calculus involved. This relationship is worth overlooking the fact that they haven't done this work on themselves, as usually the way you're going to think about it yourself, they're probably thinking exactly the same thing.

So I think that shared experience is so formative. But even though experiences can be shared among siblings, they also might have been experienced very diff.

very helpful one. So I think, Yeah, the novel ended up being about care in a lot of ways that I didn't anticipate. And I was going to give it an epigraph by James Baldwin at a certain point, and it was love is the only reality, the only terror, and the only hope. And I think that you could equally kind of substitute in there for a love care,

which is kind of a synonym. But then I thought, well, no, you can't start a novel with the James Baldwin quote, because it's going to be downhill from the reader's perspective from then. But I would never have known what the kind of epigraph or that kind of cohering idea would be at the beginning of the novel, or even halfway through. It's only when I get to the end of a novel that I really know what it's about. I think I might have been afraid to write a novel about Care.

I think I was. You know, that might seem a bit twee or coy or weirdly directed if I knew

that to begin with. It's more just I started out with this feeling that in paying attention, Alwan, the character who is a geologist and who works in the earth sciences, so she's kind of representing someone who works in climate change, and I wanted to think about what it is to love someone who does that work, and supposed to support them and acknowledge them as well as to be that person, And I was really afraid of where the novel might take me. So I'm very glad that it wound up

being about the set of things that it's about. But I didn't know that to begin with.

is part of the action. But I have seen at dinner party, at social event, at mingling in a lobby, how quickly the question goes from what do you do for a living? Too? Do you have hope? And then you see this mental calibration going on of how much time does this person have? How much nuance can I give? And it's such a lot of responsibility to be thrown on you, and at any given point of the day,

you never know where it's going to come from. That someone ultimately is starting to run scenarios in their mind

for their family, and it's loaded. It's extremely difficult. So it's not just the work itself and the relentlessness of the data and the relentlessness of the pushback that there is in terms of dissemination of that data and really trying to equip people with what they can do, what they need to know, but also that care giving load that you're suddenly you suddenly have as a responsibility, you know, which can be very very existential and very real in terms of the impact on the other people.

the point. We still have to find a way to go on, and we still have to find a way to be true to one another and to find meaning in whatever's left either way of it is the novel singularly well placed to tease out those ideas, do you think?

happen next year, when was COVID going to end? You know, what would twenty twenty three look like, But also try to capture the moment that I was in, because there are at the beginning of the novel there's a section that's set a little earlier, and it turns out that well, it felt so urgent to write about now because everything

is changing so rapidly. It seems like the most interesting and also critical questions of our time are happening right now, you know, and even tomorrow there'll be even more so. And so it just felt like, you know, an urgent thing for me to do. That's the feeling that I

went into the novel with. But then the process of writing it and trying to capture the now but also anticipate what's just around the corner mirrored partly what the novel is about, you know, with that attempt to lurch forward in the story as the carpets being pulled from beneath our feet, and that's a form of adaptation. So I was kind of having to do that as I

was writing. And you can't write really any character in their profession today without getting, you know, the huge issues of our time, inequality, climate change, all of the things that sit with under underclimate change, like biodiversity loss, you know, land use problems, all of that. Those issues are pretty much epitomized in every job. There's there's no neutral zone.

I suppose there's a cliche that a lot of novels open with the weather and often close with the weather as well, and that you know, Offen, on the last page, there'll be some mention of light or some movement towards the sky, you know, And and so as a writer, it's really tough because you know there's a reason why why that's that's the case, and also a tone is established,

but now there's no neutral weather. So as soon as you try and do that, which is just really to open a novel, it's already embroiled in these big, existential, species wide questions.

each of those worlds. And I'm curious, are these like the four parts of killing Hughes, Like, can you manage all of those things yourself?

you know. And so the chef character I did actually have to do the most research for, honestly, also with things like she's working around local produce so to figure out what can be grown in England in which months. And then the geologist Alwin was the character that I started with, and she's the character that I wrote the novel for. Even though it's weighted equally and I grew up on the west coast of Ireland, it's completely win stripped. I mean, there used to be an endemic forest there.

But as Alwin tells her students, at one point, you know, we went the full hundred percent in terms of getting rid of our ancient forest in Ireland. So there's no trees and it's completely wind stripped, and you see the geology shouldering out of the fields, and you know there's this granite and limestone and these low lying hills and then this peat, which is you know, a resource that's kind of saving us in the sense of how much

carbon is stored in there. And it's the contrast of the I think, the peat and then this rock where there's no soil, there's nothing you can grow. It was a really tragic area during the famine because it was so so hard to grow enough food for subsistence, and so partly that landscape. I was writing the book mostly there, and I grew up on the west coast of Ireland.

So something about the rocks and the fact that you could see the geology of the place embedded itself in me in some way that I think, if I were to have ten lives, one of them would be some form of being out in the landscape. I suppose. I used to think about it as a very romantic job, you know, to really be able to look at a landscape and read it and know the story. I find

a really worthy way to spend your life. And I can understand, you know, the impulse to spend your life doing that, But obviously today to any work in the earth science is not at all romantic.

of the Alternatives. We'll be right back. All four Cystem is almost most animated in the book at the point at which they're teaching, or the points at which they're sharing the things that say mergent to them to another audience, and that sense of responsibility to pass on knowledge runs through all four of them in a kind of fundamental way.

that that didn't need to be a separate book. That we don't kind of go around our lives thinking about ourselves as being a sister, that we're kind of in our professional lives and we happen to be a sister within them and kind of crossing those especially for women who's there isn't a very clear line between their lives and their work. So three of the sisters are teaching. The one we haven't mentioned is the political scientist Rona. We don't see her teaching. She's kind of got the

cushiest job of all of the siblings. And so there's a spectrum shown there, you know, between the different types of privilege that you can have as a teacher. But yes, they are the philosopher. Now we see her lecturing twice, actually, once in real life and then once on zoom. So you know, as far away from sex and the city as you can, you know, for women with PhDs, kind of largely in the country, very little sex.

to be in each other's lives. And I think part of the pain of Rona's character who's the one who's least involved and who they all kind of have issues with, but she is the one who I think there's the biggest trauma therefore, in terms of feeling that the others don't really want or need her, and all of the other siblings acknowledge that they both want and need one another in some way, you know, because The novel is partly about the delusion of self sufficiency as a you know,

coping mechanism, as a viable way of continuing in this world, and a viable iteration you know, of the trajectory or you know that we're on. I really don't think that it is viable.

really suited to being parents. They had parents who probably were quite good company some days, and then we're largely absent a lot, you know, And so the instinct there would be to try and remedy that, as we often try and do the exact opposite of whatever whatever her own formative traumas were. And I really wasn't sure how they would respond, so it was kind of entertaining for me,

you know, to initially put him in the car. Of course, I had a feeling that Mave would be seeing her imagine if this was my son, because she that's the moment that she's in in her life, and she's very broody, and then now finds the child so relatable on the level of how curious he is about the world and kind of what a blank Slady is in terms of

having a clarity of perceptions. So she's kind of interested in terms of her own work and the phases, you know, of childhood development, and they end up, you know, having a surprising kind of bond in the book that I didn't anticipate.

of pure dialogue offers this speed and immediacy. It's intensely rewarding, if surprising, and I was curious to find out more why the playscript?

am myself. So that's why I write. To become a better person or you know, or to learn something, to go somewhere new. So it's really important for me to to not know. When you get very far into a novel, there's a certain That's why I write faster when I get to the end, because you start to see it because you know the characters so well. And also just things speed up. So when then the novel turns into a play, I only figured out that that would happen,

or that it might happen throughout three pages beforehand. And you know, I emailed a friend. I was like, oh damn. So we've got four PhD sisters, very little sex, and now there's a play in the middle of the novel, like and my last novel involved a youth in asia case, so like, I'm really just killing my own career. You love it, and I think it happened because this is when the sibling has come together, and what happens when adult siblings come together talk just so much talk and

cross talk and competitive talk. And I needed to get out of the character's way. I had the sense that by now in the novel, the reader, I hope, if I've done my job, the reader knows them and is interest to see what they're going to be like when they're together, and understands a lot of the ins and outs of you know, Alwin's relationship with Rona, with Nell's

relationship with al when they want to see it. And it's a bit like, I guess the reward of meeting like your in laws after hearing about them for a really long time, the reward and the punishment. You know, you know so much about these people, but you just have to see it. And so yes, it was part least just there was so much talk. If I was going to write it out in pros, the book would have been several hundred pages longer, and I didn't feel that the scope would then match the page count and

the intensity of it as well. I mean, there's just this so much that kind of loaded in between every exchange. I like to think that as a reader that would have been rewarding and a kind of payoff for having sat through several chapters where you're learning all about their lives separately and meeting characters that you're not really going to meet again, and so now here you are getting to see the core characters whose lives you've learned so

much about. Yeah, I suppose there is a precedent. Years ago, I had read a couple of times Ulysses, and then I had listened to it. The last time I kind of readis quote unquote was as an audiobook, and so i'd forgotten actually that the Circe chapter is as a play, and so it was it was cool to go back to that afterwards. But it was actually I had forgotten about it until after I wrote this book, and then went back and said, okay, well there was a precedent, and not not a bad one.

I usually say a bus, insert truck that you that you would need to be writing, that you'd be glad to have been writing, And it turns out that you are simultaneously glad, but also in the moment of being hit and just before being hit, are absolutely tortured by because it's like finally, like I am writing the book that I must write, and I am not going to get to finish it. Actually my thought was and I didn't get to finish my fucking book. That was the thought. I was like almost shaking my head.

One of the things I started out with this book, you know, during COVID, was I wanted there to be some form of joy on every page. And I felt at the time that to write a novel is to

kind of believe in the future. It's kind of an act of faith because everything during COVID, you know, there was no certainty, and people were reading fewer books, people were kind of binging on Netflix, and I was simultaneously really worried that all art from that period would be reduced in the sense that it would be based on memory rather than witnessed you know, and lived experience and the serendipity that most artists live for, where and you're

really deep into a work, it seems like the whole world is refracted through what you're working on and is relevant to it. And that's something that any artist listening will recognize. It's, you know, one of the most amazing

things about making art. So yeah, I wanted there to be joy, to to bring me out of the covidness, and also because I really value humor in you know, in novels, and so the sisters did make me laugh, and so did all the other characters in the book, and after the crash, I was very grateful for that, but also it hurt to laugh. It really hurt, like they were physically hurt, because it was my ribs that were mostly damaged. So Yeah, it was very tough. Like whenever there was a funny line.

independam bookstore. That's it for this week's show. As always, Like, Share, subscribe, follow, review, share, like subscribe all of the things. Next week I read this. I'm joined by Australian journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox to discuss the rating of his latest novel, The First Friend.