Now thirty-nine, he has his own familial responsibilities in the form of five young daughters, and a wife to whom his occasional acts of spontaneous generosity are a real threat to their precarious wellbeing. He grew up an outsider, teased about his illegitimate status. Born on April Fool’s Day, 1946, Furlong was raised by his unmarried mother in the house of her employer Mrs Wilson, a rich Protestant widow. Gradually, his two families began to emerge, group portraits consisting entirely of women. The protagonist, Will Furlong, needed a context, a genealogy, a back-story. Over a period of about two years, the germ of the story of such a man’s dilemma grew into the short novel Small Things Like These. For her, as she explains with a winning frankness, writing is ‘digging stony soil’.
How would he deal with this knowledge?Ĭlaire Keegan is not a prolific writer. The point of interest for the author, as revealed to interviewer Tanya Farrelly at the recent Dingle Literary Festival, the imaginative point of entry so to speak into the society that made such an appalling event possible, was the coalman. The religious thanked the latter for his intervention, made a show of washing and feeding the child, then returned him to the shed once the coalman had gone on his way. At the time the Ferns Report was being released, Claire Keegan heard a victim of institutional abuse describe how he’d been discovered by the coalman locked inside a coal shed.
Some stories begin as thought experiments.
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