Danielle McLaughlin: 'I was turning 50 and I'd been ten years out of legal practice'
Before becoming a fulltime writer, Danielle McLaughlin had previously worked as a solicitor. Picture: Dan Linehan
Danielle McLaughlin’s debut novel The Art of Falling is a tale of infidelity, betrayal and deceit set in middle-class Cork, not a milieu that we see often in literary fiction. She is at pains to point out, however, that she didn’t draw on real-life people for her characters.
“I suppose there is no way of managing what goes on in other people’s heads, so there may very well be people who read the book and say ‘oh, that’s me’. I can say now that it definitely isn’t. They are all entirely fictional.”
There is one exception, however, says McLaughlin. “Bailey the dog in the novel is named after the dog after a friend of mine — a beautiful labrador who died. It only occurred to me later that the teenage daughter in the book is called Jennifer — the family that owns the dog also has a daughter called Jennifer. It just happened, I don’t know what my brain was doing. The teenager in the novel is entirely fictional and I warned my friend and her daughter that it is not them and they are completely fine with it. It just goes to show how careful you have to be,” she says.
McLaughlin, who lives in Donoughmore in Co Cork with her husband and three children, may be a debut novelist but she has been a force on the literary scene for many years now, winning numerous awards and prizes for her short stories and acclaim for her 2015 collection, Dinosaurs on Other Planets.
The main character in The Art of Falling is Nessa McCormack, an art curator whose work and personal life are in turmoil. She lives in a house inherited by her architect husband, whose recent affair has shaken their marriage. McLaughlin did take inspiration from real life in regard to Nessa’s home, one of the grand old houses in Sunday’s Well, with gardens that stretch down to the riverbank across from Fitzgerald’s Park.
“Wouldn’t I love to live in one of those houses,” says McLaughlin. “The number of times I have looked across at them — to have the river and the park just across the way, at the bottom of your garden. You could wander out in your dressing gown in the morning, have your coffee, look across at the park.
"I saw that distance between Nessa and the house — she doesn’t come from an affluent background… as well as that, the house has come down from another generation, she hasn’t earned it herself. It links to how she is very class-conscious and has insecurities around her social standing. She doesn’t feel quite at ease.”
It took McLaughlin a while to adjust to life as a full-time writer after she gave up her legal practice due to illness when she was 40. When her meticulously crafted short stories won a slew of prizes, including the $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction and the £30,000 Sunday Times Audible Short Story prize, it was a welcome boost, both financially and psychologically.
“I had a couple of prizes that came close together, that were fantastic in terms of the financial support they provided. They were an important affirmation as well because I was having a little bit of a wobble in my thought process about the big questions, like ‘what am I doing with my life?’.
"I was turning 50 and I had been ten years out of legal practice, which had been my dream for so long, then I just walked away from it. It wasn’t planned, I got ill, but I didn’t go back to it. Then those prizes dropped out of the sky. They arrived at a time where they were important from my own psychological perspective as well.”
McLaughlin has also relied on the support of the writing community in Cork from the beginning. The Fiction at the Friary monthly event, which she set up with fellow Cork author Madeline D’Arcy, offers a forum for writers, established and emerging, to share their experience.
“When I started writing, people were so good, encouraging and helpful that I always said if I was ever in a position to encourage someone else, I would want to pay it back. At the beginning, the tough parts of the writing life, like the rejection, can hit very hard. But talking to other writers who are going through the same thing really helps.
"There is also the practical side of things, to have somewhere you can go along and get tips, maybe where you should be sending your work and all of that.”
Connecting with other writers also acts as ballast against the often isolating and solitary pursuit of writing, although McLaughlin says it is a career that suits her as an introvert. She was also diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum in her 40s.
“I have zero stigma about it but I’m not sure I’m terribly interesting in the way I talk about it. I think it is always good to learn more about ourselves so it’s great to have that information. I do find it interesting to think about how being on the autism spectrum might feed into my writing in terms of attention to detail and high level of focus, which I find very helpful in writing,” she says.
McLaughlin has discovered, however, that being an introvert has not necessarily been an advantage in dealing with the ongoing isolation of lockdown.
“When it started, I thought ‘I’m not someone who is out partying anyway so I will cope with this really well’. In the beginning, it was fine, maybe because the start of the pandemic coincided with good weather but I really did find it affecting my moods, especially the last few months of last year, it really kicked in as a very negative, energy-draining, low-mood thing. January was a million years long."
McLaughlin says she has been working hard to keep herself upbeat.
"I’m doing loads of walking, trying to get lots of sleep. But it has surprised me, from a good mental health perspective, even introverts do need to get out and socialise. I know I should be more zen, going to a deeper spiritual place, broadening my mental horizons and all that but actually it feels claustrophobic and I want it over.”
- The Art of Falling, published by John Murray, is out now
I have just finished Words To Shape My Name by Laura McKenna. I thought it was wonderful, I was totally absorbed from start to finish. I also read A Quiet Tide by Marianne Lee recently; it’s about Ellen Hutchins, Ireland’s first female botanist. A beautiful book and lovely writing.
I’m not big into TV but my kids got me into watching it, especially in the last year. We watched all of The Crown, which I really enjoyed. Also The Queen’s Gambit and Anne with an E, which I thought was beautiful.
I tend not to listen to music an awful lot, I have always been more drawn to curling up with a book in a quiet place. I listen to music that my kids listen to — Hozier, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift.
I tend to listen to short stories on podcast — I’ve been enjoying Spoken Stories: Independence on RTÉ Radio 1, Kevin Barry and Sue Rainsford had ones recently or I would listen to writers reading their own stories on the New Yorker podcast.
