Rachel Donohue: How writing her novel became a way of escaping the pandemic
Rachel Donohue, author of The Beauty of Impossible Things.
Rachel Donohue launched her debut novel, The Temple House Vanishing, at Dubray Books on Grafton St, Dublin, at the end of February, 2020, at what would turn out to be the last celebratory gathering of her friends and family for quite a while.
“I was very lucky that I had an actual physical launch a couple of weeks before lockdown. It was one of the last nights I was with my parents, hugging them and all of that. It is a special night for that reason,” she says.
As the Dublin author launches her second book, The Beauty of Impossible Things, timing is on her side in a more fortuitous way, with bibliophiles finding refuge once again in reopened bookshops — Donohue among them.
“I never got used to walking past the bookshops and libraries when they were closed — and I don’t want ever want to get used to it. I think during lockdown people were reading more and appreciating art generally. Music, theatre or books, these are all essential services. We can’t really live well without them. The value of art has never been clearer,” she says.
Donohue, who still works part-time as a communications consultant, had always been fascinated by words but the compulsion to be a writer didn’t crystallise until she was in her 30s, after she had her second child.
“We were doing an attic clear-out recently and I found a load of stories I had written as a child. I had an obsession with words growing up but then I went to college, and started working and it was only in my early 30s when I had my second daughter, that I had this big urge to just write. She was a good baby and I had the mornings free for a couple of hours when she slept.
"I started writing short stories — there was nothing coherent at first, a paragraph here and there, little floating ideas, and then it became more something I really had to do. I think it is confidence as well. I didn’t have that confidence when I was younger — I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say or what questions I wanted to ask.
"I’m so admiring of people who seem to have that so early and I didn’t. It took time and also it took being okay with the idea of failure. I don’t think I’m alone, I think there’s lots of people for whom that’s the case. Sometimes children trigger a need to maybe define yourself not just as a mother, a worker or a wife.”
Donohue began entering competitions, receiving positive feedback which encouraged her to keep writing, culminating in her winning the Hennessy New Writing Award in 2017 and undertaking her first novel.
“It was one of those forks in the road where you think, okay, maybe this is my chance to take it seriously and not be apologetic about it. Sometimes when opportunities come, you can turn away because it is a bit frightening. But I thought, 'no, I’m going to take six months and see if I can do something longer, delve into a bigger story’.”
That story was The Temple House Vanishing, an atmospheric mystery set in a boarding school, which was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her latest book, The Beauty of Impossible Things is another portentous coming-of-age story, where teenage protagonist Natasha navigates the strange undercurrents in a seaside town. Donohue describes the books and the one she is currently working on as a ‘loose trilogy’. She says her books are inspired by her own need for transportation when reading.
“I will always be more a reader than a writer — I love books where I can escape into another place. When I was writing Temple House, I was writing it for me — if I was sitting down with a cup of tea in the afternoon, if I had a spare half-hour, where would I want to go, what would I want to feel and experience? You do your best by yourself and maybe someone reading it would feel that too. That was my guide, my own desire to escape came out in the book and I think maybe that resonated with people.”
Writing her second book also provided a much-needed diversion for Donohue during the pandemic.
“The first month or so, I found my creativity had just died — the home-schooling, then work, having to switch the day around in terms of writing. But after I got over the shock of it all, then it became a huge way of escaping, not listening to the news, just saying, ‘okay, I’m going off to write for two hours’. That was liberating. I had my own way of shutting it out, and the book helped me be free again and tell the story I had to write.”
- The Beauty of Impossible Things, published by Corvus, is out now.
- Rachel Donohue will be appearing in an online event as part of this year's West Cork Literary Festival, which runs from Jul 9-16. www.westcorkmusic.ie
