Author interview: Cathy Sweeney happy to leave latest creation behind her

'Breakdown' features a wife and mother who leaves her suburban house one day — leaves her teaching job, her husband, and two almost grown children — and never returns

Cathy Sweeney: “ I’d taught in schools; I’d taught in The Institute of Education; I’d written textbooks. You enjoy it, but there comes a time when you know you are sublimating the passion to write into the teaching and it’s not quite the same.”

• Breakdown 
• Cathy Sweeney 
• W & N, €19.83/ Kindle, €13.41

Cathy Sweeney and I are chatting in a Dublin hotel. It’s the first time we’ve met in person, but we spoke on the phone when her renowned short story collection, Modern Times came out, early in 2020. 

We were a week into the first lockdown at the time — that uncertain period when bookshops were closed and before Zoom became ‘a thing’. But she swears that the terrible publication timing didn’t daunt her. In fact, she says, it was a relief.

“The difference between writing a book and talking about it is so extraordinarily difficult,” she says.

“It’s a bit of a shock. I had done one or two interviews before lockdown, but I side stepped the after taste of it. That made me un-self-conscious going into the next book.”

She was living in Duncannon, County Wexford, back then — a village of fewer than 300 people with no shop. She had started a novel in autumn 2019 and had done a certain amount of research. 

It’s that novel, Breakdown, that we’re now discussing. It features a wife and mother who leaves her suburban house one day — leaves her teaching job, her husband, and two almost grown children — and never returns.

I was totally gripped by it — and could identify with so many of the woman’s dilemmas. I found myself putting the book down now and then, to go into a reverie and to work out what I might have done if I’d been in her shoes. But what had been the spark for Cathy?

“The story literally came to me,” she says, sounding a little bemused. 

I thought I could see this woman — and see exactly what she was doing. I had the book. 

The research involved making the journey her character had made — by train, bus, and boat.

“I drove around at dawn. I found a cottage where I thought she might live. I went to the service station, on the train, and on the ferry at night. I stayed in a hotel in Wales.”

“I was really just having a great time. And then the pandemic hit, and I could go nowhere.”

At first, this seemed a curse. But in retrospect Cathy says it was brilliant to have been interrupted.

“You don’t think it at the time. But I took up my original book and small amount of research and had to excavate down into my feelings and imagination to find a narrator and a voice. And it took me about a year — just to find that voice.”

Most of the words she wrote during that year, ended up being thrown out — but the exercise was well worth it for forming the clarity of the novel. 

For all her contradictions, and, on the surface of it, crazy decisions, the woman’s actions come over as totally authentic.

That’s partly thanks to Cathy’s expert structure — alternating between the woman’s present — as she comes to terms with what she has done and showing the growing discontent of her recent past. 

Sadnesses and traumas are drip-fed to us — bit by bit — each event letting us get closer to the woman’s mindset.

I didn’t have a full understanding of her — nor would I want to.

“All of us have our own lives, but we carry around the lives we could have had at certain points. I wrote from a kind of alter-ego where I might have jumped off.

“And I drew on interactions with women my age. I didn’t find it hard.”

The woman comes across as lost — not sure quite why she is fleeing; and it takes some time before she reaches a sense of reckoning. 

I got the impression that had her husband shown an ounce of curiosity, empathy, or understanding, she might well have returned to her suburban life.

Agreeing, Cathy says: “But I don’t think he was a bad guy. I think they both found making a connection challenging. And I found it perfectly plausible that two perfectly reasonable people ended up performing a marriage.”

It took Cathy almost three years to complete the novel, mostly, because it was her debut, and she wasn’t sure quite how to go about it.

“I was writing it in jigsaw style,” she says. “I would write in sections, where I thought I was, rather than in a linear way. There was a lot of cutting things up and moving them around.”

She submitted her manuscript in January 2022, and then faced another round of edits. But when the process was completed, she felt pure relief.

“I was happy to leave her behind,” she says. “She came to me like a vision, and I thought, 'I’m going to have to write this thing'. It was, 'you can’t write anything else until you write this'. Now, with my second novel, I can play.”

Cathy didn’t come to writing until she was in her thirties, but she’s been a passionate lifelong reader. She taught English in secondary schools for many years, describing her career as an all-consuming passion.

“It didn’t feel like a job. I just got to share with them the stuff I love. I never got that thing of weariness. Even when I was doing Macbeth for the fifth time. I mean, how luxurious. There is more to learn each time.” 

Yet she doesn’t miss it.

“I’d done it for a long time,” she says, “And done everything that I’d wanted to do. I’d taught in schools; I’d taught in The Institute of Education; I’d written textbooks.

“You enjoy it, but there comes a time when you know you are sublimating the passion to write into the teaching and it’s not quite the same.”

She hasn’t altogether left the classroom. These days, living in Wexford town, she teaches creative writing in The Irish Writer’s Centre and the American College — something she describes as great fun: 

“I’m teaching the short story, but I’m very much encouraging the writers to have freedom. In class we’ll read a story, then people write things to find their creative energy.”

She recently spent two extremely happy years living in Cork whilst teaching during her time as Writer in Residence at University College Cork.

“I loved Cork,” she says. “We lived there for 18 months when I was very small.”

I think I started talking there because, going back, I got straight into the accent.

“I got the Dart into Dublin this morning, and the entire carriage was quiet. In Cork, people were always talking. I practically never took a bus trip where nothing happened. One day I was reading, and a girl asked me if the book was any good.”

Still at the playing stage with the new novel — Cathy is taking a break while she deals with the publicity for Breakdown.

“And I’m catching up with my reading,” she says, smiling with delight. 

“I’ve made a list of all the books I’ve missed over the past three years. I’ve ordered them all from my library. I love the library.”

We discuss the utter pleasure that reading brings — and the times when you’re so engrossed in a novel, that you’d miss your train stop.

“I remember when I was reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I was meant to go to this family thing. But I stayed behind. I couldn’t go. I couldn’t talk to anyone until I had finished the book.”

• Cathy Sweeney will appear at the West Cork Literary Festival this summer. The festival will take place in Bantry from July 12 to July 19 and the full schedule will be announced at the end of March
• www.westcorkmusic.ie/LFProgramme