‘I realised I could write a big story... I never thought I would’
Author Niamh Mulvey: 'I’m really interested in people who don’t do the thing they are supposed to do.' Picture: Kate Elliott
- The Amendments
- Niamh Mulvey
- Picador, €16.99/ Kindle: €10.12
When Niamh Mulvey was a teenager, she became enmeshed in a fervent religious group. It was a good experience, but she didn’t stay a member for long and afterwards felt too embarrassed to talk about it — this was a time when, typically, teenagers were turning against the church.
Years later, gathering material for her short story collection, , she was looking back on those years.
“I thought, why did I do that, and what was it all about? The minute I opened that box, and remembered the friendships, I knew it was a good experience to write about.”
The story featured Nell — a teenager who became pregnant.
“I was interested in the questions pregnant women ask themselves,” she says, when we meet in a Dublin hotel to discuss her debut novel.
“They ask, what will the baby be like, and what will it mean to their lives. In your forties, it’s the most wonderful thing ever, but if you’re a teenager it’s a catastrophe. I was interested in that whole storytelling around pregnancy — it’s just so fraught in mystery.”
She sent the draft to a few friends, and one of them responded, saying she had liked it, but wanted to know more about Nell.
“I went home and wrote 10,000 words in a couple of days because I realised there was so much there.
“And after I had finished and was dealing with the publisher, I said to my agent, Sallyanne Sweeney, ‘I think I have this novel’. I’d realised I could write a big story, and I never thought I would.”
The publisher accepted the novel on those first words, plus a synopsis, and Niamh set to work. The Amendments opens when Nell and her partner Adrienne are expecting a baby. Adrienne is ecstatic, but Nell has reservations. She had been unhappy for a long time before meeting Adrienne and now has her life transformed by true love, but she has trauma in her past, and is terrified she will lose everything. So she goes along with Adrienne’s pregnancy, hoping it will all be grand.
Back in January 2023, when Niamh was polishing the novel for publication, we met in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre Artist’s retreat in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan.
During the week, we all shared our work, and Niamh read the first chapter of , which takes place in a therapist’s office. We were all intrigued — and anxious to find out what happened next. And the book, when I finally read it, proved itself even more engaging than I could have imagined.
The story spans three generations of women. There’s Brigid, a traditional rural wife and mother, who is dismayed when her daughter, Dolores, becomes involved in the women’s movement — and then Nell, who following her experience in the religious group, makes life-changing mistakes while she’s grappling with her sexuality.
“I’m really interested in people who don’t do the thing they are supposed to do,” says Niamh. “Dolores’s involvement with the women’s group was very much against the spirit of her time, and Nell’s involvement with the religious group was against the spirit of her time.”
The amendments of the title, refers to the 1983 and 2018 abortion referendums — the first introducing the eighth amendment — the second repealing it. Although relevant to the plot, this issue simmers in the background.
“I didn’t want it to be too much on the nose, but the issue felt irresistible,” says Niamh.
Dealing with the varying timelines makes for a complex structure, which took Niamh a long time to perfect. She completed the second draft in London two days before moving back to Ireland, and she fervently hoped the novel was done. But her editor said it needed finessing to make the narrative flow better, so it was back to the drawing board.
Brought up in Carlow, then Kilkenny, Niamh has always wanted to be a writer, but did not have the belief that she could be. After gaining her degree in English and history at Galway University, she worked in random jobs before getting into publishing in London.
Hugely successful, she ended up as a senior commissioning editor with Quercus.
“I loved it,” she says. “When I started, I couldn’t believe I was there. Over the years it became tougher because the money was bad, but I still had a ball.”
On maternity leave with her first baby, she got down to writing — and got back to it when her second child was due. But she discovered her experience as an editor did not do her any favours.
“As an editor, you have to think what kind of book each manuscript is, who is going to read it, and what the pitch should be. I was writing the kind of book I thought I should be writing, rather than being true to what I was interested in.
“They weren’t terrible — I got an agent through one of them — but they weren’t good. I’m so glad, now, that none of them were published.”
felt different. It was, she says, transformative, and this shift continued with .
“It’s a book that demanded to be written,” she says. “I was completely in it all the time. I became obsessed with the book. I just felt it so much.”
That total focus has made for quite exquisite characterisation. Even the minor players come alive on the page, and the more major ones are so well drawn, that it’s easy to view the world through their eyes.
I was particularly moved by the teenage Nell’s predicament, and of the fallout on herself and on others through her actions, that I found myself in tears.
Niamh is finding it hard getting going with a new book — although she has many ideas, nothing seems to stick.
“I’d love to be one of those writers who writes all the time,” she says, “but I’m not. felt so natural, so it’s hard to work on something tentative. I want that feeling again. But you can’t have it all the time, or you’d be a basket case. Maybe in a year or so I’ll be ready to get back in.”
Meanwhile, Niamh is providing Zoom writing classes online, as well as giving on-line coaching.
“It’s quite a weird writing class, because it’s based on meditation, but people seem to like it — and I love doing it.
“You have to be open to mystery and to strange things happening. I think of myself as very logical and practical — I don’t like woo-hoo — I don’t even like horoscopes, or anything like that, but when my writing is going well there is something going on that you can’t really understand — but you feel it.”
Now living in Kilkenny, with her "really great" husband, Thomas, and children Séan and Rosanna, Niamh feels settled.
“Thomas is very into being a dad,” she says. “He’s a web designer and works from home a lot. We’re either working loads, and are short on time, or not working and having time but no money. But that’s OK.”
She’s happy with , feeling she has pretty much achieved what she set out to do.
“In a weird way, when you’re writing a novel you have to trust yourself,” she says. “You can’t hold it all in your head at the same time. You have to hope you were true to it in the moment of writing, and I think I was.”
