Culture That Made Me: Claire Kilroy on Black Beauty, The Beatles, and rewatching Friends
Claire Kilroy: Black Beauty showed me the power of what a book can do
Born in 1973, Claire Kilroy grew up in Howth, Co Dublin. She was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her fifth novel, , a raw account about motherhood, was shortlisted for this year’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She will be in conversation with Jackie Lynam at the Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, Saturday, 6 July. See: www.junctionfestival.com.
I remember sitting in the back seat of my mother's Mini. It was summer and I was in shorts and the red vinyl seats were burning my legs. I was reading Anna Sewell’s and I was borderline hysterical with upset about Ginger, this highly strung female horse, having the bearing rein put on her. It was such an intense experience. It was a first-person narration which I've never left myself as a writer. I had such a direct connection with the horse’s voice. I was with that horse. To experience such an intense reading experience at that age set me on a path – that beauty teaches you empathy, that creatures suffer. It showed me the power of what a book can do.
Vladimir Nabokov’s is a book I re-read now differently. It’s a moral compass book – to watch my own compass swivel around as I age. I read it aged 16-17, in love, cheering on the love story of this girl aged 12-14 with this 38-year-old man. Now I'm a mother and I'm horrified – a motherless child being raped by this paedophile and there’s another paedophile in the wings trying to get his hands on her. It’s interesting to see how pliable you are when you're young. It’s creepy as a mother – to see how you can mould young people. When you're older, you see that plasticity in youth. We do need to guide them – the vulnerability of youth when they don't know they’re vulnerable. It’s one of those books that helps you live.
I could wax on forever about how brilliantly John Banville writes, and with such playfulness. His books are chess games where he moves a character and the reader thinks something has happened, but it’s actually a ploy to trick the reader. It's very satisfactory when a plot catches you out, when something happens you didn't see coming. I can't read crime fiction because it's all sewn up at the end. I feel that's too easy. It doesn't reflect life. Life isn’t easy. It's tricky. You can never grasp all of it. I love Banville’s game-playing with the reader, that he has fun, and reflects upon a world that is chaotic, but cohesive and described in terms similar to the way I see it.
A writer who plays games and is fun also is Michael Frayn. He's a playwright as well. His plays are funny but also hard-hitting. His novel is a real laugh, but also a terrible thing happens at the end. I’m drawn to tragi-comedy, to farcical elements that capture the messiness of the human experience, as well as the gravity of it. I can't get with a book unless it's funny. It needs to make me laugh. Humour has a big place in my creative value system.
My husband and I are rewatching . I admire the writing and acting in a way I didn't, watching it in the ’90s. It’s interesting watching it sequentially, seeing the construction of various plotlines, with Rachel and Ross’s relationship structured throughout. Each episode references itself at the beginning; it's clever and admirable. I underestimated how good the acting is. It's comic acting, but they're spot-on. Plus there's the sadness of knowing Matthew Perry wasn't happy, and the sadness knowing they're all much older now. There’s a filter of melancholy watching it 25 years later.
I got the same melancholic buzz, but stronger, watching the Beatles documentary – watching them create, and knowing this moment ended and can never be repeated. George is dead. John's dead. Seeing them in their youthful, brilliant glory from afar. Anything that makes me aware of my mortality is interesting to me because we’re all gonna die. This is it. This is all there is. To get some perspective on it, watching that Beatles documentary, was awesome. Watching a moment that's now over is interesting, moving and thought-provoking.
I remember watching Olwen Fouéré in a Marina Carr play, , a one-woman show. I found it extraordinary this woman could do this, and also this older woman. It was very physical. She was up on tables. Apart from remembering her lines, I was thinking about the sheer athleticism of it. She’s like a role model. She's not a little old lady, but she is older than me, fitter than me and stronger than me. You don't have to turn into a little old lady.
I'm a fan of Conor McPherson. His plays are funny, but serious, with ghosts, and alcoholism is a big thing. How he writes about alcoholism is very interesting. When you put the devil on stage, in a play like , it becomes electric. He uses stuff we're scared of and makes us laugh at the same time. If you can laugh while you're creeped out by this devil playing poker it's good theatre. He understands the catharsis of theatre.
When I go to the cinema, I'm brought to war movies because that's my husband’s area. I block my ears because it's just bang, bang, bang! It's such a masculine endeavour. A beautiful movie, which is a war movie, is , but I watched it because of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. Their performances were so electric, erotic and charged. You know one of them is dying at the beginning of the movie, and you don't know what happened to the other. Something has ended, and now we shall look at it and look how alive it was. It's all connected to what a life is, how short it is.
Kate Bowler has a podcast about how you cope with grief. She has a cancer diagnosis. Her guests include actor Richard E. Grant, who is hilarious in his grief and his rage at losing his beloved wife, but also about people ignoring him. Death is inevitable. Why are we so bad at looking at it? People are cast into solitude in their grief, which makes it worse. Rob Delaney, the actor and comedian, is fantastic. His child, Henry, was diagnosed with brain cancer and died at just two-and-a-half years old. He approaches death in a funny, human way.
I love ’70s funk, and I'm from the Radiohead generation, but who I have been listening to lately – and she's a young Irish woman – is CMAT. She's lyrically and musically so interesting. For whatever reason, she’s interesting to my brain, even visually. It makes me happy she's an Irish woman. Where did she come from? Dunboyne apparently [laughs, answering her own question]. She’s amazing.
