‘There was a story that had waited long enough to be told’

After penning a Parisian debut novel, there was only one city in the world that would do for its successor, writes Lynda Marron

Lynda Marron’s debut novel, ‘Last Chance in Paris’, was published in 2024.

• The Bridge to Always 
• Lynda Marron
• eriu, €15.99

I was born in Dublin.

Let me get that out of the way before we start. On July 29, 1981, when I was nine, I moved to Cork.

I know the date because I remember my mother keeping back the telly from the removals van so that, standing together in an otherwise empty kitchen, we could enjoy the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di.

Just as soon as the happy couple had kissed on the palace balcony, in went the boxy PYE to the boot of the car and off we struck for Bandon. 

As far as I was concerned, that queasy four hours was a one-way journey; Cork might as well have been Mars. 

In some ways, I was right. A single car trip marked the end of one part of my life and the beginning of another. 

In my head, my childhood is divided into two parts: before and after that infamous nuptial embrace.

I hated Cork. There. I’ve said it.

I missed my old house, I missed my Granny, I missed my best friend in the house next door. 

It was my first time feeling rage at my own lack of power. I was filled to bursting with blind fury that my life had been turned upside-down, that no one could be trusted anymore, that nothing was certain. 

But I was a quiet child, and my anger was expressed only in hot, silent, night-time tears. Please, Holy God, let me go home.

Those were the days when people didn’t explain things to children, when people hardly talked about anything real at all. 

Infidelity didn’t happen, divorce didn’t exist, and families were nuclear, or they were broken. 

I didn’t know then that Cork was expected to provide my parents with the fresh start they needed after a series of poor choices and undeserved tragedies, that Cork was meant to make everything better.

It was a lot to ask of a place. Even Cork.

And it wasn’t Cork’s fault that it didn’t work, that the clean slate got messy, that the happy ever after never came.

All of that is ancient history, and I thought it was well buried. Writing, however, is a funny business. You don’t make up the words so much as wait for them to arrive. 

At least half my so-called writing time is spent staring at the sky, just waiting. And the next quarter of my time is spent deciding whether the flotsam of my subconscious might be bent into a decent story.

Having set my debut novel in Paris, partly as a device to protect me from my own confessional inclinations, I was determined that book two would be set in Cork. 

There was a leap of courage in that decision.

My publisher would have accepted a Parisian sequel, my agent suggested “Last Chance in the Maldives”, but I had a gut feeling that a two-book deal was an opportunity not to be wasted. 

There was a story that had waited long enough to be told.

Not being a Cork native, I wouldn’t dare to write a native protagonist, so my central characters would be outsiders: Emer Gaffney, aged nine, and Maeve, her mother, who move from Dublin to Cork...

A hook was cast into the deepest trench of my memory, and what came up was a book.

All my adult life, I’ve named The Great Gatsby as my favourite novel, without ever being able to reason why. 

I studied it for the Leaving Cert, wore myself out writing impassioned essays on the illusory nature of the American dream, but I never got to the nub of what it was that hurt me so much.

Staring out the window, 30-odd years after I first read it, I had an unprecedented flash of insight. I saw that I’d grown up in the role of Nick Carraway, the powerless observer. 

As a child, I’d witnessed the difference between new money and old, between having strength and having power, between love and desire. There was even a car crash.

I just didn’t understand any of it.

So, I wrote: Maeve, holding a torch for an old boyfriend, upends both their lives in the pursuit of love. Loverboy, Tim Corcoran, has a pretty good life going on for himself, a life he shouldn’t dream of messing up, but first love cuts deep, and Maeve is damn near irresistible.

The Bridge to Always is not a re-write of The Great Gatsby. I was never so foolish as to think I could swap in West Cork for West Egg, Cork City for New York, and a Nóinín for Daisy, and somehow have penned The Great Cork Novel. 

All right, maybe I entertained the notion for half a minute, but that’s all.

What the comparison gave me was that spark a writer needs to carry her onwards, my very own green light to chase. 

I would write a whole novel, because that was what it would take to figure out exactly why F Scott Fitzgerald had burrowed so deeply into my heart.

It’s also important to say that The Bridge to Always is not the story of my life. I didn’t write the true story, but I did write the true feelings, as best I could. 

Am I any the wiser now? I think I am. I can see that good people doing their best, including myself, can often fall short of good enough. That doesn’t make any of us bad people.

I’ve accepted that, sometimes, just beating on is as heroic as it gets, and I’ve noticed that almost any story can have a happy ending if only you can figure out where to draw a line under it.

Most of all, I’ve learned that it’s not a place you rely on, it’s people.

There came a time in my early 20s when all my family had, separately, gone back up the country. 

To the best of my knowledge, I was the only Marron within the county bounds.

Not because it had to be, and not because I didn’t have a choice, but because I’d been adopted by a group of kind, generous, and unbelievably loyal friends — Cork to their bones, the lot of them — Cork was home.

I’m married to a man so Cork he wooed me with the promise of a plot in St Finbarr’s.

I live in Cork. It’s looking like I’ll be buried in Cork.

I’ll never be able to say that I’m from Cork, but if I can lay claim to being a Cork writer, that will be enough.

It will have to be, like.

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