Author interview: Exploring the complicated reality of female friendship

In an interview with Sue Leonard, author Kathleen MacMahon describes the laborious yet rewarding process of creating her fifth novel, ‘Other People’s Lives’

Kathleen MacMahon: ‘This has been fifteen years of writing novels. I do think there are more novels in me, but there are other things I would like to do as well.’ Picture: Neil MacDougald

• Other People’s Lives
• Kathleen MacMahon 
• Penguin Sandycove, €16.99

‘It’s a universal fact that women’s lives conformed to other people’s needs, while the lives of men ploughed straight through them, like a motorway tunnel.’

This sentence, appearing in the middle of a paragraph on page 40 of Kathleen MacMahon’s fifth novel, simply jumped out at me. 

Meeting the writer in the Avoca cafe in Mount Usher Gardens, Co Wicklow, I asked her was this a main theme, and she agreed that it was.

“That to me was the central part of the novel,” she says. “Because you think it’s true, and you really have to question that. I’ve thought about it so much, and I think in many cases it really, really is.”

Other People’s Lives is full of such quotable lines — in a novel that made me examine my own relationships as well as those of the characters. 

I’ve always adored MacMahon’s perceptive novels — and this is her most accomplished and comprehensive yet.

The novel starts with the friendship of two small girls — Iseult and Justine. Lifelong friends, they have contrasting characters, and once married, their lives diverge in interesting ways. 

Justine, marrying Iseult’s brother John, whom she adores, and has always loved, dedicates herself to the needs of others, both in her job as a counsellor, and at home with her three almost adult children, but she’s beginning to resent all the demands on her time.

“She’s a great mother with a pretty happy marriage, but she starts to question why she does so much for other people, and whether they care about her much. And she’s right to question that.” 

Iseult, of whom much was expected, rushes into marriage with Simon, a man whom nobody likes, or trusts, and living abroad, seems to spend all her time reading.

Justine worries about her constantly, but although the two friends talk incessantly, and meet for frequent holidays, there are things they never share — and top of that list is their marriages.

The things women don’t share

Kathleen started thinking about the things women don’t share when her mother died in 2010.

“My mother used to talk all the time,” she says. “She was very gregarious and would talk to anybody.

“It was only after she died that I realised that she had never talked to us about anything important that had happened to her.

“I was discussing Eleanor Ferrante’s novels of friendship with two slightly older women at an event, and they said that in a friendship between two Irish women there would be a lot of things they had never said to each other.

“One said, ‘my best friend growing up didn’t ask me to her wedding. We’re still best friends, but we’ve never discussed it, and I don’t know why’.” 

This novel, her most complex yet, took Kathleen almost five years to complete.

“You can’t imagine how difficult it was to write,” she says. “There are so many characters, and there isn’t really a structured narrative; I had to cut it up and spread it all over the floor.

“I thought I was never going to get the book together and thought I’d have to shuffle it randomly. It was hard to copyedit because it got shuffled so many times and things got moved around.”

Author's sixth novel already finished

In contrast, she has already finished her sixth novel — a companion piece, which almost wrote itself.

“There aren’t many of the same characters, but the two are loosely connected. This one is about women and family and the sixth about women and work.

“It’s about a woman in the same class as Justine who made a choice not to have children because she saw her mother, an opera singer on the cusp of an international career, decide to give it up for her children.

“I suppose, on a general level, I was questioning the notion that you can have it all. And I don’t think you can, or not at the same time, and not easily.”

Starting life as a news reporter and journalist for RTÉ, Kathleen famously received a half-million advance for her first novel, This is How it Ends.

“It was like a fairytale start to my career — one of those pinch me moments. I still can’t believe it happened,” she says. 

For all that, making a living as a writer can be, generally, extremely challenging. “All you have to do is look up the sales figures every Saturday and see how that equates with what you do for your income.”

It’s hard too, having to be constantly on social media, creating a buzz for your book. It was easier, in many ways, for her grandmother, the short story writer Mary Lavin, who was able to concentrate solely on her writing.

I don’t mind doing media, but it’s very exposing, and very hard on the nerves. 

“If you choose to write fiction, that is where you put your material, and it is quite in opposition to that to go out and talk about yourself,” she says.

With six books now written, Kathleen is thinking of, maybe, taking a break.

“I’d love to do more journalism,” she says. “I’d love to do some more reporting from abroad. 

“I did some reporting from Spain, and I went to Nicaragua on a lovely trip with my dad and reported from there.

“This has been fifteen years of writing novels. I do think there are more novels in me, but there are other things I would like to do as well.” 

She’s worried, too, about the world her 24-year-old twin girls are inheriting.

“I studied history at UCD then Cambridge, and became a journalist in the early nineties. And for the first forty years of my life I had the sense that life was getting better.

“Bad things still happened, but international institutions were getting stronger. We had learned some lessons.

“But now… that evil perpetrated on a grand scale and the international community wouldn’t step in to prevent it? Genocide in Gaza; occupancy of the West Bank.

“I am so upset and ashamed at what is happening. I am horrified. I really feel like I’m writing in the middle of a hurricane. And I do wonder about writing about ordinary middle-class lives and their problems.

“One of my daughters and I went to Miami for the election last time. We thought, wow, we’ll be there to see America elect its first woman president.

“The result was devastating. One of the most unbelievable things that have happened in the past 15 years.”

On a happier note, Other People’s Lives ends with a wedding. Justine and John’s daughter Ruth is marrying a newish boyfriend, Gav, in a wedding she’s planned to perfection. 

Justine goes through the day with trepidation, worrying that Ruth is on the rebound.

“There are so many dimensions in a relationship, and so many things that can go wrong. An older person watching a young person getting married is aware of all the dangers.

“I’m happily married,” she says, “but I’m really interested in what a mad thing it is to do.

“For a young person to throw in your lot with somebody else; your financial future, the genetic material of your children, to sleep in the same bed as someone else for the rest of your life — it’s a miracle anyone does it. It’s mad.”

The wedding day makes a great conclusion — and was one Kathleen planned from the start.

Is she now proud of the novel?

“I know that I did what I set out to do,” she says. “I didn’t realise what a difficult job I was creating for myself, but I did want to write a book about female friendship and document the daily ups and downs of marriage with as much honesty as I could put into it about everyday life.”