by Lisa Carey
Kieran Concannon’s film, Death of an Island, was the initial inspiration for the prologue of this book, and I will always be grateful for it, and to Kieran for smuggling me a copy meant for someone else.
Thanks to the MacDowell Colony, where I began this novel, and all the staff and office folk who make the running of a paradise appear effortless. Special thanks to Blake, for telling me about the women and their knives, and hanging a graduation balloon on my door after I finished the first draft.
I am grateful to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I wrestled with many later drafts, to Craig and Sheila Pleasants, Bea Booker and everyone in the office and staff, to all the artists who inspired me and made me laugh, in particular the ones who let me cry: Priyanka Champaneri and Kathryn Levy.
Thanks to my early readers: Gary Miller for tossing the hammer that stunned the poor pig, Sandra Miller for the popovers and truth telling, and Lacy Berman for loving Emer and reminding me to read poetry.
I am indebted to my friends (you know who you are) for remaining my friends even though I go to residencies and Ireland and don’t talk to them for months at a time. Thanks to Breakwater school, the teachers, the children and the parents, for the reassurance that my son is with a family who loves him, even when I am not at home.
Thank you to my parents and my extended family; they have always supported my choice to be a writer, even when it means I am useless at calling them back.
Last and best, my husband, Tim, who made it possible for me to go away and write, and my son, Liam, who forgave me for leaving. I am thankful every day for my little family. You have made me happier than I ever suspected I would be.
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About the author
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Meet Lisa Carey
About the book
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The Story Behind The Stolen Child
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Author’s Picks: My Favorite Books by Irish Authors
Have You Read? More by Lisa Carey
About the author
Meet Lisa Carey
LISA CAREY was born in 1970 in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Irish American parents. Her father is a lawyer and law professor and her mother a nurse, and she has one younger brother, who works in the film industry. She has a large extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and when she was a child they spent holidays and summers together on the south shore of Massachusetts. They still do, as much as they can.
From an early age, her favorite pastimes were reading, daydreaming, eavesdropping, and pretending to be the protagonist in a novel. At the age of nine she decided that her dream career would be to write copy for book jackets. She preferred writing assignments to all other schoolwork and became addicted to the feeling that came from creating an almost perfect sentence. She wrote melodramatic stories she never finished and preferred the lives of fictional characters to her own.
She attended public schools in Brookline and Hingham, Massachusetts, and then got her BA in English (reading novels) and philosophy (accidentally acquired by taking philosophy courses where they read novels) at Boston College. After graduation, she took a three-week trip to Ireland, where she cycled fifty miles to see the birthplace of her great-grandmother, in Connemara. She felt so at home in Ireland that she bought an electric kettle and continued to call everything “lovely” back in America. Since she preferred school to work (her only jobs thus far were medical secretary, barista, and bank teller), she had two graduate programs in mind: medical school (she loved hospitals) or creative writing. She ultimately chose to pursue the program that would allow more sleep and plenty of reading time. She applied to the MFA in fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a low-residency program that was started before most people had heard of low-residency programs, which led her father to ask if she’d found it on the back of a matchbook.
She wrote short stories and mailed them (from the post office, in real envelopes) to her advisors every month, while also working at Brookline Booksmith, where she could buy novels at a discount. After she wrote a story that felt like it was the beginning of a novel, she left her job and apartment, borrowed extra money on her student loan, and moved to Ireland for four months to research and write it. She spent the majority of that summer on Inishbofin island, listening to accents in the pub and reading every Irish novel she could get her hands on. When she had ten days left before she had to fly home, she went to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, an artist’s residency in County Monaghan, and wrote the first hundred pages of the novel that had grown in her mind during all that listening and reading.
She returned to Brookline, immediately felt out of place, and moved back to Ireland as quickly as possible. She finished The Mermaids Singing in time for her MFA thesis, found an agent with the help of a friend in publishing, and got a two-book deal with Bard, a division of Avon Books, at the age of twenty-six. Since she had no plans for her next novel, she traveled to Annaghmakerrig to look for an idea. After a nightmare in Tyrone Guthrie’s old Irish manor about a girl ghost in a nightgown, she wrote In the Country of the Young.
When she was writing her third novel, Love in the Asylum, she returned to America with her Irish immigrant dog, Axel. She lived on Nantucket for a year before moving back to Brookline. In between books three and four she met Timothy Spalding, a classics scholar turned computer programmer, who read her second novel before their first date. After they were married, and while she was writing Every Visible Thing, they moved to Portland, Maine, where Tim started his website, Librarything .com. Just after her fourth novel was published, their son, Liam Patrick, was born. Lisa decided to take a year off from writing and stay home with Liam. Her delight in her son, combined with a baby brain that made writing less inviting than reading or sleep, turned one year into four. After her dog, Axel, died, she started a memoir about her life in Ireland, but she was much happier putting it in a drawer than having anyone read it.
In 2010, on a trip back to Inishbofin, she saw a documentary about the evacuation of an Irish island and knew she wanted to write another novel. Over the course of four years she wrote The Stolen Child, mostly during trips to Ireland and at artist residencies.
Tim, Lisa, and Liam have divided the last few years between Ireland, the United States, and Turkey. They built a library in their house in Portland to hold all their books, and now that their son is obsessed with reading, they might need to build another one. They have a large family of relatives and adopted friends.
Lisa, who can’t bear to live away from the sea, is putting off having a “real” job for as long as she can, and she struggles with all the life crap that gets in the way of love and art. She reads more than she writes, spends more time in pajamas than clothes, worships the effortless creativity of her child, and still imagines that she is the protagonist in a novel she hasn’t gotten around to finishing yet. She is currently writing a YA book and gathering ideas for her next adult novel.
Lisa is the author of five novels. Her books have been translatedinto twelve languages and optioned for film. Every Visible Thing won a Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction; Love in the Asylum was the winner of a Massachusetts Book Award. She has been awarded fellowships at the Hawthornden Castle, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. The Stolen Child is her newest novel.
This bio reads like a social media post, all happiness, success, and premeditated life choices with no breakdowns, failures, or existential despair. Lisa hopes no one is foolish enough to believe that’s all there is, and that they read between the lines.
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About the book
The Story Behind The Stolen Child
Inishbofin—an island off the west coast of Ireland, which translates as “island of the white cow,”—is a place I have returned to countless times since my first stay in 1995. Dur
ing that initial visit I researched my first novel, and I based my fictional island on the landscape there. My second novel was also set on an island, this time in Maine. So by the time I went to write my fifth I had absolutely no intention of writing anything set on an island, certainly not one in Ireland. I safely could have said that’s exactly what I wouldn’t be writing. If every writer has only one story in them that they get to tell over and over again, then mine appears to be surrounded by water.
Fifteen years later, I visited Inishbofin with my four-year-old son. We met a group of American archaeologists who had a six-year-old, and they were kind enough to share their babysitter. One night, this allowed me the time to watch a documentary, Death of an Island, by a local man named Kieran Concannon. It was about the evacuation of a smaller neighboring island, Inishark, that was once home to hundreds of families. The combined blows of the famine, two world wars, and Irish emigration had dwindled the population down to twenty-three residents by 1960. Inishbofin, with its natural harbor and sandy beaches, attracted sailboats and visitors and would eventually build a thriving tourism business. But Inishark’s harbor was a dangerous cove that could only be navigated during the right tide by experienced locals. It had no electricity, phone lines, or doctors, and it was on its own in an emergency. The government, which often provided social welfare to poor Irish villages, wanted to clear people off Inishark and so refused to set up the island with modern conveniences. What the government did offer were houses on the mainland if the islanders agreed to leave. After the sea killed three young men on their way back from Mass on Easter Sunday, the islanders had too few men to handle their boats. They left for a mainland village that overlooked their old home, and no one has lived on Inishark since. The documentary interviews people who have remembered the island in their dreams their entire lives.
Not all novels come to you in a shivering flash, like a dream. This one did. I knew I would write about a community’s final year on an Irish island, though my characters would not be the kind, generous, respectable people of that documentary, because, let’s face it, I don’t write characters like that. I would take the real evacuation and replace the community with one from my imagination. But the documentary remains, in my prologue, as a tribute to the real residents of Inishark.
I don’t start writing a novel with one idea. I have to have at least five, all of which could be different novels and none of which has much in common. One woman from the documentary, whom I later met myself, told how she did not want to leave and refused to pack until the last minute. I started to imagine two sisters, one who hated her life on the island and the other who loved it. For some reason I had the Salem witch persecutions on my brain at the time, and I imagined a group of desperate, frightened islanders turning against an outsider. I was reading Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan, one of my favorite Irish authors, about a female healer who moved into a desolate house in the west of Ireland. I couldn’t get this character out of my mind, and she was my first inspiration for Brigid. I was also reading a book about Maine lighthouses and the families who lived in them before the lights were automated. I was reading Irish myths of changelings and stolen children to my son. Last I had an idea—left over from when I was researching my second novel—about a torrid affair between the Irish saints Patrick and Brigid. (I never worked out the details of this, thank goodness.)
So there I had it: evacuated islands, sisters, witch burning, healers, lighthouses, fairies, and saints. At least seven ideas, and many more that either ended up on the cutting-room floor or never made it into the room in the first place. Then, while I was writing the first draft, Emer and Brigid rejected my plans for friendship and became lovers. I hate it when writers talk about characters doing things on their own, because for me writing is extremely difficult and not one bit of it feels like it is being written by anyone else but miserable me, but in this case, they really did. I was the one who had to write it, but they told me to.
The Stolen Child is not an autobiographical novel; my abandoned memoir is proof that I fail when I try to write about myself. I included a few things from my memoir: my lovely Irish dog, and a baby who couldn’t breast-feed. While writing it I was quite sure it had little to do with me, because the story was so difficult to manage and get a proper hold on. I have no healing powers, and I’ve never lived in a lighthouse or an orphanage, or anywhere without electricity or plumbing. I am not afraid of fairies and I have never had an affair with a woman. I wrote an entire draft that built toward one ending and then changed my mind while writing the last chapter and had to go back and redo the whole thing about five more times. But once I approached the final draft and read the entire story out loud, I was shocked. It may not be about me or my life, but its themes, particularly motherhood and all its backstories and consequences—pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, love, loneliness, worship and resentment, the inability to live in the moment because you’re too busy missing something else—had been in my life for years. So don’t believe it when I say that my books aren’t about me. They are nothing about me and everything, at the same time. Because, as my son said recently, “You are only able to have one perspective your whole life. Doesn’t that make you the center of the universe?”
But still, it is other people’s worlds that I fall in love with. I have been to Inishark every summer since I first saw the film, going for day trips in a local boat that drops you off and picks you up according to the tide. You have to leap off the boat while it’s still running, just at the moment when it rises with a wave. There are only sheep there now, and sunbathing seals, and rabbits, and occasionally that group of archaeologists, who camp there for two weeks every year no matter the weather. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, yet I know, from being trapped on Inishbofin in a storm, how desolate it must have been at times. The houses are still there, their roofs fallen in, and if you visit with a local they will tell you who lived in each abandoned building, and where they ended up. You can almost hear the children in the school playground, or the bells announcing Mass in the church. Two years ago, a series of winter storms tore in half what remained of the cement quay that had lined the cove. The graveyard, set perilously on a cliffside, is beginning to release the bones of its ancestors as the land succumbs to erosion.
I never saw Inishark when it was populated, but I have visited its sister, Inishbofin, countless times over the last twenty-one years. I have been welcomed again and again by the wild landscape and the generous people; learned to understand the accents that required subtitles in the documentary; watched the babies from my first trip become adults manning the boat, serving Guinness, or playing music in the bar. I have spent lazy days sitting outside the pub, watching my son’s silhouette run back and forth on the hillside against a sunset that lasts for hours. Although I have only seen Inishark as an abandoned village, I can imagine how heartbreaking it was to leave it, and I can see precisely what life would be like there now, if it weren’t for the dangers of nature and the limited imagination of the outsiders who were in charge.
Read on
Author’s Picks: My Favorite Books by Irish Authors
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
Foster by Claire Keegan
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
The Green Road by Anne Enright
The China Factory by Mary Costello
There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
The Likeness by Tana French
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Tender by Belinda McKeon
The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
Related links:
http://www.inishbofin.com
Inishark: Death of an Island:
https://youtu.be/VmXb2sIFJuY
Lío
nta na Cuimhne: Nets of Memory, a documentary about emigration from Inishark to Clinton, Massachusetts
https://vimeo.com/88290076
Have You Read?
More by Lisa Carey
THE MERMAIDS SINGING
There is an island off the west coast of Ireland called Inis Muruch—the Island of the Mermaids—a world where myth is more powerful than truth, and love can overcome even death. It is here that Lisa Carey sets her lyrical and sensual first novel, weaving together the voices and lives of three generations of Irish and Irish American women.
Years ago, the fierce and beautiful Grace stole away from the island with her small daughter, Gráinne, unable to bear its isolation. Now Gráinne is motherless at fifteen, and a grandmother she has never met has come to take her back. Her heart is pulled between a life in which she no longer belongs and a family she cannot remember. But only on Inis Muruch can she begin to understand the forces that have torn her family apart.