A Time of Mirrored Unease: A Guest Post by Elizabeth O’Connor
Our September Discover pick is a tender story of a young girl’s coming of age on the shores of a remote island. Elizabeth O’Connor has penned an exclusive essay on where she found the inspiration for this story and how she feels about having her debut novel out in the world, down below.
Hardcover $27.00
Whale Fall: A Novel
Whale Fall: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $27.00
For fans of Carys Davies’ Clear, Whale Fall is a stunning coming-of-age tale of a girl caught on the precipice between adulthood and childhood, familiarity and the unknown.
For fans of Carys Davies’ Clear, Whale Fall is a stunning coming-of-age tale of a girl caught on the precipice between adulthood and childhood, familiarity and the unknown.
When I first began writing Whale Fall, the idea was really a collection of ideas: wanting to write about the cultural effects of a whale beaching, about a small island community, about working class relationships to nature, about climate change. I also wanted to write about the lives of my grandparents, who both moved inland to cities after growing up in isolated coastal places in Wales and Ireland. I wondered what that passage meant to them, and how their knowledge of the sea and shore would be so different to mine; their bounds up in labour, hardship, reliance, and mine romance and leisure.
To find a story in the midst of this, I turned to the histories of a number of island communities orbiting the British Isles. In the early twentieth century, islands such as Bardsey Island (Wales), St. Kilda (Scotland), and the Blasket and Aran Islands (Ireland) saw declining populations, newly extreme weather conditions, and threats to their way of life through mainland modernisation and the prospect of war. In researching these places, I also found that they featured in some complicated popular culture sources about islands, such as Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 ‘documentary’ Man of Aran, where islander lives and traditions were often fabricated and falsely portrayed to urban audiences.
I wondered what such places might tell us about living at a time of mirrored unease, where our lives are similarly shaped by fraught relationships to the natural world, widening class divides, and the prospect of great change on the horizon. Islands appear throughout literature as places of instability, an in-between space that is both land and water, and that can allow characters to occupy edges, to be contradictory, to turn an expected social order or narrative on its head.
It is easy in hindsight to trace this lattice of ideas, but at the time it felt messy, unruly, and often fruitless. I worked in a café for most of the drafting process, writing on slips of paper, receipts, old wrappers. While it felt unglamourous then, I can see now it gifted me with the fragmentary, ebb-and-flow structure the story needed.
It feels very special to see my novel out in the world; when you are writing your first book, you can’t imagine its life afterwards. I’m very grateful for the readers and booksellers who have taken it under their wing. If you can forgive an extended metaphor here, I often think of writing as being like a bird building a nest. As a bird collects disparate objects – grass, twigs, hair, spiderwebs, wrappers, a stem with a flower still attached – I go through writing in the same way, collecting memories, articles, snatches of dialogue, small details about a person. It always remains strange and disjointed – then, suddenly, I can step away. It has built into its own structure, in which something new can live.
