Kathleen MacMahon's second novel, The Long, Hot Summer, charts the marriages, rows and travails of an ambitious Southside Dublin family. Paddy Kehoe met the full-time author.
Novelist Kathleen MacMahon hit the headlines back in 2011 when her agent struck a lucrative two-book deal worth €684,000 for both her first and second novels; This is How it Ends, which was published in 2012, and The Long, Hot Summer, which was published in May of this year.
For understandable reasons, she doesn’t like talking about the money which, suffice to say, is best seen in terms of long-term income rather than instantaneous wealth. After all, she gave up her full-time job at RTÉ, but in the end it was worth it. “To see the two books on the shelf is very satisfying,” she says, in that genial, companionable way of hers.
“The first book is all about 'the book' and you don’t see yourself as a writer,“ she says of the time spent writing This Is How It Ends, which concerned a South Dublin woman and her love affair with an American man. “‘Can you write the book, you know, are you capable of writing a book?’ If it’s published, it’s `the Book’. The second book is about the writing, because then you become `a writer’ which you weren’t before.”
The second novel is not written in the same sense of splendid isolation, in other words, as there are now vested interests involved, she’s in the industry. “I think it’s done with much more self-consciousness than the first. You exist as a writer out there in the world, and it’s also done with a whole range of people who have opinions about what you are as a writer.”
Yet she doesn’t want to be categorised and wants to do her own thing, no matter what publishers expect. “As soon as an ounce of cynicism or marketing gets into the mix, it’s a different thing. You can’t write with an eye to the market.It’s a difficult thing that I haven’t figured out entirely yet. I think you do have to be careful not to be put in a box, and that happens more women writers than to men writers, that’s for sure.
Kathleen remembers reading some author’s observation that writers should write the same thing over and over again. If you have one success, do it again, stay in the groove, write in that space. But she ignored that advice and wrote an entirely different book from the first, namely The Long, Hot Summer which concerns an extrovert, often flamboyant south Dublin family, the MacEntees whose talents include politics - radical and otherwise - acting and journalism, opinion-making and opinion-forming. They are clued-in, purposeful, talkative types, high flyers whose apparent success masks messy dysfunction and acutely- felt vulnerabilities.
The late Maeve Binchy praised MacMahon’s first novel as a “story of people who are easy to believe in and hard to forget.” Rights were sold in Germany, Spain, Brazil, Holland and France and the book was translated into 22 languages. It was a Richard and Judy choice in the UK, and went down well in Italy and in Scandinavia, where she was interviewed on TV. This Is How It Ends did not involve the dry, acerbic humour, the range of differing portraits and themes – abortion, Gaza, marital discord, infidelity, separation - that fuel MacMahon’s latest work.
“Happiness and unhappiness are found in all kinds of places," says its author of The Long Hot Summer. “A privileged childhood is not necessarily the childhood that’s lived out in a big house, a mother with a big job or a father with a big job, and it’s simplistic to think so. Because of the nature of these people’s lives they would be easy to dislike, and that’s not fair.” It's not the first book she wrote after This Is How it Ends. In between times, she wrote - or rewrote four times - a complete novel of 100,000 words. “There’s not a word of it in there," she says, pointing at my copy of The Long, Hot Summer. But she is using some of that novel in her third book which she is currently writing.
“You realise looking back, in a way it’s not enough for one book and in a way it’s too much for one book - it’s two books, or half a book, I’m not sure.” Nobody was happy with that interim book, neither the editors at Little Brown nor the author herself, although she believes there was nothing wrong with the writing. And nothing is wasted, as far as the writer is concerned.
She is married to Mark, and their twin daughters, Lucy and Clara, are almost 14. Outside of summer, when there are distractions, she writes when the house is empty, 8.00 am to 4.00 pm. "Sometimes, if I’m on a roll, I’ll get up at six in the morning. I wouldn’t ever write at night.” She was very happy in the RTÉ newsroom and when she left she knew hers would be a solitary life much of the time.
“You have to manage the head with more diligence than you do when you are getting out every day," she remarks. “When you are sitting by yourself in a room all day, you have to be quite careful not to,“ she says cautiously, pausing. “You could become eccentric but you could also become very depressed. Eccentric would be fine, give me that.”
She has cried tears of frustration when problems occur. “And I have stopped to wonder - is life just too short to be doing this, is this too hard a job to do? I’m talking about the middle of every book when you run up against a structural problem that you cannot defeat, when you think, I don’t think my mental health can stand the effort of sitting here and breaking rocks with my head all day.” Why does she do it then? “Because the desire to write a better book I think is very powerful.”
