Earlier this year, Roisín O’Donnell started to get stories from strangers. Direct messages on Instagram. People approaching her to share a quiet word after book signings. Confidences exchanged over email. In one message a woman wrote, “Thank you. I now understand why my daughter didn’t leave an abusive partner sooner. It was very hard for us to understand what was going on at the time. I finally feel I understand.”
Over coffee in a hotel in Blanchardstown, O’Donnell explains how it felt to receive that email. “I cried my eyes out reading that. The messages have been very moving. A lot of the time, it’s just women saying, Thank you. You told my story.”
The softly spoken 42-year-old doesn’t yet have the air of someone comfortable in the public eye. A teacher for most of her working life, for the past year, she has been on a career break from a primary school near Trim in Co Meath, writing fiction and living as a single parent in Navan with her two young children, aged six and eight. During that time, Nesting, her debut novel, has been quietly changing her horizons. Since it was published in January, after a nine-way auction, its cheerleaders have included Roddy Doyle and Ryan Tubridy. It has lingered for months in the bestseller charts, and last week, it was declared winner of the Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; she is one of six contenders for the overall Irish Book of the Year award.
A compulsive read, Nesting tells the story of Ciara Fay, a pregnant teacher left homeless with her two children in Dublin after walking out on her controlling, emotionally abusive husband. Ciara finds herself in emergency accommodation in the Hotel Eden on the quays, where she must clock in every day, creep up the back stairs, and fend for her two-year-old and four-year-old with no cooking facilities and hardly any cash. She can’t go back to her menacing husband, who is willing to see them starve on the street, but the system affords her little pathway to move forward. Her family in England wants to help, but their interventions make matters worse.
The novel reflects headlines we read every day. In October, more than 5,000 children in Ireland were registered as homeless, a record-breaking statistic. Reading the book – at least for this reader – feels like a way into a shadow society that most people are aware of, but rarely experience directly, even though it’s within touching distance. Ciara is a teacher, a mother, an ordinary, hardworking person, with colleagues and kids who are dropped off every day to playschool, their safest place.
“So many people are impacted by the housing crisis,” O’Donnell says. “People have found themselves able to relate to Ciara, even if they haven’t been in that exact situation. Maybe they’re in unstable rental accommodation or they’re worried about their mortgage or they’re trying to find a house. I wanted to provide that visceral experience to break down the headlines and the figures, which we become so numb to.”
O’Donnell also wanted to lift the shame that people carry with them. “Ciara has been made to feel that it’s her fault. For anyone in a relationship with an abusive partner, a really important first step is realising that it’s not your fault. I was determined to show she has been targeted for her strengths, not her weaknesses. Even writing that part felt quite risky and radical, because normally you go down the route of seeing that there’s some sort of problem, that the woman has a troubled background and that she is basically to blame in some way for getting into this relationship. I wanted to show very clearly is that, no, it’s not her fault.”
As with many of the best tales, there’s an urgency to Nesting, a sense it’s a story that had to be told. O’Donnell tried to abandon the novel many times. “At numerous points, I would have lost my nerve and said, ‘Look, there are no books like this; nobody wants to read a book set in an emergency accommodation about coercive control.’ I would put it aside sometimes for a month or two. But something always pulled me back. I just had to know what was going to happen, if these characters would be okay.”
Fiction is all O’Donnell has ever really wanted to do, but she has long doubted herself, first as a dreamy, story-scribbling, library card-carrying kid in Sheffield being raised by Derry-born parents, and then when she got her heart’s desire: a place at Trinity College Dublin. Living in house-shares from Fairview to Terenure, she embraced the course-load, but felt intimidated by the other students. “At that age you’re vulnerable to comparison,” she says. “College did impact my confidence in that on that course there were people from a much wealthier background than me, with a lot more confidence. I would have felt they probably had something more worthwhile to be writing about.”
Office jobs and spells abroad teaching English as a foreign language followed, before O’Donnell began work as a teacher in Ireland. As the years passed, publishing fiction began to seem impossible. “You start to feel disconnected, not truly yourself.” At 30, O’Donnell signed up for a course at the Irish Writers Centre, where the poet Dave Lordan was her teacher.
“He spoke to me about the importance of finding your readers. You can’t keep writing just for yourself, at a certain point you will burn out.” She began placing short stories in literary journals, and her acclaimed collection Wild Quiet was published in 2016. In 2018 she won the short story of the year award at the Irish Book Awards. “It came at a pivotal moment for me. I had a young child at home and I was expecting another one, and I wasn’t getting much writing time and my writing confidence was low. It was hard. Winning that award gave me encouragement.”
Nesting started life as a short story commissioned in 2020 for RTÉ Radio 1. When it was broadcast in 2021, read by Siobhán McSweeney, O’Donnell realised she wasn’t finished with the tale. So she began the intimidating task of turning 5,000 words into 80,000. As part of her research, she contacted experts such as Dr Melanie Nowoki (O’Donnell was informed by her study The Hotelisation of the Housing Crisis, one of the only big studies that looks at the impact of emergency accommodation on families), and spoke to women who have experienced emergency accommodation. She found out details such as how technology can be used by a partner to keep tabs on an ex trying to flee. “There’s all this talk about moving to a cashless society. That would be devastating for someone in Ciara’s position, because cash cannot be traced. Your bank card can be tracked.”
Her development of the novel parallels the growth in recent years of Irish society’s understanding of the term coercive control. Defining it, O’Donnell says, “It’s this feeling of being under surveillance. It’s being in a relationship where you’re constantly having to pre-empt what a partner’s reaction is going to be. It’s living with someone who is very unpredictable. The pillars would be fear, obligation and guilt.”
O’Donnell intentionally knitted threads into the novel that parallel her own life experience. Like Ciara, she was raised in Sheffield, moved to Dublin, is a single parent and a teacher. “It’s pure fiction, but you can draw on elements of your own life and weave them in to give that sense of richness,” she says. “It can be stressful, parenting alone. The financial pressure. The constant calculations on the phone as to how we’re managing each month. All that fed into Nesting.”
[ Patrisha McLean on her marriage to Don McLean: ‘For 29 years I was controlled’Opens in new window ]
She also relates to the loneliness Ciara experiences. O’Donnell has family support – her parents and her sister and brother-in-law live close by: they moved from Sheffield to Ireland in the period after she secured a place at Trinity. But naturally she makes choices that put her children first. “I wouldn’t have a massive social life,” she says. “But I have lovely writing friends and people that I chat to. I’m in a book club. We’re all single mums and we meet up on Zoom after the kids have gone to bed.”
The book has altered O’Donnell’s relationship with her children in ways she hadn’t expected. “Soon after Nesting was published, I needed to go to the local Eason to sign some stock. It was a Saturday and I said to the kids, ‘Look, just come on with Mommy, I have to do something for half an hour.’ I brought them into Eason and they were so excited: ‘That’s Mommy’s book!’ They were jumping around. I was quite moved.”
She believes that for her children, seeing their mother achieving her goals will teach them to nourish their own ambitions. “If you have something that is really important to you, it is important to hold on to that. Particularly as a single parent, but just as a parent in general and as women particularly. It’s good for children to see that as a mother, you don’t have to sacrifice your dreams.”
A new paperback edition of Nesting will be published on January 2nd. Roisín O’Donnell will appear in conversation at the Solstice Arts Centre in Meath on International Women’s Day on March 11th, organised by Meath Women’s Refuge & Support Service. solsticeartscentre.ie
