Why Maggie is now familiar to millions

A KEEN eye for relationship dynamics is central to a good plot. It drives the story and hooks the reader. Blend family dynamics with a hint of intrigue and you have the makings of a page-turner. For the past two decades Derry-born Maggie O’Farrell (above) has mastered the art of writing about family relationships whilst spinning a good yarn. Her critically acclaimed books regularly top the international best seller lists and have been successfully adapted for screen.

Yet having spent most of her life in the UK, O’Farrell, has never lost her sense of Irishness. Nor has the Cambridge-educated writer shied away from addressing the issue of anti-Irish discrimination both in her public statements and in her fiction. This has made the characters that she depicts and their experiences instantly recognisable to the Irish community in the UK. Moreover, her ability to write about family dynamics with realism, humour and sensitivity has earned O’Farrell an international readership and critical acclaim. Yet her early years were so traumatic; it is nothing short of a miracle that she survived childhood let alone become a million-book selling novelist.

Derry days

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine in County Derry on May 27, 1972, less than four months after Bloody Sunday. In the predominantly Protestant Coleraine, the O’Farrell family, being Quakers, were at odds with the cultural norms of the Unionist town. Their Quaker beliefs in peace and equality were severely tested in the 1970s as the conflict endured its most violent decade as many felt compelled to choose a side.

Maggie’s sense of being an outsider were further compounded when, at the age of eight, she was hospitalised with encephalitis—an inflammation of the brain. The life-threatening illness led her to missing a year of school and left her with a pronounced stutter. Adding to her health woes, the young Maggie nearly drowned in the sea as teenager. By all accounts, growing up an Irish Quaker during the conflict, experiencing near death and left with a severe speech impediment was not the most promising start for the young writer to be.

Discrimination

These traumatic childhood events were dramatised in her third novel The Distance Between Us (2004) and described in her memoir I am, I am, I am (2017). However, it was when her family moved to the UK the young O’Farrell was first subjected to anti-Irish discrimination. The experience of prejudice was to have a lasting personal impact on her and yet would be a driving force in her fiction. When the family first moved to Wales the young O’Farrell was subject to overt Irish racism. She later recounted how even teachers would ask: “Are your family in the IRA?” in front of the whole class to the 12-year-old O’Farrell. Moreover, this incident was far from isolated as she and her family were subject to prejudice on a regular basis in the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s.

O’Farrell’s sense of being an Irish outsider was intensified by the fact that she did not have the cultural cushion of going to Catholic school, where teachers fostered a sense of Irish community and tradition. This led to author feeling distinctly Irish, but without the traditional support of school, church and community which many Irish people relied upon in the UK. The old Irish proverb: ‘Under the shelter of each other, people survive,’ was at times, missing from the young O’Farrell’s experience of growing up Irish in the UK. Yet she and her family did hold on to their sense of Irishness in the face of relentless discrimination.

Proudly Irish

The discrimination that she experienced would be a find a creative outlet in her most Irish of novels, Instructions for a Heatwave (2013). The book centres around the Riordan family who have moved from Ireland to the UK for work. During the drought of 1976, Robert, the father goes out for a newspaper and does not return. This forces the grown-up children to return to their London home to help their mother Gretta search for their father. During the ensuing search, the family is forced to confront their own relationships with each other and what is missing from them.

The novel is excellent at describing the Irish experience in the UK in the 1970s. Britain was a country where casual discrimination and outright racism were commonplace among all sections of society. However, the book also celebrates all those unsung heroes who kept Irish traditions alive, even in the face of the historical anti-Irish prejudice which was further intensified by the IRA’s bombing campaign during the decade.

Unsung heroes

O’Farrell describes how the novel’s matriarch Gretta ‘had always done her best to keep Ireland alive in her London-born children. The girls went to Irish-dancing classes.’ Gretta is symbolic of the countless quietly courageous people who kept the traditions alive before Irishness had its cultural renaissance in the 1980s. These were the unsung heroes who established the social clubs, folk clubs and kept their sense of who they were and where they came from alive, even in the face of overwhelming prejudice.

O’Farrell uses the drama of the missing father to show the Irish at their best observing: “The Irish are good in a crisis…They know what to do, what traditions must be observed, they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news.” Anyone who has grown up in a large extended Irish family will instantly identify with her description of the Riordans.

The novel subtly pays tribute to the generations who ensured that the old traditions would survive. It was these quiet people who laid the foundations that have witnessed a vibrant cultural resurgence and sense of Irishness that is thriving in the 21st century. In this, her most Irish of novels, the writer’s sense of Irishness is intensified by her exile from her native land. In an interview for the New York arts and culture magazine Guernica, the novelist said that the book was a way for her to talk to her Ireland. For O’Farrell, and most literary exiles from Joyce to Beckett, the yearning for Ireland never leaves them. The critics hailed the book and it was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year award in 2014.

A star on the rise

O’Farrell, despite the anti-Irish prejudice and her speech impediment, excelled academically reading Literature at New Hall, Cambridge. It was there that she met her future husband, the fellow writer William Sutcliffe. However, like most things in O’Farrell’s life, things were never simple. It only after ten years of friendship that they became a couple. In the intervening ten years she worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and on her return to the UK, became the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday.

As the new century dawned O’Farrell, still only in her 20s, published her first book After You’d Gone (2000). The book established her trademark style of being able to write with forensic sensitivity about the complexity of relationships. The novel was greeted with critical acclaim and the awards soon followed with O’Farrell winning the prestigious Betty Trask Award. Remarkably for a such a young writer, her first six books all won literary awards. Yet it was for her seventh book Hamnet (2020) that O’Farrell swept the board on literary awards both in the UK and internationally.

Literary heavyweight

The historical novel retells the tragic tale of the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet. The book deals with the aftermath of a child’s death and how the grief impacts on the family. Both husband and wife are so consumed with their own circles of sorrow that their family are nearly torn apart. O’Farrell tells the story with such sensitivity, that although at times unbearable to read, is also compulsive page turner. The novel beautifully recounts that how from the Bard’s greatest sorrow emerged his greatest play Hamlet as a tribute to his lost son.

The novel was nominated for five literary prizes in the UK and in Ireland, winning three of them and for countless awards internationally. The book was such a critical and commercial success that the film rights were immediately bought. Hamnet is currently in production with Ireland’s Paul Mescal playing the role of Shakespeare and is due to be cinemas early next year. O’Farrell, the Irish outsider, had authored a novel about England’s greatest playwright, and in so doing, established herself as literary heavyweight.

At home in Edinburgh

Book sales numbering in the millions and the successful screen adaptations of her novels, has meant that O’Farrell could live anywhere in the world. Yet she has chosen to call Edinburgh home, where she lives with her author husband and their three children. Her range and prolific nature of her writing show no signs of letting up with her children’s book The Boy of Who Lost His Spark winning the KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Award in 2023. If you want to hear the Derry-born writer recite excerpts from her work, then you can see her at Glasgow’s Aye Write international literary festival in November. Maggie O’Farrell: from Coleraine to commercial and critical acclaim.

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk