Small Things Like These
Small Things Like These
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Claire Keegan on Small Things Like These
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A newspaper spread and a locked shedThe book’s origin is a specific news document published in 2005, when Keegan was writer-in-residence at University College Cork. The Ferns Report, which catalogued Catholic Church abuse in Ireland, ran survivors’ testimonies across a newspaper spread, and one image from that reading planted itself and waited more than a decade to become fiction.
There was a spread in the newspaper with victims’ testimonies. I read through those and was floored. I thought about somebody finding a person in a shed, and that stayed in the back of my mind all those years.
The novella’s central question went through a full structural revision before Keegan found the right protagonist. Her earliest attempt made a child its main character, a boy who accompanies his father on a coal delivery and finds another boy locked in a coalhouse. The problem was agency: a child has none. So the story moved to the father, the adult who could actually choose.
Because he has agency. Because he can do something. It would be far more unlikely, I would imagine, for his wife, who already has five children to care for, and a husband and herself to feed. It was just interesting to test what he would do with his freedom.
Interviewers and readers repeatedly placed the Magdalene Laundries, institutions where the Catholic Church in Ireland detained women and girls and compelled them to labour, at the centre of the book. Keegan pushed back on that framing consistently, and her correction reveals what she actually set out to write.
I think that [the laundries scandal] overshadows the community Bill Furlong lives in. It’s his atmosphere. It’s the environment. But I don’t think it’s the story at all. I think this is the story of a man with five daughters, in a marriage, who’s running a coal yard and is probably a workaholic, and maybe facing some kind of midlife crisis. I think it’s a story about a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else. And it may actually be a self-destructive thing. I think this is a love story.
When the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Keegan was asked what she had been trying to do. Her answer separated her actual intention from the thematic labels that were already accumulating around the book.
I wasn’t deliberately setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland or economic hardship or fatherhood or anything universal. I did want to answer back to the question of why so many people said and did little or nothing, knowing that girls and women were incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions.
How she wrote it
Thirty drafts from nothingKeegan had no character biography, no setting, and no plot when she began. She has described the early stage of writing as an act of faith that something might emerge, and the quote that follows is her account of exactly how bare that starting point was.
I didn’t have Furlong at the beginning, I didn’t have his past, his daughters, his wife, the shop, the river, the convent. I had nothing. So, I started with pretty much nothing. And as I say, it’s just kind of an act of faith that this might turn into something that might be decent and have something to say.
Furlong’s personality came to Keegan through observation of a small physical habit, not through backstory planning. A reader’s suggestion that he might notice cars along the road turned out to be wrong, and the wrongness of it told her something that years of planning had not.
He didn’t really look up. He’s a man who looks down and looks ahead only to see where he needs to get to on that particular day. He is not especially observant. I think what interests him most is the contents of his own mind. Then when I realized he looked down, I thought maybe he’d been bullied in school, and that gave me his past.
The daily practice behind the book was methodical and slow. Keegan works by returning to the beginning of her draft each morning, printing what she has, and revising before adding anything new. The number of drafts she completes is not a claim about difficulty but about how she understands the work itself.
I start at the beginning, and I keep starting at the beginning every day and printing out what I have from the day before and going over it and trying to add a page or improve a page. And I just keep doing that every day until it’s over. I usually write in the mornings. I usually do about 30 drafts.
Keegan describes her relationship to her own material in terms of service rather than authorship. The framing matters because it explains why she resists judging her characters from the outside: she sees herself as following what is already there, not imposing a verdict on it.
I feel as a writer that I’m more a servant than squire. And that my job is to listen, and to try and follow what is there, and listen for what is there, and discover it and put it down as evenly as possible without exaggeration. [paraphrased from audio]
That position extends to the book’s most morally charged figures. She told the Brick interviewer that judging anyone in her stories was simply not her place, and that she left the verdicts to the reader.
The personal thread
A country that regarded her as second-classKeegan left Ireland at 17, and the conditions she left behind were not abstract: contraception was still illegal, marital rape was not yet a crime, and she has said she felt the country treated her as a second-class citizen because of her gender. The novella’s setting in that same era is, on one level, a return to the world she escaped.
I’m not trying to be, I just am, political. I think that your beliefs as a human being will come out in your work, even if you try to have them not come out, if you’ve done your best.
The community’s silence around the laundries was the question that drove the book, and Keegan’s answer to it draws on what she knew from living inside that culture. The Church’s authority was not figurative but institutional: it controlled schools, hospitals, and employment.
I was really interested in why people did [know] and said nothing. And I do like to think the book answers that because people were terrified, and the church had such a stronghold. The church ran the schools, the hospitals, they hired and fired the teachers. There were a lot of books banned and contraception was illegal until 1985 in Ireland and marital rape was legal until 1990.
What she wants us to sit with
Self-destruction in the guise of heroismReaders who finish the book often reach for the word ‘heroic’ to describe Furlong’s final act at the convent. Keegan accepts the word and then immediately reframes what it costs him, drawing on his specific history of bullying and his need to keep working to avoid confronting who he is.
I know some readers see it as a story of a simply heroic character. I’m not saying that my character isn’t heroic — but I see Furlong as a self-destructive man and that this is the account of his breaking down. He’s coming into middle age, suffering an identity crisis, doesn’t know who his father is, and he’s also coming to terms with the fact that he was bullied at school. And his workaholism, which until now has kept the past at bay, is wearing thin.
In her Brick interview, Keegan traced the specific wound behind Furlong’s action. The psychological logic connects the taunts of his schoolyard past to the moment he walks into the convent and does something that could ruin him professionally and socially.
For somebody who had been bullied for years at school, probably the message there was ‘You’ll come to nothing. You’re a bastard child, you have no father, you’re nobody, and you don’t know who you are.’ That never really goes away. For him to have openly done something so astonishing was an act of self-destruction, seeing as he has five girls that he wants to send to a school run by the Catholic Church.
After finishing the novella, Keegan found herself returning to a Philip Larkin poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb,’ whose closing line, ‘What will survive of us is love,’ kept arriving unbidden. That convergence gave her a way to name what the book is finally about beneath its moral drama.
I couldn’t help thinking about it after I’d finished, thinking about Furlong being loved when he was a child, even though his own mother died, and knowing what love was and carrying it with the other things he experienced as he went through life and is getting to be middle-aged. He’s thirty-nine and touching forty, and he knows what love is. And that is something he is able to offer as a grown man.
The book’s open ending has been a frequent topic in interviews. Keegan’s explanation for where she chose to stop is not a statement about ambiguity as a literary virtue but about a specific aesthetic position she holds as a reader herself.
Because it suits my taste aesthetically as a reader. I’m trying to write a book I’d like to read. And the place I would like that story to stop is where I ended it because I think I’ve said enough. And for me, elegance is saying just enough.