The Women on Platform Two
The Women on Platform Two
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Laura Anthony on The Women on Platform Two
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A Wikipedia accident and a forgotten trainAnthony was not researching the Irish women’s movement when she found it. She was following an unrelated thread online when she stumbled onto the events of May 22, 1971, the day a group of Irish women boarded a train from Dublin to Belfast, bought contraception across the border, and came home with it openly. The discovery stopped her completely.
To say my mind was blown would be an understatement. I had absolutely no idea that this event had ever happened. [paraphrased from audio]
Her first instinct was to call her friends. When she asked whether any of them knew how contraception had actually come to Ireland, none of them did. That gap between the scale of what those women had done and the near-total public silence around it was what made the novel inevitable.
The forgotten status of the women who boarded that train became the animating injustice behind the project. Anthony framed it not just as a historical oversight but as a failure of collective memory that her generation was living inside without knowing it.
The women before us paved the way so our lives could be so much easier, and we’re not really celebrating them. [paraphrased from audio]
Before the history arrived, there was the personal experience. Anthony describes spending nearly an hour pacing outside a Boots pharmacy in Dublin at nineteen before she could bring herself to go in and buy a pregnancy test. That moment became the novel’s opening scene, carried word for word from her own life into the book’s first pages.
I took my first pregnancy test in the public toilets of St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre in Dublin. I was nineteen.
How she wrote it
Three women, three different reasonsAnthony built the novel around three main characters, and the structural rule she set herself was that their reasons for needing contraception could not overlap. Maura’s situation required the most careful calibration: her desire for motherhood was real, which meant her need for contraception could not come from reluctance but from something more frightening.
She actually, really, truly wanted to be a mother. But she started to fear that if she couldn’t keep herself safe, how was she possibly going to keep a baby safe? [paraphrased from audio]
Writing Maura’s story meant deciding how much violence to put on the page. Anthony made the choice to be specific rather than elliptical, partly because of what she wanted readers to understand about the interior life of a woman in that situation, and partly because of what Maura ultimately becomes by the end of her arc.
It was quite hard to decide the level of detail that I was going to include, but I think Morah’s story ultimately — she’s a woman who overcame so incredibly much and had to really find her inner strength — and so I did make the creative decision to be quite descriptive in her scenes. [paraphrased from audio]
Bernie’s storyline was built on a deliberate structural inversion. Where Maura’s marriage is dangerous and Saoirse’s situation is solitary, Bernie has a loving husband. Anthony designed that relationship to make a specific argument: that the problem of illegal contraception was not confined to unhappy homes, and that the law pressed equally on couples who faced it together.
I wanted to make sure that Bernie and her husband Dan had a wonderful relationship. Because I think in their instance, and I think in every instance, contraception is not necessarily just a woman’s concern. Especially with a loving couple, it’s very much the concern of their unit. [paraphrased from audio]
Every difficulty Bernie and Dan face comes from the law, not from each other. That choice keeps the novel from reducing the contraception ban to a symptom of bad marriages.
Anthony simplified some of the real history to make it novelistic — the actual participants in the 1971 contraceptive train were mostly journalists with media contacts her fictional characters do not have. But she kept one of the stranger true details: in Belfast, the women found they could not simply buy the pill without a prescription, so they improvised with paracetamol tablets and empty blister packs. She left this in the novel precisely because it is real.
That’s actually what they returned with. But nobody knew. [paraphrased from audio] This is all in the book, but it’s all also true.
The personal thread
Timing as the only differenceAnthony became a mother at nineteen, and she has been public about what that meant in terms of how others saw her future. When her book deal was announced, she posted about it on social media in a way that folded her professional milestone directly into that history.
I was a teen mam and people said my life was ruined. Today, I’m a published author. I think people were wrong, eh?
Writing the novel required Anthony to hold her own life next to the lives of women who were teenagers in Dublin in an earlier era. The comparison is not abstract: girls who entered the Magdalene Laundries were often in circumstances almost identical to hers, separated from her only by when they were born. She names that proximity directly in her personal essay.
The difference between my life and theirs is nothing profound, it is simply timing. Our fortunes were separated only by the decades in which we found ourselves pregnant.
This is the argument the novel’s dual timeline is built to carry. The contemporary thread with Saoirse in 2023, set alongside Maura and Bernie’s 1971 story, asks readers to feel that proximity rather than simply understand it as a fact.
What she wants us to sit with
Celebration before it becomes assumptionAnthony returned to the same word repeatedly in the podcast interview when asked what drove the project. Not justice, not outrage: celebration. The women who boarded the train in 1971 took a concrete, physical risk to assert a right that the next generation has largely inherited without knowing where it came from.
I was just so drawn to it to just really celebrate what these women have done to make my life so much easier. [paraphrased from audio]
Below the celebration is a principle she states without qualification. The novel’s three storylines, varied as they are, all circle the same underlying claim about who gets to make decisions about a body and a life.
I think that everybody has a right to govern their own body. And their own lives. I should never tell you how to live your life or what is best for you, and you should offer me the same respect. [paraphrased from audio]
The contemporary frame of the novel, set in 2023, is where that principle becomes a question rather than a settled fact. Anthony leaves Saoirse’s timeline open enough that readers cannot take the rights Maura and Bernie fought for as guaranteed.