Q&A with Claire Coughlan

 

 

 

Claire Coughlan is the author of the new novel Where They Lie. A longtime journalist, she lives in County Kildare, Ireland.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Where They Lie, and how did you create your character Nicoletta Sarto?

 

A: Hi Deborah. Thank you for reading my novel, and for these interesting questions. I was inspired by lots of different things. Like most writers, I’m a magpie when it comes to ideas, homing in on any shiny objects I come across, and I believe that good ideas occur when “two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new,” as Stephen King says in On Writing.

 

Many years ago, as part of my MA course in Creative Writing at University College Dublin, I took a module called Archive of the Imagination. As part of this class, we studied myths, legends and fairytales.

 

I read an Irish folktale called “The Man Who Had No Story,” which had been archived by UCD’s folklore department in the mid-late 20th century from the oral tradition after being translated from Irish into English.

 

I reimagined it as being about a young woman who has no story: a freelance journalist in mid 2000s Dublin whose deadline is looming. That desire to write about a journalist stayed with me.

 

I used to work as a journalist in Ireland and I wanted to create a narrative about a reporter investigating a story, who becomes sucked into it at a very high-stakes, personal level. I didn’t want to set in in contemporaneous times as I didn’t want people to think I was writing about myself!

 

I read a collection of journalism, Maeve’s Times, by the late Irish novelist Maeve Binchy, who was the first editor of the women’s pages at The Irish Times.

 

The late 1960s seemed like the perfect time to set my novel as many newspapers set up women’s pages around then, edited by female journalists. The Irish Women’s Liberation Movement was founded in 1970, with many of its members journalists, so this was the start of that wave of consciousness.

 

The character of Nicoletta Sarto arrived in my imagination one day. She feels like an outsider, and that she has a lot to prove. She also has secrets and trusts no one, which fits in with the themes of the novel.

Q: The writer Tana French said of the novel, “The mysteries surrounding Nicoletta intertwine grippingly with the mysteries within her, but what makes Where They Lie special is its keen awareness of Dublin’s layers of light and shadow. Coughlan digs deeply into the dark side, Ireland's horrifying record around women and childbearing – but at the same time the book brings to life, in fine, tender, vivid detail, the rich atmosphere of 1960s Dublin.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I have been a big fan of Tana French since her first novel, In the Woods, so I was blown away by this description. And I was so happy to read that my novel has “layers of light and shadow.”

 

Although there are sad/contentious social issues raised in my novel, I would sincerely hope that it’s not a sad/contentious book. There is so much that is good about Irish culture and society, and I am glad that Tana picked up on the light, as well as the shade.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: I’m not a very methodical researcher. I tend to research on a “need to know” business, according to what my character is doing, and then go down rabbit holes of information when I land on something interesting. I read newspapers and court reports from that time to lend any period details authenticity.

 

One of the things that definitely surprised me in the course of my research is that the truth is almost always stranger than fiction. Things make sense and have order on the page, whereas they rarely do in real life (to paraphrase Nicoletta!).

 

Q: Without giving anything away, did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I did many, many drafts of this novel. The plot evolved with each draft, though I did have an image of how the story would end before I started writing it.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a second Nicoletta Sarto novel, set in the summer of 1970, provisionally called Among the Ruins. Nicoletta covers a story about a woman’s grave being exhumed as her family suspect she has been the victim of murder and fraud after her paid carer vanishes.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Nothing is straightforward in this novel!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb