When you look back through your life, what is your biggest regret? Is it one, momentous moment, or a series of small, callous decisions? In Stations, author Louise Kennedy outlines 20 years of a young woman’s life, and lets us decide for ourselves what could have been done differently.
Stations sees the Irish author of Trespasses—a hit translated into more than 20 languages and adapted into a television series starring Gillian Anderson—returning to Ireland during the Troubles. While her debut centered on a forbidden love affair on opposing sides of the country’s violence, the sprawling narrative of Stations explores how one friendship can transform over time, opening up chasms that become increasingly perilous to cross as we age.
When we meet Red Camelin and Roísín McCaffrey, they are 16 and trudging through school in the Republic of Ireland. Roísín has just moved from Northern Ireland and is distinctly unpopular, whereas Red, all sly charm and long drags on his smokes, is the kind of boy who is “spoken about in giddy whispers” at school. When Roísín agrees to carry a note to him from one such giddy classmate, the pair strike up a friendship that is dragged kicking and screaming to its heart-wrenching conclusion over the next 200-something pages.
The pair transform from effusive, reckless teens to young adults in a London squat, running from both their own homes and the town they grew up in. They have different reasons for hitting the road, and not quite enough perspective to understand the other’s. Violence—emotional, physical, political—is relegated to Roísín’s peripheral vision. The kind of oblique references she misunderstands, the whispers of her parents in the kitchen she does and doesn’t want to overhear. On her own in London, getting fall-down drunk or worse with Red seems a fine enough way to escape into adulthood, even if not everyone in the dingy squat makes it to that phase of life. Those who do must reckon with everything, and everyone, they left behind.
Kennedy is unflinching in her account of the ills that festered within Irish society during the late 20th century—from addition, to abuse, to economic despair. With precision, she guides her characters and readers alike toward the questions that should have been asked, the steps that could have been taken.
As wonderfully specific as Stations is, the novel is far from historical fiction. In Roísín’s every petulant outburst, in Red’s every stubborn move, in the pair’s enduring softness despite it all, is an account of growing up that every individual who has had the privilege to do so will undoubtedly find relatable. What that says about us is perhaps Kennedy’s most incisive flourish yet.
This interview contains spoilers for the novel.
I know the character of Roísín originated in one of your previous short stories. I’d love to start by hearing how you decided to revisit her.
I started writing in 2014, and toward the end of that year I wrote a little thing that wasn’t quite a short story—I’m going to use a word I hate, “vignette,” because I can’t think of a better one. It ended up in Stations, toward the end of part two. It’s where Róisín has decided to go home to see her mother, who she hasn’t spoken to for months. She goes for a pint while she’s waiting to board a coach at Victoria Coach Station, and at the bar beside her there’s a man in his 50s from rural Ireland who was part of that previous big wave of emigration from Ireland to London. She boards the coach, but he doesn’t. That had stayed with me, so I knew I was interested in the story of the Irish in London.
The other thing I had was a short story in my collection called “Belladonna.” I think I felt a little bit bad about Róisín. This has happened with another story in the collection, too. There’s a story set on a farm in rural Ireland during lambing season, where a young pregnant woman is at home with a baby on her hip and her husband is in the lambing shed, which is actually a cannabis grow house. He’s in the company of an unhealthily sexy young girl in leopard-print wellingtons and wet-look jeggings called Stacey Rainey. I don’t think, in my hands, Stacey got to give a great account of herself, so I gave her another chance in a later story in the collection, where she’s the mother of a sick child.
So maybe I felt guilty about Róisín, because in “Belladonna” she is barely 14, she’s unpopular at school, and she doesn’t have a lot going on. She becomes unhealthily interested in a couple who move in across the road, misunderstands pretty much everything about what’s happening in their relationship, and toward the end says something that doesn’t help at all, to put it mildly. But I felt bad for her. She’s kind of awful, but she’s also very isolated, and she has things to be angry about. Maybe I wanted to give her another chance. I thought I’d give her a friend and see how she’d get on with that, and I think it’s fair to say the results are mixed.
You’re talking about the misunderstandings of being a teenager or a child. Here you’re giving her a chance to grow up. In the early chapters of Stations, I feel like you capture really well how, when you’re that age, everything is a very serious melodrama, but at the same time, you’re not quite ready to deal with legitimately serious situations. How do you think about that balance?
Even in the opening chapter, when Róisín meets Red, she has agreed to carry a letter to this boy, and he is beautiful and a bit of a handful. He’s troubled, and he’s got a bad reputation. All of those things were certainly enough to make me fall madly in love when I was a teenager—and sadly for a lot longer. I was probably in my early 30s by the time I got over that phase.
Red follows her home and stays for dinner. Even though he’s got a spanking new school bag and everybody knows his family has a bit more money than everybody else, he doesn’t go home. He spends most of his time in Róisín’s house. But she doesn’t really question that. A couple of times she wonders what’s going on, but she doesn’t let that feeling settle. Maybe that’s because she’s really self-absorbed, as we are at that age—certainly, I was—and she’s not getting what she wants. Very quickly she’s besotted, and there are signs that he’s a bit crazy about her, too, but she’s never really sure.
I also think the reader can see things before Róisín does. Much later in the book, Róisín’s mother reflects that nobody was asking the right questions. There are adults who suspect things aren’t right, but they don’t really do much about it. They try to manage it a little, but it probably needs some kind of grand intervention, which doesn’t come.
That’s an interesting tension in the book. You grow up and realize what was going on, and maybe you have a different perspective on it, but being an adult doesn’t mean you’re not out of your depth.
Sometimes there are things going on that are so dark and so disturbing that it mightn’t even occur to a right-thinking person that this is the case. In this country in the ’80s, and up until the ’90s, there were things happening that we just did not acknowledge, that everybody knew about.
It was a very Catholic, conservative country, a fearful place in some ways. There was no divorce, so if marriages broke down, people very rarely left the family home. They’d stay together hating each other’s guts and bring their children up in a horrible, stilted atmosphere. There were houses I went into as a teenager where that was the case, and it was really dreadful, but also very normal. Women’s reproductive rights were pretty much nonexistent. [One] way to deal with unwanted pregnancy was to lock women up and force them to do laundry: the Magdalene laundries, which were run by nuns. These were things that people knew about, but they were not discussed.
There were other things, too, like child abuse. Some very brave people came forward in the ’90s to talk about things that had happened to them in orphanages or even in their own homes. There was one almost landmark case of a farmer in the West of Ireland who had done things to his own children that no sane person could imagine doing to any creature on earth. There had been numerous interventions, but not with any great zeal. In fact, one of the children in that family had been to the emergency department of the local hospital more than 60 times with injuries, some of which were really suspicious. Eventually, a doctor there took the father aside and asked him to put his hand on the Bible and swear not to harm his children again. So this is the sort of place we lived in. There was all of that secrecy.
Tell me a little about putting together the two central characters. Róisín has that grit, that protective armor, to deal with all of the things we’re discussing. And Red is, as you were saying, that pitch-perfect boy you want to save, who you went to school with and think about for the rest of your life. How did they find themselves here?
I spent a long summer in London in 1985, from about May until October. Then I was back in London in 1988 and 1989. Pretty much everyone I knew left Ireland, at least for a time. The country was in a very deep economic recession, and, for the reasons I just explained, it was a stifling place to grow up. On the one hand, we were resentful that the country didn’t have anything to offer us, but we were also dying to get away. London was cheap to get to, it’s pretty close, and there was already a network there. So that’s what we did.
I’m really glad my own children didn’t do this, but at 17 and 18, we were in London. I didn’t live in squats. I paid loads of rent for places that weren’t much better than squats, because the idea of squatting terrified me. But I was on the margins of that world, because those were the places where my friends lived. We were all drinking, we were all doing anything else that was available, and most of us managed to get up and go to whatever shitty little jobs we’d found for ourselves in the morning. But some people didn’t. From the outset, some people, even in their teens, were going at it a little harder than everybody else. Of the people I knew then—and for periods of time I might have been very close to them—most are dead now. I’m fascinated by addiction. We’re all engaged in the same behavior, so how come some people stop and end up having normal lives, whatever that is, and other people don’t make it?
I guess that’s kind of the question at hand here. Róisín has this idea that if she had just done something a little differently, maybe things would be different. Where do you come down on that?
I have mixed feelings about it. I’m going to turn 60 next year, and I don’t know anybody—or actually, I don’t want to know— people my age who don’t have regrets. I don’t see how anybody could go through their lives and not look back on some things that happened, or some things they said or did, or, more crucially, didn’t do, and think, If I had done that differently, something might have happened differently. At the same time, I know lots of addicts, and they would all say it doesn’t matter what anybody does: unless the addict decides they want to get clean or sober, nothing is really going to help. I don’t know if we can change people. I think it’s probably better to err on the side of trying. Maybe that’s the regret Róisín has, that she didn’t even try.
There’s an element of her that’s unchanging through the novel—a combativeness with the people and the world around her. It seems like you’re making the argument that there are some inherent qualities we have.
I think fundamentally we don’t change at all. What we do as we get older is get better at publicly managing ourselves. As a teenager, Róisín is slamming doors. She’s shrieking horrible things at her mother. She thinks the world really needs her to tell everyone what’s on her mind at every given moment. By part three of the book, Róisín isn’t 15 anymore. She’s 40. No 40-year-old would get away with behaving like a 15-year-old girl, but that doesn’t mean her instincts aren’t the same. As you say, she’s stroppy. She’s very quick to blame people. She’s mistrustful. I think sometimes she can be generous as well, but it tends to be in spite of herself.
That was tricky, because I didn’t know how far I could go with it. I wanted her to have learned something by the end of the book, but she still has to fundamentally be Róisín. So maybe what happens is that, whereas in part one she’s shouting and banging doors, in part three it’s a voice in her head where she’s going, Oh God, I imagine he’s saying that or doing that. She becomes a bit more reflective, and for most of us that’s about all we can hope for.
Given where we leave everyone, do you think of it as a hopeful book, or a bit pessimistic? Or do you not concern yourself with making it one way or the other, and let the characters go where they go?
I hope it isn’t without hope. There are relationships in there that are great for Róisín and that really surprise her. When I’m working, I don’t think, I’m in this tradition or that tradition, but it is a realist novel, and didn’t feel that I could deliver any other ending than the one I did. It’s not a closed ending, so who knows what happens afterward? Maybe there’s a sign that the awful cycle of harm there can be in families might be broken, or that it can be broken. I think that’s a hopeful thing.
I have to ask you about the absence of Red at the end of the book, who is in the throes of addiction and lost to his friends and family. Roísín decides to try and track him down, but is unsuccessful. When I was getting to that final stretch, I saw there were 15 pages left. Okay, now there are 10 pages left, and he’s still not found. Where is he? I was hoping so much to see him.
I wrote a few different endings, and I did write one where it seemed she had some idea that he was out there. But honestly, I spent some very sad months looking quite obsessively through websites of missing people in the U.K. It would break your heart, and it’s also surprising, because we’re so trapped because of tech, but people disappear. I don’t know where they go, but they disappear without a trace. As Barry [another school friend who joined the pair in London] explains to Róisín, Red’s life became really precarious and dangerous, and it was unlikely that he survived. I had to bear that in mind. I really wanted her to find him, but honestly, that would be a fairy tale under the circumstances.
I’d love to ask how you felt putting out your second novel. I get the sense there’s been a lot of change for you in recent years, particularly with how well Trespasses did. Was there a different feeling going into this one?
I wrote Trespasses when I didn’t have a publisher, so there was great freedom in that. What I did have was a first draft that was a big mess, and it took about eight drafts in total to turn it into the book that was published. This time the process was different for a number of reasons. Obviously, there were people waiting: I had a couple of editors, one in New York and one in London. Also, people took to Trespasses in a way I never expected. It was made into a TV show, and there are 22 translations out there, so it’s had a much bigger and longer life than some books have. That was great. It was also kind of weird.
I had written Trespasses after a melanoma diagnosis and some surgery, and then, while I was writing this book, my melanoma came back, and it was stage four, so I needed to go on these big, mad immunotherapy drugs. The main thing is that they killed all the cancer, which is unbelievable, because if I’d had this maybe 10 years ago, I would absolutely have been dead within nine months. But it did have some permanent effects on my health. One of the things I have to manage is fatigue, so it was physically really hard to write. I was falling asleep at the desk, and I find it harder to concentrate than I did. But all of those problems kind of disappeared once I opened the document and got stuck into working. The writing actually cures all of it, thank God. It was when I wasn’t writing that the fear would get in: Oh God, what are people expecting, and what if everybody hates it? But the further into the book I got, the less I thought about that, because I just had to write the book I wanted to write.
I feel like every writer has a different opinion on whether, when they open the document, everything else goes away. But you can feel it in this book—it’s a very absorbing story. You’re really in this world.
In the acknowledgments at the back of the book, I thank my oncologist and the people at the hospital, but actually I should have thanked a company in Cork that produces Barry’s Tea, because I was drinking about five big mugs of Barry’s a day and sticking my head out the back door to get blasts of cold air to keep myself awake. It’s kind of funny. But once I was stuck into it, it was fine.
That’s a lot of things to have happen at the same time: to be going through treatment, to have a book take off and be made into a show, and to be working on the next one.
Yeah, but that was kind of great, to be honest. I didn’t have health insurance, because before I wrote books we didn’t have any money. So I was in a public oncology ward, getting a bag of drugs into a port-a-cath in my chest for several hours every two weeks for two years. When I wasn’t doing that, I was going all around the world talking about Trespasses. It was the best distraction from worrying about whether the drugs were going to work. It also probably stopped me from getting absolutely carried away and delighted with myself, and I’m glad of that, because it was very real. Do you know what I mean?
Well, I’m hoping that with the next one you can get carried away and delighted with yourself.
Oh, thank you so much. It’d be very hard for an Irish woman my age to get too carried away and delighted with herself. Maybe I’ll try.
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