Claire Keegan’s “Foster”

I don’t remember who gave me this piece of advice, but it’s one I tell my students: if you’re writing about people who are different from you, read writers like them. I find this really helpful for the men in my class. It’s not enough to have women in your life: you have to hear their voices on the page. 

In my case, I have a character I’m working on who is an Irishwoman, so I’ve begun reading Irish women writers. I still haven’t gotten to Sally Rooney–Conversations with Friends is near the nightstand, though not quite on it yet–but I read Claire Keegan’s Foster while in Galway. It’s more of a novella, and not typically the type of book I’m attracted to. It’s told from a child’s POV–I rarely enjoy  reading about children–and it’s a very quiet story set in rural Ireland involving a young girl sent to a relative’s house as her mother gives birth to yet another child. Her family is broke, the father a ne’er do well. 

In her relative's house, she finds a kind of peace and love that she didn’t know existed. But there’s also a darkness in the house that gives the story a larger sense of scope. Keegan also has a really spare voice I enjoyed: “And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before.”