Claire Keegan interview: 'A longer novel would not have suited my main character's personality'

How does it feel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and what would winning the Booker mean to you?

It’s both a privilege and an honour to see this novel nominated for the Booker Prize, to know that the judges consider it worthy. I’ve no idea what winning would mean, don’t know that anyone could know what winning would mean unless or until it happened - and even then, its meaning might be difficult to articulate. More readers is the most obvious answer - readers who might not otherwise find your work finding your work. 

There was an 11-year gap between your last book, Foster, and Small Things Like These. How long did it take to write Small Things, and what does your writing process look like? Do you type or write in longhand? Are there multiple drafts, sudden bursts of activity, long pauses? Is there a significant amount of research and plotting before you begin writing?

I don’t like to think about how long it took to write this book. The story was rumbling in the back of my mind for a long time, some years, before I ever began and then I went through a period of taking notes and trying not to write it. I’m always reluctant to go in - and my early drafts are the most difficult to compose and face. At the beginning, little or nothing works on a level of suggestion. It seems to me that all good stories are told with varying degrees of reluctance - and in my case the author, too, is reluctant to go in. But not writing is almost always more difficult than writing.

There must be 50 or so drafts. I’ve kept them all and they filled two large boxes. I take notes in longhand then make the incision in time and choose a point of view, and begin freshly, on the screen. Long pauses don’t work for me. There is no magic drawer in my house that makes the work look better after it is put away for months, but I understand that other writers do find this useful.

I don’t ever plot. And I do very little research, as little as possible. I prefer to use my imagination. Language is older and richer than we are and when you go in there and let go and listen, it’s possible to discover something way beyond and richer than your conscious self. It seems to me that when we fail, it’s because our imagination fails us. I believe this to be true of both life and literature. 

Where do you write? What does your working space look like?

I write at home. This book was written in my sitting room overlooking the Wexford coast, and was completed during lockdown. I wrote for several hours every night and morning during those 18 months, as my fellowship at Trinity College was cut short when the pandemic began and I didn’t have the usual commitments to my students.

If it was at all cold, I kept the fire going. It’s nice to have a fire in the room you’re working in. Long, dark mornings can also be a great help. And a young ginger cat came straight up to me out of the bushes and moved in and slept on an old sheepskin on my desk, as though that’s where he wanted me to be. In the finish, for that final year and more, I was probably averaging eight hours a day at the desk, something I’d never done. 

Small Things Like These is the shortest book to have been longlisted for the Booker in its entire history. Did you know from the outset that it was going to be a short book? Are your earlier drafts much longer? 

It isn’t possible at the outset to know what length a book will be. I’ve never set out to write something short except when there was a set word limit for a short story competition or a commissioned piece. But I’ve always been interested in choosing well and putting what’s chosen to good use, reusing those choices made. I’m more interested in going in than going on.

There’s a wonderful letter Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander about the meaning of grace, how grace is when you make the least number of movements between two points - and that type of athletic prose has always appealed to me, coupled with light-handedness and restraint. Elegance, to me, is writing just enough. And, as James Baldwin said, in his Paris Review interview, ‘the hardest thing in the world is simplicity’.

I’m interested in transitions, paragraph structure, in what happens between paragraphs, those leaps in time. And Furlong, my central character, isn’t someone who says much. He’s a most unwilling narrator, so I was obliged to stay within his mindset, his reluctances. A longer novel would not have suited his personality and it’s all told from his point of view, so it was my task to oblige him in this way, to be well-mannered towards and abide by his reserve.