Christine Dwyer Hickey: ‘I’m always going to be fragile about my relationship with my mother … I just try to make it up with my own kids’

The Dublin author Christine Dwyer Hickey is dressed in the standard-issue author uniform of head-to-toe black, and she exudes a cool glamour, from the subtle brocade of her trousers to her dark sunglasses and her tumbling auburn hair. We are meeting in a small coffee shop in the Dublin suburb of Blackrock to discuss her new novel, her ninth, Our London Lives. It’s her first book since 2020′s The Narrow Land, her novel about the artist Edward Hopper and his wife that won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award.
Our London Lives is a story closer to home both geographically and thematically, but as with all Dwyer Hickey’s novels there are enduring themes of loneliness, isolation, addiction, regret, human fallibility and complicated love, as well as the lives of women refracted through many lenses.
The book tells the story of Pip, an ageing former boxer just out of rehab and trying to begin a sober life, and Milly, an Irish barmaid living in London. Through a beautiful elliptical sequence of alternating chapters Dwyer Hickey pieces together their decades-long relationship.
She had wanted to write the story of a boxer for many years, even before she had the idea for The Narrow Land. Initially, she wanted it to be a play. Owen Roe was the actor she visualised in the role and in a nice piece of symmetry he now narrates the audiobook. But in 2015 she developed kidney cancer and decided she could do without the stress of a play and so shelved the idea. During her recovery, she saw a documentary about Hopper’s life and the idea for The Narrow Land took over.
But her boxer, Pip, remained in her imagination, and when she wrote the short Christmas story Home for BBC Radio 4 in 2020 she knew she had her second character, Milly, and Our London Lives was born.
The characters are both Irish in some way, but Dwyer Hickey wanted to avoid the cliches of the Irish in London. “They don’t belong to the Irish community, they don’t fit into the Irish community. Milly is a Protestant and she’s poor. Pip is sort of half-English but people think he’s Irish because he was educated in Ireland but the school is Clongowes, so it’s one of those schools.” So they are not part of the Irish community in Ireland or in London, nor do they fit in with their new London lives.
Dwyer Hickey spent four months living in London to research the novel. “I love cities, they invigorate me. Location is the first thing I have to have right when I write.” Like her character Milly, she spent some time working in a London pub as a young woman. “The anti-Irish thing was definitely there, the suspicion. I remember opening a paper and seeing a piece saying: get the Irish out.”
Dwyer Hickey is probably best known for her 2004 book, Tatty, but she didn’t always want to be a writer. In fact, at one point she actively shunned it. “My parents were very friendly with a lot of writers and it always struck me as being a very unhappy life. I would see heavy drinking, unhappiness, dare I say it sometimes neglected children, a lot of struggle, even the ones who had money. I didn’t want that.” Still, in her 20s with a young family, she was compelled to write a novel but it didn’t get published and put her off trying again. Did she find having children an impediment to pursuing her writing? “No. I actually think kids ground you. You just have to organise yourself. And it’s probably the best position to be in to write because if you’ve a full-time office job and kids, forget about it. You’re just going to be permanently exhausted. But the baby goes to sleep at some stage and the kids go to school and you forget about the housework and just sit down for two hours. It worked for me. I think it’s very difficult for women to write and have a full-time job and a family as well. It’s nearly impossible.”
[ Tatty: a book to illuminate our isolationOpens in new window ]
When she was approaching 30, she decided to try writing again. She entered the Listowel Writers’ Week short story competition and won. Then she won it again the following year, followed by the prestigious Observer/Penguin short story competition. “So then I thought … I’ll chance the novel,” she says with a smile.
After publishing a trio of novels known as the Dublin Trilogy, she published Tatty, which confirmed the arrival of a talented new voice. The book went on to be a bestseller and was longlisted for the then Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize) and more recently selected as the 2020 Unesco Dublin One City One Book choice. The book was semi-autobiographical and described her chaotic childhood growing up with alcoholic parents.
Unusually, Dwyer Hickey’s mother left the family and she recalls having to bring her two-year-old brother along to her Leaving Cert Irish oral exam. “He was swinging out of the trees roaring at the children outside,” she laughs. “It’s funny in a way. I remember going to an interview for the college of journalism in Rathmines, which I would have loved, and he was causing mayhem. I couldn’t even hear the questions they were asking me.” She laughs about it now but her relationship with her mother was irrevocably damaged. While they reconnected as adults, by the time she visited her dying mother in 2019, they hadn’t seen each other for decades.
“For 20 years I hadn’t seen her and even before that it was kind of a false relationship because I always had to be very careful about what I said to her. I could never say, why did you leave me with the burden of so much? It’s difficult to talk about that in a way. I’m always going to be fragile about it and disturbed about it and I just try to make it up with my own kids. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met Dennis, to be honest with you,” she says of her husband. “He’s so steady and secure and very affectionate. I nearly lost him in January.”
After they both developed Influenza A while on holiday in Seville, her husband had a heart attack upon their return, the result of post-viral inflammation of his heart muscle. “I became almost incapable,” she says of the time he was in hospital. “I couldn’t cope without him.”
A member of Aosdána, Dwyer Hickey is among the most admired and respected writers in Irish literature, even if she is not as much of a household name in Ireland as some of her peers (in Italy and Germany “they go ballistic” for her.) When asked by this newspaper in 2015 who was the most underrated Irish writer, she answered “Myself – if I’m to believe what I’m told!”. It is a source of amusement to her when asked why she thinks she isn’t as well known as she should be. “I think it’s my personality. I have to arrange to be a bit more difficult,” she says laughing.
And it’s true, Dwyer Hickey is fun, easy company, telling tales and cracking jokes, impatient of any pretension. “Some people are really good at being career writers, really good at projecting themselves and nobody messes with them. I write because I have to write and because it gives me some kind of peace, even though it’s stressful sometimes. It puts me into another world and it’s an essential part of me. I’m always thinking. I’m always intellectualising everything. I’m interested in people and interested in everything that happens in the world, but I don’t want to be going around with a big serious puss on me all the time.”
Does she think her underrated status might have something to do with sexism? “That’s to imply that Irish male writers somehow elbow you out of the way and I actually think most of them are gentlemen. But I also sometimes think that everybody prefers the boys, even the women.”
With 10 books published, including her short story collection, she is happy with where she is in her writing career. “I have complete freedom. I have publishers who get me, they’re very good and they’ve been generous with me. It’s not massive six-figure sums but they look after me and they don’t try to bend what I write. That’s quite precious because I know people who have just as many books as I have and they can’t get published.”
One hesitates to ask an author who has just spent five years working on a novel what’s next, but she is already working on a second collection of short stories. “I’m going to avoid a novel for a little while now because my publishers are repackaging and reissuing all of my books. But I still want to do my cowboy book … and my detective one.”
Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey is published by Atlantic Books on September 5th