‘Antarctica’ by Claire Keegan

My female relatives huddle round me in the bedroom, have brought up tea, china cups and saucers excavated from the sideboard, the clink of crockery on trays. They’re tweedy, big-boned women who like to think they taught me right from wrong, manners and the merits of hard work. Flat-bellied, temperamental women who’ve given up and call it happiness. We come from women who comfort men, men who never say no. Now they fill their best teacups, asking about my future, asking, ‘What is it you do now?’ and ‘What are you going to do now?’, which isn’t quite the same thing.

‘I’m going to write,’ I say. A smutty novel, I want to add, something lecherous and bawdy, make Fanny Hill look like your Sunday missals.

This always brings a sneer. It’s a smart answer but a queer occupation, especially at my age. They calculate my age mentally, trying to remember what happened around the time I was born, who died. They’re not too sure, but I’m no spring chicken any more. I should be doing something else by now, latching myself on to some unmarried man with a steady wage and a decent car.

‘You and your books,’ they say, shaking their heads, squeezing the good out of the teabags.

They don’t know the half of it. Don’t know the disguises I’ve made for them, how I took twenty years off their hard-earned faces, washed the honey-blonde rinses out of their hair. How I put them in another country and changed their names. Turned them inside out like dirty old socks. The lies I’ve told.

The final paragraph of this extract from ‘Quare Name For A Boy’, one of the fifteen short stories in Claire Keegan’s 1999 prizewinning debut collection (just re-issued by Faber as a timely stocking-filler), struck a chord when I read it today. Having opted for the Creative Nonfiction genre on my recently completed Masters degree with the Open University, I have spent much of the past two years turning the lives and characters of my family and friends inside out for the sake of my prose. Socks, underwear, bed linen. I took my pick. The dirtier the better. I call it memoir. They might call it a bloody cheek.

Of course, I have been acutely aware of the ethical dilemma of writing about people I know while trying to respect their privacy, dignity and anonymity. But for the sake of the story, this sometimes isn’t possible. After all, Carole Angier (Cline and Angier 2010, p.9) comments that life writers like herself are ‘private detectives who take the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside…What we do is dangerous.’ I am also conscious of the vagaries of memory and the need to play a little fast and loose sometimes with the truth for literary effect.

While these stories remain unpublished and shared only within the semi-confidential confines of academic discourse with my university tutor and peer tutees, I can live with the problem. However, I foresee a time when I might want these tales to reach a wider audience. And then the seriousness of the issue will depend on which genre I choose: either turning characters and situations into fictions where the resemblance to anyone living or dead, or actual events, is, to coin a phrase, purely coincidental; or biting the bullet by giving people and places their real names for nonfictional authenticity and credibility, while submitting their appearance to a rinse-through at the hands of libel lawyers before risking publication.

The Times critic, Susie Goldsbrough, described ‘Antarctica’ as ‘sketches by the Artist as a Young Woman’ in her tepid review of the reprint of Keegan’s book. Although she acknowledges the author is writing about what she knows – from the rural Irish settings familiar to Keegan’s readers from ‘Small Things Like These’ and ‘Foster’ to the surprising locations of New Orleans where the author went to college – Goldsbrough notes a lack of ‘warmth’; that the stories ‘make no attempt at understanding – its men are unredeemed, its women unspared’. The title of the collection suggests that the younger Keegan was not unaware of this and not worried by it either. Goldsbrough concludes that in the work of the older writer, Keegan has become ‘strong enough to accommodate love’.

Perhaps being confident (and wizened) enough to bring some love and warmth into my stories (fictional or otherwise) points the way to counter-balancing the worries I have about how they might expose – or exploit – those about whom I write. Time will tell.

I leave the last word to Virginia Woolf in ‘Orlando’:

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.