Molly Keane Creative Writing Award 2014

I was driving to a job hosted by the Yeats Society in Sligo, mid-May 2014. Just as Ben Bulben came into view, I got a call from Margaret Organ, Waterford Arts Office, telling me I was shortlisted for the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award 2014. Two weeks later, on a Friday evening, she phoned to say I had won but that I had to keep it to myself. I told my trusted husband and my pal Eilo, no burden to either to keep a confidence. 

Something changed in me then. I loved the validation, grateful to the five person judging panel, two of them Molly Keane’s daughters, for reading my story carefully, finding the worth in it, and its suitability for the prestigious prize.

Sally Phipps, Molly’s daughter wrote the biography, ‘A life’ (Virago 2016), calling her mother ‘a caustic chronicler,’ as indeed she was.

Molly represented the lost Anglo-Irish world of the great country house, hunting, extramarital affairs and bad parenting, a topic that still holds vestiges of taboo in modern society.

‘Good Behaviour’ (1991) was Booker nominated, a novel I have read more than once, a savage novel in ways, full of eviscerating put downs and dismissals of the family, a brilliant study of negligent  maternity, family survival, snobbery, social and class divides with good behaviour as the ideal.

The heroine child is Aroon, too tall and plain, too awkward and self-conscious, only daughter of ‘Mummie and Papa,’ desperately craving maternal love. But Mummie is unaware, cold and indifferent, channelling exclusive affection and attention on her beloved son Hubert. 

Novels like ‘Good Behaviour’ are not making it into the bookshelves today, hanging the private family linen in public, especially with traces of unfit mothering, still carrying a stigma.

Here’s a link to a short story I wrote, exploring the non-hallmark-card Irish mother and son relationship.