Set in rural Wexford, it is narrated by a young girl who is fostered out to another family, the Kinsellas, by her father, for the summer months. They are kind and caring, giving the girl the space to develop and feel valued. It is a getting-of-wisdom story and one that illuminates the contrasting lives of the families, one struggling and overcrowded, the other contented but childless, the rural community that they live in and, by extension, Ireland itself.
Blessedly, Keegan's Ireland is not the familiar land of misery, abuse and constant drizzling rain, but a place of community, common decency and, most surprising of all, sunshine. "For me, the fact that the story unfolds in summer was primarily a practical matter," she says, smiling. "For her to go away, it would have to be a summer. I made it hot because, given that it is so long since we've had [a hot summer] it was pleasurable to write about, but because it also deepened the happiness of the summer."
Though it seems, in its depiction of the slow rhythms of rural life, to take place in a much older Ireland, "Foster" is set in 1981. The reader only finds this out when Kinsella tells his wife, in passing, of a news report about the death of an IRA hunger striker. It is an arresting moment, one that makes the story seem suddenly both more contemporary and more ominous. Without giving too much away, "Foster" is about love and loss, about how familial grief can be transformed into tenderness, about how hope endures and, with it, kindness. It is, at times, almost unbearably poignant in its evocation of childhood innocence and adult stoicism.
"It's an examination of home and an examination of neglect," says Keegan. "I don't trust that home is necessarily where one finds one's happiness. Families can be awful places, just as they can be glorious and loving. Also, I'm very interested in what we can do without, what we can go without. To a child, for instance, the difference between being able to be well-fed when you are growing, and not, is enormous." Complex terrain, then, for a story just 88 pages long.
In writing the characters, Keegan tells me, she "discovered" a wealth of detail about them that was left off the page. She knew, for instance, that "the Kinsellas talked in bed at night about what they should do with the girl, and agreed on it". Why would she leave such an intimate and telling moment out of the narrative? "Because the girl, the narrator, didn't know about it. If it's not in her consciousness, I couldn't put it in."
You can read the full interview with Claire Keegan on the Guardian newspaper.
Blessedly, Keegan's Ireland is not the familiar land of misery, abuse and constant drizzling rain, but a place of community, common decency and, most surprising of all, sunshine. "For me, the fact that the story unfolds in summer was primarily a practical matter," she says, smiling. "For her to go away, it would have to be a summer. I made it hot because, given that it is so long since we've had [a hot summer] it was pleasurable to write about, but because it also deepened the happiness of the summer."
Though it seems, in its depiction of the slow rhythms of rural life, to take place in a much older Ireland, "Foster" is set in 1981. The reader only finds this out when Kinsella tells his wife, in passing, of a news report about the death of an IRA hunger striker. It is an arresting moment, one that makes the story seem suddenly both more contemporary and more ominous. Without giving too much away, "Foster" is about love and loss, about how familial grief can be transformed into tenderness, about how hope endures and, with it, kindness. It is, at times, almost unbearably poignant in its evocation of childhood innocence and adult stoicism.
"It's an examination of home and an examination of neglect," says Keegan. "I don't trust that home is necessarily where one finds one's happiness. Families can be awful places, just as they can be glorious and loving. Also, I'm very interested in what we can do without, what we can go without. To a child, for instance, the difference between being able to be well-fed when you are growing, and not, is enormous." Complex terrain, then, for a story just 88 pages long.
In writing the characters, Keegan tells me, she "discovered" a wealth of detail about them that was left off the page. She knew, for instance, that "the Kinsellas talked in bed at night about what they should do with the girl, and agreed on it". Why would she leave such an intimate and telling moment out of the narrative? "Because the girl, the narrator, didn't know about it. If it's not in her consciousness, I couldn't put it in."
You can read the full interview with Claire Keegan on the Guardian newspaper.
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