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Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell Books

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Hamnet

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After You'd Gone

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“It seems to Marithe that her life has undergone two changes: one, when her father left. And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted; like the deck of a ship in a storm. At first it seemed to her that her house, her family, her dogs, her accordion, her books, her room with its geology samples, its display of feathers, its pictures of foxes and wolves, all took on an unreal aspect. Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You're picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home? [...] And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbours' horses -- which she hardly ever did any more, she didn't know why -- she wouldn't have the energy, the sap in her to do it. She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?”

SelfSelf AwarenessTeenagerSelflessnessExternalization
Book:This Must Be the Place
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“The sight of the mark seemed to enrage the father further because he lifted his arm again, for a second blow, but the son reached up. He seized his father’s arm. He pushed, with all his might, against him and found, to his surprise, that his father’s body yielded under his. He could push this man, this leviathan, this monster of his childhood, back against the wall with very little effort. He did so. He kept his father there with the point of his elbow. He shook his father’s arm, like that of a puppet, and the wineskin dropped to the floor. He leant his face into his, noticing at the same time that he was looking down on him. That, he said to him, is the last time you will ever hit me.”

Empowerment
Book:Hamnet
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“I find,' he says, his voice still muffled, 'that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can't have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That's what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.”

GriefLoss Of A Child
Book:Hamnet
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“He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without the rain.”

Grief
Book:Hamnet
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“She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion. There is the stall they passed earlier, piled high with tin pots and cedar shavings. There is the woman they saw, still making her decision, holding two pots in her hands, weighing them, and how can she still be there, how can she still be engaged in the same activity, in the choosing of a pot, when such a change, such a transformation has occurred in Agnes's life? Her very world has cloven in two and here is the same dog dozing in a doorway. Here is a young woman, tying up clothing into bundles, just as she was doing when they passed. Here is her neighbour...giving her a grave nod as he walks by. Can he not see, can he not read that life as she knows it is over, that he is gone?” Hamnet, pp214-5”

Loss
Book:Hamnet
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“She glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.”

LossSorrow
Book:Hamnet
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“Lucrezia had not known it was possible to fall asleep--or, at least, a halfway version of it--on horseback. That you could be riding along, a leading rein stretching from your horse's bridle to the hand of a groomsman, mounted beside you, and your head could tilt forward, slowly, so slowly, and you would believe you were just resting your eyes for a moment, but then you would jerk it upright again and see that the sun had slipped down behind the rocks and the trees had clothed themselves in darkness and the night sky was a black bowl upturned over your head.”

Falling AsleepHorseback Riding
Book:The Marriage Portrait
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“Cuando se la apretó aquel día, el día en que lo conoció, sintió… ¿qué? Algo sin igual, algo desconocido hasta entonces. Algo que no se esperaba en la mano de un joven de la villa, un bachiller con estudios y botas limpias. Algo de gran alcance: de eso estaba segura; con muchas capas y estratos, como un paisaje. Vio espacios y vacíos, partes densas, cuevas subterráneas, elevaciones y depresiones. No le dio tiempo a entender la totalidad de aquello: era demasiado grande y complejo. Escapaba a su comprensión casi por completo. Sabía que había más de lo que podía asimilar, que era más grande que los dos juntos.”

AutorasLiteratura InglesaHistórica
Book:Hamnet
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“There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The clac-clac-a-clac of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn't, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The ding every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in.”

WritingTypingTypewriter
Book:The Hand That First Held Mine
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“Sigue pintando mucho rato, se aleja de la tavola y vuelve a acercarse. Observa la transición del cuenco a la miel y a los pliegues y arrugas del paño. Sigue su curso entre los objetos, entre la forma en que influyen unos en otros, entre los espacios y las conversaciones que sostienen entre ellos; se reduce al tamaño de un escarabajo para poder pasar por los huecos que quedan entre los melocotones y por los hexágonos contiguos del panal. Palpa las formas correspondientes en el cuadro usando los pinceles como si fueran patas o antenas, buscando el camino en el terreno desconocido de cada objeto, abriéndose paso en lo que hay por debajo de lo que se ve”

ArtePintura
Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“Despite being from Ireland, I've always avoided writing about it, for two reasons. For a very small country, Ireland has produced an astonishing number of literary geniuses, and at some level I probably never felt, having left as a toddler, that I had the right to try and add my voice. That's part of it. But I also didn't want to write something that was the equivalent of the Irish theme pub. You find them all over the world. The idea of producing a novel that might replicate that type of ersatz really set my teeth on edge.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“When my family moved from Ireland in the 70s, Britain was such a difficult place to be Irish. It was a decade of real social and economic upheaval in Britain. There were strikes, the three-day week, the oil crises, huge inflation, the winter of discontent and, what was it, four Prime Ministers? And relations between Britain and Ireland at that time were at an all-time low. I was born in the year of Bloody Sunday and of course the pub bombings happened in the mid-1970s.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“There was so much anti-Irish sentiment not just from other kids at the school I went to in Britain, but also the teachers themselves. I remember very clearly a lot of the things people said to me and my sisters. And of course those sentiments go back a long way. When my dad visited London in the 50s and was looking for somewhere to stay, there were signs outside boarding houses that said "No blacks, no Irish."”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“When I worked at The Independent newspaper, I had colleagues who would laugh and say that whenever they picked up the phone to my dad and heard his accent, they thought they were about to hear a five-minute warning to get out the building. People in Britain have always thought it acceptable to make racist remarks about the Irish. The prejudice underlying that supposed joke was everywhere.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“Spending a lot of time away from home was strange. My parents visited me, obviously, but I was in hospital a lot, alone. And then when my health had improved a bit and I was in a sick-bed in the house, with the life of the house going on around me, that was very vivid for me. I always think that's a bit like the position of a novelist in a novel, going through drafts: there but not there, one remove from reality.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“The role you've been ascribed in childhood can twist or break apart or seem outgrown, especially when you have your own family and begin to see your own childhood from a different angle. You remember. You reassess. I think that was the kernel of the novel for me. This idea that you change but that your family, the people you were born into, might find that change hard to accept. You no longer fit the mold you've always been ascribed. When the adult children in the book converge back on their small family home there's a sense that they don't fit there anymore.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“I think all families have these secrets, and it's sometimes the strangest things that bring them out. That was part of my interest in the heatwave, in heat as a catalyst for uncovering truths. I was reading Alice in Wonderland to one of my kids recently, and I remembered that it starts on a really hot day. Alice falls asleep because of the heat; the whole story is predicated on falling into a heat-fueled dream.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of people who just walk out of their lives when the weather gets unbearable is astronomic. He said the police prepare themselves for it - for a huge rise in the instances of missing persons. People choose to disappear when it's hot. It was fascinating.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“While I was writing the book, one of my children was diagnosed with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very tiny word for a wide-ranging neurological condition that affects different people in different ways. But I was reading an awful lot about it, to try and find ways of helping my child. I think a lot of fiction comes from this desire to confront unanswerable questions, and it's heartbreaking to see your child, a bright child, struggling so much with something that others are finding so easy. It's such an assault to the child's self-esteem and, as a mother, it's hard to watch.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, when there were no books on it, when there was no understanding of it. I remember kids in my class at school who just didn't seem to progress in their reading. There was no extra help. People just thought, "Oh, he or she isn't so bright, or they're obstinate."”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“Something that had an enormous influence over my relationship with language was my stammer. I had a really bad stammer in my childhood and adolescence, and that imbues you with two things. First, a hyper-sensitivity to grammar, because a stammerer will have problematic sounds, impossible verbal stumbling blocks. Second, writing is just such a joy when you have a problem with speaking. It's so astonishing to watch language coming out of your pen without any hesitation or dysfluency.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“I still have a stammer. I hate it; I loathe and despise it. But it's always there, and I have lots of ways to conceal it. I can conceal it now but I'm not good on the telephone. I get my husband to make dentist appointments. And I hate live radio. Hate it. I really try to avoid it at all costs. But it's always there. Stammerers become skilled at sentence construction and synonyms: we have to be. Faced with a problem word, we need to have instant access to eight others we could use instead - ones we could say without stumbling. I think my stammer is a huge part of my being a writer.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“For a while I used to listen to those whispers about babies costing you books, and Cyril Connolly's loathsome quote that "There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." But it's rubbish. Absolute rubbish. A huge amount of your work is done when you're not at your desk. Knotty problems that you need your unconscious to solve. So it can be helpful to walk away and focus on other things and it can be helpful to be a bit harassed in your daily life, to be hungry for time to write.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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“My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial and irreplaceable and you want them to approach it as someone in a bookshop might, not knowing much about it. So I've got into this pattern of not telling Will anything about the book I'm working on. He often knows nothing about the book I'm working on at all until I give him the whole manuscript and ask him to read it. The book I'm working on at the moment he knows nothing about. No one does.”

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Author:Maggie O'Farrell
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