The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Exploring the Rich Tapestry of The Coast Road With Author Alan Murrin
Hi there!
In this week's episode, Irish author Alan Murrin tells us about his childhood as an "author," his teen life ensconced in rigorous piano practice, and mastering the art of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Learn how his varied career in the art world and as a bookseller in London shaped his unique voice, making his debut novel, The Coast Road, a complex story of women dealing with life in 1995 Ireland.
Alan takes us behind the scenes of the intense five-way publishing bidding war in London over The Coast Road and his journey from finished manuscript to published book.
Explore the societal undercurrents of 1990s Ireland through Alan's eyes as he reflects on the pressures women faced during the 1995 divorce referendum. Hear how Alan's upbringing, with a father involved in fishing politics and a mother running a bed and breakfast, infuses his storytelling with authenticity and emotional resonance.
I love The Coast Road and I hope you do too :)
Enjoy!
Mandy
Alan Murrin
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 261.
Speaker 1:Alan Murin is an Irish fiction writer. His debut novel, the Coast Road, was shortlisted for the Peters Fraser Dunlop Queer Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Caledonia New Novel Award. In 2021, Alan was the winner of the Bournemouth Writing Prize for his short story, the Wake, which went on to be shortlisted for Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was published in the collection Waves of Change. In 2023, he was awarded an Irish Arts Council Next Generation Award. Alan is a graduate of the Prose Fiction Masters at the University of East Anglia and writes for the Irish Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. His writing on art and photography has appeared in Art Review and the White Review. Here's a short synopsis of the Coast Road.
Speaker 1:Set in 1994, the Coast Road tells the story of two women, Izzy Kiveny, a housewife, and Colette Crowley. A poet, Colette left her husband and sons for a married man in Dublin. When she returns to her home in County Donegal to try to pick up the pieces of her old life, her husband, Sean, a successful businessman, denies her access to her children. Hi, Alan, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Mandy, and thanks for asking me to do this.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned earlier to you, I cannot believe the Coast Road is a debut novel. I loved it and I've been recommending it to everyone, so congratulations on the book. It really is a fantastic piece of work. Now let's begin by learning about you and your life in Ireland studying at the University of East Anglia in the UK, relocating to Berlin, and when you realised you had a passion for writing. I know that's a lot of questions all wrapped up into one.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've always written, even since I was a child, and I think you know, when you're a child and you're praised for something, it tends to be what you cling to, because kids are so responsive to that sort of affirmation. I was writing stories when I was a small child and I distinctly remember watching a kid's show with some puppets and they stole a rubber chicken full of diamonds and I continued the story and I thought that you, you know, if you wrote with pen in a notebook and you filled that notebook up from cover to cover, that meant you had written a book. You know the equivalent. And I mean I did other things, took over and other other sort of distractions in life. I played the piano when I was a kid, actually, and I was reasonably good and for a period in my teenage years that became my obsession and then, almost as soon as I decided I didn't want to be a musician, the writing came back in again. But I think there was something about practicing the piano all the time and the level of self-motivation and discipline that took at that particular time in your life and going back to something and failing at it and failing at it again until you get it right was very good.
Speaker 2:It's also given me like a real, uh, affinity with sort of monastic professions. I always think, like I mean, writing is quite monastic, but you know, when I hear that someone is, you know, a concert pianist or a ballet dancer or something like that, that's the real gruel that I think, oh my God, that's a life that always holds deep appeal for me. And then I decided, as a consequence of getting more interested in writing, that I was going to study English at university because I couldn't think of a better training. And, yeah, I went to Trinity in Dublin, I studied English there for years and then I lived in London for nine years and I worked in the art world. Actually, actually, that kind of happened by accident. I sort of just needed to earn money and I arrived in London at 23. I'm going to be a writer and I went for a job interview with someone who said no, come and work for me, because you don't know anything about the world.
Speaker 1:You're too young.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're too young, yeah, um, and so I did uh various jobs in galleries and artist studios throughout my 20s and had this kind of like weird and rarefied experience of the commercial gallery world. And uh, then I left that and I went back to become a bookseller and I'm framing that as if that was planned. I would say I quit a job and I had nothing else to do and I thought you know what, Maybe this is the time to concentrate on the writing. And so I worked as a bookseller at Don't Books in London for part and full time for a couple of years, at which point I had been almost eight, nine years out of formal education. I'd spent my entire 20s saying I don't need to do a master's in creative writing.
Speaker 2:And then I thought that what I did need was a year to write, which you know formal education does provide that sort of freedom to do and I decamped to Norwich from London, lived there for a year, had the most wonderful time, had been out of full-time education long enough that I really appreciated the opportunity again. You know, if I had gone straight from my undergraduate into this really prestigious programme I would have thought that's just what happens, whereas actually it, you know it had been hard won and I was ready to do it.
Speaker 2:Um, I was. You know, I had a level of discipline I wouldn't have had at 23 and, um, yeah, and I mean, it was an extraordinary year. What did I learn on that course? I mean, it made you just. It took away a lot of the illusions about writing as, um, something that is anything other than sitting down to tell a story and you have a job and you have to think about the reader a great deal, which is something I probably wasn't doing before. Structure, form, perspective, things that are basic, but if you get them wrong, you're incredibly talented.
Speaker 1:Oh, isn't that the truth, alan? I'm interested because I've asked this question to a lot of authors who have done their MAs in creative writing. What was it that you think you gained from your MA? Many writers will say it was all about the people I met there, who I'm still friends with. It's like having a support system. Others have said that the style of their writing or the genre of their writing almost wasn't appreciated or somewhat acceptable within that department, but they all say that what they did gain was that community. So how was your experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I went there with the plan that I was really just going to concentrate on the work rather than thinking I have to write a novel this year that will be published, because if I was considering those kinds of pressures I would be sort of second guessing myself or trying to judge a market or what people wanted or whatever. So I approached it in a sense that I just went. Every workshop I went to I brought a different short story, of course. Then some kind of like mercenary impulse did kick in and I thought, oh, hang on, these are all about the same community in Donegal, and it was the first time I'd allowed myself to write about home.
Speaker 2:I find the structure of a linked collection of short stories, when it works, deeply satisfying. But I did not know how to write a novel or a great short story, and the idea that I would combine both in a way that would have like the overarching structural principles of a novel was beyond that particular time. So what I did leave with was a handful of good stories that I still couldn't get published, like no one wanted what I was selling. And it was also very good UEA for connecting you with publishers and agents. They, they organized those meetups at the end of the year and it's how I met my agent.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a great bonus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she waited five years, but anyway it was five years after I graduated. We'd kept in touch before she actually had a manuscript from me, and it just goes to show. I guess that's good advice as well. If someone likes your work, they will wait. You only get one chance to get it right with them, so you should wait until it's ready, or until it's prepared to hear no. I think that's also good advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is good advice. And after five years your agent, caroline Wood at Felicity Bryan Agency, took you on as a client. Was there interest in your book from publishing companies immediately?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was a five-way auction in London for the book, which was very exciting. I mean, there's also it's interesting that you know you're allowed into some of the conversations. That goes on and people did say no, it's just not for me. You know it wasn't an unequivocal joy to certain people and I suppose when you're deciding what books to buy at some point it has to go on instinct and subjectivity. Like you know, I just couldn't. Some people didn't like the character development or did a bit of a downer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's important to remember that rejection isn't always personal. And what about Berlin? What was the draw to live there?
Speaker 2:So I made a bargain with myself when I was I'd been living in London for nine years and I was ready for a change for sure. And I had been visiting friends, like really good friends from back in Ireland who'd been living here for a few years, and I thought, oh, that seems like a different way to live. And it's funny, when I visited it in my early twenties and I was fresh out of university, I was so ambitious in that sort of like insanely kind of capitalistic way you can be at that age where you just have to be successful. And so when I was hanging out in Berlin in my early 20s and I would see people, you know, doing nothing in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, I'd be like, what are they doing? And when I came back at 33, I was like that's exactly what I want. Yeah, that's perfect, that seems great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have spoken with a few friends who are now living in Berlin and they absolutely love it. I was there in 87. I was on tour with David Bowie working as a stylist for the Glass Spider Tour. One of the things I loved was the thrift store shopping in Berlin. Oh my goodness, back then it was absolutely fantastic. The downsides for me was the fact that the wall was still up and it was so depressing and at that stage I was vegetarian, going into vegan and that was really hard because it was so much meat. I lost about five pounds during our time in Germany, but I reclaimed that five pounds the second we arrived in Italy. One thing I remember vividly about Germany was that the minute we got out of the city and we were in the country oh my goodness, it was absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 1:Anyway, back to the coast road. I'd like to talk about your writing and specifically the voices in the book. They're strong and never stray away from their characters. So which characters spoke to you first during the initial writing of the story, and did their voices stray much from your original draft to the final print?
Speaker 2:Oh, it was all about Izzy and Colette. At the beginning I had written a short story called what Poets Do? I wrote that during my master's and that's a sort of a recurring joke between Izzy and James in the book. You know Colette, the bohemian who collects rainwater in a barrel. Oh, that's what poets do, and this is kind of almost like they bond is making fun of her, or you know poor Colette.
Speaker 2:Something about that story seemed to have worked, but actually all that happened in it was that Izzy is out for a walk. She encounters Colette, who's now living in this cottage. She goes inside, they have a very frank discussion about their marriages and Izzy reflects on the time when she saw Colette drunk in the bar and I thought, you know, that was the most outrageous thing she'd ever seen in her life, because Colette is beautiful and sophisticated and educated and if a woman of that calibre could behave like that, then what could happen Izzy if she were to stray outside of the bounds of convention and I hear it's okay? Also, people in my head have different accents, so I didn't think of Izzy as having a very strong Donegal accent. But she does have a Donegal accent, but Fleta's from Dublin and she would have a different accent altogether. That creates distinctions as well. And there's also things because I can hear the voices so clearly in my head there are things that Izzy would say that another character just wouldn't.
Speaker 2:But I don't just. I mean like, okay, one of the things that I could think of. I remember James, for example. He actually uses a lot of sporting metaphors and that wasn't something that I had planned, but when I went back to look at it, I kept going you know, you're cliche alert and then I would think, no, that is the way he would think in his brain. Those are the thought patterns that he would have. So, know, that is not. He said something he talks about his um allowing father Dempsey too far into his life and he said he had taken his eye off the ball. And I thought that is exactly what he would.
Speaker 2:He would think about that you know, um, whereas Izzy would not use that idiom, or collette would not use that idiom and um. The person who became more distinct over time was dolores. Dolores is a really strong donigol accent. I could hear it. It's like it's you know, it's um. It is the full-blown Donegal accent and it became a novel about three women and it didn't start out that way. It took me a while to.
Speaker 2:So when it went out to agents, one of the things that they mentioned in their notes was that the ending wasn't working and it's like the final fifth maybe, and it's like the final fifth maybe, and I realised that I kept sending Dolores off, you know, rather than actually dealing with her or giving her any agency, I was just like, and then she got in the car and left and it took me a while to figure out that actually she had to play a more active role in what was taking place. It was really rewarding to do that, and I wasn't giving her enough credit. I wasn't treating her as though she had as rich and interesting an inner life as Colette and Izzy had. I began to explore that more and I realised that she did. It was very rewarding actually. I became incredibly fond of her. She did. It was very rewarding actually.
Speaker 1:I became incredibly fond of her when I went back and reread the Parts with Dolores. I was humbled by her and I think for many women with children will relate to her story and I thank you for actually going back and revisiting her exit. You did a great job. Now, in chapter one, Izzy sits on a church pew suffering from a hangover and her story is interspersed with responses during mass. These responses perfectly align with Izzy's feelings and what she's seeing. Do you feel your writing style developed during your MA or by practicing over and over writing, rewriting and editing?
Speaker 2:You know that's a really difficult question. How do you get to the point where something is working? I guess In chapter one there was no deliberate plan to match the responses thematically to what was going on. I was more concentrating on the fact that, you know, I remember being in church when I was a child and there's all the mumbling and the rise and the fall. Lord have mercy, lord have mercy. And I was just thinking is there anything more nauseating at that particular time than a group of people like in this kind of loud up and down murmur?
Speaker 2:And I suppose one thing I did learn, maybe from my master's or maybe and this is probably from writing, you know, having put in some hours is right thought, right time.
Speaker 2:So as opposed to like shoehorning in very coherent and cogent thoughts that are clearly meant to like push you on to another plot point or narrative or something like that, you really have to work to connect the mental thoughts in a way that make it look natural and organic. I had a very good creative writing teacher at UEA and I wrote a short story where a man is driving and he looks up and he sees the moon and it's just a little sliver of the moon and he says that it looks like a cuticle. You know, and God, I thought I was so clever and you know, and I presented this work in class and my teacher said to me you know, that actually has, isn't, doesn't really have any meaning at that particular point. And then she said one of his hands are on the wheel. He sees his wedding ring on his finger and then he looks up at the moon and thinks that it looks like a cuticle. You know, then there is coherent meaning progression in the mental landscape.
Speaker 2:And I thought that was very useful.
Speaker 1:That's great advice. When I was reading chapter one, I became immersed in the one and only time I've been to a Catholic mass, and that was on Christmas Day a couple of years ago in Ireland. As I was reading that first chapter, I just kept going back into that church in my memory and you just nailed it. It was spot on. It was so well done. Now you were 10 years old in 1994, 1995. Do you have any memories of the mothers of your childhood friends talking about their marriages or divorce? Or do you feel in retrospect that while many women may have voted for divorce, they may have felt unsafe or insecure discussing the subject? And I'm asking this because in retrospect, if I look back, I do remember the mothers of some of my friends when they got together and they would talk about personal things such as their relationships with their husbands, and not all of them were happy.
Speaker 2:In terms of the divorce referendum. I was 10 in 1994, so yeah, but it was. It was 1995, so I was 11 years old. I do remember that the conversation about it occupied the airwaves, the news programmes, discussions of that kind were prevalent. However, I was perhaps too young, maybe to really remember, but I would say that saying that you were going to vote yes for divorce was like saying that your marriage wasn't working, and I think there would have been a degree of um shame to that. It's.
Speaker 2:It's, I think sometimes it is um, you know, part of the Irish psyche in a way that it's um shameful to show your unhappiness. In a way I or how would you say I kind of. I was interested in that when I was exploring the character of Colette. Colette is almost considered to be too happy, considering the tragedy that she's experienced in her life, and yet other women are criticised in the book for looking depressed. You know, even Izzy comments about this woman in the writing group is like that. She, you know, has a sourpuss on and even though Izzy knows some of the difficulties this woman has in her life.
Speaker 1:And yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess it's not just Ireland. All women have that problem to seem happy, but not too pleased with yourself. You can't and you can't write right. There's no way yeah.
Speaker 1:In Australia, we call this the tall poppy syndrome. Like you said, you can be happy, but not too happy, because you don't want to stand above all the other poppies that are the one height. Now this actually goes now toward anybody who is a minority, whether it be because of their ethnicity and cultural diversity or part of the LGBTQ plus community. But for women, we have been fighting this for centuries and we will continue to fight it, just because we want our voices heard now. Enough is enough. Now let's talk about the cottage where Colette stays and the coastline and the village, because they often seem almost like characters within the story, as if they're vessels and they're holding her safely amid a storm at sea. So can you expand on this idea, and was it something you thought of while writing the Coast Road?
Speaker 2:No, I didn't, I didn't really think to myself, you know, that I had to create those structures as such. But I draw little maps when I'm laying out a room or a home, like Issy's house, I drew the floor plan because that seemed important logistically for people moving from A to B and just to get the geography, the psychogeography of it correct. And I suppose there's a certain degree to which I was like trying to build detail within these interiors and I sometimes think that I haven't done the Donegal landscape justice because it is so extraordinarily beautiful. But to some extent also I didn to, you know, go too far down the route of oh, the wind blew and the mountains were purple and blah, blah. You know, it's like maybe, maybe it was good to rein it in a little bit, rather for it to be, um, like this, you know, poetic love song dirty, johnny Gall.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a fishing port. It's a beautiful, beautiful coastline everywhere, and it's wild and it's windswept and I wanted to I mean, I didn't have to have to try that hard to imagine it. It's like rains all day long and the wind blows and it's this. You know, the weather is drama. Some people said to me uh, you know, oh, it's amazing how the coast road becomes a metaphor for what people are trying to escape from, and I was like, oh yeah, totally planned. I hadn't quite seen that until I'd written the whole book.
Speaker 1:I think that's the magical part of reading Stories affect everybody differently, depending on what they're going through at the time of their life when they're reading the book. If I had read your book when I was 45 or 50, I would probably have connected with Colette immediately, whereas now reading it and I'm 65, it's almost like I'm looking over the women and I want to protect them all when I'm reading it. It had a completely different effect on me than I knew it would have had if I'd read the book when I was younger, and I think that's the beauty of a book like this. The Coast Road shows us this vision of what Colette is seeing from the windows of the cottage, looking out across the water, and then it's also showing you what Izzy sees looking in the opposite direction, across toward the cottage, and then you also have Dolores and what she's going through. It's just beautiful and heartbreaking.
Speaker 2:You know, Colette is as alone and vulnerable and exposed as it is possible for a woman to be in that situation at that particular time.
Speaker 2:And as I was reading back through the manuscript, I realized that I had not deliberately, but this often happens where you have lots of imagery that corresponds with each other and is the same, and a lot of the images were to do with curtains falling into place or curtains opening theatrical references like someone's on a stage set, things to do with views and looking and looking down upon and looking back onto, and you know Donal being in and looking and looking down upon and looking back onto, and you know Donal being in the cottage and looking down and at his own house and how disconcerting that is for him and he's like who lives there, who am I? And it looks empty and yeah, yeah. So I kind of I became aware of it over time that there is lots of yeah, almost stage setting, like watching a performance happening on a stage, and that other people's lives are that performance and the gossip, that kind of comprises their lives as well as just here for everyone.
Speaker 1:While I'm watching you speak and listening to you talking about the Coast Road and your writing, I can see why you were drawn to the art world and how it has affected your writing in a positive way. I think when someone is in the art world, or if they're on stage as an actor or a musician or a painter, it gives them this different perception of how they see and how they experience everything around them. Some of my favorite writers and people who I've interviewed have come from the art world or they have been journalists, but they have all come from an area where they've had to see life through a different lens, an alternate point of view. They have to have empathy for their characters.
Speaker 2:The actors often make good writers, so much of what they learn at drama school are the things you need to know about how to show and not tell, and create story using the body rather than always kind of writing about an interior life. They acquire the skills that you go to like, you write for years to acquire, and they just get it at drama school.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the advice is take that high school drama class and take that theatre class in university. Now let's talk about your dad, because your father served in Irish and international fishing politics for almost three decades. What did you learn from listening to him, and is there any part of his voice in the Coast Road?
Speaker 2:I mean, he was great with advice. I definitely did learn a lot from him, but he didn't talk about work a lot. He didn't talk about his job. He certainly didn't come home and do that, you know, maybe because he was incredibly busy. So perhaps, you know, he didn't want to do that. So when I was building the character of James it's super, it's integral to the story that he is someone important enough in a community that embarrassment will make him act out in ways that move the plot forward, and so I thought, okay, local TD. And so I thought okay, local TD. And I thought you know what? This is helpful, because I know someone who had a career trajectory like this. My father can kind of you know, I can map it onto that and I ended up having to google all the information because I didn't really know.
Speaker 2:I didn't. You know, there was and and even at times there are things where I kind of kept the details as vague as possible and fluffed it a bit because I thought, you know, if someone was really to analyze that, james held up you know, a strike until there was a proper a price for the sale of fish at the co-op.
Speaker 2:I was like I don't even know, I'm not even sure I know what a co-op is you know it's like just just leave it as vague as possible, because, yeah, I mean I want this to be part what about your mom? I'd love to hear a little about her, ah my mom ran our house as a bed and breakfast for 20 years oh my gosh, yeah, she stopped when I was about four or five years old. I do have vague memories of people being in the bedrooms, but I don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it wasn't really my experience. My brothers and sisters grew up in it and you know you say like someone would knock on the door and say, have you got a room? And they'd be kicked out of their bedroom. And they'd be kicked out of their bedroom, and so to me it was a big one and my mom ran it successfully and efficiently and was very independent and liked having her kind of financial independence and, yeah, busy woman Still a busy woman.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's 83 now. She'll hit me soon.
Speaker 2:She's 29.
Speaker 1:And has she read your book?
Speaker 2:Yes, she has. Yeah, yeah yeah, she was so proud and excited.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sure she is. Now let's talk about books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I'm reading the Sister's M Mao by Gavin McRae. It's a real doorstopper. It is set between the communist struggle in 1960s, britain such as it was, and Mao's China, and it moves back and forth between these two places. The scenes in China are particularly compelling and you're just turning the page. Um, yeah, very, very good. Yeah, he's a very good writer. I've also written a memoir um by him called cells, which was about um growing up gay in dublin in the sort of 90s and the difficulties he encountered.
Speaker 1:It was very wonderful and does he live in Ireland? Yes, yeah well, alan, I love Ireland. We were there for Christmas, mostly in Sligo, where my daughter-in-law's family live, but we spent time in Dublin and I loved it. Dublin during Christmas is just beautiful.
Speaker 2:It is a really Christmassy city. I like it. Christmas it's like Dickens, it's that you know. Those colonisers made it really Christmassy, All that Georgian architecture.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, alan, if an Australian and an Irishman start talking about colonialism, we will never get out of here. Exactly, alan, it's been fabulous chatting with you. I love the Coast Road and I shall continue to recommend it to everyone, and I'm looking forward to your next book.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I enjoyed that very much.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with author Alan Murren about his new book, the Coast Road. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at MandyJacksonBeverly on X, Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson-Beverly, Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, Adrienne Otterhan, and graphic design by Frances Perala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.