Page Turners: ‘Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way’ author Elaine Feeney

Elaine Feeney’s debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. How to Build a Boat was also shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year.

Her new novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, is a story of love and resilience, rich with history and drama, and the legacies of violence and redemption. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make her own future – and whether finding herself means facing herself too.

Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But snatches of her old life are sure to follow her when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby for work. As Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself.

Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – obsessing over the internet, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house.

Did you always want to be a writer? Tell us a little about your journey to getting published.

I’ve loved stories for as long as I can remember. I was obsessed with books, pictures, drawing, art and making up worlds as a child. Storytelling was a big part of my life growing up — my siblings and I were always sharing stories. So moving from telling stories out loud to writing them down felt very natural to me. Honestly, I can’t imagine a life where I’m not writing.

What first inspired you to start writing?

A few things sparked it. I fell in love with poetry when it was introduced to me at school — it just captured something about how I was feeling at the time. It felt so powerful. I also found a lot of freedom in reading writers like Edna O’Brien, Maeve Binchy, and Rita Ann Higgins when I was a teenager. They reflected parts of the world I knew, the west of Ireland, women’s angst, patriarchy, and writing gave me a sense of control when life felt anything but. I’ve been writing seriously since my teens.

Tell us about your new book, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way. Where did the idea come from?

The novel follows the O’Connor family in Athenry and their history. It focuses on Claire, who moves back from London to the west of Ireland to care for her dying father. After he passes away, she’s left alone in her childhood home, grappling with her own feelings of being stuck, especially after spending lockdown there. The Old House behind the family home and various objects start revealing layers of the past. When Claire’s ex, Tom, moves nearby, it stirs up even more.

We go back to a visit from some horse men in 1990 that ends in disaster for the family, and that then reveals an old family story about the Black and Tans. The whole novel culminates in a dinner party with a motley crew in Claire’s house. Influenced by Chekhov. And in particular, Andrew Scott in Vanya.

I’d actually written about Claire and Tom before, in a short story for The Paris Review, and I found myself wondering what happened to them next, which brought me back to what happened before. Why can Claire not love? The story ended up spanning a century of Irish history, something I’ve always wanted to explore — particularly how history impacts women like my mother’s generation and my own. Claire and Tom gave me a way into telling that story.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

I hope they get swept up in the story. I love getting lost in books, and I hope this one gives readers a little escape, too.

What did you learn while writing this book?

That everything is cyclical. That the past is never really past. And that unresolved things don’t just disappear because we want them to. This is my third novel, and it wraps up a sort of trilogy I’ve been working on, looking at institutions — first a hospital, then a school, and now, in this book, the family home. Writing it made me realise just how often the ordinary and the brutal live side-by-side. And how the home can be a place full of threats.

Can you tell us about your writing process?

In a word: chaotic. (four more words: all over the place!)

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Everywhere — the world around me, my own slightly mad experiences, conversation, history, music, and, of course, other books. For this novel, I was especially inspired by Percival Everett’s Erasure, Sunjeev Sahota’s The China Room, Annie Ernaux’s Shame, and always Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. There’s always some poetry in the mix too. The 1920s sections about the Black and Tans in Athenry were influenced by Sophocles’ chorus style, especially Anne Carson’s translation of Electra.