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Irish America magazine - Oct/Nov '08 issue: The Legacy of the San Patricios Lives On , Stars of the South, The Legal 100, Roots: The Mighty Mahers, All Hail The Humble Spud! , Music: Still Fiddlin’ Away , The Real Bill , The Battle over Ulysses, Broadway's Irish Colleen
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Among Other Things...
 Kara
Rota talks to writer Aoibheann Sweeney about her first novel, life in New York
and unearthing her links to Ireland.
Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, is
quite simply the story of a girl’s journey from one island to another. Miranda
Donnal is a young woman caught between her father’s world as he doggedly
translates Ovid in the mythic fog of Crab Island, Maine, where she has grown up
motherless, well-educated and utterly lonely, and the draw of New York City,
where she is sent by her father after forgoing her college admissions test to
work at the Institute for Classical Studies that he founded there decades ago.
The story that unfolds in Miranda’s voice is marked by the geographic and
generational ambivalence of an emigration narrative, despite the fact that both
Sweeney and her heroine were born in New England. “I grew up with an unspellable
Gaelic name in Boston,” says Sweeney, “and I got a lot of credit for just being
Irish because we were supposed to be the underdogs. I always thought my
grandfather came straight from the old sod to here, but actually my
great-grandfather came over in the 1880s and married into a very lace curtain
Irish family in Queens. His wife, my great-grandmother, died when their children
were young, so he sent them home to Ireland to be raised. But by then he was a
pretty wealthy merchant, and they were hardly working the land. He was able to
send for them to come back and be educated as teenagers in the United States,
and eventually they all attended university.
“Around the time the book was being published, I discovered that the last house
my great-grandfather lived in was only a neighborhood away from my own
apartment, and that it was quite well-to-do and so on. I think some of the
confusion, or secrecy, around the Irish side of my family history crept into the
book. The main character is really trying to find her roots and identity.”
Sweeney’s novel is a loose retelling of The Tempest, which Sweeney describes as
a “springboard” for her own story of a girl, like Shakespeare’s Miranda, stuck
on an island from age three with her distant father after her mother’s
disappearance and death in the surrounding waters. “I think I felt a real
sympathy with her,” explains Sweeney, “because in a way she is the classic girl
who grows up with a really strong education, but no skills in the real world.”
Miranda Donnal’s childhood is deeply impacted by the presence of Mr. Blackwell,
an unmarried, part-Native American fisherman who steps in as a surrogate second
father to softly fill in the places where her own father falls short, teaching
her to cook and fish and drive their dory, helping her make molasses cookies on
her first day of kindergarten. As the unspoken but also unhidden intimate
relationship between Miranda’s father and Mr. Blackwell unravels, Miranda is
left even more alone. “I get lots of different reactions about the father having
a relationship with what I see as the Caliban figure of Mr. Blackwell. But
that’s Shakespeare’s idea, that Prospero is necessarily having a complicated
relationship with Caliban, his slave, and Ariel, his attendant fairy.” For
Sweeney, this retelling was also about breathing new
life into Miranda, a character somewhat overlooked in Shakespeare’s version.
“The relationships that stand out in the play are those between Prospero, Ariel
and Caliban. Those relationships are really what Shakespeare is more interested
in—Miranda has very few lines. But if you’re a girl trying to find a way into
Shakespeare, that’s what stands out for you.
“I think Miranda’s situation is also a classic one to write about as a first
novel. What would happen if you could have somebody who has just hatched out of
the egg, just fresh—what do they see in the world? I think a lot of first novels
are about just trying to see what’s there to a new mind.”
What’s there is a revolutionary take on the coming-of-age novel that draws on
mythology as well as a rich history of American literature to create what a
Washington Post review refers to as “post-gay fiction,” although Sweeney rejects
the term. “No movement is ever as simple as the debunking of it sounds,” she
says. She takes her inspiration from early- to mid-20th century closeted lesbian
and bisexual writers who “never wrote explicitly about their sexuality, but all
wrote about the complications of love and desire. Their work was not only
admired by the literary community but by the broader American public. I feel
like I come out of that tradition and I’m honored to be able to be continuing
one in which I can be out as a gay person. But I don’t think that means we’re
past it in any way.”
Like her predecessors (“writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and
Elizabeth Bishop”), Sweeney has succeeded in writing a novel that refuses to
marginalize itself. “The gay rights movement seems to have not only brought
lesbian writers out of the closet but out of engagement with a literary
tradition they have every reason to take pride in. Understandably, lesbian
authors today feel compelled to write about explicitly gay characters,
but…contemporary lesbian literature tends toward the counter-cultural and has a
narrow readership.” She says, “It was a relief to me that my book did not have
to be pigeonholed.”
 Once
in New York, Sweeney’s central character begins to put together the pieces of
her father’s life there, developing an understanding of who he was before her
just as she is developing the person she will be, grown up, without him. She
begins a sweet and nerve-wracking affair with Nate, a beautiful and well-bred
graduate student fellow at the Institute, but finds herself seeking out
momentary interactions with Ana, a Latina selling terrible coffee out of a
street cart. Both relationships escalate to crescendo when Miranda joins Nate on
a trip to his family home in Long Island for his sister’s wedding. Overwhelmed
by their WASPishness and feeling out of place in a red dress Ana’s had made for
her, Miranda decides to cut and run just before the wedding begins, leaving a
sparse note for Nate and instantaneously throwing away her ticket to
assimilation in a world where she’s never belonged. “I think, interestingly,
that this happens to a lot of people who come to New York,” says Sweeney about
her heroine’s ultimate decision in the novel. “So many people feel their life
open up for them when they arrive here. That definitely happened to me in New
York. I fell in love with the city and all the freedom that it represented. So
many people my age—even then, in my early twenties—were locked into lives that
they felt like they couldn’t get out of. And I felt so differently that I
thought, the only thing I can do is write about this and let people know that
there are other options, even if they are imaginary, just to remind people that
they always have a choice, that there’s a million adventures for everybody to
have.”
The novel ends on a gentle note, with a cathartic conversation between Miranda
and her father, as if the understanding she’s wanted to reach with him has been
there all along. “What I hope I got across was how much forgiveness there can be
between generations,” says Sweeney. “It seems like kind of a dead end game to
declare ‘gay’ or ‘not gay’ or the truth or not truth—because as is hopefully
seen in Miranda’s life, it’s all very flexible anyway, and individual.”
She’s right. This is not a moralistic coming-of-age novel, nor is it
particularly interested in whether its characters are ‘gay enough’ for gay
fiction. “In a way, that forgiveness is really forgiveness of yourself for
making choices that you can’t understand, and taking risks. I remember when I
came back from New York I met a lot of people who hadn’t traveled at all, out of
their own cities or out of their own country—out of their comfort zone. There
was just kind of a lack of exploration, which to me was what adulthood was
about—you didn’t have to be from any certain class to do things differently. I
wanted to write something that reminded people they had more choices than just
the one they were born with.”
As for a second novel? “I’d like to write some fiction that has siblings in it
because I grew up with siblings, part of a relatively big family, and it was a
little lonely writing about a girl who lived alone with her father.”
For Aoibheann Sweeney, starting her own family has brought her closer to her
Irish heritage. “My partner is Irish, from Dublin, so I go back there every
Christmas now, because it’s where the other part of my family is. My daughter is
actually in Dublin right now with that side of the family. Ireland is a big part
of my life now, in a very different way than it was growing up.”
Aoibheann Sweeney is the Executive Director of the Center for the Humanities at
the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. She lives in Brooklyn, and
has roots in Donegal.
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