The Month of Borrowed Dreams
Page 29
Since then, partly through writing The Library at the Edge of the World, I’ve come to realize more deeply that my earliest experience of storytelling came from my grandmother’s Irish-language oral tradition; and that memories of that inheritance, married to my love of Ireland’s English-language literary tradition, have shaped me as a writer.
When Wilf and I first decided to divide our life between two countries, we weren’t escaping from an English city to a rural Irish idyll. Life can be stressful anywhere in the world, and human nature is universal. So, for us, living in two places isn’t about running from one and escaping to the other. It’s about heightening our awareness and appreciation of both.
There’s a story about the legendary Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his warriors hunting the hills of Ireland. They chase the deer from dawn to dusk and then gather to eat, drink, and make music. As they sit by the fire, between tunes and talk, Fionn puts a question to his companions: “What is the best music in the world?” One man says it’s the cry of the cuckoo. Another says it’s the ring of a spear on a shield. Someone suggests the baying of a pack of deerhounds, or the laughter of a willing girl. “Nothing wrong with any of them,” says Fionn, “but there’s better music.” So they ask him what it is and he gives them his answer. “The best music in the world,” he says, “is the music of what happens.”
Each time life and work take me from Ireland to London and back again, there’s a brief window—maybe just on the journey from the airport—when everything I see and hear becomes heightened. For an author, that’s gold dust. Focus sharpens, bringing with it a new sense of what it is to be alive. As my brain shifts from one language to another, I discover new word patterns, and reappraise those that are familiar. The contrasting rhythms of the two places provide endless entrance points for creativity; and, for me, the universality of human experience, seen against different backgrounds, has always been the music of what happens.
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About the Book
The Story Behind The Month of Borrowed Dreams
MY STARTING POINT for the Finfarran novels was that they should be rooted in community. I wanted the peninsula I created (by sneaking an extra county onto the island of Ireland) to mirror the real landscapes and lives a visitor might encounter along Ireland’s stunning west coast.
Central to each book is the little market town of Lissbeg and its library, run, as all public libraries here are, by the County Council, and, as my central character is Hanna Casey, Lissbeg’s librarian, it’s inevitable that, one way or another, the Finfarran novels are books about books. A huge part of the fun of plotting a new one is working out how Hanna’s plotline will work as a focus for the book’s other story strands. This is where the series’ rural community setting offers endless avenues to explore. I’m not dealing with the kind of library where scholars sit among dusty tomes, glaring if anyone coughs or says a word. Lissbeg Library is a meeting place, a club room, a venue for cake sales and fund-raisers, a very public place for very private assignations, and sometimes, to Hanna’s annoyance, even a crèche. So, when I came to write The Month of Borrowed Dreams, I had plenty of scope for plotting, and the central idea wasn’t hard to find. This is the summary that I sent to my publisher: “Hanna sets up a club that encourages people to read books by showing films based on bestsellers, and my book takes place in the month when the club reads its first chosen book.”
In order for this concept to work, the fictional club’s choice of book had to be something my readers were likely to have heard of, and which had been released as a high-profile film. Now, as I sit typing this, I’m not sure whether I came up with the concept first and chose Brooklyn, or whether Colm Tóibín’s novel made me think of inventing Hanna’s film club. Whichever it was, Brooklyn provided exactly what was required. Finfarran fans had met Jazz, Hanna’s daughter, in earlier novels and I knew from readers’ feedback that they wanted to know more about her. So I decided that The Month of Borrowed Dreams would give Jazz a central storyline. To do so, I needed the club’s choice to have a young heroine with whom Jazz would identify. Which was why Tóibín’s protagonist, torn between two countries, and played in the film by Saoirse Ronan, was ideal.
Brooklyn didn’t just offer me parallels for my characters. Its will-she/won’t-she tale was also a fit thematically, because the interlocking stories in The Month of Borrowed Dreams all explore aspects of commitment, choice, and uncertainty. Jazz has begun to call Lissbeg home but, when her life is turned upside down, will she return to London? Aideen is afraid her engagement to Conor won’t survive the pressures of their planned double wedding. Hanna’s newfound happiness with Brian is threatened by the return of her manipulative ex-husband. And Rasher is cast adrift in the world, unsure of where he belongs or who he can be.
I had two other ideas in mind when starting to write The Month of Borrowed Dreams. Both were jokes but, like all the best jokes, each revealed a truth. The first was that, though book and film club members do a great deal of talking, their meetings can take off in unexpected directions, leaving the work that inspired them far behind. This is something every author and librarian knows and, while it doesn’t matter at all, it offers scope for comedy. The second idea that came to me was a theatre joke that’s probably been around for hundreds of years. Tom Stoppard uses it as a running gag in his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, in which each actor thinks that Romeo and Juliet is centered on his own character, however small his part is in the play. The same thing happens in The Month of Borrowed Dreams. Jazz identifies with Eilis, the heroine of Brooklyn, but Pat, whose kids have immigrated, relates instead to the character of the mother who’ll be bereft if Eilis goes off to America; and each of the other club members is drawn to a character whose story mirrors their own in some way. And this, of course, is the point of storytelling. As Shakespeare has Hamlet say, it “holds a mirror up to nature,” allowing us to see the world and ourselves in imagined contexts, and offering us a route to empathy.
It seemed credible that, as a librarian, Hanna would think of bringing readers to books via films and, as it happens, I was well-placed to write about adaptation. Before becoming a novelist I wrote for TV and theatre, and some of my scripts were dramatizations of books. This, too, informed my approach to The Month of Borrowed Dreams. Turning a book into a screenplay involves separating its threads and reweaving them, a process that makes you think about how things are made. Not everyone in Hanna’s film club sees the parallels between their own lives and Brooklyn’s characters, but I hope that readers of The Month of Borrowed Dreams will, and that you’ll enjoy how its central image of stories woven together echoes the interwoven lives of Finfarran’s close-knit community. I hope, too, that you’ll get in touch and tell me what you think of it. And, whether or not the discussion takes off in unexpected directions, if your library or book club would like to discuss The Month of Borrowed Dreams, I’d love to come and join you, even if it’s just via Zoom!
Read On
Have You Read?
More by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
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“From the moment I crossed the mountain I fell in love. With the place, which was more beautiful than any place I’d ever seen. With the people I met there. And with a way of looking at life that was deeper, richer and wiser than any I’d known before. When I left I dreamt of clouds on the mountain. I kept going back.”
We all lead very busy lives and sometimes it’s hard to find the time to be the people we want to be. Twelve years ago Felicity Hayes-McCoy left the hectic pace of the city and returned to Ireland to make a new life in a remarkable house on the stunning Dingle Peninsula. Having chosen to live in a community that, previously, she’d only known as a visitor, she finds herself reengaging with values and experiences and reevaluating a sense of identity that she’d thought she’d left behind.
Beautifully written, this is a life-af
firming tale of “a house of music and memory,” and of being reminded of the things that really matter.
“Hayes-McCoy is a lovely writer, far superior to the average memoirist. . . . She has a style that’s poetic but not showy; finely honed but easy and unforced; descriptive and evocative without seeming to try too hard.”
—The Irish Independent
“Wise, funny, and blazingly beautiful.”
—Joanna Lumley, actor, author, and television presenter
ENOUGH IS PLENTY
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An immigrant to England in the 1970s, Felicity Hayes-McCoy knew she’d return to Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, a place she’d fallen in love with at seventeen. Now she and her English husband have restored a stone house there, the focus for this chronicle in response to reader requests for an illustrated sequel to her memoir The House on an Irish Hillside.
The Celts celebrated the cycle of the seasons as a vibrant expression of eternity, endlessly turning from darkness to light and back again. Enough Is Plenty, a book about the ordinary small pleasures in life that can easily go unnoticed, celebrates these seasonal rhythms and offers the reader recipes from the author’s kitchen and information on organic food production and gardening. It views the year from a place where a vibrant twenty-first-century lifestyle is still marked by Ireland’s Celtic past and the ancient rhythms of Samhain (winter), Imbolc (spring), Bealtaine (summer), and Lughnasa (autumn). In this way of life, health and happiness are rooted in awareness of nature and the environment, and nourishment comes from music, friendship, and storytelling as well as from good food.
“Magical.”
—Alice Taylor, bestselling author of To School Through the Fields
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A WOVEN SILENCE: MEMORY, HISTORY & REMEMBRANCE
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How do we know that what we remember is the truth? Inspired by the story of her relative Marion Stokes, one of three women who raised the tricolor over Enniscorthy in Easter Week 1916, Felicity Hayes-McCoy explores the consequences for all of us when memories are manipulated or obliterated, intentionally or by chance. In the power struggle after Ireland’s Easter Rising, involving, among others, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, the ideals for which Marion and her companions fought were eroded. As Felicity maps her own family stories onto the history of the state, her story moves from Washerwoman’s Hill in Dublin, to London, and back again; spans two world wars, a revolution, a civil war, and the development of a republic; and culminates in Ireland’s 2015 same-sex marriage referendum.
“A powerful piece of personal and political history.”
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“Questions are explored delicately and deftly.”
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“Writing of high order.”
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DINGLE AND ITS HINTERLAND: PEOPLE, PLACES AND HERITAGE
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The tip of the Dingle Peninsula, at the westernmost edge of Europe, is one of Ireland’s most isolated regions. But for millennia, it has also been a hub for foreign visitors: its position made it a medieval center for traders, and the wildness of its remote landscape has been the setting for spiritual pilgrimage. This seeming paradox is what makes Dingle and its western hinterland unique: the ancient, native culture has been preserved, while also being influenced by the world at large. The rich heritage of the area is best understood by chatting with the people who live and work here. But how many visitors get that opportunity?
Working with her husband, Wilf Judd, Felicity Hayes-McCoy takes us on an insiders’ tour, illustrated by their own photographs, and interviews locals along the way, ranging from farmers, postmasters, and boatmen to museum curators, radio presenters, and sean-nós singers. A resident for the last twenty years, she offers practical information and advice as well as cultural insights that will give any visitor a deeper understanding of this special place.
“For those of us who have long been under the spell of the Dingle Peninsula, and for those who have yet to discover it, this book is a brilliant guide to the land, the culture, the history, and especially its people.”
—Boris Weintraub, former senior writer, National Geographic
THE LIBRARY AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
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As she drives her mobile library van between little villages on Ireland’s west coast, Hanna Casey tries not to think about a lot of things. Like the sophisticated lifestyle she abandoned after finding her English barrister husband in bed with another woman. Or that she’s back in Lissbeg, the rural Irish town she walked away from in her teens, living in the back bedroom of her overbearing mother’s retirement bungalow. Or, worse yet, her nagging fear that, as the local librarian and a prominent figure in the community, her failed marriage and ignominious return have made her a focus of gossip.
With her teenage daughter, Jazz, off traveling the world and her relationship with her own mother growing increasingly tense, Hanna is determined to reclaim her independence by restoring a derelict cottage left to her by her great-aunt. But when the threatened closure of the Lissbeg Library puts her personal plans in jeopardy, Hanna finds herself leading a battle to restore the heart and soul of the Finfarran Peninsula’s fragmented community. And she’s about to discover that the neighbors she’d always kept at a distance have come to mean more to her than she ever could have imagined.
Told with heart, wry wit, and charm, The Library at the Edge of the World is an empowering story about the meaning of home and the importance of finding a place where you truly belong.
“A delicious feast of a novel. Sink in and feel enveloped by the beautiful world of Felicity Hayes-McCoy.”
—Cathy Kelly, bestselling author of Between Sisters and Secrets of a Happy Marriage
“A charming and heartwarming story.”
—Jenny Colgan, New York Times bestselling author of The Café by the Sea
“Engaging . . . sparkling and joyous.”
—Sunday Times (UK)
“Much like a cup of tea and a cozy afghan, The Library at the Edge of the World is the perfect book to hunker down with. Prepare to be transported.”
—LibraryReads
SUMMER AT THE GARDEN CAFÉ
by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
The Garden Café, next to Lissbeg Library, is a place where plans are formed and secrets shared, and where, even in high tourist season, people are never too busy to stop for a sandwich and a cup of tea.
But twenty-one-year-old Jazz—daughter of the town’s librarian Hanna Casey—has a secret she can’t share. Still recovering from a car accident, and reeling from her father’s disclosures about his longtime affair, she’s taken a job at The Old Forge Guesthouse and begun to develop feelings for a man who’s strictly off-limits. Meanwhile, involved in her own new affair with architect Brian Morton, Hanna is unaware of the turmoil in Jazz’s life—until her manipulative ex-husband, Malcolm, reappears trying to mend his relationship with their daughter. Rebuffed at every turn, Malcolm must return to London, but his mother, Louisa, is on the case.
Unbeknown to the rest of the family, she hatches a plan, finding an unlikely ally in Hanna’s mother, the opinionated Mary Casey.
Watching Jazz unravel, Hanna begins to wonder if secrets that Malcolm has forced her to keep may have harmed their beloved daughter more than she’d realized. But then, the Casey women are no strangers to secrets, something Hanna realizes when she discovers a journal, long buried in land she inherited from her great-aunt Maggie. Ultimately, it’s the painful lessons of the past that offer a way to the future, but it will take the shared experiences of four generations of women to find a way forward for Hanna and her family.
“Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s latest novel is a triumph. This is clear-eyed storytelling in a romantic setting, but it’s doing far more than weaving a begui
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—Irish Central
“The landscape and the cadence of the villagers’ language leap off the page. Fans of Debbie Macomber’s Blossom series will enjoy this trip to Ireland.”
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THE MISTLETOE MATCHMAKER
by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
The days are turning colder, preparations are under way for the Winter Fest, and everyone is hoping for a little holiday magic on the Finfarran Peninsula. And as Cassie Fitzgerald, fresh from Toronto, is about to discover, there’s more to the holidays on the west coast of Ireland than mistletoe and mince pies.
Enchanted by the small town where her dad was born, Cassie makes friends and joins local librarian Hanna Casey’s writing group in Lissbeg Library. But the more she’s drawn into the festivities leading up to her first Irish Christmas, the more questions she wants to ask.
Why does her sweet-tempered grandmother Pat find it so hard to express her feelings? What’s going on between Pat and her miserly husband, Ger? What happened in the past between the Fitzgeralds and Hanna’s redoubtable mother, Mary Casey? And what about Shay: handsome, funny, smart, and intent on making Cassie’s stay as exciting as he can. Could he be the one for her?
As Christmas Eve approaches, it’s Cassie, the outsider, who reminds Lissbeg’s locals that love, family, and friendship bring true magic to the season. But will her own fractured family rediscover the joys of coming home?