After the funeral mass, everyone went for pints at the Quayside. Eoin’s mother, released from the hospital, showed up in a new dress and freshly dyed hair. She sang “The Hills of Glenswilly” at Mike’s request because it had been Dan Sean’s favorite. Eoin’s face burned with pride when she brought the house down, and this made Maggie ache for her own mother back in Chicago, but by now she knew enough not to mistake this aching feeling for regret. Later, two fiddlers from Shankill took the stage, and Maggie danced with Eoin on the same floor where it all began for them. And when the trays of potatoes and ham were eaten, the pints drunk, the ashtrays emptied, and the sky faded to a rich, velvety purple, she and Eoin slipped away. They walked hand in hand along the strand, breathing in the fishy wideness of the sea, pausing for a moment to gaze up at the spindly hulk of the Ferris wheel. A warm breeze was blowing down from the hills and the crab traps bobbed in the water.
“I haven’t been on that thing in a long time,” Maggie said.
“What do you think?” Eoin raised an eyebrow at her. “Feel like going for a ride?”
They approached the booth at the water’s edge and bought two tickets.
“First riders of the season, you two,” grunted the ride operator as he pulled the safety bar over their laps. “Might be a little squeaky.”
The machine hummed to life, jerked their carriage forward, and swept them slowly toward the twilight, groaning with rusty effort.
“Is this thing safe?” Eoin peered over the side at the ground below, where the carnival workers were hoisting white tarps from the rides and rolling back the corrugated aluminum from the gaming booths.
“Who knows?” Maggie grinned. “Better hold on tight.”
She felt the warm pressure of Eoin’s knee next to her own as they creaked higher and higher, the briny air dewing their faces. When they reached the top of the arc, they could see the far-off lights of Dublin glimmering beyond the darkening hills to the west, and to the east, the vast, lapping Irish Sea. They remained like that for just a moment, suspended hand in hand above the hills and rooftops, their faces flooded with sunset, before the Ferris wheel whined and jolted them back to the safe, familiar earth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to give thanks to:
The wonderful team at Elephant Rock Books: Cassie Sheets, Amanda Schwarz, Emily Schultze, Amanda Hurley, and, most particularly, Jotham Burrello.
The Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.
Mom and Dad, for being my first and best teachers, Nora and Dan for their friendship and superior musical taste, and Jackie, for Selfish Fetus—cooked up on a napkin at Burnside Brewing in Portland, Oregon.
Most of all, thank you to Denis for your fact-checking and advice about all things Irish, your read alouds, and your love.
AFTERWORD
Elephant Rock’s Cassie Sheets discusses the writing of The Carnival at Bray with author Jessie Ann Foley. Learn more about Jessie at jessieannfoley.com.
Cassie Sheets: What’s the genesis of The Carnival at Bray?
Jessie Ann Foley: A few years ago, I took a day trip from Dublin to Bray. When I walked out of the train station, one of the first things I saw was this carnival at the edge of the Irish Sea. It was summertime, but chilly and overcast, so nobody was around, which imbued the whole place with this forlorn feeling. I thought that it would make a great setting for a story, and I wrote a little description of it in my journal. At that point, I had this cool setting, but no characters to put in it. A couple months later, it occurred to me that the obvious inhabitant of a lonely place like this carnival would be a lonely person—and Maggie was born.
CS: Did you draw on any other personal connections when choosing the locations?
JAF: I grew up in Chicago, and when I was younger I had a summer job renting out volleyballs at Montrose Beach. Business was very slow, so I spent 95 percent of my time sitting on a lawn chair, reading. Sometimes, when I got bored, I would lock up the volleyball trailer and go for a walk through the bird sanctuary, the place where Kevin goes on the night of his death. On these walks, I got the same feeling I had in Bray when I saw the carnival. I knew it would be a great setting for a story. For me, place is a trigger for storytelling. You can always create characters, but it’s only when you put them somewhere that they become real. I’ve also spent some time in Italy and Ireland, but not enough to ever assimilate to either culture. That’s why it made sense to me to write Maggie as someone who was struggling to belong.
CS: Did you find you needed to do additional research on Ireland as you were writing?
JAF: Well, the original draft of The Carnival at Bray was a short story that I published in the Chicago Reader Fiction Issue in 2010. If I had known then that I was setting myself up for the task of writing an entire novel set in Ireland, I might have made things easier for myself and kept Maggie in Chicago. But then, she wouldn’t have met Eoin. I’m Irish American, but as Maggie learns in the first chapter, that identity has very little to do with what it means to be actually Irish. But my husband, Denis, is from County Kerry in the southwest of Ireland.
CS: And he helped you bridge that gap?
JAF: I couldn’t have written this book without his help. I drove him insane with constant questions: What do you call those bales of hay covered in plastic? What is the hurling equivalent of a quarterback? When you were a little boy and your dad brought you along to the pub, what did he give you to drink? Things like that. The poor guy even read all the bits of dialogue from Irish characters out loud to tell me if they sounded authentic or not. I was so nervous for him to read the first draft of the book, because I knew I was going to make ridiculous mistakes. He was polite enough not to make fun of me.
CS: Music plays an important role in this story, and is one of the many interests that tie Maggie to her uncle Kevin. How did music influence you while writing this book?
JAF: While I was writing and rewriting the novel, I listened to a lot of nineties music: Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, the Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr., P. J. Harvey, and the sound track from Singles. I’m in my early thirties now, old enough to understand the nostalgic pull of bands you loved when you were a kid. This music from the early nineties just means so much more to me than any other music I’ve ever listened to. That’s not to say I like it the best, or even that it conjures specific memories. At a certain age—maybe fourteen or fifteen—it’s so much easier to be amazed by things, to be impressed by things, and I miss that. Listening to that music from my old Case Logic CD books reminded me of my capacity to be amazed, shaped, exposed—and I think that was really good for my writing.
CS: Maggie is also a reader, and Kevin’s book lists are another way he guides her. What books did you read at Maggie’s age?
JAF: My sister is two years older than I am, and she has always been a voracious reader. I often read books she had lying around. I remember when I was about fourteen, she was reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I thought it was so dorky because, based on the cover art, it looked like something super boring that I’d be forced to read in Brit lit class. But then my dad, who’s also incredibly well read, started grumbling that she was too young to be reading something like that. He didn’t tell her she couldn’t read it exactly, but he was definitely not happy that she was carrying it around with her. Well, of course, then I was totally intrigued. I was too lazy to actually read the whole book, so just like Maggie did, I skimmed it to see what my dad was talking about. And sure enough, I got to the chapter where Mellors meets Connie in the hut and I was like… “whoa.” I didn’t think people even did stuff like that back then. I don’t know what I thought—that we were all a bunch of cold-blooded egg-laying reptiles until my generation came along and spiced things up?
CS: So you were a bookworm?
JAF: When I was in elementary school, I tore through books like crazy. I even snuck them into church with me. In high school, my priorities changed, and I became more concerned with obsessing over boys and s
neaking beer into parties. I tried to play the rebellious part, but the only times I remember actually being happy during high school was when I was sitting by myself, reading.
CS: Your day job is teaching high school English. How did being around teens five days a week influence the way you got Maggie’s thoughts and voice on the page?
JAF: I don’t know if it affected me in any conscious way, but teaching high school, being surrounded with teens all day, does help you remember what it’s like to be young. A lot of adults are disgusted by, mystified by, or straight up afraid of teenagers. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to those years, but it’s still such a cool age. When you’re Maggie’s age, everything is new and fresh, and so much life happens. You really feel the possibilities of your life ahead of you.
CS: Maggie has a lot of universal adolescent experiences—the loss of someone close, first love, awesome music parents are sure to hate, among other things—but so much has changed since Maggie was growing up in 1993. From the counterculture, to the ease (or lack thereof) of staying in contact with people after moving, how does growing up in the early nineties shape Maggie’s development?
JAF: People might think that I set the book in the nineties because that’s when I was Maggie’s age, with the implication being that she is a prototype of myself, but that’s not true at all. Maggie and I were very different teenagers. She was a lot cooler, smarter, and tougher than I was. She also had better taste in music and men. And she learned from her mistakes a lot more quickly than I did.
CS: So no running off to Rome with a boy to see a Nirvana concert during your teen years?
JAF: No, unfortunately. The less exciting truth is, setting the novel in the nineties solved some very important plot problems, the obvious one being the absence of social media. In order for Maggie to grow in the way she did, I felt like she needed to be truly isolated in Bray, truly marooned in this new country. If she’s following Selfish Fetus on Facebook, if she’s Skyping with Nanny Ei, then she’s still got one leg immersed in Chicago, and the need to find her way in Ireland is not as urgent. With the lack of Internet access, it’s harder to go back. She’s stuck, and she needs to show her mettle.
CS: Kurt Cobain is also such a major background player in the novel. When you were thinking about when to set Maggie’s story, was the culture and movement surrounding grunge an important factor?
JAF: I know every generation says this, but I just can’t think of any band today that has the capacity for life-alteration as Nirvana had in the early 1990s. And part of that relates back to social media. How mythical would Kurt Cobain be if he’d left behind a trail of Instagram selfies? If he’d Tweeted? And maybe that’s why today’s teenagers still idolize him as much as the young people of his own time did. We just know too much about today’s celebrities—and that makes them far less interesting, far less romantic.
CS: There are two starkly different sexual encounters in the novel—the first when Maggie is emotionally low, and Paul comes onto her in a rough, slithery sort of way. The second coincides with an emotional high for Maggie, and she shares an intimate, fulfilling moment with Eoin. What was the process of writing each of these scenes like?
JAF: Both of these scenes were really difficult for me to write, and both unfolded in very different ways. I felt that the first scene needed to be somewhat graphic, so that the reader could experience the pain and discomfort along with Maggie. What I wanted to come across was not that Paul tacitly forced Maggie to do anything, but that it never occurred to her that she could have said no. She felt like she’d already gone to a certain place with him, and she had no choice but to keep going. Sadly, too many teenage girls feel this way, which is why for many of us, our first sexual encounter is excruciating. I think it’s true to life that many young people have to suffer through a Paul experience—sometimes several Paul experiences—before they find their Eoin and realize, oh, this is what it’s supposed to be like.
As far as the second scene, that time Maggie was ready, and she’d found someone who loved and respected her. Partly because of that, she had a lot more respect for herself. That key difference is what made losing her virginity such a positive thing.
CS: What was your revision process for this novel?
JAF: As I’m sure most writers have experienced, I started off thinking I knew where the novel was headed and then, somewhere around the middle, it turned into a great big mess. Fixing that mess required a lot of returning to the beginning and rewriting, rethinking. All in all, it took me about a year to write the book, and when it was finished, I was so deeply entrenched in it that it was hard to know whether it was actually finished or not. Luckily, my editor was a wonderful guiding force in helping me nail down the final draft. We did about three months of intensive rewrites, focusing mostly on voice and pacing. Those three months just so happened to fall during one of the worst winters in Chicago history, which was great for me. The revision process kept me plenty busy while I was holed up in the house avoiding the polar vortex.
CS: Was there a moment you knew the book was done?
JAF: I wouldn’t say there was a particular moment when I knew it was done. I’m hypercritical of my own writing. I never really go back and read any of my published work because of the compulsion I feel to change everything. But I guess I felt like the book was done when I went back and reread it and I only wanted to change small words and phrases, not rip apart whole scenes.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1) The Carnival at Bray is written in third person, rather than the sardonic first person that’s common in young adult now. What access does the third-person point of view allow readers that they wouldn’t have known in first person? Why do you think the author made this decision?
2) Ronnie asks Maggie a lot of age-inappropriate questions, to which Maggie responds, “I’ll tell you when you’re my age.” How does Uncle Kevin’s way of handling this compare to Maggie’s? How does Maggie learn about what it means to be an adult?
3) Many of the characters in The Carnival at Bray are outsiders in some way. How does being an outsider in Ireland shape Maggie’s identity? In what ways are the other characters in the novel outsiders?
4) How does Maggie’s relationship with her mother, Laura, mature over the course of the book? What does Maggie understand about Laura at the end of the book that she didn’t understand at the beginning?
5) How do the song lyrics and poems quoted throughout the novel shape your understanding of Maggie or the time in which she’s living?
6) Mental illness is explored through Eoin’s mother, Mary, Uncle Kevin, and Kurt Cobain. Discuss the way the author deals with mental illness in this novel.
7) How does Dan Sean mark the passage of time and the history of Bray in the novel?
8) When Maggie and Eoin run away to Rome, they essentially play house. Laura is often described as doing much of the same with Colm. What do you think Maggie learns about love and relationships from her mother, and where do you think she makes an effort to do something different?
9) How are images of the natural world (e.g., the water surrounding Bray or the Italian countryside) used to set the tone of certain scenes?
10) When Maggie decides to travel to Rome to see Nirvana as per Uncle Kevin’s instructions, Dan Sean dubs it a pilgrimage. Throughout the novel, she prays to Uncle Kevin for guidance. Discuss Maggie’s faith, whether it be in religion, Cobain, love, or Kevin.
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