Alice Ryan: ‘I realised my mum never could have left me. It was a huge euphoric moment’

Alice Ryan’s debut novel, There’s Been a Little Incident, is full of communication: the hubbub of voices talking over one another at a family summit; the buzzing of phones and WhatsApp alerts relaying information, opinion and gossip; a series of hastily convened meetings from Avoca to Bangkok.

To a casual onlooker, it would be impossible to conclude that the Blacks, from Sudoku-playing Granny to millennial twins Damon and Liam, aka Blur and Oasis, don’t talk. But noise isn’t always a reliable indicator of connection, and we soon realise that Molly, who as the book opens has mysteriously disappeared, is experiencing that disconcerting feeling of being alone while in the middle of a crowd.

To what extent her unhappiness stems from a sense of estrangement from her family in Ireland after she moves to London, from her best friend’s increasing unavailability after he couples up, or from suppressed grief at the premature deaths of her parents, is gradually worked out over the course of an eventful narrative that veers from the exceptionally poignant to the wildly comic.

Ryan drew on many aspects of her own life during the 10 years it took to write the book. She had embarked on it after discarding her first attempt at fiction, which she now describes as “a coming of age novel… I think I really wanted to be taken seriously”. It was much rejected, and once she’d “conceded defeat” and consigned it to the bin (her description), she remembered the words of a cousin who’d read it and asked her: “Are your friends really sad? Is everyone you know just having a really awful time? And she said, You’re funny, that’s a big part of your personality.” The second time around, Ryan decided, “I only wanted to write the novel I wanted to write for me.”

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One of the things that involved was addressing the painful subject of parental loss – and of how grief may surface to distress and disrupt one’s life years after the intense shock of bereavement has begun to subside.

Ryan lost her own mother, Caroline Walsh, a former writer, features editor and literary editor of The Irish Times, just before Christmas 2011, after Walsh had suffered a short and brutal illness. Ryan talks candidly about the impact that the loss of her beloved mother had and continues to have on her life, and how much she wanted to represent the complexity and challenges that the death of such a foundational presence brings.

An immediate challenge – and not one that everyone will experience – is that her mother was a well-known figure and a leading light in Irish literary life, so there were many public expressions of grief and sadness at her death. Ryan remembers that the moments in which her mother’s private life was commemorated were just as, if not more, valuable to her: “Colm Tóibín wrote the kindest thing after Mum’s death. Everybody was writing about her literary legacy. And he wrote: ‘I met Caroline and Alice on the street one time, and I asked them where they were going’ – I don’t remember this, I was very small – ‘and Caroline answered that they were just enjoying each other’s company.’ It was a great gift to me.”

Walsh had herself grown up as the child of someone in the public eye: her mother was the celebrated short-story writer Mary Lavin and so, says Ryan, she “had a very bohemian childhood: she told the story of Patrick Kavanagh being asleep on the couch and being minded by these people when Mary had to go somewhere for an hour. It was very exciting.” But it perhaps explains why she was determined to manage her own family life with her husband, the writer James Ryan, Alice and her brother Matt along different lines.

I hope the book allows people to understand that you can be in awful places and awful things are happening, but there’s enough incredible warmth there in the world to kind of keep us going

“What is always interesting for me,” Ryan tells me, “was that there were all these literary figures in our lives, and absolutely people like Maeve Binchy would come for dinner and Colm Tóibín and John Banville and John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, but my mum would always come up the stairs and want to talk to us. And I think our childhood was very different because she’d had a bit more of a chaotic childhood. She adored the normality of our home. So in a way, my memories are not of any literary events.”

Instead, she recalls a mother who would come through the door every evening and be utterly delighted by the domestic tableau that awaited her, much of it organised by her husband. “She honestly thought it was miraculous, every evening, we were well fed, and her favourite thing in the world were her chores in the house.”

Nonetheless, it’s also clear that the spirit of spontaneity and whimsy remained, because Ryan also recalls a parent who would suddenly decide that fish fingers could be abandoned for a drive to Connemara. “She brought an imagination to parenting, which is very freeing,” says her daughter, referring to her own experiences of motherhood.

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She and her husband have a three-year-old daughter, whose arrival coincided with the latter stages of writing the novel and whom Ryan recalls rocking, when the baby was just a couple of weeks old, as she wrote some of the novel’s most emotional scenes. They are a cache of letters written to the missing young woman, Molly, by Annabelle, her dead mother, when Molly was a young child.

“Dear Molly,” runs one. “I know I’m not a conventional parent. And I know that isn’t always a good thing. I shouldn’t have brought you to Neary’s last week to meet Pat O’Shaughnessy. I forgot he was a drunk. I thought he was on the milder end of alcoholism like F Scott Fitzgerald but it turns out he is closer to Hemingway.”

For Molly, the letters complete the missing parts of the puzzle that loss always brings – and writing them against the backdrop of the early days of parenting also allowed Ryan to make a breakthrough in her own understanding of the mourning process.

One night, she recounts, she had a sudden realisation – “and it wasn’t like a creeping thought, it was like a lightning bolt” – that the depth of her love for her daughter was something that would, in some sense, infiltrate her life so totally that it could never disappear: “It’s kind of in her bones, it’s in everything she could possibly ever do. I adore this person so deeply. And then I realised, of course my mum never could have left me. It was a huge euphoric moment. And I guess that’s ultimately a big part of what I ended up saying in the book; she gave it back to me in a way that I realised that in tiny things that I do or in ways that I am, it’s all in there.”

Alongside the central dilemma that Molly faces – how to find her place in a family that, as much as its members love her, doesn’t seem quite able to accommodate her – are numerous other explorations: into the lives of the Irish in London, addiction, infertility and how we define a successful life.

One of the aspects of family life that Ryan wanted to explore was what happens when it doesn’t quite go right: “The question for me was, at what point does the individual become the communal? And at what point do you raise your issue? And I think, certainly in Ireland, and in many countries, you don’t feel allowed. You don’t say, hang on everybody, I have this big problem. And you can let it get too far.”

At the end of our conversation, Ryan goes back to her day job – she is head of public engagement at Arts Council Ireland, and has previously worked in a similar role at the BBC, gifting her, she says, with a useful love of feedback. She will always have another job, she reckons, and has become adept at writing fiction on her phone during her commute, building up material until she has a critical mass and books time off work in order to lick it into shape.

Now that the long march to publication is complete, what does she hope for the book? More than anything, she answers, is that it allows people experiencing dark times to cut themselves a bit of slack; to understand “that you can be in awful places and awful things are happening, but there’s enough incredible warmth there in the world to kind of keep us going”.

There’s Been a Little Incident is published by Apollo