Chloe Michelle Howarth: As a young teenager I didn’t know I was queer and had that ‘why am I one degree away from everyone else?’ feeling

When Chloe Michelle Howarth and I meet over Zoom on Black Friday, it’s one of her busiest days of the year in her job as operations manager of an online hair accessories company in Brighton. But we’re not meeting to discuss hair supplies, rather literature. The 27-year-old Cork native’s debut novel, Sunburn, was last week shortlisted for the inaugural Nero Book Awards in the debut fiction category. Her debut is one of four books shortlisted, including Michael Magee’s Close to Home, which won the Rooney Prize for Literature in October.

Howarth grew up in Roscarberry in west Cork, and Sunburn is set in a similar small rural village called Crossmore in 1990. It tells the coming-of-age story of schoolgirl Lucy and her burgeoning sexuality.

“It’s such a compliment that the panel think I belong in that category,” she says. “I’m just not the kind of person to be focused on things like awards and accolades so it’s a really happy surprise.”

[ Irish authors dominate Nero adult fiction awards ]

The novel, too, was a happy surprise, it seems. After graduating in 2019 with a degree in English, media and cultural studies from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, she moved back home. On New Year’s Day 2020, she got the idea for Sunburn.

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“I often joke that my lockdown started a few months before everyone else’s did because I moved back in with my parents, and a lot of my friends had moved out of west Cork, so I was already living that socially isolated life. I probably did have more time to write in that people weren’t trying to pull me out of the house for any reason.”

Hers is a generation that often end up living at home with parents for longer than they want to as a result of the housing crisis. Was it difficult to be living at home again at that time? “I’m lucky in that I love being with my family and there’s so many positives to it but – I think a lot of people experience this, especially if you move away for college and then you move back – it’s a strange stunt in your development. You think you’re so grown-up and mature but actually I had no job and no flat so I was lucky that I had them to fall back on.”

When you’re a child and people say, ‘You’re so creative’, if you get told that a lot you internalise it and it becomes part of your personality

Howarth is the middle of three children (she has two brothers). “I genuinely had a lovely childhood, and my family are friendly, funny people and I’m lucky we get on so well. My mother works in the playschool in Roscarberry and has done for 20 years, and my dad is a builder, so they were always very local community jobs, working in the area. It was a very quiet childhood, I’d say. I look back and I’m very glad that that was the experience I had.”

She wrote Sunburn throughout lockdown in a “non-linear” way. If she noticed something, she would make a note of it on her phone and add it to a Google document later. “The pieces I was writing were gradually getting longer and more developed, and I realised this was now novel-length with a plot arc and characters, and I did write, without meaning to, what is considered a novel,” she says, laughing.

Writing had been a serious hobby for her since she was a teenager. In school, her interests were English and art. “I knew going into secondary that I was not a science girl or a maths girl, and those weren’t my ambitions. When you’re a child and people say, ‘You’re so creative’, if you get told that a lot you internalise it and it becomes part of your personality. I wanted to do English because by the end of the Leaving Cert it was the one thing I didn’t have to break my back trying to understand. It was coming easy to me, and I loved it. I always had ambition because I love writing so much, but I had the ambition to be writing, if that makes sense.”

When she realised she had written a novel, her family and friends encouraged her to seek representation. “The book was there, so why not try?” An agent and a publishing deal followed, and the resulting book is a tender evocation of that time between adolescence and early adulthood and the accompanying rites of passage that come with growing up and moving away from home to go to college. Howarth had always wanted to move away for college. “I wanted to try something different. New people, new spaces. I’ve never been a shy person but I can get socially anxious, and it was good for me to go somewhere where I knew no one and the only way I was going to get on was if I made friends. I think the one thing that was really great was I saw a lot of queerness very quickly that I wouldn’t have really seen in west Cork. When I was in my final year in school I don’t think anyone in my class was out. At the time no one around me was queer, and when I got to Dublin I met the two guys I live with now in Brighton on my first day, and they’re both gay and I just thought, wow, look at you both, you just are who you are, and it was very refreshing to me to see there are others and you’re getting on great.”

Often you’ll end up erasing the parts of yourself that aren’t easy to understand just to make yourself palatable. I do think it’s a natural thing when you’re young, but it’s a horrible thing

Howarth came out as bisexual aged 14. “It’s not that I ever hid that part of myself,” she says, “but [at college] it was being seen in a new way and appreciated. Sometimes I feel like if you’re the only queer person in a room, you’re translating yourself in a way, even if it’s just little things like jokes. I just felt very understood so it was liberating and refreshing and very, very nice.”

In the book, Howarth’s protagonist, Lucy, is also grappling with feeling alienated from her friends, and from the traditional path of marriage and children. “I think, queer or otherwise, when you’re young and a teenager, everyone is desperate to assimilate and desperate to belong. No one wants to be the odd one out so everyone is trying to fit in. I often wonder, if you’ve got 10 friends trying to be the same, which one of us is being honest? When I was a young teenager and I didn’t know I was queer I did have that ‘why am I just one degree away from everyone else?’ feeling. Whether or not it was because I was queer, I don’t know. We want to relate to people and we want to feel understood but I think with that want often you’ll end up erasing the parts of yourself that aren’t easy to understand just to make yourself palatable. I do think it’s a natural thing when you’re young, but it’s a horrible thing. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach a stage of enlightened society where that isn’t the case.”

In spring 2021, as lockdown continued in Ireland, Howarth made the decision to move to Brighton with a friend. “It was at that point in lockdown where in England things had been lifted a lot and they were getting back to normal life and it was completely different in Ireland. I thought it would just be for the summer. Now friends from Ireland have moved over here and we have a place together, I’m in a relationship, and I have a job and my life is here now.”

I like the feeling of: I’ll write this and then when it’s finished I will hand it over. I don’t want the pressure of a two-book deal

Sunburn is a deeply Irish novel, with beautiful descriptions of the countryside as well as painfully accurate portrayals of teenage life in a small Irish village. “I wanted to say something authentic,” she says. “I was trying to reflect what I knew to be true and I did want to make it as Irish as possible because Irishness and the culture of Irishness is so fascinating to me, even our speech patterns and our syntax. I wanted it to be really unapologetically Irish, with Irish names and such. I wouldn’t have enjoyed writing something that didn’t include that.”

The Nero award winners will be announced on January 16th with a £5,000 prize for each category winner and a £30,000 for the overall winner. Howarth is relaxed about the outcome. “I’ve done my part and, whatever happens next, there’s nothing I can do to help or prevent things from happening. The book is written, there’s no more I can add to it, there’s no more I can do, so it’s a nice way to feel.”

She is working on another book but is going at her own pace. “I like the feeling of: I’ll write this and then when it’s finished I will hand it over. I don’t want the pressure of a two-book deal.”

The publication of Sunburn and the Nero nomination have given her the confidence to push forward with her writing. “I have an opportunity here; I might as well keep going. Until Sunburn came out I wasn’t really sharing what I was writing but I would always talk about writing so people knew I was doing this all the time but no one knew what I was doing,” she says, laughing. “So it was validating in a way to say this is what I’ve been working on. It was nice to feel it is actually a real thing.”

Sunburn is published by Verve