The writer Mary Costello is sitting in the plush lobby of a Galway city-centre hotel. She is diminutive in stature, smartly dressed, with impeccable long, blonde hair hanging neatly around her shoulders. She drinks mint tea as we discuss her new novel, A Beautiful Loan, an intimate portrait of one woman’s journey towards self-discovery. It is Costello’s fifth book since her 2012 debut collection, The China Factory.
“It looks like I’ve been productive,” she says. But in reality she has been gripped by a crippling writer’s block for the past number of years. “I haven’t written a word of fiction, not one sentence, since the genocide started. I have been utterly broken by Gaza.”
A Beautiful Loan tells the story of a woman called Anna. When we first meet her at the age of 19, she is a young, naive woman from Galway living and working in Dublin and in love with a much older, emotionally withdrawn man. Over the course of more than two decades, we follow Anna through relationships, marriage, loss and a growing self-awareness as she seeks answers to life’s big questions in philosophy, literature, music, religion and science.
The book feels like a perfect combination of the free-flowing philosophical inquiry of her second novel, The River Capture (2019) and the pared-back prose and emotional storytelling of her debut novel, Academy Street (2014). If The River Capture was Costello’s Joycean book, A Beautiful Loan is without doubt her Jungian novel.
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She has studied Jung in the past, and has even undergone Jungian analysis herself. “I didn’t do it out of any deep crisis,” she explains. “I did it because if I go to the gym for my body – I don’t – I consider doing analysis for my mind as worthy.”
She came to Jung through a hunger to understand the meaning of existence. “That’s why I write, I suppose. I write to become conscious. I read to become conscious. I think to become conscious. Joan Didion said if she knew her own mind she wouldn’t write at all. So, I write to become conscious.”
Costello says that in many ways modern life seems designed to keep us unconscious. “News is homogenised. We are encouraged to conform. We are directed to think by advertising, algorithms, social media … And look at the universities. Traditionally, universities are where independent thought and argument were nourished. Now in many universities there is a lot of fear of getting cancelled by opening debate.”
The novel is equally as involved with the subject of religion as it is with philosophy, and it delves into Islam when Anna starts dating a Muslim man.
“About 25 years ago I fell in love,” Costello says. “I had a Muslim boyfriend. Before that I would have been very ignorant of Islam, like a lot of people would have. I had a lot of negative misconceptions and biases. I studied it, I went into it in a lot of detail because I was curious, and studying Islam helped me write Anna, to get inside the skin of that. I saw it up close and personal because I had a Muslim partner for a few years.”
[ Mary Costello: how I came to write Academy StreetOpens in new window ]
At this stage of the interview, it feels imperative to ask the question that most writers hate, and the one that Costello is probably asked the most – are her books autobiographical?
She’s at ease with the misconception. “This is a novel, this is fiction, but like many writers I use aspects of my own life, my work, my influences.”
Does she not worry that by giving her characters some of her own experiences or traits or obsessions that people will think her books are about her?
“I actually don’t. It isn’t me. Parts of the mind are me – the great love of books, the adoration of Camus and Jung – but I can’t police myself and leave out the stuff I love. I used to do that when I was young, leaving out allusions to literature or music, thinking people will think I’m showing off. I was self-censoring and it was such a dishonest, wrong thing to do because you’re leaving out some of the soul of writing.”
Costello grew up on a farm in east Galway and moved to Dublin to study English at the age of 17. She stayed for 30 years, forging a career as a teacher. She had no plan to be a writer. In fact, she felt writing as an intrusive force in her life. She had been published early in New Irish Writing, then in the Sunday Tribune, at the age of 22, but when she got married and started her career, writing slipped into the margins of her life. It was only when her first marriage ended when she was in her 30s that she returned to writing and began submitting stories to The Stinging Fly.
It published her debut story collection, The China Factory, in 2012, which was nominated for a Guardian First Book Award and an Irish Book Award. Costello’s debut novel, Academy Street, quickly followed, in 2014, and it won Novel of the Year and the overall prize of Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for a Costa award. A new voice in Irish writing had arrived.
She has since left Dublin and now enjoys a quiet life in Kinvara, Co Galway, where she lives with her husband, and fellow writer, Martin Roper. Much like her character Anna, she says the life of the mind is very important to her. “Life without books or without time on my own would be hell. It’s as simple as that. Martin is quite the same, so we read a lot and talk about books a lot. We’re very lucky like that.”
Is it a good thing or a bad thing to have another writer in the house, I wonder. “It is a great comfort to have somebody there always to talk about books. He’s my first reader and my best reader. He’s tough, but my best.”
Needless to say, she is not on social media. “I joined Twitter for about three days around 2011 and ran frightened from it,” she laughs.
When it comes to her writing process, she says she doesn’t have any modus operandi, or set way of doing it.
“I’m an awful time waster. I procrastinate. I’ll do everything but get started. I’ll go on the computer in the morning, and I will read all the newspapers, all the literary journals. I’ll go on a deep dive everywhere, and then it’s 11 o’clock, and I’ll have been at it since half seven and I’ve wasted the whole morning. And then the guilt sets in and the self-loathing,” she laughs.
My sister says to me: Mary, I have two daughters, they want a life, a future. You’re in your third quarter – will you tamp it down?
— Mary Costello
She keeps notebooks everywhere, including one in her car, because she will often get an idea while driving. “I have an idea for a short story, which is inspired by a view I have driving home from my mother’s to Kinvara. There’s a ruin of a castle on the skyline, and I know what happened there – terrible suffering – and I have an idea to link a historic moment to a certain moment in a woman’s life.
“But that [idea] has been there for two or three years, and it’s stagnant, it’s frozen now, because I can’t access anything creatively. Nothing in my life so far has affected me like this genocide – no personal loss, no personal crisis, no personal bereavement – it has really disabled me. I think, how could I go into a room and make up stories? It’s utterly appalling.”
With her inability to write fiction for the time being, she has turned her attention to non-fiction, some literary essays and, lately, more political essays, that she hopes might eventually make a collection. “I write what obsesses me and consumes me and distresses me.”
She admits ruefully that her obsessions can sometimes spill over into dinner-table conversation. “When I’m in company or with family, I turn into a raging tyrant on this topic,” she laughs. “I spend time raging with humanity sometimes, and I’ll bring it up at Christmas dinner or something,’ she laughs again. “It is man alone who has caused all this suffering so I say, roll on the sixth extinction, roll on the end of humanity, because then it will be the end of all suffering.”
Sunday lunch must be great fun in her house I suggest. “My sister says to me: Mary, I have two daughters, they want a life, a future. You’re in your third quarter, will you tamp it down.” She laughs again good-naturedly. “It makes for good argument.”
Having now published a book that so thoroughly investigates one woman’s journey towards consciousness, I wonder has she come any closer to understanding consciousness herself. She says of all the theories of consciousness that she has read about, panpsychism is the one that she has a “soft spot” for.
“It is the idea that every system has some degree of consciousness, from the subatomic particle to amoeba to mouse to man. If we go on that premise, we would not harm anything, we would not harm each other, we would not harm the planet. For me, that’s about the best thing. It mightn’t be correct but it sort of understands that everything is trying to become consciousness.
“When I wrote Academy Street, Tess, that character, found moments of something higher, something numinous, something divine, in church music or in Rilke’s poetry. With Anna, she finds that in literature and for a while in religion. What I understand as the human impulse for the divine, I equate that with the human impulse for consciousness. It sounds like I have things solved, but I don’t. I’m just plunging away in the darkness.”
A Beautiful Loan is published by Canongate. Edel Coffey is a contributor to The Irish Times and an author. Her most recent novel, In Glass Houses, is published by Sphere.
