Seeing the world differently

“I like the idea of using Irish mythology to explain something inexplicable,” says Caitriona Lally.

In her debut novel, Eggshells, the inexplicable takes the form of the changeling, a fairy child swapped for a human. Although the idea is not used blatantly, it is central to Vivian, the novel’s protagonist, who believes she may herself be a changeling. “If the world isn’t working in your favour, then why not see it in a different way?”

On a sunny afternoon in Mantova, in the cosy setting of a medieval church, Lally discusses Eggshells with editor and translator Enrico Terrinoni. The novel, published in 2017 and newly available in Italian translation, follows Vivian as she inherits her great-aunt’s house and wanders the streets of Dublin, searching for codes that might lead her through a portal into another world.

Lally began writing the novel after losing her job, while she herself wandered Dublin looking for “staff wanted” signs. The city she captures is one emerging from the years of the Celtic Tiger and the economic crisis that followed. “It was also a sort of myth internationally, that Ireland was doing so well,” she says. Vivian’s sister embodies that contradiction. She is successful and secure, but seemingly indifferent to her sister’s struggles. “There were a lot of people like this, who just didn’t look to others.”

Lally’s later books have grown out of different aspects of her life. Home Economics, her most recent novel, draws on her own work as a mother, cleaner, and writer, exploring her relationship with money and creativity. She describes writing Eggshells as easy and joyful, partly because she did not initially realise she was writing a novel. Her second book, Wunderland, was more difficult: “With two children and a cleaning job to pay the bills so I could write, life got in the way.”

And what of Joyce, perhaps the unavoidable literary presence in any discussion of Dublin? Lally didn't read Ulysses, or any of Joyce’s work, before writing Eggshells. “I don’t want to diss Joyce,” she adds. “I got a lot from him.”

For her next book, Lally hopes to leave Dublin behind for a rural setting, following another outsider: a “blow-in”, as they say in Ireland, someone who never quite belongs. It is a perspective that connects her work: the outsider looking in, and, perhaps, seeing the world differently.