Big questions brought to book beautifully in Anne’s new novel

REVIEW BY STEPHEN GLENNON

Through her prize-winning debut novel, When All is Said, Dublin-born author Anne Griffin established herself as an engaging storyteller with an innate ability to weave a tale stitched together with intriguing characters, tumultuous emotions and a sense of place.

Now, in her follow-up book, Listening Still, Anne conjures up more absorbing figures, not least the protagonist Jeanie Masterson. A 32-year-old married woman working in her father’s funeral home, Jeanie has a gift of being able to hear the dead and it falls upon her to relay their last messages to the living.

This, quite often, puts Jeanie in awkward positions because it’s easier for the dead to make their last confessions when they don’t have to suffer repercussions – at least not on this earth. In true Anne Griffin style, the situations that arise can be as much funny as sad.

Anne, who workshopped the original draft of her first book When All is Said when undertaking an MA in Creative Writing in UCD in 2015, admits she had fun exploring death in Listening Still – a story that had been “knocking around in my head for a while”.

“Even when I was writing When All is Said, I had a short story I wrote when I was in UCD where I was trying to work out what I wanted to do (in Listening Still),” says Anne, speaking from her adopted home in Mullingar.

“I knew I wanted to set a story in the funeral director business because, like with anybody, I am really drawn to the mystery of this world. Also, in school, there was someone in our class who lived in the house in our local graveyard in Dublin. Her father worked (as caretaker) at the graveyard and I used to think she was so special and different.”

What has grown out of that memory is a book that centres around a character who lives on the edges of things – be it death, relationships, love or the truth. “With this book, I wanted to write from a female point of view, about a woman who was struggling with who she was,” says Anne.

“I suppose, there was quite a bit of myself in here, of the struggles of getting to know who you are, from a 16-year-old right up into your 20s and even your 30s, when you are really only getting to know yourself.

“I always feel sorry for people at 18 who are expected to figure out what college do they want to go to. What is it they want to be in life? So, I wanted to capture the struggle that I had with that.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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