When rising star Chloe Michelle Howarth published her debut novel Sunburn, you can safely say that it struck a nerve globally.
Set in a small Irish village in the 1990s, the book was lauded as a tender, devastating portrait of queer first love — and one that unfolded against the backdrop of a country on the cusp of social change.
Now she’s back with her second novel Heap Earth Upon It, and she’s travelled back even further to the 1960s. To say it’s a riveting read is an understatement, and we were thrilled when it landed on our desks at Missing Perspectives.
In conversation with Missing Perspectives, Howarth reflects on the threads connecting her two novels: queerness, adolescence, repression, the weight of Irish tradition, and why, for her, longing is the true engine of storytelling. What’s not to love? Buy these two books STAT!
Sunburn was such a standout debut set in 1990s rural Ireland. Now with Heap Earth Upon It, you’ve gone further back in time to the 1960s. What draws you to writing about these particular moments in Irish history?
When I’m starting out with a novel and trying to get a feel for the world that the characters are in, selecting a decade is one of the most important points for me. The motivation for choosing the decades in Sunburn and Heap Earth Upon It were different to each other.
With Sunburn, there were so many reasons that the 1990s felt right. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland in 1993, so writing a story about a young girl realising that she is gay during that time was compelling to me. I wanted to explore the ways in which laws and social attitudes can be misaligned, sometimes for the worst. Another reason I chose the 1990s was that I didn’t want the teenage characters to have access to mobile phones.
This novel is all about romance and yearning, and that is often expressed through love letters between the two main characters. Details like perfumed paper, the idiosyncrasies of somebody’s handwriting, and just knowing the person that you love has touched the same paper as you are all lost with texting. Lastly, I had a feeling that the 90s in Ireland were the end of an era, similar to many places in the world. Children began to grow up differently after the 90’s, with changes in technology, what was available to them, and what was possible for them. As somebody born in 1996, the 90s were very easy for me to romanticise.
When I first started writing Heap Earth Upon It, I knew that I wanted to go deeper into the past than I had before. I considered many different eras for the book to be set in, going back as far as the mid-nineteenth century. After I considered lots of different moments in time, the 60s began to feel a lot less far away. I became fascinated with the differences between the portrayal of the 1960s in media and the realities of the 60s in rural Ireland. Writing this novel really changed my perspective of that era. Previously, the 60s would invoke thoughts of countercultures and civil rights demonstrations; now, I think about how some houses in the Irish countryside were without electricity.
Jumping all the way back to the 1960s was a different experience in regard to research. Writing about rural Ireland in the 90s was fairly easy, as I had so many people to ask about what things were like there and then. The answers I needed were often only a text away. Getting information on the 1960s was different. I found it really difficult to find first hand accounts of being queer in rural Ireland in the 60s. I was very keen to have a queer character in a setting where queerness was not allowed to exist. So much of what we hear about queerness — and many other topics — in Ireland’s past is that it simply wasn’t spoken about.
And by virtue of that, it was erased from public life. I thought that, as a writer, I might enjoy inserting a queer character into that space and have her try to understand her sexuality, desires, and attractions without having any reference for them. It was a real challenge to write about these things without having any of the typical language that one would use to describe them.
It all makes me wonder what decades I’ll write about next, and whether I’ll revisit some decades again in the future.
Both novels explore desire, shame and secrecy in tight-knit rural communities. What fascinates you most about these settings?
The main reasons that I’m drawn to these tight-knit, rural settings is probably because that is where I grew up. I really understand what it is to be a part of a small community, to feel both on the inside and the outside of it. As a writer, these complex communities in such beautiful landscapes are irresistible to me. I could write about it forever, I probably will.
As for the themes of desire, shame, and secrecy, for me, they are all different forms of longing, and longing has been a central theme in my writing. I am obsessed with the emotional tug that comes from a character constantly wanting the one thing that they cannot have. So love stories become less about love and more about the absence of love. Family stories become about flaws, and what the family is missing. Success stories become about wanting more. It sounds negative when I put it like that! But I’m drawn to those absences, especially when it comes to love.
Secrecy in tight-knit communities is something that everybody experiences, whether they’re from a small village or not, because it’s a dynamic that is repeated everywhere: in friend groups, in the workplace, and in families. And the notion of secrecy in these communities has become quite funny to me. I used to be so mortified over the idea of somebody knowing my business, which I think is very normal.
But then I began to consider how many people’s business I know about and how fleeting it is in my mind. When I thought of that, the threat of people knowing my business sort of fell away. Now it has become funny to me that we go around pretending not to gossip, and trying to convince ourselves that nobody is gossiping about us. As a writer, it has been helpful to have this new perspective on the shame that comes with secrecy. I already knew the horrible fear of having secrets and the threat of being found out, and I think that seeing it from another angle aids in building and dispelling tension around secrets.
I wonder if it’s inherently queer for desire, shame, and secrecy to go hand in hand. It’s sad that they are all so easily connected in a queer context. However, it cannot be denied that that has been a part of life for queer people all over the world. It’s still how things are for so many queer people now, to be caught between shame and desire, and that makes me really upset. It feels like, sometimes, in novels, shame and fear are needed to give the queer experience legitimacy.
I would say that my queer characters — so far — have had a really difficult time due to society’s reaction to their sexuality, which is why I’m especially keen to make them full, real people, with traits beyond their queerness. I make sure that a certain amount of their issues are self-inflicted, and for their failures to be more linked to who they are as people and how they behave, rather than as a direct result of their sexuality. Although that’s a fine line to walk when writing in rural Ireland in the 90s and the 60s.
Heap Earth Upon It has been described as “gothic” — what does this term mean to you, and how do you use it to explore intimacy, repression and the darker side of love?
I’ve always been drawn to the gothic, in all of its forms. I have a collection of Edgar Allan Poe anthologies that I adore, and a book of illustrations by Irish artist Harry Clarke that accompany some of Poe’s stories. I’ve always loved the Southern Gothic, and often go back to novels like Beloved and The Sound and The Fury.
And then, of course, there is the Irish Gothic, which has had a huge impact on me. I have always admired this more realistic depiction of Ireland, as it moves away from our tourist-friendly image. The Field is a play that captures this perfectly, and has always been a big influence for me. A lot of work by John B Keane, Martin McDonagh, and Marina Carr share the themes of family, money, farming, and loss. They are like tragedies in many ways. For example, the play Sive, and the novella Foster are both stories that centre family and money, with climaxes of children drowning in bogs. They are so beautifully written, so dark, and yet so real. I’ve been fascinated by this style of text for years, so I adored leaning into it.
The Irish countryside is the perfect setting for a Gothic story. I think that there is something undeniably gothic about Ireland in the winter. Quiet pubs, electric fences, bare trees. The drizzle, and the biting cold, and the short days. You can create a sense of the gothic without exaggeration, by just describing exactly what is there before you. There is a lot of superstition in Irish culture, which adds to the tension and suspense of these stories. Between the creatures of folklore and the characters in the bible, Irish life has long been influenced by these otherworldly forces. I think that unseen, threatening presence is very gothic.
As a child, I was told folklore about changelings, small creatures who steal new babies and live in their places; the púca, a shapeshifting horse/hare-like animal who meets people walking home alone at night and takes them for a ride; and the banshee, Ireland’s first widow, whose keening is a sign of death. I was told she would knock on the back of my wardrobe to warn that she was coming! Stories like these are quite scary and very common. And then consider the influence of the Catholic church. The constant guilt and awareness of sin, always striving to be better for a God that is always watching. When you combine all of these things, rural Ireland becomes a very eerie place, the ideal setting for a gothic novel.
The four narrators in Heap Earth Upon It were great vehicles to explore different elements of the Irish gothic. Betty, a woman who has always longed for a child and always felt the absence of a child in her life, attaches herself to an orphaned family to fulfil this deep craving. Tom and Jack, on two different ends of masculinity. One so deep in his emotions that he is teetering on becoming entirely lost to them. The other is so keen to repress his emotions that he acts like they aren’t even there. Both men are so occupied with their feelings that they begin to face a type of madness. And then Anna, with all of the desire inside her that she doesn’t understand, which becomes bigger than her, and takes over her life. This strangulation of all of their feelings happening in this superstitious, quiet place, in the depths of winter, all feels very dark to me. The gothic helps to bring out the emotion, and the emotion helps to amplify the gothic.
You’ve said before that, as a teenager, you didn’t yet have language for queerness and that you felt “one degree away from everyone else”. Does that feeling still inform the way you write and develop characters (who are also discovering their own desires)?
Yes, I definitely felt that way when I was younger. A part of me still feels like that sometimes now. I wonder if that’s because it was a strong feeling in my formative years, so it has never really left? In any case, it is definitely something that I keep in mind when writing. At one time, I thought I had experienced that feeling of separation due to my own queerness, when actually, I now think that the majority of people will feel that way at one time in their lives. We all have times when we feel outside of the loop and like we can’t fit in with everybody else. It’s just a part of life.
In Sunburn, I used it with Lucy discovering her identity, the things that she wants, and the things that she doesn’t want. But in Heap Earth Upon It, I took it further, and it seems that every character felt that at one time or another, queer or otherwise.
For the queer character in Heap Earth Upon It, Anna, this feeling has been present throughout her life. Anna has had a very hard time when it comes to her friendships. Over the years, her close female companions have fallen away from her. She cannot understand why she can’t maintain a nice friendship the way that other women seem to be able to. This feeling of being far away from everybody else is a driving force for Anna to try to keep her close relationships alive, and it leads her to some very unhealthy situations. But it isn’t just the queer character who is plagued by this feeling. Betty is a middle-aged woman who appears to have a perfect life. Everybody in the town admires and respects her. She has a genuine love for her husband, and she has money, a home, and anything else that she could want.
But Betty has never been able to have a child, and that has been a great disappointment to both her and her husband. We see Betty feeling outside of all of the other women in her town, as she is the only one in her circle who hasn’t had a child. Tom is a character who, again, on the surface, appears to be doing very well. He is the head of his family, a hard worker, trying to make a good name for himself and his siblings in the town. And as well as Tom does with the other men around him, he never feels fully appreciated. He has a deep need for approval, something that is almost insatiable. This leads him to feeling isolated, and that in trying to get people to like him and his family, the weight of the world is on his shoulders.
So these two non-queer characters experience the same feeling of dissonance that I have written into my queer characters in the past. I enjoyed going deeper into the minds of many characters, rather than just one protagonist. It was refreshing for me to put the straight characters in as much trouble as the queer ones, and hopefully prevented an ‘us’ and ‘them’ from forming within the novel.
Do you see your work as part of a broader wave of Irish queer fiction with authors reimagining what Irish womanhood and sexuality look like on the page?
It’s difficult, as I still see my work as pretty separate to what other writers are doing. That’s not to say that I think I’m doing something radically different to other writers. It’s more that I have a great reverence for writers, and I struggle to see myself as ‘one of them’. I find it hard to look at what I’m doing objectively. I suppose that’s just this thing that has been drilled into me to not be too pleased with myself or what I’m doing – I think that’s quite an Irish attitude.
I’ve only recently become comfortable with calling myself an author, and I’ve been writing for years. So it might take a while for me to be able to step back and see myself as part of a wave of writers. I do know that my own focus in my work is to represent queer people in rural spaces. I want to shine a light on them because they are there, and always have been there, and always will be there. I want to allow queer characters to take up space in small towns, so that real people living in that situation might feel more comfortable taking up space themselves.
I’m only gaining a bit of perspective on Sunburn now, two and a half years after it was published. It all feels a bit abstract because so much of the work I do as a writer is done alone. I work on my books for around a year, and then it’s about another year where the only people who have read the book are my agent and publishers. By the time the book becomes available to the public, I’ve moved on to something else, and I’m very absorbed in another world. So while I can identify as a writer, it’s hard for me to see myself as part of a collective of modern writers, because I’m not that present in the moment that’s occurring with my work.
I just love the writing that is coming out of Ireland at the moment. Niamh Ní Mhaoileon’s Ordinary Saints is a brilliant, heartbreaking, very funny look at queerness and Catholicism. Thirst Trap by Gráinne O’Hare is a hilarious and poignant look at female friendships, with queer characters who feel like very real people. I’ve been so delighted to see so many queer writers and characters coming out of Ireland lately. It’s a great sign of what Irish people are currently interested in, and a reflection of a culture. I’m very glad to be a queer Irish writer at this time.
This feature was sponsored by NewSouth Publishing.