We are delighted to have a piece by Anna Fitzgerald for Girl in the Making. This coming-of-age tale is about a gentle girl called Jean Kennedy growing up in suburban Dublin in the 1970s and ’80s alongside her mother, her Aunty Ida, and her little brother Baby John F. She shares a few words below.
I grew up in an Ireland that now seems almost a foreign country. Wives were for the handling of husbands, their ambitions subject to men’s authority and men’s entitlement; and an unmarried woman was seen as a comical, unfulfilled figure. When I started writing the novel that became Girl in the Making, I wanted to tell a story of a household in this Ireland, from the perspective of a vulnerable child.
My narrator, Jean Kennedy, takes the reader into her most intimate confidence, inviting you to listen to the things that she dares not speak to anyone else; to accompany her as she grows up in this strange and confusing world into which she must somehow fit – no matter the cost to herself.
As Jean grows up, the language she uses grows up with her. The voice I created in the first few pages is intended to establish something that for me feels very important: a three-year-old has personhood, memory and an innate morality. I wanted the book to be utterly centred on the child. While Jean has none of the power, she has all of the voice.
You can now pre-order Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald.
