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Page Turners: ‘Confessions’ author Catherine Airey

Page Turners: ‘Confessions’ author Catherine Airey


by Sarah Gill
31st Jan 2025

Here, we sit down with Catherine Airey to discuss beloved literary titles, writing process, and the joy of falling head first down a rabbit hole when reading a good book.

Catherine Airey’s remarkable debut title, Confessions, has just been published — and it’s poised to be one of 2025’s finest reads.

Having grown up in England, Catherine made the decision to give up her job in London and move to West Cork—where her grandmother was from—to volunteer, writing what would eventually become Confessions in her free time.

The book explores these of sisterhood, familial bonds, immigration and placelessness, secrets, institutional abuse, abortion, and mental health. Opening in late September of 2001, when the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing, Confessions centres around Cora Brady, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, adrift and alone.

Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of Cora’s family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool…

Rich with texture and emotion, Confessions traces the arc of three generations of women as they experience in their own time the irresistible gravity of the past: its love and tragedy, its mystery and redemption, and, in all things intended and accidental, the beauty and terrible shade of the things we do.

Catherine Airey
Photo by Teri Pengilley

Did you always want to be a writer? Tell us about your journey to becoming a published author.

I did. I’ve kept a diary since I was seven years old, and in the first one I wrote ‘Please read this diary’ on the first page, which is rather telling as well as being hilarious to me now. That said, when I got older I did pretty much give up on the idea of being an author as a career aspiration. It seemed like such an indulgent thing to want to do, and I didn’t trust my chances. Eventually, though, I became too disappointed in myself for not giving it a try. I quit my job in London and came to Ireland to do volunteer work, which allowed me to live without an income while I wrote. It didn’t feel like a huge risk at the time. I wasn’t really expecting to get an agent and a book deal at the end of it. Writing a novel was just something I wanted to do for myself.

What inspired you to start writing?

For me personally, it really helped that I’d turned my life upside down. I’d tried writing bits and pieces of fiction for years when I lived in London, without much success. When I came to Ireland, I was living in a totally different kind of community, in Baltimore in West Cork. That kind of change—moving from a big city to a small fishing village—obviously informed the settings in Confessions. West Cork is also where my grandma was from, and I was quite consciously doing a reverse of her move to England when she was in her twenties. So I was thinking a lot about women being on their own in a place that’s alien to them, where you feel like an alien yourself. Even when you speak the same language, there are so many differences to process.

Tell us about your new book, Confessions. Where did the idea come from?

Confessions follows several Irish women from the same family on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It opens in New York, on the day that 9/11 happened. Then the story goes back in time, to Burtonport in country Donegal in the 1970s. It’s not the kind of novel which stemmed from an idea or concept. I didn’t have a clear idea of what the story would be, which was quite freeing. I was open to surprising myself along the way.

Catherine Airey

What do you hope this book instils in the reader?

I’ll know when I’m really loving a novel if I get the urge to look things up mid-sentence, when the next thing I know it’s 2am and I have a dozen Wikipedia tabs open. I do this while I’m writing, too, driven by my own curiosity. I’d love it if people ended up falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes based on events that crop up in Confessions, keen to find out more.

What did you learn when writing this book?

So much! There’s obviously the research that went into the book. Growing up in England, Irish history was usually overlooked. What I did learn in school (about the Famine and the Troubles) was taught, at least implicitly, through a colonial lens. After I moved to Ireland I had to examine much of what I thought I knew and reframe it, which made me think more about the details we forget or try to brush under the rug. I learned a lot about myself as well. You have to spend so much time on your own when you write a book. That part of it I actually really like. But it can be difficult sometimes to keep believing in yourself, when it feels like the writing isn’t going well. I suppose it affirmed that I am brave. An odd kind of bravery, because I was scared the whole time, but I kept going.

Tell us about your writing process?

I was quite strict with myself. I wrote 1,000 words a day around my volunteer work. This was quite an achievable number for me, as it’s only a little over a page typed. Most of the time, it would feel like what was coming out of my head was terrible. But pretty much every day there’d be something that I’d be excited about or proud of, which was enough for me to keep going. The difficult part was taking a step back and trying to think about it as a whole.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

Mostly from other novels, particularly when it comes to thinking about voice and plot. While I was writing, though, I found reading novels too distracting and intimidating. Instead I spent a lot of time researching the different times and places in Confessions. I’d seen all the documentaries about 9/11 over the years, but I wanted to know more about what the city was like for the people living there in the days that followed. For the Ireland parts, Fintan O’Toole’s book We Don’t Know Ourselves really helped bring the past to life. The chapter about the Pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979 is brilliant.

What are your top three favourite books of all time, and why?

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, because I relate to someone different each time I read it. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, my favourite coming-of-age novel. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, for telling such an ambitious story with so much granular detail.

Who are some of your favourite authors, Irish or otherwise?

I love Edna O’Brien’s writing for its immediacy. I really think she paved the way for the literary landscape in Ireland today. I am drawn to voice-driven authors like Anna Burns and Eimear McBride, but I also have a great respect for authors who tell very ambitious stories which play with voice more broadly (Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea is a good example, and I’ll read anything by Jonathan Franzen or Hanya Yanagihara). I admire daring, and love it when authors seek to do something different each time. Ottessa Moshfegh comes to mind.

What are some upcoming book releases we should have on our radar?

I can’t wait for Eimear McBride’s follow-up to The Lesser Bohemians, which is out in February. I’ve also been lucky enough to read a proof copy of Cloudless by Rupert Dastur, his debut novel. It’s a tender portrait of a family struggling to stay afloat on their sheep farm in Wales. One of the sons is away fighting in the Iraq war which provides a haunting backdrop to the story. It’s beautifully written and the characters are very well drawn. The tension builds slowly as each of their emotional landscapes becomes increasingly difficult to bear. It’s a very assured debut.

What book made you want to become a writer?

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It’s written as a diary and that made writing a book seem possible to me.

What’s one book you would add to the school curriculum?

Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald would be a brilliant Irish novel to study at school. Some of the best writing about being a child and teenager that I’ve ever read.

What’s some advice you’ve got for other aspiring writers?

This won’t apply to people who have certain responsibilities I didn’t have, but there are lots of ways you can live for a year or two without an income. I used Workaway to find volunteer work which gave me a place to stay and food to eat. With that taken care of, it was amazing how much space I had for myself. The rich experience I had doing this work definitely inspired and enriched my writing.

Lastly, what do the acts of reading and writing mean to you?

For me, reading and writing are obviously related, but actually quite opposite activities. Almost like sisters who look alike but have totally different personalities. Reading for me has always been an escape. It calms anxiety precisely because you don’t have control over what happens next. When I’m reading, the words on the page replace the voice in my head which is often uncertain or fearful. With writing, it’s about amplifying those thoughts and putting them down into words, thinking up what’s going to come next. It’s satisfying to do this, when you look back over what you’ve written. But the process can be agonising. Certainly not relaxing.

‘Confessions’ by Catherine Airey is published by Viking. Catherine will be doing an In Conversation event on Wednesday 5 February at 6.30pm in Books Upstairs on D’Olier Street. You can book your place here.

Portrait photography by Teri Pengilley

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