Claire Keegan

speaker

550 appearances 4 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 21 Jun

Claire Keegan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Oprah Podcast · Claire Keegan: “Small Things Like These”| Oprah’s Book Club · 3 Dec 2024 podcast

I do. I really do. I don't know why I believe that, but... That the story finds you.

I do, and I think you have to listen for it and wait for it and not force it and play with it and sometimes just be really patient while it's making up its mind. I know you have dogs. You know when you're lazy and you don't walk your dog on a wet day and the nose keeps coming?

There. Yeah. Yes? Well, I think that stories, when they start doing that to you, it's time to either write them or then they'll go off and find somebody else who will. Really?

I never have and I don't have it yet. I've never felt that. I don't know if it'll come again. You don't know if it'll turn into something even when you're in the middle of it. You don't know if you'll finish it. I couldn't say that I've ever known that.

I've no talent for titles at all. I really don't. I don't know what to call something. I think what you call something is actually a different talent to writing movement. When you're writing a story, you're writing movement over time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then naming it.

Sometimes when, you know, I've been teaching creative writing for 30 years, and sometimes there'll be somebody in the group who'll know exactly what to call it. Yeah. And they have that talent. They can name it.

I think so.

I think it was the best thing that I could pick out of the book and my editors couldn't come up with anything better. LAUGHTER

It means everything to me. I think we all, you know, you live your life over time and how you use the minutes and the hours and the days that build into years becomes your character. And that becomes who you are and becomes who you treat people and how you relate to people and how people relate to you.

And it's also about the things you could have done, which you haven't, or the horrible things you could have said, which you didn't. Whatever it is turns into a life.

I just follow somebody physically through time. You see, I believe your feet never lie. I'm really interested in horses. One of the things that horses and starting horses taught me is that your feet never lie. You know, you can go up into your head in that place above your eyebrows and you can say something that absolutely isn't true is true because you've come to believe it.

But your feet never lie. So one of the things I do when I'm writing is I just follow somebody's feet through time because that'll lead to the truth of what they want. What the hell?

Your feet are always after your object of desire. Uh-huh. It's always true. Even if you're a con artist, your feet are going after whoever it is or whatever it is you want to con. Uh-huh. So it's just, I don't try and analyze what somebody is thinking, but your feet are just hooked onto your emotions. And your emotions also are always accurate.

Because he's a man of few words and he isn't a gossip and he doesn't say very much. I actually think he wouldn't make a long night shorter. You know? So he's not somebody who goes on and he needs to keep busy. And I think he likes the repetition of work. And I also think he's kind of afraid of falling apart if he stops.

Yes, I think he's that thoughtful type of a person who's asking what he's doing with his time. I think also it's part of his upsets. Is he doing what he should have done with his life, with his time as a father, as a husband, as a man? Also, I think in that time leading up to Christmas, we all wear some type of a shield.

And I think especially if you have children, that at Christmas time, that shield grows a bit thinner. Why? Because you're supposed to be a Christian. You're supposed to be thinking about how you're getting on. You're supposed to pause.

I think so.

I didn't have any relative or anybody I knew in the laundries. It was just all over the news for a long time in Ireland. And I think the question I was interested in was, why did people do nothing? when the police knew, the social workers knew, the parents knew, the Catholic Church knew, the priests knew, the nuns knew, and nobody did anything.

And I wasn't able to not ask the question while I was writing. Really, I think the book is a response to my asking the question.

96.

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