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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

I mean, this is.

I'm just delighted. I'm just delighted to have, you know, had the opportunity to write the book and be heard and to say something about misogynistic Ireland. Because one of the things I know about the misogynist is that he wants to shut you up. Mm-hmm. Verbally and physically. In Maureen's case, obviously she was incarcerated.

So it was lovely to be able to come out the far side of that and use my voice and use my power to be able to say something which obviously Maureen at least does not find in any way offensive and finds it accurate.

Well, Ireland is and was primarily Catholic, you know, and the Catholics were, generally speaking, poor and Protestants were not. But I just wasn't brought up with any hatred. I was very lucky in that regard. And I never remember my parents having any kind of a them and us relationship.

And I actually remember my mother saying that a Protestant was more likely to give you a lend of a plow than a Catholic would be. And so I was very lucky. I didn't think about Protestant neighbors as being anything other than more privileged than we were. So there was there was just no no hatred at all. There was no hostility as far as as far as I remember any anywhere in my childhood.

And maybe that's why Mrs. Wilson in the book is kind.

There wasn't a great deal, apart from the motor cars, I don't know that there was a huge difference between the 80s and the 60s or the 50s. Wow. We had bad hairdos in the 80s. Contraception was illegal in Ireland until 1985. Martial rape was legal until 1990. So that'll give you a picture of what the 80s were like in Ireland. We also had the highest unemployment in Western Europe. Wow.

So it was a difficult and backward time.

Hello Wicklow. Bad Wi-Fi in Wicklow. No, there really wasn't. It was just after reading the Ferns report, first of all. And then I heard what was going on in the Magdalene laundries and the radio, and I just needed to write something about it. But it wasn't in any way personal for me on an autobiographical level. It was what I was imagining.

But I don't think there's anything more personal than what you imagine. Yeah.

Good luck with your studies.

It just makes me feel grateful that I have the life I have and then I'm able to make a living writing stories and that people want to read them and that they're being taught in the schools. And it's lovely to think that there are, you know, teenage boys in Ireland now asking the question of what would I do and how am I and how do I treat women?

Let's hope not.

I think the main difference between Furlong and some of the other men in that community might be that when he was young, he was loved and cared for. He was living in privileged circumstances and the three people who lived there all cared for him and cared well for him. And even though he lost his mother when he was young, she loved him and she minded him.

And people in that house respected each other. And there's a wonderful poem by Philip Larkin called An Arundel Tomb and it concludes with the line, what will survive of us is love. Mm-hmm. And I think that carries over into Bill's personality. Because he wasn't brutalized perhaps the way other people were. Wasn't so hard. Seamus Heaney says we get hurt and get hard.

And I think he was able to keep some of his softness.

Thank you for the question. I'm not sure that there is a message I want anyone to take away from the book. I think reading a book is a really personal thing. And whatever you take away from it is all right. And, you know, some people may think this is a story of a fool. I mean, he was born on April Fool's Day and people predicted when he was born that he would turn out to be a fool.

And maybe that's what the story is. Maybe there were clever ways to get done what he got done. Maybe it's a story about love. Maybe it's a story about a marriage falling apart. Maybe it's a story about a man breaking down. But whatever it is, whatever it is, is all right. Because I think your response to a book is deeply personal and shouldn't be interfered with.

I think the reader completes the book

I think it's empathy. I actually think it's sadness in the end. I know that we're supposed to be happy all the time, but I mean, I just think that would be death for empathy. I think sadness actually makes you think about what life is like for others. If you weren't sad, if you didn't feel that, you wouldn't have empathy.

Showing 521–540 of 550 · page 27 of 28