Sinéad Gleeson
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's so horrible.
It's so painful.
But again, you're talking about a lot of the stories are set in an Ireland which would have been a very painful and repressive place.
There wouldn't have been divorce.
There would have been a very set of strict codes of morality, you know, after McQuaid and, you know, the era of De Valera.
And it was De Valera who sent her father to America to be the first Irish ambassador anyway.
So a very restrained and horrifying time that the house would have been, you know, at one point it talks about Hubert's job, he works in a shop on Graffin Street in Dublin, but that's the only reference to him going outside.
The whole thing, all of those stories are so claustrophobic, it's very much set within those four walls of the home, deliberately so.
You're not meant to leave.
Brennan doesn't want us to leave.
She wants us to stay, to look around, to eavesdrop and absorb the horror of these dysfunctional people and the hatred that they have for each other.
So that's why that's why we don't get to leave.
And that's why there are all these returns and echoes all the way through.
And it's to remind you all the time there's no escape from the life these people have chosen.
Yeah, it's like the unheimlich in the house.
It can be a horror house in a horror film or it can be a place of bliss and safety.
But I think to me, the fact it's the quietness of the stories, they're not bombastic.
They weren't dealing with the same kind of things that we were used to seeing in Irish writing, the kind of the tropes and themes that we get kind of along the way with Irish writing.