Sinéad Gleeson

And the church were at the head of this, encouraging all this, you know, canoobial bliss.

It's amazing.

And of course, it wasn't for a lot of people, you know, and usually they had one son and he was now gone.

And all they were left with after these years of marriages is that they don't really like each other.

And they're not very fond of each other.

And that would then in turn impacts on their own individual happiness and lives.

So this kind of being, this umbilical collection they have together is very poisonous.

So I think the ferocity for me is that, again, Maeve didn't fear saying these things because I think holding up a mirror to that kind of, you know, buckling

puncturing the idea of what the Irish happy marriage is and what goes on again, as we know, the term behind closed doors.

You didn't talk about that in Ireland.

And there is the good room in the house, that so-called good room you'd bring the priest to.

I think she wasn't afraid to sort of call out that it isn't always wonderful, it isn't always happy.

And the ferocity for me is that I find them deeply uncomfortable to read sometimes because they're too real and they're too brutal.

but they feel like relationships you know about.

You know this happens in relationships now, but we didn't know that those things happened in Ireland in marriages because we just didn't see them in literature.

I don't think you can say this about a lot of writers, but I think you'll be utterly changed by the work of Mae Brennan if you read it.

You won't be the same person again having read her work.

And I can't stress that enough.

So there's only two short story collections, a novella and a brilliant collection of columns that I consider to be essays.

So read them all.