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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's June and another big week in the run-up to the midterms. Primaries in half a dozen states, including California, where new congressional maps are in place and a chaotic race for governor is wide open. We're also following gas prices and Iran. So far, talk of a peace deal is just talk. We'll keep you posted. Listen every morning, up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest is author Maggie O'Farrell. She's best known for her 2020 novel, Hamnet. It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jesse Buckley won an Oscar for her performance as Agnes Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife. O'Farrell co-wrote the film's screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao.
Maggie O'Farrell spoke to Fresh Air's executive producer, Sam Brigger, about her new novel, Land. Here's Sam.
Hamnet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway. It's about how they meet and fall in love, marry and have children. Their young son, Hamnet, dies from the plague. The grief shakes the family and leads Shakespeare to write his play, Hamlet. O'Farrell's novel, Hamnet, won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Maggie O'Farrell has a new novel called Land. It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomás and Liam, an Irish father and 10-year-old son, out in foul weather, mapping a peninsula as part of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Tomás, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, is tasked with modernizing the maps of Ireland.
Something magical happens on the peninsula that forever changes the trajectory of their family and compels Tomas to move his family from the tight quarters of their city's one-room apartment to an abandoned cottage on the peninsula and begin an agrarian life.
There are many abandoned cottages and houses and villages throughout Ireland, as the novel takes place only a decade or so after the country's great famine. The countryside has been emptied out, with millions lost to the famine and to emigration. Tomás is in part mapping the erasure of those lives from the land.
O'Farrell has written eight other novels, children's books, and a memoir called I Am, I Am, I Am, 17 Brushes with Death, about, well, her brushes with death, nearly being murdered, nearly drowning, and her childhood encephalitis that left her with various balance and spatial recognition challenges.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Maggie O'Farrell's novel 'Hamnet'?
Maggie O'Farrell, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
So can you tell us what the spark was for your new book, Land?
Oh, well, I'd say it crept up on me very slowly. I've always really been interested in the life of my great-great-grandfather, on whom, to us, the character is based. He worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the mid-19th century, just after the Great Famine had taken place. And... I thought about him for years and I thought about his son for years.
His son was my great-grandfather and he took a very different path in life initially from his father's. He became a Jesuit, which, as anyone knows anything about Catholicism, is not a job you just happen to fall into. It's something that you really, really commit yourself to and it takes years to train.
He was a Jesuit for a while and then he left, quite astonishingly, hence my existence and the existence of all my cousins and siblings here. And he came full circle and became a mapper like his father. So the two of them was always really interested in me, but I could never really see a way forward to making into a novel until I was on a train a few years ago on the way from Belfast to Dublin.
And just suddenly, and I wish this happened more often, Sam, but the very first line of the book just slid into my head, which is his father was ever a man of few words. And it was really extraordinary.
I've never had this experience before. As soon as I had that first line, I could suddenly see the path of the whole novel. I could see how I could do it.
So, I mean, not to give too much away, but this book does really map the history of your family there.
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Chapter 3: How does 'Land' explore the aftermath of the Great Famine?
There's still even now in Ireland an expression which means to sort of say get lost or curses on you. And it's bad cess to you. And that's where it comes from. So initially it was taxation purposes and they had an edict that no Irish were to be employed, which didn't go very well. They initially thought that they could map the whole of Ireland in seven years.
It actually took them almost 20 and they did have to employ Irish because obviously... you know, they would come across linguistic problems. So there was a mountain on one side, people called it one thing, on the other side, they called it another. Not to mention the fact that obviously, when a British army division arrived in a township, the Irish were naturally quite alarmed and suspicious.
And I have heard accounts that when the British would spend a long time setting up their trig point, which of course was essential for the accurate mathematic calculations of distances, and during the night the Irish would just move it a few feet just to mess with them. So they did end up having to employ Irish, one of which was my great-great-grandfather.
When I realised that he'd started in the late 1840s, it really stopped me in my track because, of course, anyone who knows anything about Irish history realises that those were the final years of the Great Famine. So obviously the human and physical geography of the land was completely changed in just that short decade.
Right, because there's a village on the peninsula. Well, there's the remnants of a village. In the book, you say this, you know, there used to be 40 houses here. Now there are four. I'd like you actually to read a passage that describes that. This is Tomas thinking about the work that he has to do in light of this terrible famine.
It is a necessary but unenviable part of his current task to distill into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps were drawn. These new revisions must contain a cartographic record of the Great Hunger, the disaster that struck this land more than a decade ago now. Tomás must amend the hundreds of households in a barony to the handful that now remain.
He must erase row after row of tenant cottages on landowner estates which have been emptied and dismantled. The Redcoats turn their eyes from this task. They prefer never to acknowledge the crisis that befell the country, the losses and deprivations it has suffered. They do not wish to make such marks upon their maps, which might lead to certain admittances.
Tomas has determined, however, that his maps will bear an account of what happened, what was lost, if it kills him.
Thank you for reading that. What are the certain admittances that are mentioned there?
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Chapter 4: What inspired Maggie O'Farrell to write 'Land'?
It goes right back to the times of the Druids in Ireland. But some of them have been, quite a lot of them have been co-opted into Catholicism and Christianity and they've been blessed by a priest and given the name St. Bridget's Well or St. Patrick's Well or whatever. But they all have this kind of folkloric resonance to them and some of them are really extraordinarily charged places.
But there's also a science to them. Really interestingly, there's one, a very famous one in County Cork, which is said to cure madness. And recently somebody did an analysis of it. And apparently it has a very high level of lithium, which just goes to show.
Which is a treatment for psychiatry.
Yeah, which is a treatment even now for some mental illness. So it just goes to show that in all myth, there is at least a seed of truth.
Your father used to read to you Irish folktales as a kid.
Only Irish folktales. He would only ever read Irish folktales to us.
And I sort of see magical elements in your books. There's hag stones, these like special stones, magical stones. There are these... magic wells. You have people who are closely tied to nature and tend to have sort of extrasensory perceptions. What did you take from those folktales in writing your books?
Well, my father would only ever read, as I said, only ever read Irish mythology to us. And at the time it used to annoy us a bit because we used to beg him to try and read the Moomins or Pippi Longstocking to us, but he would only ever read Irish myth.
But actually now I see that it forms, that that world and those people and the narrative rules inside these myths form part of my storytelling DNA in a way. And it was really important to me to try and transpose as much of that atmosphere of those tales to this novel. So in Irish mythology, the land itself is, it's like a character. It has opinions.
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Chapter 5: How do maps reflect history and identity in O'Farrell's work?
Right.
Well, we need to take another short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is novelist Maggie O'Farrell. Her new book is Land. She's also written many other books, including Hamnet, and she co-wrote the screenplay for the film from 2025, and her memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, 17 Brushes with Death. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air.
The surreal horror film Back Rooms is a smash. The director is a 20-year-old YouTuber and it's based on his popular web series. Why is this online phenomenon taking off at the box office? We get into it on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nusberg, digital producer at Fresh Air.
And this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter. And I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week's shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read. It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week in exclusive.
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So, Maggie, your book Hamnet tells the story of Agnes and William Shakespeare, the family they create, the death of their son Hamnet at the age of 11, we think, and the grief that they suffer and then the play that Shakespeare writes, Hamlet, that comes out of that grief. As a young person, you were obsessed with the play. Is that right?
Yeah.
Yes, I studied it at school when I was 16 for my Scottish Highers and I absolutely loved it. I fell for it in a big way and it really got under my skin. I particularly loved the character of Hamlet, who felt like sort of a brother to me in a sense. I think he appeals to a certain type of teenager.
Well, it's kind of emo, isn't it, the play?
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Chapter 6: What role does the Ordnance Survey play in 'Land'?
It's true, I did. And I didn't write them in the house where my children live. I actually wrote them in a really old shed in the garden, which has since blown down in a gale. and I had to do it in sort of 10 or 15-minute intervals. So I would write it, and then I would have a walk around the garden to kind of decompress, and then I would go in again.
And the two scenes probably took me about a fortnight to write. And they were really hard, but I wanted them to be hard, actually, partly because I felt his death had been so downplayed and overlooked and wrapped in statistics. I wanted to give it the dignity I thought it deserved.
Yeah.
You co-wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of Hamnet with the director Chloe Zhao. I would imagine that you might have some ambivalence about seeing your book made into a movie. On the one hand, it might be kind of magical the way Agnes is entranced by her husband's play by seeing these characters embodied and enacted by very talented actors.
But on the other hand, your work is so much about the interiority of your characters and just by the virtue of the medium, the time constraints, whatever, you have to lose so much of that.
Yeah, but the book is my baby and always will be. And the film feels more like maybe a niece or a nephew. And it never felt at any point like handing it over. A lot of people said, how was it to hand it over? And it never felt like that. It felt like... More just opening up and inviting others to step inside. Novelists are such, we're all very much a lone wolf.
And I love that, don't get me wrong. But it was such an interesting experience to collaborate with so many, but not just with Chloe on the script. But, you know, when you step on the film set, you realise that actually you're collaborating with hundreds of people.
And everybody on that set is absolutely at the top of their game in whatever their speciality is, whether it's lighting or rigging or costumes or set design or acting. I think you can't go into the process of adaptation expecting it to be the same as your book because you will be disappointed. It could never be the same. It's a completely different medium.
And the language of cinema is so much younger than the written language. So in a way, it's different, but it needed to be different. And that's a good thing. It sits alongside the novel rather than as a replica of it.
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Chapter 7: How does O'Farrell portray the impact of the Great Famine?
I got through it. But honestly, I've never quite recovered from that.
Well, I'm sorry to spring a reading upon you today.
No, it's fine because I've got it all marked up. And I thought, OK, I really have to do something about it. So I did go to a speech therapist, and she said to me, you know, what's the worst thing? And I said, well, it's the worst thing is if I stammer. And she said, but why? If you stammer, why is that so bad? Why is it so terrible that somebody knows? And she asked me to keep a stammering diary.
And one of the weeks I went, I'd gone into a chemist to pick up a prescription, and they'd asked me my name, and I couldn't get it out. And the woman behind the counter laughed and said, oh, you've forgotten your own name. And I came out feeling... I was so humiliated. And I told the speech therapist about this. And I said, this was a moment which I stammered really badly.
And she said, you need to look that woman in the eye and you say, I have a stammer. And she said, I want you to practice it now. Say it to me. And so I said, I'm sorry, I have a stammer. And she said, no, no, don't apologize. Just put it out there. And she said, if the woman in the prochemist can't cope with it, that's her problem. But you tell her, be upfront about it.
And it was, I mean, it's such a simple piece of advice. But I think, you know, as a child and as a teenager, you become so used to hiding it and so used to thinking, I need to conceal this from people because people might find out I have a stammer. You know, it took me until I was 41 for someone to say, it's okay, just tell people.
In the book, you list the lingering effects from your encephalitis and the challenges it presents to you on a daily basis. It's hard to walk up and down stairs. It's hard to direct your hand to pick things up on a table. You say you're particularly challenged when there's... A table set with lots of cups and knives and stuff like that. Yeah. And you've improved so much.
People thought you would never get out of a wheelchair at one point. But when you were able to, you really seemed to hide these difficulties from other people. I think you only told one person as a young adult. What was your reason for hiding that part of you?
Well, I think I moved from Wales to Scotland when I was about 13. And where I lived in Wales, everybody I was at school with knew that I had had this very serious illness and that I had been off school for a really long time, I mean years, and that I'd returned and I'd been quite different. And I think I thought of that move as a chance to start again. So it was always very conscious.
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