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Soldier Sailor: 'One of the finest novels published this year' The Sunday Times

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On a personal note, I related a lot to the struggles of postpartum depicted in this, of blaming your husband, of losing your friends of feeling so lost you go a little crazy, my daughter is almost 12 and I still feel a little crazy most days

Born in Dublin in 1973, Claire Kilroy grew up in the scenic fishing village of Howth, north of the city. Educated in the local primary school, Howth is central to two of her novels and she describes its beauty and character as fundamental to the person she became. Kilroy does not remember a time where she did not want to be an author. Her first story, written at age 7 or 8, was a ghost story centred on a child who one night decides to break into a haunted house. Once inside, the child is chased by figures wearing chains and white sheets. Kilroy gave the story to her mother who laughed hysterically; Kilroy later learned she had misspelled sheet, replacing "ee" with the letter "i", resulting in her mother's reaction. [1] Education [ edit ] Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?Asked in a 2016 Q&A about her writing habits, she replied: “I wrote the first four novels in a quiet room of my own (or a room of my parents’ in the case of the second one). It all changed with motherhood. I can’t answer that question yet.”

The objective difference between the parenting experiences of mothers and fathers is laid bare, such as when the narrator considers men – like her husband – turning to films to feel connected to noble endeavours while women risk death for babies. "Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?"

Claire Kilroy’s writing style is beautiful, very lyrical. It blends tenderness with pain so perfectly. Your heart aches while reading this. Particularly the ending, which feels like a poem and left me wanting to immediately re-read the entire book. In 2016, the Irish author Claire Kilroy revealed that she was writing a novel inspired by her fraught experience of childbirth and motherhood. Seven years on, Soldier Sailor is the novel in question, Kilroy’s fifth and her first for 11 years. Based on the clarity and subtlety of Soldier Sailor, she has been devoted in that period to refining this short book, in which not a word is wasted, to maximise its emotional and philosophical power. Oh wow, oh wow, I thought, watching her go. Watching a lot go. Toddlers don’t like transitions and neither did I. She had winded me, that girl. That girl who had not registered me, nor the bomb that had detonated in her wake. As I had possibly winded mothers in my day. Simply by walking by. By being free to walk by. Did they always have those names? “No, the child was Darling for years. Then India Knight published a novel called Darling, so he became Sailor.” How many novels and how many works of non fiction have been written by women describing, reflecting, and making sense of childbirth? The change to the woman, now mother; the mental battle as joy, and unbridled love, fight with the enormity of the immediate life change. Exhaustion, unremitting responsibility, physical pain and body transformation; all experienced under the huge strain of sleep deprivation like you’ve never imagined.

Langan, Sheila (17 February 2011). "Young Irish Writers Part 2: Claire Kilroy". irishamerica.com. Irish America LLC. Her latest work, however, is an astounding exercise in self-dissection, a gripping portrayal of a new mother in the throes of postpartum chaos, and a glimpse into the tortured, ecstatic, harrowing and transformative experience of motherhood. Well, Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another's arms. The Earth rotates beneath us and all is well, for now... Such is the intensity of the world Kilroy creates, beginning with a frenetic prologue where the narrator is at the edge of some forest, at the edge of her own mind, really, close to abandoning her child. The chaotic action lands the reader in the middle of the madness, in media res, which is like opening a book at the worst point of a storm, without giving a context of where, when or who specifically is suffering. A story told by a woman who can’t get it together enough to say what is actually going on. This is a deliberate stylistic choice that may risk alienating readers initially but certainly works to reflect the trauma of new motherhood, the loneliness, guilt, the fog and incoherency.I miss my old life like I’d miss a lover", Kilroy’s narrator says, and in many ways this novel reads like a ghost story or post-war epic, following a woman as she stands in the ruins of her life, haunted by former versions of herself, tormented by the looming future. Claire Kilroy has ways of phrasing things that just made lightbulbs ping on for me, such accurate descriptions, like this:

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