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Her second novel, The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually, was published in Ireland and the UK and as The Dazzling Truth in the USA and Canada in August 2020. Like the best speculative fiction, good poems weird the truth, rearrange it, re-present it, cause us to re-envision the past, to rememory (to borrow Toni Morrison’s word) our own history. How do they do this? For one thing, they subvert our expectations and also reward them. These poems give us what we want, but they also give us what we don’t yet know we need. The transition from one to the next can be uncomfortable because it is simultaneously obvious and surprising.
When Murtagh is given the opportunity to pursue his career as a potter on Inis Óg, a small island off the coast of Galway in Ireland, it means Maeve giving up her own aspirations. It’s just one of the things that creates the first small fissures in Maeve’s mental state. Those fissures will gradually expand until the whole edifice comes crashing down. As the book progresses, we witness heartbreaking moments such as Maeve recording in her journal her ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days and finding the second have become more numerous than the first. She worries about the impact the days when despair overwhelms her is having on her children, and on Murtagh in particular. ‘Murtagh is so loyal, he would never leave me. He would endure the challenge of living with me and my moods and my difficulties until the end of time if I let him.’Elizabeth’s reading (#31, 32) is right on, except line 3, where she writes “inform” instead of “infirm”. A peculiar thing to note in this poem is the usual capitalization of some words. Words like Delight, Lightning, Children, Circuit, and Truth are capitalized. While there is no confirmed meaning behind this, I think these words weren’t meant to hold more meaning. She only focuses on how this truth must be revealed. She does not care what kind of light it is, she cares about how bright the light is. Blinding people means that if the truth is too hard to swallow or too controversial that it shakes the very foundation of people’s beliefs, it will make people ignore it. People will choose not to believe it since it is too much to take and this will make them never accept it. Hence, to avoid this, it must be revealed gradually. The Deeper Meaning of Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant Helen worked at RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) for seven years before moving to London in 2010.
The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually was a novel that took me completely by surprise. I knew I would be impacted by the story of Maeve and Murtagh but the scale of that impact was powerful. I devoured this book. My heart was battered on completion. I am Irish so I understood completely all the Irish references and it was very easy for me to visualise the island setting. The Currach boat was a powerful image on both the cover and within the story as was the weather, the islanders and the church. I can’t express how free that makes me feel. My body now is a vehicle for me to live and be happy in; not something I inhabit resentfully, judging it based on how I see others judge it.” Absolute poetry and a love letter to family and to the arts. The depiction of depression is as accurate as any I've read and the empathy in this book is beautiful Maggie Smith, award-winning author of Good Bones and Keep Moving The pieces of the Maeve puzzle were intriguing and unnerving in equal measure. He felt so grey in the shadow of her Technicolor. If he were to hold her interest, he knew he would have to shake off the ennui that so often dogged him, that he’d need to achieve more than just getting by. Mediocrity would not the heart of Maeve Morelli win’In conclusion, Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant is a poem from which we can take practical advice. Written centuries ago, it always will stay true and helpful. It is not that “we can’t handle the truth”, it is more “we can’t handle the truth at once”. But the truth is inevitable. It is better to take it slowly than all at once. The move to Inis Óg allows Cullen to fully stretch her descriptive wings, painting achingly beautiful word-portraits of the island and the house that Murtagh and Maeve move into, so that Murtagh can take up his apprenticeship under the island’s resident potter. Cullen’s prose sings, and both the island’s rugged beauty and the cottage’s transformation under the Moones’ stewardship give ample opportunity to display the very best of her poetic sentences.
In one moving passage, she describes how she can sense the illness approaching from afar, cognisant that, when it lands, it will be merciless until the day it simply chooses to fly away again. She identifies it as a migrating bird, one that disappears for long portions of the year, but will return, preparing to nest, sooner or later. Cullen's quietly devastating novel is both a family saga and a careful exploration of the realities of living with mental health issues iShe is now writing full-time and is a also a literary critic for the Irish Times newspaper and a regular contributor to Sunday Times Magazine. Helen is also a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University London and is currently completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia.
I love stories of families that span decades, and this was no different. I appreciated the setting, which changed through the years as the island slowly modernised with the times.In the wake of one fateful night, the Moone siblings must learn the story of who their parents truly are, and what has happened since their first meeting, years before, outside Trinity College in Dublin. I devoured this, falling in love with the setting and with every character - and when I reached the end, I wept. It is just glorious. A sweeping family safe and, at the same time, a close-up on the everyday beautiful details that make up love' Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths If you liked Harold Fry and Me Before You, you will love Cullen's nostalgic debut. This life-affirming book will draw you in and keep you there Independent Maeve is an actor, struggling with her most challenging role yet - as a mother to four children. Murtagh, her devoted husband, is a potter whose craft brought them from the city to this rural life.
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