The weight of memory
I’ve been fortunate to read some of what I think are the best reads of 2020 and Hilary Fannin’s The Weight of Love is one. Set in London and Dublin, in 1996 and 2017, Hilary’s debut fiction recounts the relationship between Robin and Ruth, who meet in a East London school staffroom, and Joseph, Robin’s childhood friend (the attraction between Joseph and Ruth is instant and unforgettable). While Robin and Ruth later marry, Joseph is never far from their memories.
The award-winning playwright and Irish Times columnist said her first foray into fiction felt more ‘private’ than other work she’d completed.
“When you’re writing for theatre it’s collaborative and that’s a lovely thing, I really enjoy working collaboratively and it’s not the loneliness of writing away on your own,” she says.
“The columns I write, the pressure of deadlines and that feels quite speedy. This felt like going on a very long cruise with myself. It’s over 80,000 words and you have to be slower and you have to be more patient with yourself and sometimes it’ll feel like it’ll never end and you’ll be writing for the rest of your life.
“Suddenly you start to feel it knit together and you get a sense of, ‘Well if I keep going, I think this is going to be all right.’ That propels you forward and suddenly you have it over.
“I found I did enjoy it and now I’m kind of missing it, I’m missing that senses of privacy you get when you’re working on a novel. I didn’t expect to feel that.”
Explaining the need to let the work ‘stand on its own two feet,’ she’s grateful for the support of other Irish writers including Anne Enright, Marian Keyes, Louise O’Neill and Roddy Doyle.
“The response from people has been very generous and so I feel, if I am putting this ‘child’ into the world, at least she has some friends there and that’s a good thing.”
The Weight of Love is a bittersweet story of relationships we say, and Hilary agrees, explaining how one character continuously made his presence known.
“It is bittersweet. I think that my initial impulse was to write about Ruth and Joseph and I’m very interested in how, for all us, especially at a certain age, that we get to a point in our lives where we look back and maybe we look back at the one that got away. For many of us, we carry a fantasy around in our minds of a life that we didn’t live and what might have been and really we create our own fantasies.
“Often when we’re faced with the reality, it’s not what we might have imagined it would be. I had that thought in my mind and thought I would write about somebody who meets someone from their past who was very important to them and I would explore that territory of how we can carry people in our hearts for a long time.
“I was more or less sitting down to write that, and then Robin popped up. As a character he was very insistent that he stayed and he just didn’t go away. Every time I tried to write Joseph I ended up writing Robin. I knew I needed to listen to this and Robin became, for me, the centre of the book then.”
Central to the novel is Hilary’s need to write what she calls ‘an emotional truth,’ that her plot and characterisation would be true to the characters, ‘that I wouldn’t be making things up for effect.’
“In a way, if you could drop a plumbline, like a builder would, through the centre of these characters’ lives, you’d discover that what they do is real and true to them. We all get buffered around by circumstances and unexpected things happen to us and we have to deal with loss, grief, children moving away and growing up. Our lives are not static; they change and as we get older, our lives continue to change. I think, for Robin, he became the centre for me, he’d turn up first in the morning when I’d turn on the computer and say hello.”
Set two decades apart, the novel also reflects the power and draw of memory and that young people don’t have the monopoly of feelings.
“Our memories stay with us throughout our lives and we don’t suddenly become different people with no longing or no romance. Our feelings are as important to us in our fifties and sixties as they are in our twenties and thirties, young people don’t own those kind of emotions.”
The Weight of Love by Hilary Fannin (Doubledy Ireland) is available now
