A Conversation with Caoilinn Hughes
First, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me!
To start, could you tell me about the origins of The Alternatives?
Thank you so much for picking it as your book of the month! And for the gorgeous review! And for chatting with me about it now. I never know what a book will be from the outset, but I started out with this boomy, funny, heartsore geologist character, Olwen. She came to me on the west coast of Ireland in a place called Connemara, where I wrote a lot of the book. It’s a place where you can’t but notice the geology. It’s not a pastoral landscape, thank flip. It’s rocky and raw and boggy and beautiful, even if sometimes barren. Rocks protrude from the fields and there are these low-lying hills and no real trees, so you really see the bedrock. It’s a wild and dynamic place, but there’s something immovable about it, which was a sort of parallel to this character I was meeting. Extreme weather scours it nonstop, and yet it remains.
But we meet Olwen at a moment when she’s having a wobble, let’s say. She’s been teaching students about the collapse of Deep Time, where processes that should have taken place over millennia are happening over decades; she’s tending to a frightened cohort of students. We see her in the lab teaching, to begin with, and what with the eldest sibling tending towards roles of leadership and mentorship, it occurred to me that she had big sister energy. I discovered that she had three other sisters. Their parents had died in tragic circumstances when they were young, so Olwen brought her sisters up. And we’re meeting her in her late thirties. Her sisters are all in their thirties, and we meet them too in their professional realms: a philosopher, a political scientist, and a chef. They all have PhDs—the chef’s PhD is honorary! Which made me laugh! But also, I thought it was very exciting. I realised that I was writing a book that’s as much a book about family as it is about women at work.
It’s about women who are trying to do meaningful work as the paths they’re on are crumbling beneath their feet. Their work gives them energy and purpose, and they centre it in their lives. I think there’s still a taboo about that; about work being the centre of gravity of a woman’s life. So, I wanted to lean into that and show them all in their workplaces. So, the book opens with four chapters focusing on each sister independently, but the story kicks off at the end of the opening chapter—when Olwen takes off on her bicycle in the middle of the night, leaving her tenured position and her adopted family, and leaving a message to her loved ones saying, ‘Don’t try and find me’.
Amazing. My next question was actually going to be about how each of the sisters’ careers feels so fundamental to their identities and passions – I really loved that element of your book. You’ve already answered that question a little, but is there anything else you wanted to mention about the decision to foreground their working lives and why you think that’s quite rare?
I think, no matter how many siblings you might have, as an adult, you go about your life as an individual—all going well, your friends and colleagues see you that way. You don’t think of yourself as a sibling primarily. You’re fully coherent as a person, goddammit! And, here, the reader gets to experience that. They get to meet these sisters independently first—to understand what their lives look like outside of the familial psychodrama!
These women don’t consider themselves to be defined by the early loss of their parents or by sibling rivalries or any of the complexities of their childhood. They’re sort of actively defining themselves by what they’re doing. And yet, when they come back together, those dynamics take over and they become, first and foremost, sisters. I’m really interested in how that happens.
But back to your question about foregrounding their working lives. With my first novel, Orchid & the Wasp, I wanted to write a picaresque novel with a female lead, which I’d never have thought was a rare thing ... Since a picaresque is just a novel that’s episodic, that follows a character moving through social strata, where the protagonist isn’t a hero/heroine. But I really struggled to find any model picaresques with female leads. There was Emma and Vanity Fair, but in both of those, the women are in pursuit of marriage. So it’s not a fair equivalent to all those books about men who are moving through the world, working through ideas and engaging with society. Where the engine of the novel comes from the characters’ pursuit of something, not romantic or to do with their relationships, but from their interest in the world and their attempts to understand it. I want to write about women who are, you know, throwing ideas up against the wall to see what sticks, who are trying on worldviews for size, as I think we all do all the time. In the conversations we have, in the choices and compromises we make, in our hopes and fears.
There’s got to be a reader for books about women trying to make meaning with their lives, where the meaning isn’t derived from their interpersonal relationships or their romantic relationships or from overcoming past traumas – but from what they’re doing, now. I believe there is! But, still, I was very nervous to write this novel, because several of these characters are teachers – we sit in on a couple of lectures! But that also really thrilled me because why not?! There’s a thriving tradition of novels about male professors, so we should be able to put it up with a few women who teach. I’d love to think that that’s not off-putting.
Definitely! And it’s crazy that it’s so rare to find that in a novel because the majority of women do move around the world in that way. We have our own passions, thoughts and approaches to the world, but sometimes those elements that exist around our personal relationships aren’t given much space.
Yes exactly, or often there’s trauma that justifies why we’re following a female character, that makes their behaviour interesting – not to say that stories where a trauma informs the character’s actions are lesser in any way! I guess with this book, it’s really about what the characters are living through right now, how they’re individually responding to the moment that we’re in. There’s a tragicomic element in the set-up of a geologist, a philosopher, a political scientist and a chef … who walk into a bar! The sense of fatedness can weigh you down, or it can make you lean forward to try and get ahead of it.
There were a lot of scenes that were great fun to write because it was exciting to put these women in the one room. There’s a scene, for example, where Rhona, the political scientist, who’s the most ostensibly successful of them all – she’s got a tenured position, she’s a single mum by choice, and she’s really thriving – she arrives to one of her sister’s places in her Tesla … with a flat battery. It’s extremely unlike her to have a flat anything. I don’t want to spoil the scene, but let’s just say that they wind up having to do the calculation as to how many kilowatt hours the other sister is willing to share – just enough for her to be able to exit the driveway! I loved the idea that there’d be more than one sister in a room who knew how to do those calculations, and that there could be serious drama—even melodrama—entwined with the mathematics!
Read the rest of the interview in the Spring edition of nb notes. Sign up here by 31st March to get a copy.
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