Tell Me About Your Mother
The Closet of Savage Mementos by Nuala Ni Chonchuir, excerpt from review in Dublin Review of books
“Bad mothers run in my family,” states Lillis Yourell, the main character of The Closet of Savage Mementos (2014), Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s sage second novel. So convinced is Lillis of the supremacy of nature over nurture, she allows fear to override her natural common sense until she “let everyone go in the end”. Ní Chonchúir peels apart, with savvy insight and brief flashes of dark humour, the often thorny relationship between a mother and a daughter, and how it transmutes over time ‑ especially when the daughter herself becomes a mother ‑ affecting the siblings, lovers, partners, children and friends on its periphery, like a rock thrown into a still pool.
The impressive quality of The Closet of Savage Mementos, following on from You, her fine first novel from 2010, ensures Ní Chonchúir will be name-checked in that ballooning roster of up-and-coming Irish writers capturing national and international attention, including Colin Barrett, Kevin Barry, Donal Ryan, Paul Murray, Claire Kilroy and bona fide superstar Eimear McBride. Nevertheless, I’m sure Ní Chonchúir smiles when described as a “new” voice, given that she has been working consistently and prolifically for over a decade. Slipping gracefully between short and long forms, between poetry and prose, she has written ‑ in addition to her two novels ‑ four short story collections, four poetry collections and a book of flash fiction. She has also received numerous awards including the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award, the Cecil Day Lewis Award, and the Dublin Review of Books Flash Fiction Prize and been shortlisted for both the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize and the European Prize for Literature.
Ní Chonchúir divides The Closet of Savage Mementos into two sections, set twenty years apart, though given how frequently the narrative flashes back from the second section to scenes set within the time period of the first, I wasn’t convinced of the efficacy of this structure. In the first section, titled “Book One: 1991”, the sudden death of Dónal Spain, Lillis’s closest friend and sometime lover, propels her into a tailspin of grief and regret; she flees from her job in a photography store in Dublin to work as a waitress in a Scottish hotel. Lillis’s beautiful, extended meditation about her late friend contains some of the finest writing in the book. She describes their childhood, swapping duffel coats so often “neither of us knew who owned which” and “racing our bikes over gravel and skidding hugely”, before comparing “the marks in the churned up stones”. In the hours between waitressing (clumsily) at her new job and snapping photographs of her new surroundings, Lillis attempts to “take him back from death for a while”, daydreaming endlessly about “Dónal, the photogenic. Dónal, the energetic. Dónal, the funny, the silly, the adventurous, the clever. Dónal, my first love. Lovely, gone-away Dónal”. Her fantasies are fuelled not just by mourning but by guilt: she had been reluctant to formalise their relationship, convinced her fondness did not equate to true love. Her conflicted emotions reflect, partly, the typical frustrations of youth; at twenty-one she yearns for escape, for that indefinable something that equates desire with otherness. “We had little in common apart from our long history and where we had grown up,” she concludes, a perceptive remark, no doubt, yet one which might make us (and her) smile at how quick we were when young to disparage such intimate understandings…
