Cathy Sweeney lives in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College and taught English at secondary level for many years before turning to writing. Her work has been published in various magazines and journals.
Why do you tell stories?
I suppose I am chasing the sensation of aliveness that comes from observing the world closely and filtering it through language, but also, I to tell stories to keep sane. There is something about expressing what I see in the world in a really clear way that grounds me, makes me feel I go on living. But clarity, of course, is available only when you eliminate sentiment.
Describe Breakdown in one sentence.
An unremarkable middle-aged woman with a seemingly perfect life gets up one morning, takes a wrong turn on her drive to work, and never comes home.
For me, Breakdown arrowed straight to the heart of the alienation, melancholy and rage I feel witnessing climate breakdown and at the same time, mindless overconsumption in every human being around me, including in myself. Was that something you’ve wanted to write about for a while or did it just come out as you wrote?
That is exactly what inspired me to write Breakdown. The psychic dissonance of observing people getting out of SUVs carrying keep cups, and of partaking in similar charades myself, experiencing environmental melancholia but also booking flights, was making me crazy, so I decided to write a novel that would interrogate exactly this: the ordinary middle class lifestyle that is held up as the model in much of the developed world, a way of life that is addicted to consumption and stimulants; one in which the mores of late capitalism have seeped into minds and bodies, making relationships transactional; where frictionless comfort is the ultimate life goal, all while the planet burns.
Most of the reviews I’ve read of Breakdown focus on the unnamed protagonist’s rejection of an unhappy marriage and her escape from the confines of domesticity. You did not shy away from making your character flawed, unfaithful, as ambivalent a mother as her own mother was. It might have been an easier but less interesting choice to garner sympathy by making her the victim of a philandering husband instead - can you comment on your (better, I think) choice to make her morally ambiguous?
It was essential to me that the main character be flawed, or, in other words, human. I get bored reading novels where the moral compass of the protagonist is preset to ‘pure’. At the beginning she is self-absorbed, suffering from ennui and living in ‘bad faith’, as Jean Paul Sartre has it, but from the outside her life is fine: functioning marriage, successful children, nice house, comfortable job, money and friends. The road trip that she goes on leads to a profound transfiguration as she comes to understand just how much courage it takes to be a person rather than play a role; but this is not a redemption narrative; the main character suffers in this novel and, while she ultimately finds some kind of peace,, she loses a lot in a quest to live without lies and hypocrisy.
There’s a flashback of a particularly brutal act that occurs between the protagonist and her daughter when they’re on holiday that seems to shock even our protagonist. What did that scene mean to you? What is at the heart of the mother-daughter relationship in the book?
That scene was hard to write - a frazzled mother losing it with a young daughter who is trying her patience - but I felt it was important to include it in the novel. Firstly, because such scenes happen in life, even in nice middle-class families, but also because I wanted to show the long-term effects, not simply of the violence, but of the cover-up. It takes years for the main character to tell the story of what happened with honesty. And by then it is too late. The mother-daughter relationships in the novel are characterized by patterns of silence and shame that travel down generations, causing pain and damage.
There’s an elegant sparseness to the language in Breakdown, including passages that are just lists that become all the more evocative and gut-wrenching for noting the mundane details of our lives and the unnerving strangeness of the late capitalist world. Was your economy of language a deliberate stylistic choice or a carry-over from writing short stories?
The style of a novel, for me, is not separate from the content; the more in tune they are with one another, the more powerful the overall effect. From the outset, I wanted Breakdown to read like a report from experience rather than a ‘well-made’ novel, and so I took the familiar and plain style of the personal essay as a model, allowing myself some poetic flourishes here and there, as well as incorporating text as it is used in the contemporary world. Language in Breakdown is both a means of communication but also a site of interrogation. The main character is constantly bombarded with messages and emojis and advertisements that demonstrate how denuded of meaning language use has become. So much time is spent interacting with smooth AI voices telling us our CALL IS IMPORTANT or HELP IS COMING.
When and where do you write?
I’m a morning person so that’s when I get most of my writing done. I can work anywhere which is lucky since I’m restless by nature. A typical morning might find me at home at my desk, then in a coffee shop, and finally in the library. I also love to write on buses and trains.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
While I’m writing I enjoy the absorption of the work. Also, I’m a stubborn person so when things get tough – as they always do – I draw on that. Lastly, I keep it in mind that it’s a privilege to have the time to write, and also the freedom.
Name three books that were crucial to the writing of Breakdown?
Capital Realism by Mark Fisher
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
What books have you read and loved recently?
Recently I have enjoyed two stunning debut books by Irish women writers: The Celestial Realm by Molly Hennigan is a tender and beautifully written memoir about intergenerational trauma and Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong is a knock-out short story collection.