Literature Sub-Editor IRINE TENEISHVILI discusses undercurrent narratives and converging heritages in Catherine Airey’s forthcoming debut novel, Confessions.
Remembering the tab of acid under your tongue as you watch the second plane hit your father’s workplace—there’s nowhere to go but under.
This is the first image we have of one of our protagonists, the sixteen-year-old Cora, who recalls counteracting the acid by taking pills from her almost-boyfriend, which come with a promise of a “deep, dreamless sleep”. Cora goes under and comes out sober and orphaned, and a debut novel that is deeply concerned with the “under”—currents, pinnings, and world of intricate and sinuous threads revealing a shared female history—is set into motion.
Airey’s narrative comes together through non-linear strands and voices spanning half a century, and moving between New York City and Burtonport, Ireland. Despite the fragmentary nature of the novel, with a narrative voice that fluctuates between the first person, second person and epistolary correspondence, it never feels disjointed. Airey’s careful crafting of the characters’ common world feels distinctly lived-in and whole.
In the novel itself, this space becomes physical in its grounding in the Burtonport house, which the different character narratives circle around. The trajectory of Máire, Cora’s mother, is straight and leads away from the house, as she leaves for New York and never returns. Cora’s father Michael’s is almost the same, while Cora’s is almost exactly its mirror image. Róisín’s is static; around her we watch the story expand and become nebulous, and it is her continued presence in the Burtonport house that allows us to hear and uncover her sprawling family’s spatially and temporally removed voices.
The house, for Airey, is both macro and microcosm: for the individual female body, and for the larger generational and historical context within which it exists. Alone in New York, Máire carries in her pocket a piece of paper upon which the words “she herself is a haunted house” are written, the motif of haunting at once consolatory and tragic. As Máire clutches this reassurance in her hand, we are made to feel the comfort of knowing what came before you, with the spectres of the past keeping company.
At the same time, the motif stands also for the indelible marks and violations made on female bodies throughout the novel, ones which haunt both the bodies themselves, and the futures of the female protagonists. In her exploration of rape, forced birth, and female exploitation, we see how this form of haunting creates generationally-felt mutilations of narrative, splinterings and derailments through violence, which penetrate through the forms of storytelling in the novel.
Airey is interested in these processes, where bursts of occurrence or violence have the power to cause the narrative to veer or double back on itself. We see these moments rise to the surface of the action in upward stabs, or bubble beneath the surface until finally, inevitably, they come to a head years later. Cora’s father is killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and years later, a stranger in New York tells her that his father passed away that year from a cancer caused by the ash he inhaled back in 2001. Máire’s first baby Emily, conceived from her rape, is taken from her by a professor who exploits the pregnant teenager at his doorstep for his own gain. Years later, in Ireland, Lyca discovers that it was Ireland’s anti-abortion laws that forced Cora to give birth to her. In this way, Airey impressively crafts a compression of space and time within which circularity and determinism are at play, and dramatises the way in which choice, and its absence, shapes the women’s lives.

Despite the spatial and narrative scope of the novel, the characters resist being flattened and allegorised into a single story or consciousness. Rather, they are deeply fleshed out, linguistically and stylistically recognisable among the gradually building echoes of voices coming together as the novel progresses. Voice in itself is explored at length, with the act of screaming functioning as a continued metaphor for release and agency. Agency is stripped when voices are dulled—a hand over the mouth a purposeful reduction of the self to avoid detection—while we hear screams at moments of self-determination or self-knowledge. It is here that we get a sense of the novel accomplishing its title: the scream as confession, as admission and release into the shared canon at a moment where a specific haunting of past knowledge can no longer be ignored, has risen to the surface. For some characters, this confession is almost instant, their entire narrative a scream: Máire is a banshee for All Hallows. For others, this resolution is delayed and deferred, and it is in this way that Airey controls and brings together the ebb and pace of the novel.
Confessions takes place in the wake of tragedy, and Airey’s unthreading of these women and their relationships with each other plays out in such a context. She explores what it means to know someone no longer living, but also to know someone only after they have died. People and memories become fragmentary, hard to pin down. Cora plasters missing persons posters of her father, retracing the route through the bridges of New York that they would take together on their walks. It is a return to a memory, a comfort, but also a physical march, very much a ritual funerary procession. The recovering and uncovering of the past throughout this novel happens along the path of a generation-spanning wake, one which is littered with remnants, dismembered impressions and memories—years earlier, Róisín’s mum tells her about the body parts of family members found in the water after a mine explosion. We get the impression of this wake being infinitely stretching in either direction, as characters that are on the peripheries of our protagonists’ memories describe for a moment their own tragedies, that seem lost to the narrative but are felt in their haunting.
No memory or past pain is ever truly lost in Airey’s debut novel. She creates a world in which linearity and the passage of time allow for the central drama of revelation—a collective confession—to play out, but simultaneously become secondary to the coming together of narrative, suspending the characters “in space together”. The undercurrents of this novel are what cause it to surge forward—everything that is hidden and underneath is eventually realised and remembered, and holds the power to alter narrative; a line of code running underneath the video games by which these women are individually fixated, for example, or a tab of acid under the tongue.
Confessions is set to be released through Viking Press on January 23rd, 2025. Featured image courtesy of Penguin Books.