Coming of Age

Coming of Age

Author Anne Griffin was in her forties when she finally picked up the pen and authored her first novel When All Is Said. 'Masterful storytelling' declared Graham Norton of the number one bestseller. Here, in her own words, Anne looks back over her childhood, education and adult life on a journey that eventually led to her ‘coming of age’ again with the publication of her second novel Still Listening 

I find the term ‘coming of age’ interesting. Normally reserved for those in their late teens and early twenties, it suggests that there is only one period in life when we finally become adult, finding our voice, our ballast in the world. Personally, I seem to come of age every decade.

At fifty-two, I don’t know everything about myself. In fact, I often end up saying or doing something that totally surprises me. And I like that. There have, of course, been defining moments when I have fully understood myself and made decisions that I’ve defended vigorously.

But I haven’t always been like that. 

I was raised working class and Catholic, in a strict religious home. I went to an all-girls convent school, that didn’t expect nor demand high academic achievement. In the Leaving Certificate, our brainiest student received what was the average in the mixed school not three miles away. In later years, I came across a book called ‘Girls Don’t Do Honours’ by Doctor Mary Cullen. It put definition on all I had experienced as a female in the Irish secondary system. Look, I wasn’t academic. My reports told me that I was ‘mediocre’. But in an institution devised by the church and wholly supported by the state, not to mention my parents, even if I had been that kind of brainy, I was someone from whom nothing was desired other than to serve God and the family as laid down in DeValera’s 1937 constitution. In school, I felt bereft of opinions, and specifically how to confidently form one about anything. Religion, in which we were immersed to the point of drowning, asked only that we obey rather than question. I experienced an emptiness in school, lost, in a system that didn’t encourage a thing other than prayer and wearing my white socks pulled up to my knees.

At seventeen the only thing I knew I wanted was to go to college. My middle class school friends from families who weren’t particularly religious had sown that seed. Their plans to go on to institutions that didn’t ostensibly care about their religious beliefs and it seemed at the time, their gender, began to give me a sense of direction. College was a battle hard won with my parents. They had simply wanted me to finish school, get a civil service job and stay Catholic. I managed one of those. College only happened because of the bravery of my eldest sister, who decided to leave her permanent job in the bank, a thing that shook the very foundations of our council house, and go to UCD to study Arts. One year later I was to follow her to study history. 

I specialised in women’s history, learning what it was to be female in a society that wanted only to contain her. I delved into the lives of women such as Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, Mary Hayden and Kathleen Lynn, who had so clearly said no to such constriction. The term ‘feminist historian’ was thrown at me by a male lecturer one day as an insult. His sneer had degraded the term, belittled it, and yet I turned my back on it, saying that he was wrong that I was a historian first and foremost. How I wish now that I had had the guts to say, that’s exactly who I was. But I wasn’t as brave as those women I studied, nor some who taught me, like the great Doctor Margaret McCurtain, nor Nell McCafferty, who was demanding on every media outlet back then that women take back their power.

The most radical thing I did over the next couple of years was to get a nose piercing, marry a musician at twenty-three and divorce him at twenty-five. I worked in careers on the margins which were a little bit quirky. Waterstones Booksellers, for example, where I met writers, artists, creators. Non-religious, funny, intelligent, hardworking people who weren’t always going to have to tell customers that the queue started at the other end. 

Fuelled by their dreams of something more, I ventured forth. I left for a career in community development to assist in empowering marginalised voices, convinced that I’d finally become the radical hiding inside. I worked with asylum seekers and Travellers and working class women. I stood alongside them arguing with council officials, wrote countless letters and position papers. But all the time, it terrified me. 

While I believed in the fight, I was useless, preferring to be back in the office doing funding reports. I was more attuned to the role of the polite, quiet revolutionary who made sure the placards were ready. Ironically, I was bloody good at it. I spent the next fifteen years managing charity finances. Until one day I felt the light go out. By then I was married again with an eight year old son. I had never been so happy in my personal life and yet my public persona, ensuring every penny was accounted for, was killing me. 

I was forty-four when I finally took up the pen on the advice of one of those former booksellers. Three years later I was back in UCD, this time in the English department studying for a Masters in Creative Writing. It was the likes of Anne Enright, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Lia Mills, Frank McGuinness, and the twelve other students, who taught me how to find a voice. I was terrified, again. I cried my way through the year, not that my colleagues knew, but my poor husband, and my bookseller friend did. After all those years of work and education and achievement, I was still unable to stamp out the word ‘mediocre’ that clung on to the gnarly bits of my brain. But I kept on as encouraged, leaving with a draft of When All Is Said under my arm, a novel that would hit the bookshelves three years later and become a number one bestseller. 

But it is Listening Still, my second novel, which has perhaps been my most challenging. At fifty-two, I am still dogged by the doubt that a woman’s voice will be as inviting to the world. I’m not wrong when I say women writers and their female leads can still be considered, by some, for female readers only – there are men who apparently don’t read women writers at all. And ‘Chic-lit’, who does not hate that classification? I was told that my first book would appeal to everyone. Was this because it was a man’s voice, I wondered? 

In my new novel, Jeanie Masterson is a woman working in the male dominated world of funeral directing, straining under the pressure of obligation to her family and floundering under expectations that are not necessarily hers. And although in crisis, we watch as she gradually draws closer to finding her voice, her strength to follow a path of her own choosing and not that defined by others. This book has been written under the gaze of all of my old insecurities and perhaps some new ones. Through its help, however, I realise that I am coming of age once more, giving voice to a woman who finally finds her way.

Listening Still by Anne Griffin is published in Trade Paperback by Sceptre, €14.99