Claire Coughlan

Claire Coughlan has worked as a journalist for many years, most recently for publications such as BookBrunch and the Sunday Independent. She was a recipient of the Words Ireland National Mentoring program, funded by Kildare Arts Service and the Arts Council. Coughlan has an MFA in creative writing from University College Dublin, and she lives in County Kildare with her husband and daughter.

Coughlan's new novel is Where They Lie.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My husband came up with Where They Lie, the title of my novel. I knew it would work the moment he said it. It evokes the essence of the book, which is a crime story, a mystery. The action starts when a young female journalist, Nicoletta Sarto, answers the phone at the Irish Sentinel newsroom in Dublin just before Christmas in 1968. The bones of a missing woman, Julia Bridges, an actress who vanished twenty-five years earlier, have been found, and Nicoletta starts chasing the story. So, where they lie refers not only to the recovered human remains, but also to the secrets and lies that have been buried for a quarter of the century, which Nicoletta is about to pull out into the light.

What's in a name?

I love naming characters, and I think names are very important. Nicoletta Sarto, my main character, is Irish-Italian, so she has an Italian first and last name, which sets her apart from her contemporaries. She has become wary about the explanation she’s expected to give well-meaning people when they ask her where she’s from. There’s a road near where I live in Naas, a town in Co Kildare, Ireland called Sarto Road, and I walk past it all the time. Sarto was the surname of Pope Pius X and was presumably given to this stretch of housing by an Irish Catholic builder many years ago. Sarto is also an Italian profession originated surname and means ‘tailor.’ I named Nicoletta’s on/off boyfriend Barney King, as a nod to Stephen King, of whom I’m a massive fan.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I don’t think she’d be very surprised at all. Though I hope she’d be proud - teenage me wrote a lot but didn’t show it to anyone. I think this is exactly the type of novel she would devour as a reader.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are harder, definitely. I change them constantly, right up to the moment of turning in a draft to my publisher, as there are thousands of entry points into a story, it’s almost impossible to find the one that’s just right. You know where you are with an ending. What I found with my debut novel was that the end scene came to me quite early on. I wrote it out, and it stayed pretty much as a guiding true north all the way through the drafts.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There’s probably a bit of me in all my characters; I don’t think I’d be able to write them otherwise. Though the beauty of writing fiction is that your characters can say and do outrageous things you’d never get away with in real life, and I’m actually a fairly quiet, reserved person. To write fiction convincingly takes a leap of faith and imagination, this is a given. But it also takes empathy to create vivid, flesh and blood characters that the reader wants to spend time with.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Too many influences to name! But the main ones for this novel would be Twentieth Century Irish history, the Italian language and culture, rock music of the late 1960s/classical pianists of the 19th Century, feminism.

Follow Claire Coughlan on Instagram.

The Page 69 Test: Where They Lie.

--Marshal Zeringue