Finished reading: Foster by Claire Keegan 📚

This was the first book I’d ever finished, and then I immediately started over again. Claire Keegan is a master with words and story. I loved every word of this book. It’s a Novella at around 90 pages, and you will wish it were much longer.

I looked up what interviews I could find, and Keegan speaks about her meticulous revision process and reworking until every word earns its place. Sometimes, spending years on a story.

Do yourself a favor, sit down with this book and enter a moving, beautiful, story.

I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.

Some favorite highlights:

Part of me wants my father to leave me here while another part of me wants him to take me back, to what I know. I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’

This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight. I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home.

Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes shorter steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

and so many more…