'Small Things Like These': resources and links
This is a list of helpful links to accompany teaching notes on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These [the detailed notes are in Sections 1 and 2; then Section 3; then Sections 4 and 5; then Section 6; finally Section 7. Plus a post on the comparative modes, and more below. All notes together, downloadable.
I will be giving a free webinar on the book for English teachers on the evening of Tuesday 10th September 2024: register.
From me:
Original review of the book, November 2021. Some of the ideas here I am targetting in the notes which follow.
A comparison between Small Things and Fintan O’Toole’s personal history of Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves.
An analysis of the cover art and its relation to the story: Bruegel’s ‘(Winter) Hunters in the Snow’.
Foster is an essential read: here is the most-visited post on this site, Claire Keegan’s comments on the story when she visited my school. Also a review of An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl, the fine Irish-language film based on Foster.
So Late in the Day: link to CK’s reading, and discussion by George Saunders.
Elsewhere:
The Booker Prizes reading guide, including history of the Magdalene Laundries, discussion points, and further links.
An excellent interview with Claire Keegan by Martin Doyle in the Irish Times [but subscribers only] when So Late in the Day was published.
A helpful author interview with Claire Armistead in The Guardian.
Long review by Susannah Clapp in the LRB: ‘You think you are just looking – it turns out you are travelling.’
Claire Keegan talks to Colm Tóibín in The Art of Reading Book Club.
Liz Nugent: The Gothic Horrors of 1980s Ireland - The Crimes and Hypocrisies that Inspired a Generation of Women; CrimeReads, June 2018: ‘These girls, on the other hand, were considered sluts who had let themselves and their families down. It was believed that they must be punished and pay for their sins. They worked in convent laundries to earn their keep, hidden away until they gave birth.’ Looks particularly at the Ann Lovett and Joanne Hayes cases.
Erin Blakemore on the story of the Magdalene Laundries (history.com). And the Wikipedia entry.
Added 2024: the final Graham Norton Book Club episode features the book, among other things, and an interview with Claire Keegan (from about 4 minutes).
The film (2024):
Sinéad Gleeson interviewed Cillian Murphy and Enda Walsh for Sight and Sound magazine: ‘Watching Small Things like These, it’s hard not to feel a familiar rumble of anger, exacerbated by the fact that although the story feels old, the last Magdalene laundry in Ireland only closed in 1996. “It feels like a completely different country now,” Murphy says, “but the events in the film take place in living memory. It’s a small book, but not a small story – not politically or emotionally, and not to me.’
Guy Lodge review in Variety for the Berlinale première: ‘A story of the unspeakable gradually leaving the realm of the unsaid, (the film) rests on both (Cillian Murphy’s) quiet and his disquiet as an actor.’ ‘the drama here lies in the community blind spots, maintained through equal parts innocence and avoidance, that enabled these institutions to prosper for as long as they did.’