When I moved to London in 2011 I knew I was walking on a well-trodden path made by generations of young Irish people who had gone before me. I was 22 and newly graduated from university, and while I loved life in Dublin I also yearned towards the bright lights of cities like London. In recession-era Ireland, there were few career opportunities for someone who wanted to write about fashion and culture.
I didn’t know then that the experience of moving, and making a new life for myself in a new city, would leave such an impression on me that I’d eventually write a book about it. There is a parallel track to that well-trodden path, one walked by Irish writers who have for centuries gone abroad to make their literary careers. But working as a fashion and culture journalist in my 20s left little time for pondering my future in such lofty terms. I tended to be focused on the present moment above all: the shifting material conditions of my life, renting a room in a flat-share, looking for more freelance writing work or a chance to prove myself in professional terms.
On the Tube home from the office I’d distract myself by working my way through the back catalogues of Irish women writers who’d also left their homelands. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to gain from this process – I knew enough to know that no individual woman’s biography could serve as a roadmap for my own life and work. Also, I knew that my own situation bore almost no similarities to someone like Edna O’Brien’s, for instance, and that the versions of Ireland we had left behind us were radically different. But that didn’t stop me from reading her early novels and picturing her moving alone the London of the 1960s, imagining her by turns dazzled or homesick, or both at once, as I often was then.
This was what most interested me when it came to sitting in front of the blank page: this strange, shifting idea of home. Home can be a complicated notion for anyone, which probably explains why so many writers are drawn to it as a subject. Over the years I found I was growing less dazzled and homesick here, more comfortable. I spent enough time moving through the city in my own way that life here began to make more sense. Things started to feel less precarious. I moved out of the flat-shares and managed to spend more time doing the writing that felt most interesting to me. I tried to puzzle out these questions on the page. To me home felt like a mathematical equation that I was struggling to work out. I was sure that if I really spent time thinking about it, writing about it, maybe I could finally solve the problem for good.
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But over the decade I’ve lived in London, the idea of home has grown only more complex. The feeling of returning to Dublin becomes more freighted with every journey back. The topic comes up over and over when I’m with other London-Irish friends, in beer gardens and at dinner tables. All of us made a choice to come here, but sometimes it feels like the choice to return to Ireland is a far thornier one. Conversation inevitably drifts towards questions like “What would it take for you to go back?” (To which the answer is usually secure, affordable housing.) The next question, then, is ‘But what cost would it come at to do so?’ What would I miss most about the city where I’ve made a home for myself?
I think of the man in my local newsagent who always chats with me about the weather and his inability to understand the preferences of his English customers. Or I think of my favourite dosa restaurant, tucked down a side street behind Euston station. The cheap seats at the top of the Royal Opera House, allowing me to feel extravagant for less than the price of a cinema ticket. London’s love of a street party, usually a mash-up of bunting and bass-heavy sound systems, hot fried food and clammy cans of beer bought from the corner shop. Also, I think of the feeling of being small in a big place. The anonymity that London grants you, something that I think a lot of Irish people are drawn to when they decide to move abroad to a big and unfamiliar city.
When I first came to the works of Maeve Brennan, something clicked for me. I had recently changed jobs, was attempting to write a novel for the first time, and reading her felt like finding a familiar face among the pavement’s crowds. Brennan’s columns in the New Yorker formed astute chronicles of daily street life in the Manhattan of the 1950s and 1960s. There is such a sense of the city’s variance in her writing, and of the street’s possibilities for experience. “There is nothing like a short walk through this city to remind us of the accidental nature of our lives,” she writes in one essay. By the time I read her collected columns, titled The Long-Winded Lady and republished by the Stinging Fly in 2017, I had spent years walking and watching my own adopted city. I had even tried to write about it myself. But now the mission of replicating the experience of being an observer on the street, party to a unique set of sensations that shifts from one block to the next, began to seem vital in my mind.
London is a particularly abundant place to write about within these terms. More than almost anywhere else, London is a city that becomes a home to people from all over the world for a spell. In the author Simon Kuper’s words, “it becomes a second hometown” for people who come to stay for a season or a decade. In this way an adopted city can become intertwined with a sense of selfhood, and it was this selfhood – a shifting, evolving thing – that I tried to pin down in words in my book Look Here.
My own book is nonfiction, but as I wrote it I thought also of Eimear MacBride’s coming-of-age novel The Lesser Bohemians. Much of MacBride’s love story takes place on streets around Camden, near where I live in north London, and her narrator, new to the city, names them over and over in her telling. It’s as if she is making a map for herself of her own new life. It struck me that this is all any of us do when we move somewhere new – we fix ourselves into the city by telling our own stories about it, in our own words.
In writing Look Here, I tried to replicate these emotional journeys, drawing on my own walks through the city’s streets and focusing on the joys of observing as I go. It occurs to me now that these walks, these opportunities to take my place among the tumult of the street, have left an indelible mark on my character. That mark is a sense of home that I can bring with me, wherever I may find myself.
Look Here, by Ana Kinsella, is published by Daunt Books
