What inspired you to write Stone Yard Devotional?

I began writing it before the pandemic, and then through the various lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Elements of my own life began to merge with an entirely invented story of a contemplative community of nuns. I see now Stone Yard Devotional explores some recurrent preoccupations, particularly friendships and rivalries between women, and the question of how to live harmoniously with others despite prickly relations. It also touches on forgiveness and atonement, on the moral challenge of despair, and on the way we as societies decide some people deserve to be outcasts – and the cost of that to them and to us.

What were the most challenging and enlightening aspects of writing your book?

I felt as if I started the book a dozen times, writing into one seam then coming to its end and crawling out backwards. Writing, throwing it out, starting again and throwing it out. For a couple of years I kept at it, every day thinking, ‘I haven’t even started’. But somehow the novel slowly formed itself and then fell into shape in a rush towards the end of the process. 

I did know something of what I wanted – to grip the writing less tightly than I had with my previous books. I wanted to trust my reader more. Worn down by politics and the world’s aggression, I was tired of the impulse to control or harp, and I aimed for a bone-clean, understated novel. I wanted to invite the reader in to a calm and spacious consideration of their own life as they join my narrator in hers.

In what ways do you think the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional might be an empowering figure for women and young girls?

I’m not sure that’s for me to say – but perhaps there might be power in the idea of a woman leaving a life that had become full of despair to seek a more meaningful one. My narrator opts out of the frantic capitalist world and seeks depth and an ethical life in a contemplative community with other women.

How do you think literature helps to shape our understanding of ourselves and others?

I think reading literature is a way of paying sustained attention to our inner lives – it is a step back from digital noise and distraction, from the outrage churn and corrosive competition of social media. And it nurtures our imaginations. Contemplating anything quietly, in a culture purposely designed to stop you slowing down and spending any time at all in stillness, feels like a radical act. One can find, when one does slow down into quietude, that one’s thinking can become deeper and richer and more complex. And perhaps that is the start of understanding of all kinds.

What was the most recent book you’ve read about women or girls that moved you?

Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren.