Mouthing author Orla Mackey: ‘All of our lives amount to a story’

‘Sometimes their story is more about who they want to be rather than who they actually are…’ Author Orla Mackey introduces her debut novel Mouthing, a multigenerational portrait of small-town life in Ireland.

Mouthing is about life in a village in rural Ireland.

It takes a place that from a distance seems completely insignificant but is hugely important to the people who live there.

I come from a small village myself. The pub in the village is my father’s home place. I spent much of my childhood at the bar listening to the regulars and noticing how ordinary people tell extraordinary stories. I noticed how stories changed a lot depending on who was telling them – this taught me that no one has full possession of a story even if it’s their own. A story can have your name on it and your blood in it, but it can vary greatly depending on whose mouth it’s coming from.

So the book takes place over about sixty years. It follows the ordinary goings-on in the village, the disagreements that the locals get tangled up in, the way their lives pan out. In Ballyrowan, there are three sides to every story. So every story is told by three competing narrators. If I was to go into each one, I’d be here half the night. Mona and Joe are two of my favourites. They are brother and sister, and we first meet them when their tyrant of a father has just died. Mona is a woman who’s so tired of being controlled that she takes the parish priest hostage and Joe is a man who becomes so lonely that he takes a cow into his living room for company.

The book plays with the idea that all of our lives amount to a story.

Amongst the other characters we have a promiscuous alcoholic aunt, a dubious teacher-student relationship, a man speaking from the grave and a child whose mother suffers from mental illness and an addiction to Carry On films.

The book plays with the idea that all of our lives amount to a story. There’s also the idea that if your story goes untold, you pass into the forgotten. The characters in Mouthing seem aware of that. They are asking you to listen to them. And to believe in what they’re saying.

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the term ‘mouthing.’ Where I’m from, if you’re mouthing about someone, you’re not exactly singing their praises. The people in Ballyrowan spend a lot of time mouthing. From the outside this might be seen as vicious gossip, but it’s as much about wanting to be remembered, wanting to be understood or forgiven or accepted or all of the above.

Sometimes their story is more about who they want to be rather than who they actually are. And that’s always because they want to be loved or to be seen as more lovable than they believe themselves to be.

Mouthing is published by Hamish Hamilton