Where I End

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I think when you have a baby, you suddenly are hit by your own terrible power, and how your work from then on is to not harm your children, whether overtly or passively. And I think that’s something that constantly interests me in my work.” With bloodless, spidery hands, Islanders drew the frightened near-drowned from the shore and led them up to the island’s interior. When the local wool factory is deemed by the mainlanders as ripe for redevelopment and investment, Aoileann’s grandmother is employed to collate her remembrances of the island, which means she now leaves Aoileann alone with her mother. Aoileann sees this as a way for her to spy on Rachel, to ingratiate herself into her lfe so that she will become indispensible to her, and this where the novel becomes even more unsettling as events spiral and twist in ways you cannot possibly imagine. The bedbound parent in Filter This is a father suffering from Alzheimer’s — a disease White is all too familiar with, having lost her own father — the writer and television producer Kevin Linehan — to it in 2017.

No matter the situation, White is able to find the ridiculous and absurd in it - from ash-scattering to pregnancy. ‘There’s nothing so sci-fi in life as reproducing’, she says. It’s no wonder that giving birth and parenthood are mined time and again for horror, she observes. Islanders pulled grateful survivors from the sea,’ the stories said. ‘Saving them from drowning only to deliver them to a worse end.’ The book opens with one of the most horrific scenes imaginable. White is in the throes of labour while elsewhere, in another hospital bed, her father’s life hangs in the balance. This section, A Haunting, is about the 'agonising, drawn-out horror show’ of his slow decline and eventual death from early-onset Alzeimers. The actual footprint this story occupies is quite finely focussed, however the narrative surrounding the physical appearance and ‘feeling’ of specific locations is wonderfully descriptive, creating excellent enhanced visual awareness, for any confirmed ‘armchair travellers’ who are brave enough to visit. Linking the two is Lexi, the co-host of a Call Me Daddy-esque podcast, Your Hot Friend, which Claire and Joanne’s partner Bert both devour. Lexi is the sensible foil to co-host Amanda, who is referred to as "the female Joe Rogan" in a magazine write-up.The sea is death reanimated. Down under the shimmying surface, the currents conduct the corpses and they sway in a dance, ringed around the island’s underbelly. Everything changes when Rachel, an artist and young mother, arrives to the island. Starved of attention and shunned by the islanders because of their superstitions, Aoileann finds a source of affection in the nurturing and jovial young woman. Comedy and heartbreak ebb and flow throughout the novel, as each woman grieves the loss of a former version of her life. Bereft at the hardship of motherhood, Joanne says, with heartrending simplicity, "it just isn’t what I thought it was going to be".

We were brought to the island’s rudimentary ‘cemetery’ (located on the island’s high exposed north east side, see marked map on file). The practices around burial are unusual. We are told by Rionach (girl, about 17) that they cannot dig the island – at its deepest the soil layer is barely a forearm’s length – hence their ‘solution’. Island children play in the area and appear unfazed by the macabre spectacle to be found there. Rionach intimates that the island suffers losses of this scale frequently due to the dangerous nature of fishing the surrounding waters. When it was pointed out that if this were the case, then the island’s population would have died out long ago, the girl ceased to cooperate. I'd like to remember this book through the 3 main "themes", I guess, that stood out to me, using a quote that encaptures each. A few of the missing appear to correspond to ‘graves’ and testimony from islanders claiming to be surviving family, would it seem, corroborate this. However, there are at least seven others entirely unaccounted for. You don’t have to be doing your needlepoint but parlaying it into an Etsy shop or something like that. I feel we don’t say enough that it’s very good to be very sh*t at your hobby … I’m in a skate group called the Huns of Anarchy and they’re amazing. Some of them are just so spectacular, dancing and doing all the moves and stuff. And I’m fairly happy with the level I’ve achieved. I don’t think I’ll ever be a better skater than I am now.”And as Rachel's time to depart from the island nears, and Aoileann father and grandmother find out she has been interacting with Rachel and her child, the story comes to a satisfyingly disturbing conclusion. Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and her journalism has been nominated for numerous media awards. TV adaptations of her first two books are in development and she co-hosts the chart-topping comedy podcasts, Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive.

In Where I End, White tells the story of three generations of women living in an island that is and also isn’t based on the Aran Islands. For me personally, this unconventional, unique, intriguing and oh! so dark storyline, takes edge-of-the-seat thriller writing to a whole new level, especially when I arrived at the section in my reading which I recognised as being the source of inspiration for the book’s eerie cover art.It's also human, and raw, and describes the horror and fear of motherhood better than anything I've ever read.