Factory Girls - supported by the Arts Council of Ireland - coming June 2022
On January 30, 2020 - while preparing to launch my first novel Big Girl Small Town - I hit ‘send’ on an Arts Council of Ireland bursary application. I was hoping to secure financial support to help me step away from my all-consuming tech career to finish what was then a very rough, unfinished first draft of Factory Girls. In early March 2020, Covid shut down the world as we knew it. I continued my tech career while homeschooling my kids and trying to write in the wee hours.
In May 2020 I heard I’d been awarded an Arts Council bursary. I quit my tech contract and began to balance my time between homeschooling and writing. Nobody’s Covid experience - no matter how privileged - was easy. Ours was no exception. We struggled to stay healthy and happy in a lockdown that cut us off from our family in the North of Ireland and France, as well as our new friends in Dublin and old friends in London. Every book event and award ceremony I had been invited to was cancelled, and I learned how to endure reading my work to unseen audiences on zoom calls, and how to watch other authors win awards via pre-recorded videos viewed in my living room in while wearing pyjamas. Babies were born and met only over zoom. Relatives sickened far from our 2km lockdown zone. Weddings, birthdays and wakes happened miles away from us.
But somehow Factory Girls emerged during 2020, and I submitted a lengthy MS to my agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor in January 2021. Following Marianne’s editorial guidance, I quickly drafted a shorter, sharper version of the manuscript, which she then submitted to Algonquin and John Murray Press. I was thrilled (and massively relieved) when I heard that both publishers - who’d done a tremendous job in bringing Big Girl Small Town into the world during lockdown - loved Factory Girls.
Parents often say It takes village to raise a child. I think the same applies to publishing a book . I owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to the Arts Council of Ireland for awarding me a bursary that meant I just about managed to homeschool my kids and write during the first lockdown - something I would not have been able to do if I’d been obliged to work an 8 hour day in tech. I’m also incredibly grateful to my early readers and writers, who workshopped extracts from the book or provided editorial feedback on the entire MS or just texted me and said ‘you can do this’ and ‘take a nap’. I’m thankful that my husband treated my writing as being every bit as ‘real’ and ‘important’ as his job; side by side we cooked, cleaned and worked with our kids without a break for months.
Factory Girls will be published in the USA November 2021 by Algonquin and released in the UK and Ireland by John Murray Press in June 2021. You can preorder at:
Maeve Murray was just eighteen years old when she first met Andy Strawbridge but she knew he was a fucker the minute she laid eyes on him. In fairness, she’d expected it. He was an Englishman who drove in to the Town for work. Nobody knew him, but everyone knew of him. She’d heard the stories about him taking his pick of the factory girls, offering them lifts home where he’d park his Jag up some lonely lane so he could get a blowjob from whoever was belted into the front passenger seat. She’d tried to listen to the stories with only one ear, for she knew the people spouting that shite about Andy would’ve said the same of Father Goan, who wasn’t fit to find his mickey for a pish. But when Maeve stood face-to-face with Andy Strawbridge in his office in the factory, she knew every last word she’d heard about him was true – and was probably only half the story.
Cover design by Sara Marafini