Review by Kevin Brown
Confessions, Catherine Airey’s debut novel, follows three generations of Irish women, moving from the 1970s to the 2020s, showing how each of them deal with discovering who they are, partly through love and relationships, but partly through art and culture, as well. The novel begins with Cora in New York City in 2001 as she was already struggling with stability, given the death of her mother. The death of her father begins to push her over the edge until a letter from her Aunt Róisín gives her a chance at a new life in rural Ireland.
In the 1970s, Róisín and her sister Máire watch as a group called The Screamers move into a house in their neighborhood, ultimately hiring Máire as an artist to catalog their life. Michael, the boy who lives next door, but who doesn’t fit in for his own reasons, loves Máire, but watches her ultimately move to New York to pursue her artistic desires, while Róisín stays home alone.
In 2018, Cora’s daughter Lyca lives in rural Ireland with her mother and Great Aunt Ró. Cora is one of the main activists working for legalization of abortion in Ireland, while Lyca looks through the old house as a means to understand herself and her family.
Given the title, the main irony of the novel is that the characters don’t often confess the truth to one another, as most of the revelations that come in the novel do so because a separate character finds out information about one of the others. Given the different points of view, readers often hear about one character from another, not from themselves. Thus, they all have to decide what they should reveal and what they should hide, usually out of a desire to protect.
Overall, Airey’s novel shows the struggles women have faced and continue to face — whether that’s abusive men, a culture that outlaws choice, or isolation that comes from their not following the dominant narrative —but also how they can support one another to build real community, at times.
Confessions by Catherine Airey. Mariner Books, January 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
