Nine Books About Your Life:

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their life. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with Keely O’Shaughnessy, author of Baby is a Thing Best Whispered (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).

First Book
The first book I remember clearly was The Twits by Roald Dahl. My parents would read it to me. The descriptions were so gross and vivid. I remember being utterly obsessed with it. I even bought a plastic eyeball from the joke shop and would drop it into my family’s drinks when they weren’t looking, just like Mrs. Twit did with her glass eye and Mr. Twit’s beer. Part of what I loved so much about the book was Quentin Blake’s brilliantly gruesome illustrations. 

The image that’s stuck with me the most is his drawing of Mr. Twit’s beard. It was a zoomed-in drawing of a bearded mouth with rotten teeth and crumbs of food stuck to the bristles. Each moldy blob was annotated, too, with arrows pointing to tinned sardine, stilton cheese, and cornflakes. As a child, I always had such a visceral response to the descriptions, especially when paired with their matching illustrations. And now, as an adult, I have a phobia of beards that I blame completely on the power of Roald Dahl’s writing.

Most Cherished Book
There are two answers to this, really. My life-changing book is very well cherished. But one of my most treasured possessions is my Great Grandma’s WW2 dairy. It charts her time spent in Canada when my Great Granddad was stationed there in 1944 and runs until just after my Gran was born that summer.

Sometimes, I bring it out just to hold it and feel the weight of it in my palm. It’s tiny but heavy and well made. It’s bound in a deep red leather and the pages are bible-thin. It has the most wonderful musty but sweet scent, like lily of the valley. Everything about it is precious to me. It means so much to be allowed an insight into my great grandparents’ lives.  

Thanks to the diary, in 2016, my husband and I were able to travel to Canada and echo their footsteps around Prince Edward Island. Reading about where and how they lived, and then visiting those same places was an incredibly cool experience. So good, in fact, that my always-on-the-back-burner novel grew from this idea of retracing their journey.  

Most Perplexing Book
A book I struggled to read was Zadie Smith’s NW. I quite enjoyed White Teeth and thought that I liked Smith’s writing style. But from the first page, something about NW felt fake to me; the picture of urban London living only went to a surface level and didn’t delve any deeper. I don’t know if it was the way she seemed to try so hard to play with style and form, but I couldn’t connect with the narrative at all. It can be difficult to warm up to a stream-of-consciousness anyways, and with all the other elements in play (if I remember correctly, there were text messages, emails, and play scripts?), it felt as though Smith simply threw everything in and hoped for the best. I usually like curt and snappy moments of description and a pace quickened by changes in direction, but NW felt choppy and too disorientating.

Life-changing Book
For this, I’d have to go with Angela Carter’s Wise Children. This was one of the first books I really read/studied as an adult— I’d just turned eighteen. I’d studied most of the usual texts at school, Shakespeare, Golding, and Steinbeck, but the first time I experienced Angela Carter, that’s when I fully realized I loved writing. Wise Children was funny and vibrant and rude and sad and odd. It referenced Shakespeare but wasn’t stuffy or pretentious. I annotated my copy wildly and, really, for the first time, I found that I was enjoying writing essays about this book, I wanted to understand how the story was constructed. I wanted to absorb every detail. Wise Children was my first encounter with magical realism too, and to me, it was everything.       

Most Underrated Book
There are so many underrated books out there, especially is the indie book sphere, but one of the most underrated books, in my opinion, is The Drive by Tyler Keevil. It’s a clever homage to great American road trip stories while also being a page-turner of a novel. It’s a real ride and a triumph. In fact, anything by Keevil is well worth a read.    

A Surprising Book
As well as writing and editing, I work in a school, and as a result, I read a surprising amount of young adult fiction, and a book I always recommend is Witch Child by Celia Rees. I read it when I was a teen and I think it still stands up now, twenty-two years later. A story of womanhood, witchcraft, and survival, it certainly set me on my path to finding my own writing style.

Your Most Recent Book
My most recent book is Baby is a Thing Best Whispered, which was published with Alien Buddha Press this year. It’s a flash fiction collection comprising of twenty-two stories about womanhood, mothers, daughters, and sisters. When first putting a collection together, I didn’t realize that these themes were ever-present veins in my writing, but as I started to examine my work more closely, they were topics that I was undeniably drawn to. Fully embracing the themes, I was interested in exploring familial and generational relationships, mothers to daughters, and sisters. I wanted the stories to read as a coming-of-age narrative. How we grow, adapt, and are shaped by our upbringing. Within the book, there is otherness and the magical, trauma and self-discovery, revelation, and hope. Being a disabled author, I was aware that my writing can be viewed through that lens and although not all the stories contain disabled characters, otherness is a theme that runs throughout.

Your Next Book
As already mentioned, and like most authors, I’m always working on my novel, but short-form fiction will always have my heart. A current dream project of mine is to write a novella-in-flash that showcases the life of a strong disabled protagonist. I’m interested in writing a disabled character who isn’t pitied for their struggle nor held high as an inspiration for overcoming their struggles. I want to write about a character who is a person who happens to be disabled and is living their life.   

Plug a Book
I know a few writers, and they are a talented bunch, so narrowing it down to a single book to plug is difficult, for sure. But I’m going to shine the spotlight on my dear friend Cecilia Kennedy as she’s too modest to sing her own praises. Her debut short story collection, The Places We Haunt from Potter’s Grove Press, is brilliant. It’s thirteen dark, macabre tales sewn together in wonderfully unusual ways. Cecilia’s understated prose often takes you in directions you weren’t anticipating and reveals truths you didn’t know you were ready to hear.