This week’s story, “In the Act of Falling,” is told from the perspective of a woman whose life is fraying. Her husband has lost his job; her nine-year-old son has been suspended from school; her house is too big and too expensive for the family’s reduced circumstances. Did you always know the point in her life at which the story would start?
No. In the earliest versions of the story, she didn’t exist at all. The story began as an urban apocalyptic one, and in place of the tennis net I had nets hanging above the streets of the Dublin city center to protect shoppers from birds that were falling from the sky in the thousands. There was a younger couple in that early version, but no child. The ducks were part of the story from the start; dead, of course—birds, animals, and insects tend not to fare too well in my fiction.
Danielle McLaughlin’s debut collection of short stories, Dinosaurs On Other Planets, was published in Ireland in 2015 by The Stinging Fly Press, in the UK in January 2016 by John Murray, and will be published in the US and Canada by Random House in August. She lives in County Cork with her husband and three young children.
Danielle McLaughlin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Irish Times, Southword, The Penny Dreadful, Long Story Short and The Stinging Fly and have also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. Her debut collection of short stories, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, was published in Ireland by The Stinging Fly Press in 2015 and in the UK by John Murrays in January 2016. Random House will publish it in the US in August 2016.
