Review: Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures by Caroline Magennis, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies: Eleven More Stories (2021) movingly charts the lives of young Northern Irish women. While Multitudes, her previous collection, focuses largely on children and adolescents, Intimacies tells a number of stories of motherhood and reproductive rights, largely centred on women in their twenties and thirties. The final, title story consists of seven sections, narrated by a mother to her unborn child. At the end she speaks of ‘[t]his private place achieved against the public odds; achieved and in a sense guaranteed because of them’, and claims that the words she gives her child are a ‘spell’ to make ‘now’ an ‘always’ (Caldwell 2021: 154–5). As Caroline Magennis writes in her beautiful, important new monograph, Caldwell’s stories in this collection show ‘how we navigate the tensions of intimacy between this holding-close and letting-go, and across the breadth of our intimate lives’ (61). Caldwell’s collection, like the other texts Magennis discusses, reframes and remakes questions of intimacy, the relations between public and private, and the forms of bodily connection we share.